"-but we give them names and we see the systems and processes that link them. We contextualise them within their setting. We make them more real by knowing what they mean and represent."

"Hnn," she said, shrugging fractionally, distracted by the sight of her hand moving through the flame. "Maybe." It sounded like she was losing interest. "But everything requires a leavening. Everything." She let her head fall slowly to one side, watching her hand moving through the flame with a perfectly absorbed intensity that left me free to look at her.

She sat bundled in a crumpled white sheet. Her hair, a brown-red spill of curls across her shoulders and along her slender neck, formed a quiet nimbus around her tipped head. Her deep brown eyes looked almost black, reflecting the flickering candlelight like some image of the consciousness that she had been speculating about. They looked perfectly still and steady. I could see the minuscule spark of the flame reflected in them, see it occluded by her hand pa.s.sing over it. She blinked slowly, almost languorously.

I recalled that the eyes only see by moving; we can fasten our gaze on something and stare intently at it only because our eyes are consumed with dozens of tiny involuntary movements each second. Hold something perfectly and genuinely still in our field of vision and that very fixity makes it disappear.

"I love you," I heard myself whisper.

She glanced up. "What?"

Her hand stopped, poised over the flame. She jerked it away. "Ow!"

Madame d'Ortolan.

In the main salon of the Cafe Atlantique vast and echoing, with a ceiling lost in a layer of ancient-looking smoke stirred by giant wobbling ceiling fans there is a Jupla band playing to the mostly indifferent crowd packing the s.p.a.ces between the tables, which are variously set for eating, drinking and gaming. Stained-gla.s.s circular windows set high in the two gable walls struggle along with globular yellow lamps the size of bathyspheres to illuminate the chaotic scenes below, where small, sweating men wearing sandwich boards run up and down the aisles.

The pretty little Eurasian singer wears a vibrato collar and the snare drums are doubled, one set conventionally while the other is poised upside down directly above, separated by about half a metre. As Madame d'Ortolan enters her way cleared as best he can by Christophe the chauffeur the singer on the low stage midway along one long wall hits an especially high and plangent note and uses the cable remote in her pocket to turn her collar to high speed. Batteries in the remote power up a tiny motor attached to unbalanced weights within the device itself, making the collar burr against the girl's throat just over her voice box so that she produces a sort of staccato ululation impossible to achieve without such mechanical artifice. The drummer has both sticks blurring in between the lower and upper snares, creating a crazed percussive accompaniment to match.

"Your table, ma'am," Christophe says, quickly dusting and polishing a seat with its back against the wall of a semicircular booth set almost directly opposite the band. He called ahead from the car to book this small, neatly placed table and the previous occupants are still arguing with elements of the management even as their half-finished drinks are being tidied away by white-jacketed waiters.

Madame d'Ortolan eyes the seat sceptically, then sighs, smooths her skirt and sits, prim and upright while Christophe pushes the chair in. She can see the one who is probably the Oh person making his way through the crowds towards her. He is dressed like a peasant and has either a peasant's skin tone or just that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other colour that Madame d'Ortolan finds irritating. He arrives, stands in front of her, glancing at the towering presence of Christophe. He smiles at her, rubbing his hands. He bows sinuously. "Madame."

"Yes?"

"Aiman Q'ands. At your service."

"Sit," she tells him. She has already forgotten the name he has just spoken. To her he is still Oh. There is shouting beyond the mouth of the alcove, where the table's earlier occupants have noticed that their drinks have been tidied away. A waiter flaps a pristine white tablecloth across the table, lets it settle and turns to take her order as the greasy-looking little man sits. Christophe, standing greyly behind her, divides his time between looking suspiciously at the man who has just arrived and looking suspiciously at the arguing punters, now in the first stages of being shooed away by the management and a couple of bouncers who have just drifted up and who are even larger than Christophe.

Aiman Q'ands bows from a seated position. "Always a pleasure to see you-"

"I do not require your pleasantries," Madame d'Ortolan tells him, "and you should not expect mine." This one, she recalls, surveying his smiling, shining, annoyingly anonymous coffee-coloured face, has always responded well to being kept thoroughly in his place. She turns briefly to Christophe and glances at her shoulder; he lifts the cream jacket from her shoulders and places it carefully over the back of her seat. She suspects that he lets his fingers linger just a fraction longer than fully necessary as they touch her flesh through her silk blouse, and that he surrept.i.tiously sniffs at her hair as he bends to her. This is agreeable but distracting. "Still water," she informs the waiter. "Bring it sealed. No ice."

"Double espresso," Aiman Q'ands says. He flaps the collar of his kameez. "And water; lots of ice." He drums his fingers on the table.

It is hot in Paris and hotter still in the Cafe Atlantique; the leisurely spinning ceiling fans are largely decorative. The small sweating men wearing the sandwich boards which advertise today's specials and the services of various bookmakers, lawyers, p.a.w.nbrokers, bail-bond companies and brothels as well as conveying the latest headlines and sports results are there princ.i.p.ally to create cooling draughts as they pelt up and down the aisles. They are surprisingly effective. Aiman Q'ands squirms in his seat, looking up and all around. His hands knead each other. He seems incapable of sitting still and is making Madame d'Ortolan feel even warmer. "Fan, Christophe," she says over her shoulder. With a snap, a large lacy black fan is deployed and starts to move air gently past her face.

Aiman Q'ands sits forward, eyes glistening. "Madame, may I say-"

"No, you may not," Madame d'Ortolan tells him. She glances about her with a look of some distaste. "We shall keep this to the minimum."

Q'ands looks hurt. He sits back, looking down. "Madame, do you find me so repellent?"

As though she spared the wretch a thought at all! "Don't be absurd," she tells him. "I simply have no great desire to be here," she says, a glance taking in the smokily cavernous s.p.a.ce. "Aside from all else, these crowds are, perversely, highly attractive to bombers."

"Christians?" Q'ands says, looking mildly surprised and also looking round.

"Of course Christians, you idiot!"

Q'ands shakes his head ruefully and tuts. "The religion of brotherly love. So sad."

Just for a moment Madame d'Ortolan thinks he might be trying to make fun of her. You can never be sure in how much detail these pa.s.serines pa.s.serines remember previous encounters with things, events or people. Could he be baiting her? She quickly dismisses the thought. "The religion of zealotry," she informs him testily. "The religion that loves its martyrs, the religion of the doctrine of Original Sin, so that blowing even babies to smithereens is justifiable because they too are sinners." She jerks her head and makes a sort of dry spitting sound. "A religion made for terrorism." remember previous encounters with things, events or people. Could he be baiting her? She quickly dismisses the thought. "The religion of zealotry," she informs him testily. "The religion that loves its martyrs, the religion of the doctrine of Original Sin, so that blowing even babies to smithereens is justifiable because they too are sinners." She jerks her head and makes a sort of dry spitting sound. "A religion made for terrorism."

She can see what might be a small smile on Q'ands's unpleasantly glowing face and can feel perspiration starting to gather on her brow. She leans forward and lowers her voice. "Are you properly ambiented? Have you fully embedded here yet?" she asks. "Any idiot ought to know this. Do you?"

"I know what I know, ma'am," he says quietly, for all the world as though trying to be mysterious. Meanwhile one leg is bouncing up and down as though he is trying to follow the beat of the Jupla band. The fellow is preposterous!

"Well, know that I wish to waste no further time here." She glances up at Christophe, then has, annoyingly, to clear her throat loudly because he seems distracted by the Eurasian waif warbling on stage. Her chauffeur collects himself, follows her gaze as it flicks to the man seated opposite and, sticking his free hand into his grey tunic, produces what looks like a cigar tube and hands it to Q'ands.

He looks at it sadly and then places it in his chest satchel. "Also," Q'ands says, "I am almost out of-"

"There are supplies for a dozen journeys in there," Madame d'Ortolan tells him. "We're not stupid. We can count."

He shrugs. "My apologies for so obviously inconveniencing you." He sounds hurt. He stands up and runs a hand through his wiry brown hair. As he turns to look out into the body of the salon, a sandwich-board man races past, clacking. The resultant breeze makes Q'ands's salwar kameez flutter. "... See if I can intercept my coffee..."

"Sit down!" she snaps.

He turns back. "But you said-"

"Sit!"

He sits, looking still more wounded.

"There are certain instructions specific to this matter which have not been written down," she says. Q'ands looks appropriately surprised. She is already finding the way his expression seems to reflect his internal state so immediately and accurately extremely vexing. Worryingly unprofessional, too, if he's like this with everybody. Has he finally gone off the rails? How vexing if her long campaign to destabilise the fellow has finally succeeded just when she needs him at his most implacably efficient.

"Indeed?" he says. He looks mystified. Madame d'Ortolan half expects a cartoon thought-bubble bearing a big question mark to appear above his head.

"Indeed," she tells him. "The written orders mention some names and actions that you may find surprising. Nevertheless, these instructions have been subject to particularly careful scrutiny at the highest level, by not one or two but several sufficiently security-cleared individuals and you may be a.s.sured that there is no mistake. Regarding the final action you are instructed to pursue in each case, ignore that course of action as written in your orders. Each of the subjects concerned is not not to be forcibly transitioned; they are all to be elided. Killed. Expeditiously. Do you understand?" to be forcibly transitioned; they are all to be elided. Killed. Expeditiously. Do you understand?"

Q'ands's eyes widen. "I am to ignore my written orders?"

"In that one detail, yes."

"Detail?" The fellow looks aghast, though probably more at the choice of word than the terminal severity of the action proposed. The fellow looks aghast, though probably more at the choice of word than the terminal severity of the action proposed.

"In writing," Madame d'Ortolan explains patiently, "you are instructed to find the individuals named, close with them and take them away. The spoken amendment I am giving you now is to do all the above, except you are to kill them rather than kidnap them."

"So that's an order?"

"Yes. That is an order."

"But-"

"The written orders issue from my office," Madame d'Ortolan tells him, her voice acidic. "This verbal order is also from me, has also been appropriately vetted and approved, and post-dates the written orders. What about this sequence of events is difficult for you to comprehend?"

There is a hurt silence while the waiter delivers their order. When he goes, Q'ands says, "Well, I take it the verbal orders will be confirmed by written-"

"Certainly not! Don't be an idiot! There are reasons why this is being handled in this manner." Madame d'Ortolan sits forward, lowers her voice and softens it a little. "The Council," she tells him, head tipped towards him, drawing him in, "even the Concern itself, is under threat, don't you see? This must be done. These actions must be carried out. They may seem extreme, but then so is the threat."

He looks unconvinced.

She sits back. "Just obey your orders, Q'ands. All of them." She watches as Christophe unseals her bottle of water, wipes her gla.s.s with a fresh handkerchief and pours. She drinks a little. Q'ands looks most unhappy, but drinks his espresso, finishing it with indecent haste in a couple of tossed-back gulps. She has a sudden unbidden, unwelcome and unpleasant vision of his lovemaking being similarly abrupt and curtailed now. Where once, of course, he had been quite pleasantly proficient. She pushes the memory away as something best forgotten and nods beyond the booth. "Now you may go." you may go."

He rises, gives a cursory bow and turns away.

Madame d'Ortolan says, "A moment."

He sighs as he looks back at her. "Yes?"

"What did you say your name was?"

"Q'ands, ma'am."

"Well, Q'ands, do do you understand?" you understand?"

His jaw works as though he is trying to control himself. "Of course," he says, voice clipped. "I understand."

She favours him with an icy smile. "As you might guess, this is altogether of particular importance to us, Q'ands. It is what one might term a high-tariff matter. The highest. The rewards for success will be as lavish as the sanctions for failure will-"

"Oh, madame," he says loudly, holding out one hand to her, his voice pitched somewhere between exasperation and what certainly sounds like genuine insult. "Spare me." He turns and leaves with a shake of his head, disappearing into the tumult.

Madame d'Ortolan is quite shocked.

The Philosopher.

My father was a brute, my mother was a saint. Dad was a big, powerful man. He was what they used to call free with his fists. In school he was kept back a year and hence was always the biggest boy in his cla.s.s. Big enough to intimidate the teachers sometimes. Eventually he was thrown out for breaking another pupil's jaw. According to him, it was a boy, a bully, from a couple of years above him. It was twenty years later and he was dead before we found out it had actually been a girl in his own cla.s.s.

He always wanted to be a policeman but he kept failing the entry exams. He worked in the prison service until he was thrown out for being too violent. Feel free to make your own jokes.

My mother had a very strict religious upbringing. Her parents were members of a small sect called The First Church of Christ The Redeemer Our Lord's Chosen People. Once I suggested that they had more words in their t.i.tle than they did members. It was the only time she hit me. She was proud that she didn't sleep with my father until after they were married, on the day she turned eighteen. I think she just wanted to be free of her parents and all their restrictions and rules. They always had a lot of rules. Before they could be wed dad had to promise the elders of the church and our local minister that he would have all his children raised strictly in the ways of the Church, though he only did this so that he could wash his hands of his parental responsibilities. He had as little to do with me as he could while I was growing up. He'd usually be reading his paper, lips moving silently, or listening to music on his headphones, humming loudly and out of tune. If I tried to attract his attention he'd put his paper down, scowling, and tell me to talk to my mother, or just glare at me without turning his music down and stab a finger first at me and then at the door. He liked country and western music, the more sentimental the better.

He made no secret of the fact that he had no faith himself, except that "There must be something up there," as he would say sometimes when he was very drunk. He said it quite a lot.

My mum must have seen something in him. Perhaps, as I said, she also thought that she was escaping from the petty rules and regulations and restrictions she'd had to accept living in her parents' house, but of course dad had plenty of those of his own, as we both discovered. My usual way of discovering a new rule was being slapped around the ear, or, if I'd been really bad, dad taking his belt off, throwing me across his knee and leathering me. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that's what it was for my mum. I started out in the fire.

Mum made me her treasured boy and gave me all the love that she wanted to give dad but which just bounced back off him. Don't think that she turned me into a gay or anything. I'm not. I'm quite normal. I just had this unbalanced upbringing in this strange family where one parent worshipped me and thought I could do no wrong and the other one treated me like some pet that my mum had bought without asking him first. If I'd thought about it I'd have a.s.sumed my family was typical. It wasn't something I did think about, though, and I'd never have thought of asking other children what their families were like. I didn't mix much with other children at school. They seemed very noisy and dangerously boisterous and they thought I was quiet, apparently. Or cold. I was teased and picked on for being Christian.

I suppose people would say it was a troubled upbringing but it didn't feel like that to me, not at the time and not really since, not properly. Just one of those things. I worked hard in cla.s.s and went for long walks in the country after school and at the weekends. I always did my homework to the highest standard. I spent a lot of time in the school library and the library in the nearest town, not always reading. On the bus to and from the town I used to sit looking at nothing.

We'd probably have rubbed along not too bad together, just the three of us, but then my sister came along. I don't blame her, not really, not any more, but it was hard not to at the time. I didn't know any better. It wasn't her fault, even though she caused it.

We lived in the country in a line of prison-officer homes, within sight of the prison. I'd grown up listening to mum and dad arguing over the years because the walls were thin in the house. Though you couldn't hear mum, just dad. She always kept her voice right down, whispering even, while he either shouted or just talked in his loud voice. I don't think he ever whispered in his whole life. When you listened to them it was like he was arguing with himself, or with somebody who wasn't there. I used to wrap my pillow round my head, covering both ears, or if it got really loud I'd stick my fingers in my ears and hum to myself to shut out the sound.

One time I must have been humming really loudly because the light went on and I opened my eyes and dad was there over me wearing just his underpants standing at the side of the bed and demanding what I thought I was doing making all this noise? He scowled at me as I lay there blinking in the bright overhead light, wiping my eyes and cheeks. I was sure he was going to hit me but he just made a grumbling sort of noise and left, slamming the door. He left the light on so I had to put it out myself.

I had already, over the course of the preceding few years, heard things I would not have chosen to hear, things about s.e.x and so on, but the night mum came back from the hospital a week or thereabouts after giving birth to my sister was the thing that really made the difference, for me. Mum had had a bad time giving birth to me and she wasn't really meant to have any more children, but then she got pregnant and that was that. Dad would just have soon have got rid of what turned into my sister but mum wasn't having that because of her religion so she went through with it. But it was an unpleasant procedure and she needed a lot of st.i.tches down there. I suppose dad must have been drunk especially drunk, as he always liked a drink.

I tried humming but I knew they were talking about s.e.x that evening when she came back from the hospital and because of the age I was a part of me was getting interested in s.e.xual matters and so I partly wanted to listen, so I did. Thus I got to hear my mother begging my father to let her take him in her mouth, or even sodomise her, rather than have normal s.e.x, due to the st.i.tches and the fact that she was still very sore. I had heard dad in the past demanding these favours, or thought I had, but from the little I knew neither had actually occurred. That night, though, he wasn't to be fobbed off with such distractions, especially not after months of being denied.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, he had his way with her, and I had to listen to the gasps and gulps and then the screams. A lot of screams, even though despite it all you could somehow tell that she was trying to be quiet about it. I shoved my fingers into my ears so hard that I thought I was going to puncture my eardrums, and I hummed as hard as I could, but I could still hear her.

It took much longer than you might imagine. Perhaps it was the drink, or the screams. But eventually the screams stopped, to be replaced by sobs and, shortly, snores.

I had, of course, imagined myself bursting in on them and hauling him off her and beating him up and so on, but I was only eleven, and slight, like her, not big and burly like him. Therefore there was nothing I could have done.

Meanwhile my sister had been set off by all the screaming and she was crying the way that very small babies do, and had probably been crying like that all the time but I hadn't heard her over the screams from my mother and my own humming. I heard mum getting up from her and dad's bed and going over to the cot and trying to comfort her, though you could hear her own voice breaking and her sobbing as she did this. Dad snored very loudly, and mum was sobbing and breaking down and my sister was screaming in a high, unpleasant whine. It was only at this point that our next-door neighbours started hammering on the wall, shouting, their voices like a sort of tired, distant commentary on events.

I am not ashamed to say that I cried quite a lot throughout the rest of that night, though I still dropped off to sleep eventually and got up for school the next day, because it is amazing what you can put up with and get over. Almost anything, in fact.

Nevertheless, I think it was then that I decided I would never get married or have children.

3

Patient 8262

There is a certain purity to my existence. A simplicity. In a sense nothing much happens; I lie here, gazing into s.p.a.ce or at the view presented by the window, blinking, swallowing, turning over now and again, getting up occasionally always while they make the bed each morning and staring open-mouthed at the nurses and orderlies. Now and again they'll try to engage me in conversation. I make a point of smiling at them when they do this. It helps that we do not speak the same language. I can understand most of the one that they speak sufficient to have an idea what my perceived medical status is and what treatments the doctors might have in store for me but I have to make an effort to do so and I would not be able to speak much sense in it at all.

Sometimes I nod, or laugh, or make a sound that is halfway between a sort of throat-clearing noise and the moans that deaf people make sometimes, and often I frown as though I'm trying to understand what they're saying, or as though I feel frustrated at not being able to make myself intelligible to them.

Doctors come and give me tests sometimes. There were quite a lot of doctors and quite a lot of tests, early on. There are fewer now. They give me books to look at with photographs or drawings in them of everyday objects, or large letters, one to a page. One doctor brought me a tray holding letters on wooden cubes, from some child's game. I smiled at them and her and mixed them up, sliding them around on the tray, making pretty patterns out of them and building little towers with them, trying to make it look as though I was attempting to understand these letters and do whatever it was she wanted me to do, whatever might make her happy. She was a pleasant-looking young woman with short brown hair and large brown eyes and she had a habit of tapping the end of a pencil on her teeth. She was very patient with me and not brusque the way doctors can be sometimes. I liked her a lot and would have liked to have done something to have made her happy. But I could would not.

Instead I made that motion babies and toddlers make sometimes, clapping with fingers fanned, knocking down the little towers of letters I'd made. She smiled regretfully, tapped the pencil on her teeth, sighed and then made some notes on her clipboard.

I was relieved. I thought I might have overdone the kiddy-clappy thing.

I am allowed to go to the bathroom by myself, though I pretend to fall asleep in there sometimes. I always make mumbly apologetic noises and come out when they knock on the door and call my name. They call me "Kel," not knowing my real name. There was a reason, something between a conceit and a joke, why I was christened so, but the doctor who named me thus left earlier this year and the thinking behind this name is not mentioned in my notes and n.o.body can remember the reason. I am not allowed to bathe alone, but being bathed is not so terrible; once you get over any residual shame it is very relaxing. One even feels luxurious. I take care to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e in the toilet on the morning of a bath day, so as not to embarra.s.s myself in front of the nurses or orderlies.

One of the nurses is a big kindly woman with drawn-on eyebrows, another is quite small and pretty with bleached blonde hair, and there are two orderlies or care workers, one a bearded man with a ponytail and the other a frail-looking but surprisingly strong lady who looks older than me. I suppose if one of them well, just the pretty blonde, if I am being frank with myself ever showed any sign of s.e.xual interest in me I might reconsider my pre-emptive pre-bath self-pleasuring. So far this looks unlikely and I am bathed with a sort of professional detachment by all of them.

There is a day room at the end of the corridor where other patients gather and watch television. I go there rarely and affect not really to understand the programmes even when I do. Most of the other patients just sit there slack-jawed, and I emulate them. Now and again one of them will try to engage me in conversation, but I just stare at them and smile and mumble and they usually go away. One large fat bald chap with bad skin doesn't go away, and regularly sits beside me, watching the television while talking to me in a low, hypnotic voice, probably telling me about his ungrateful and dismissive family and his s.e.xual exploits as a younger and more attractive man, but for all I know regaling me with lurid local folk tales, or his detailed design for a perpetual-motion machine, or professing his undying love for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private. Or perhaps his undying hatred for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private I don't know. I can hardly understand a word he says; I think he talks in the same language as the doctors and nurses most of whom I can understand well enough but in a different dialect.

Anyway, I rarely bother with the television room or the other patients. I lie here or sit here and I think about all that I've done and all that I intend to do once the immediate danger has pa.s.sed and it is safe for me to re-emerge. I smile and even chuckle to myself sometimes, thinking of these poor fools mouldering away until they die here while I'm back out in the many worlds, living and loving; an operator, getting up to whatever mischief takes my fancy. How shocked they would be, patients and staff both, if they only knew!

Adrian.

Funny thing is, I always loved cocaine. I mean, obviously I loved it in the sense that I loved how rich it made me, how it helped me to drag myself up from the pretty much nothing I started with, but what I mean is I loved it when I took it.

It's a proper brilliant drug, c.o.ke. I loved everything about it, I loved the way it all seemed of a piece. The cleanness of it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but even that seems right somehow. It feels like it's cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along with all this, doesn't it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.