"I Won't Let You Go" was accepted by the editors of a recent anthology only to be turned down by the originating publisher, HarperCollins UK, on the grounds that it shared too much material with Light.

I have no qualms in presenting "I Won't Let You Go" as the brand new artifact it is. Those who've read Light can skin-dive it for its connections not just to that novel but to "The Incalling", The Course of the Heart, and several others; while those who haven't should read "I Won't Let You Go" first and imagine the author saying: "Actually, this is the short story on which the whole book was based."

Someone asked Matthew Carten, "How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millenium ?" This was their idea of an after-dinner game up in some bleak Midlands town where he had gone to give a talk. Wintry rain dashed at the windows of the private dining-room and ran down them in the orange streetlight. Answers followed one another round the table with a luminous predictability, some sly, some decent, all optimistic. They would drink until they fell down, have sex, watch fireworks or the endless sunrise from a moving jet. Then someone volunteered:

"With the bloody children, I expect."

This caused a shout of laughter, and was followed immediately by: "With somebody young enough to be one of my children."

More laughter. General applause.

Of the dozen people at the table, most of them had some idea like that. Carten didn't think much of any of them, and he wanted them to know it; he was angry with the woman who had brought him there, and he wanted her to know that. So when it came to his turn, he said:

"Driving someone else's car between two cities I don't know."

He let the silence develop, then added deliberately, "It would have to be a good car."

There was a scatter of laughter.

"Oh dear," someone said. "How dour." She smiled round the table. "Will there be any oil left by then ?"

Someone else changed the subject.

Carten let them go. He lit a cigarette and considered the idea, which had rather surprised him. In the moment of articulating it‹of admitting it to himself he had recognised how corrosive it was. Not because of the loneliness, the egocentricity, of the image, here in this enclave of mild academic and political self-satisfaction: but because of its puerility. The freedoms represented the warmth and emptiness of the car, its smell of plastic and cigarettes, the sound of a radio playing softly in the night, the green glow of dials, the sense of it as an instrument or a series of instrumental decisions, aimed and made use of at every turn in the road‹were as puerile as they were satisfying. They were a description of his life to that date.

As they were leaving, his companion said:

"Well, that wasn't very grown up."

Carten gave her his most boyish smile. "It wasn't, was it ?"

Her name was Lucie. Lucie was in her early forties, red-haired, still quite young in the body but with a face already beginning to be lined and haggard with the effort of keeping up. She had to be busy in her career. She had to be a successful single parent. She had to jog five miles every morning. She had to be good at sex, and still need it, and enjoy it, and know how to say, in a kind of whining murmur, "Oh. That. Yes, that. Oh yes," in the night. Was she puzzled to find herself here in a redbrick-and-terracotta Victorian hotel with a man who didn't seem to understand any of these achievements ? Carten didn't know. He looked round at the shiny off-white corridor walls, which reminded him of the junior schools of his childhood.

"This is a sad dump," he said.

He took her by the hand and made her run down the stairs with him, then pulled her into an empty room which contained two or three billiard tables, where he killed her as quickly as he had all the others. She looked up at him, puzzlement replacing interest in her eyes before they filmed over. He had known her for perhaps four months. Early on in their relationship, she had described him as a "serial monogamist", and he hoped perhaps she could now see the irony of this term, if not the linguistic inflation it represented.

In the street outside shrugging, wiping one hand quickly and repeatedly across his mouth he thought he saw something, a shadow on the wall, the suggestion of a movement in the orange streetlight. Rain, sleet and snow all seemed to be falling at once. In the mix, he thought he saw dozens of small motes of light. Sparks, he thought. Sparks in everything. Then he turned up the collar of his coat and quickly walked away. Looking for the place he had parked his car, he was soon lost in the maze of roads and pedestrian malls that led to the railway station. So he took a train instead, and didn't return for some days. When he did, the car was still there, a red Lancia Integrale he had rather enjoyed owning.

*

Carten dropped his luggage an old laptop, two volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time on to the rear seat of the Integrale and drove it back to London, where he abandoned it in a South Tottenham street, making sure to leave its doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. Then, rather than face an empty house, he phoned his first wife, Alexa.

"But you never call!" she said.

"I'm calling now," he explained, as if to a child.

"You never come and see me."

This was an overstatement. Alexa Carten lived in a small apartment block between Inverness Street and the Park, in that curve of streets not quite Camden but not yet Primrose Hill. A thin woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because she preferred it to her own. Her flat, dark and cluttered, smelled of handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early on in her tenancy she had painted fish on the bathroom walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with polaroid photographs and memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.

If you don't want to do something you don't have to, Carten read. Do only the things you can. Leave the rest.

"You look well," he told her.

"You mean I look fat. I always know I'm too fat when people say that."

He shrugged.

"Well, it's nice to see you anyway," he said.

"I'm having a bath. I was running it when you called."

She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and a handful of pebbles which still smelled faintly of the sea, arranged carefully in front of a framed photograph of himself at seven years old.

Though it was his own, the life these objects represented seemed unreadable and impassive. After staring at them for a moment, he rubbed his hands across his face and lit the candle.

"Do you want something to eat ?" Alexa called from the bathroom. There was a sound of her moving in the water. "I could make you something if you like."

Carten sighed.

"That would be nice," he said.

He looked round the room. It was small, with bare untreated floorboards and a window which looked out on the thick black foul-pipes of other flats. On the off-white wall above the chest of drawers, Carten had years ago drawn two or three diagrams in coloured chalk. He couldn't make anything of them, either.

After they had eaten, she lit candles and persuaded him to go to bed with her. "I'm really tired," she said. "Really exhausted." She sighed and clung to him. Her skin was still damp and flushed from the bath. Carten ran his fingers down between her buttocks. She breathed in sharply, then rolled away on to her stomach and half-knelt, raising herself so that he could reach her better. Her sex felt like very soft suede. He rubbed it until her entire body went rigid and she came, gasping, making a kind of tiny coughing groan. To his surprise this gave him an erection. He waited for it to subside, which took a few minutes, then said:

"I probably have to go away."

She stared at him. "But what about me ?"

"Alexa, I left you long ago," he reminded her.

"But you're still here. You're happy to come and fuck me, you come for this."

"It's you who wants this."

She clutched his hand. "But I see that thing," she said. "I see it every day now."

"When do you see it ? It doesn't want you anyway. It never did."

"I'm so exhausted today. I really don't know what's the matter with me."

"If you ate more."

She turned her back on him abruptly.

"I don't know why you come here," she whispered. Then, vehemently: "I have seen it. I've seen it in that room. It stands in there, staring out of the window."

"Christ," he said. "Why didn't you tell me before ?"

"Why should I tell you anything ?"

She fell asleep soon after that. Carten moved away from her and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic on Camden Parkway. It was a long time before he could sleep. The next morning Alexa Carten woke clinging to him, saying his name.

"Was I awful last night ? I feel much better now."

He fucked her again, and then left. At the door of the flat she told him: "People think it's a failure to live alone, but it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else."

Pinned to the back of the door was another note:

Someone loves you.

*

All his life Carten had preferred women to men. It was a visceral or genetic choice, made early: but he had one male friend, whose name was Valentine Strake. He now telephoned Strake, from a payphone at the underground station in Camden. There was a silence at the other end of the line then a woman's voice said:

"You have reached the BT Cellnet answering service."

"Hello ?" said Carten. He checked the number he had dialled. "You aren't on a cellphone," he said. "This isn't a cellphone number. Hello ?" The silence at the other end spun itself out. In the very distance, he thought, he could hear something like breath. "Strake ?" Nothing. He hung up and found his way down to the Northern Line platforms, and from there to the centre of town, where he expected to spend the afternoon drinking at the Lymph Club on Greek Street.

Soho Square was full of schizophrenics. Adrift in the care of the community with their small dirty dogs and bags of clothes, they were brought together at sites like this by an attraction to movement, crowds, commerce. A middle-aged woman with an accent he couldn't quite place had annexed a bench near the mock-Tudor shack at the centre of the square and was staring around with a lively but undirected interest. Every so often her upper lip folded back and a fey, unpremeditated sound escaped her mouth, more than an exclamation, less than a word. When Kearney appeared, walking fast from the Oxford Street end, an educated look sprang from nowhere into her eyes and she began talking loudly to herself. Her topics were disconnected and various. Carten hurried past, then on an impulse turned back.

He had heard her say, "I know what I know."

"What does that mean ?" he said. "What do you mean by that ?"

Mistaking this for an accusation, the woman fell silent and stared at the ground near his feet. She had on a curious mixture of good-quality coats and cardigans; green wellington boots; home-made fingerless mitts. Unlike the others she had no baggage. Her face, tanned by exhaust fumes, alcohol and the wind that blows incessantly around the base of Centre Point, had a curiously healthy, rural look. When she looked up at last, her eyes were pale blue. "I wonder if you could spare me the money for a cup of tea ?" she said.

"I'll do more than that," Carten promised. "Just tell me what you mean."

She blinked.

"Wait here!" he told her, and at the nearest Pret a Manger bought three All Day Breakfasts, which he had put in a bag with a large latte. Back in Soho Square, the woman hadn't moved. She sat blinking into the weak sunlight, occasionally calling out to passers-by, but reserving most of her attention for two or three pigeons hobbling about in front of her. Carten handed her the bag.

"Now," he said. "Tell me what you see."

She gave him a cheerful smile. "I don't see anything," she said. "I take my medication. I always take it." She held the Pret bag for a moment then returned it to him. "I don't want this."

"Yes you do," he said, taking things out to show her. "Look! All Day Breakfast!"

"You eat it," she said.

He put the bag down next to her on the bench and took her by the shoulders. He knew that if he said the right thing she would prophesy. "Listen," he assured her, as urgently as he knew how, "I know what you know. Do you see ?"

"What do you want ? I'm frightened of you."

Carten laughed.

"I'm the one frightened," he said. "Look, have this. Have these."

The woman glanced at the sandwiches in his hands, then looked over her left shoulder as if she had seen someone she knew.

"I don't want it. I don't want them." She strained to keep her head turned away from him. "I want to go now."

"What do you see ?" he insisted.

"Nothing."

"What do you see ?"

"Something coming down. Fire coming down."

"What fire ?"

"Let me go."

"What fire is that ?"

"Let me go, now. Let me go."

Carten let her go and walked away. Aged eighteen, he had dreamed of himself at the end of a life like hers. He was reeling and staggering down some alley, full of revelation like a disease. He was old and regretful, but for years something had been combusting its way from the centre of him towards the outer edge, where it now burst uncontrollably from his fingertips, from his eyes, his mouth, his sex, setting his clothes on fire. Later he had seen how unlikely this was. Whatever he might be, he wasn't mad, or alcoholic, or even unlucky. Looking back into Soho Square, he watched the schizophrenics passing his sandwiches from hand to hand, peeling them apart to examine the filling. He had stirred them like soup. Who knew what might come to the surface ? In principle, he felt sorry for them, even amiable. The praxis of it was bleaker. They were as disappointing as children. You saw light in their eyes, but it was the ignis fatuus. In the end, they knew less than Matthew Carten, and he knew nothing at all.

The afternoon had turned to rain, the streets were full of people talking into mobile phones. Knowing that he would be forced, sooner or later, to face an empty apartment on his own, he sighed with impatience, turned up the collar of his jacket, and went home to Albion Square. There, ill at ease but worn out by what he thought of as the emotional demands of Alexa Carten and the woman in Soho, he switched on all the lights and fell asleep in an armchair.

*


When he woke it was night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone breathing harshly in the room.

"Who's there ?" he said sharply. "Lizzie ?"

The noise stopped.

He rented the apartment, a single minimally-furnished space with straw-coloured hardwood floors, galley kitchen, and a bedroom on the second floor, from his second wife Elizabeth, who, though she had moved back to the US at the end of the marriage, maintained it as a pied a terre. From its windows you could see the gardens in the square, a handful of parked cars. Rubbing his face, Carten got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth's clothes which had remained to taunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath a greyish skin. He wasn't sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn't enough saliva to speak.

"I can't begin to describe the grudgingness of my life!" it shouted suddenly. "Ever feel that, Carten ? Ever feel your life is threadbare ? Ever feel it's like this worn out curtain which barely hides all the rage, the jealousy, the sense of failure, all those self-devouring ambitions and appetites that have never dared show themselves ?"

"For god's sake," Carten said, backing away.

The head smiled contemptuously.

"It was a cheap enough curtain in the first place. Isn't that what you feel ? Just like the ones at these windows, made of some nasty orange stuff with a fur of age on it the day after it was hung."

Carten tried to speak, but found that his own mouth had dried up.

Eventually he said: "Elizabeth never hung curtains."

The head licked its lips. "Well let me tell you something, Carten: it didn't hide you anyway! Behind it that horrible thin body of yours has been writhing and posturing for forty odd years, laughing and making faces (oh yes, making faeces, Carten!), shaking its huge Beardsleyesque cock about, anything to be noticed. Anything to be acknowledged. But you won't look, will you ? Because pull that curtain back once and you¹d be burned to a crisp by the sheer repressed energy of it."

The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:

"Ever feel like that, Carten ?"

Carten considered.

"No."

Valentine Strake's face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. "No ?" he said. "Oh well."

He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he had been crouching, an energetic-looking man perhaps fifty years old, with stooped shoulders, short sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless eyes were wilful and absent-minded at the same time. He had on a Patagonia fleece jacket too long for him, tight old Levis which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrel trail boots. He smelled of rolling tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand--its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness--he held a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Carten.

"Look at this."

"I don't want it." Carten backed away. "I don't want it."

"More fool you," said Valentine Strake. "I got it off the shelf there." He tore out two or three pages of the volume which, Carten now saw, was Elizabeth's beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics edition of Madame Bovary--and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. "I can't be bothered with people who don't know their own minds."

"What do you want from me ?"

Strake shrugged. "You phoned me," he said. "As I heard it."

"No," said Carten. "I got some sort of answer service, but I didn't leave a message."

Strake laughed.

"Oh yes you did. Pixie remembered you. Pixie quite fancies you." He rubbed his hands busily. "How about a cup of tea ?"

"I'm not even sure you're here," Carten said, looking anxiously at the sofa. "Did you understand anything you were saying over there ?" Then he said: "It's caught up with me again. In the Midlands, two or three days ago. I thought you might know what to do."

Strake shrugged.

"You already know what to do," he suggested.

"I am sick of doing it, Valentine."

"You'd better get out, then. I doubt you'll finish with a whole skin whatever you do."

"It doesn't work any more. I don't know if it ever worked."

Strake gave him a small colourless smile. "Oh, it works," he said. "You're just a wanker." He held up one hand, in the pretence that Carten might take offence. "Only joking. Only joking." He kept smiling for a moment or two, then added: "Mind if I roll a cigarette ?" On the inside of his left wrist he had a home-made tattoo, the word FUGA, in faded blue-black ink. Carten shrugged and went into the galley. While Carten made the tea Strake strode about smoking nervously and picking pieces of tobacco off his bottom lip. He switched the lights off, and waited with a satisfied air for the apartment to fill with streetlight instead.

At one point he said, "The Gnostics were wrong, you know." Then, when Carten didn't reply:

"There's fog out here. The whole square's full of it."

After that there was quite a long pause. Carten heard two or three small movements, as of someone removing a book from a shelf; then an intake of breath. "Listen to this--" Strake began, but fell silent immediately. When Carten came out of the kitchen, the street door was open and the apartment was empty. Two or three books lay on the floor, surrounded by torn-out pages which looked like wings. On to the empty white wall above the sofa, in a bright parallelogram of sodium light, something outside was projecting the shadow of an enormous beaked head. the upper and lower mandibles of which were so curved that they met only at their tips. It looked nothing like the head of a bird. "Christ," said Carten, his heart beating so hard he could feel it rocking his upper body. "Christ!" The shadow began to turn, as if its owner, hanging in the air two storeys above a square in London E8 at midnight, was turning to look at him. Or worse, as if it wasn't a shadow at all.

"Jesus Christ, Strake, it's here!" Carten shouted, and ran out of the apartment. There was no fog. Neither was Valentine Strake anywhere to be seen.

*

Carten stumbled south until the Regents Canal barred his way, slithered down on to the towpath at Haggerstown road-bridge, and hid among some trees. He thought he heard a voice. This frightened him again and he ran all the way to Islington before he got control of himself. There he tried to think. He decided to call Alexa. Then he decided to call a cab. But his hands were trembling too hard to use the phone, so in the end he did neither but kept on following the canal instead. Camden was deserted and bleak, with a cold wind blowing up towards Chalk Farm. He knocked and called at Alexa Carten's door. She answered it wearing a long cotton nightgown. She looked flushed and he could feel the heat of her body from two feet away.

"Hugh's with me," she said nervously.

Carten stared at her.

"Who's Hugh ?" he said.

Alexa looked back into the flat.

"It's all right, it's Matthew," she called. To Carten she said, "Couldn't you come back in the morning ?"

"I just want some things," Carten said. "It won't take long."

"Matthew--"

He pushed past her. The flat smelled strongly of incense and candle wax. To get to the room where he kept his stuff, he had to pass Alexa's bedroom, the door of which was partly open. Hugh, whoever he was, sat propped up against the wall at the head end of the bed, his face threequarter profile in the yellow glow of two or three nightlight candles. He was in his mid thirties, with good skin and a build light but athletic, features which would help give him a boyish appearance well into his forties. He had a glass of red wine in one hand, and he was staring thoughtfully at it.

Carten looked him up and down.

"Who the hell is this ?" he said.

"Matthew, this is Hugh. Hugh, this is Matthew."

"Hi," said Hugh. He held out his hand. "I won't get up."

"Jesus Christ, Alexa," Carten said.

He went through to the back room, where a brief search turned up some clean Levis and an old black leather jacket he had once liked too much to throw away. He put them on, looking up blankly from the task at the diagrams chalked on the wall. He could hear Alexa talking in the bedroom. Whenever she tried to explain anything, her voice took on childish, persuasive values. After a moment she seemed to give up and said sharply, "Of course I don't! What do you mean ?" Carten remembered her trying to explain similar things to him. There was a noise outside the door and Hugh poked his head round.

"Don't do that," Carten said. "I'm nervous already."

"I wondered if I could help ?"

"No thanks. I'm not staying"

"It's just that it's one o' clock in the morning, you see, and you come in here covered in mud."

Carten shrugged.

"I see that," he said. "I see that."

Alexa stood angrily by the door to watch him out. "Take care," he said to her, as warmly as he could. He was two flights down the stone stairs when he heard her footsteps behind him. "Matthew," she called. "Matthew." When he didn't answer, she followed him out into the street and stood there shouting at him in her bare feet and white nightdress. "Did you come back for another fuck ?" Her voice echoed up and down the road, which was silent for perhaps the only moment of its day. "Is that what you wanted ?"

"Alexa," he said, "it's one o' clock in the morning."

"I don't care. Please don't come here again, Matthew. Hugh's nice and he really likes me."

Carten smiled.

"I'm glad."

"No you're not!" she shouted. "No you're not!"

Hugh came out of the building behind her. He was dressed, and he had his car keys in his hand. He crossed the pavement without looking at Alexa or Carten, and got into his car. He wound the driver's window down as if he thought about saying something to one of them, but in the end shook his head and drove off instead. Alexa stared after him puzzledly then burst into tears. Carten put his arm round her shoulders. She leaned in to him.

"Or did you come back to kill me," she said quietly. "The way you killed all those others ?"

Carten walked off towards Camden Parkway, where he could get a cab.

His cellphone chirped at him suddenly, but he ignored it.

*

Valentine Strake lived in Kilburn at the end of a long street of inexpressive three storey Victorian stock-brick houses, the rubbish-choked basement areas and boarded-up windows of which attracted a floating population of drug dealers, art students, economic refugees from the former Yugoslavia.

Political posters clung to the lamp posts. None of the stained and rusty cars half up on the pavement among the wastepaper and dogshit were less than ten years old. Carten knocked at Strake's door, once, twice, then a third time. He stepped back and with the rain falling into his eyes called up at the front of the building. "Strake ? Valentine ?" His voice echoed off down the street. After a minute something drew his attention to one of the top floor windows. He craned his neck to look, but all he could see was a piece of grey net curtain and the reflection of the streetlight on the dirty glass.

Carten put his hand out to the door. It swung inward, as if in response. Carten stepped back suddenly.

"Jesus" he said. "Jesus!"

For a moment he had thought he saw a face peering round the door at him. It was smeared with streetlight, lower than you would expect to see a face, as if quite a young child had been sent to answer his knock.

Inside, nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of illumination before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second floor rooms. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night.

Valentine Strake lay under a wash of fluorescent light, inside a chalk circle drawn on the bare floorboards of one of the upper rooms. He was sprawled up against an armchair, his head thrown back and to one side, as if he was at that moment being shot. He was naked, and he seemed to have covered himself with some sort of oil. It glistened in the sparse ginger hair between his legs. His mouth had fallen open, and the expression on his face was at once pained and restful. He was dead. His sister Pixie sat on a broken sofa outside the circle, her legs out in front of her. Carten remembered her in adolescence, slow-moving and vague. She had grown into a tall woman of thirty or so, with black hair, very white skin, and a faint downy moustache. Her skirt was drawn up to reveal white, fleshy thighs, and she was staring across Strake's head at a picture on the opposite wall. From this strange cheap piece of religious art, the face and upper body of Christ yearned out into the room in a determined gesture of embrace.

"Pixie ?" said Carten.

Pixie Strake made a noise like, "Yoiy. Yoiy yoiy."

Carten held his hand over his mouth and went a little further into the room.

"Pixie, what happened here ?"

She stared at him blankly; then down at herself; then back up at the picture on the wall. She began to masturbate absent-mindedly, working her fingers into her groin.

"Christ," said Carten.

He took another look at Strake. Strake was clutching an old electric iron in one hand and in the other the catalogue of a recent Stanley Spencer exhibition at the Tate. A moment before, perhaps, he had been holding them up with his arms outspread in the expansive gesture of a figure on a Tarot card. The floor in front of him was littered with objects that seemed to have fallen out of his lap as he died. Seashells, the skull of a small mammal: Serbian gypsy ornaments which had belonged to his mother. There was a feeling that something else was going to happen in the room. Despite the finality of what had already taken place, something else could easily happen.

Pixie Strake said: "He was good boy."

She groaned loudly. The broken springs of the sofa creaked and were silent. After a moment she got to her feet and smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. She was six feet tall, Carten thought, perhaps more. Her great size had a calming effect on him, and she seemed aware of that. She smelled so powerfully of sex he took half a step towards her. She gave him a pale smile. "You could have had that any time," she said, "but not now."

He tried to push her back on to the sofa. She stared at him and shrugged Her mass absorbed his. Eventually he shrugged too and turned his head away. She patted his shoulder.

"I'll see to this, Matty," she said. "But you must go."

"I came because I needed his help."

The idea seemed to give her no satisfaction.

"It is your fault that he is like this. Ever since he met you he has been mad. He was going to do wonderful things with his life."

Carten stared at her.

"Strake ?" he said in disbelief. "Are you talking about Strake--?" He started to laugh. "The day we met he was eating a McDonald's in a railway carriage. He did tattoos on himself with a Bic pen."

Pixie Strake drew herself up.

"He was one of the five most powerful magicians in London," she said simply. Then she added: "I know what you are afraid of. If you don't go now I will send it after you."

"No!" said Carten.

He had no idea what she might be able to do. He stared panickily from her to the dead man, then ran out of the room, down the stairs and into the street.

*

It was three a.m. when he let himself back into Alexa's flat. Alexa was asleep. She had wound herself in the duvet so that only the top of her head showed, and there were new notes everywhere. Other people's problems are their own, she had tried to remind herself: You aren't responsible for other people's problems.

Carten went quietly into the back room and began to empty the chest of drawers, stuffing clothes, books, packs of cards and personal items into a courier bag in the dark. The room looked out on to the central well of the block. Carten hadn't been in there long when he began to hear voices echoing up from one of the lower floors. It sounded like a man and a woman arguing, but he couldn't make out any words, only a feeling of loss and threat. He got up off his knees and drew the curtains. The voices seeped in anyway. When he had what he wanted, he tried to zip up the bag. The zip caught. He looked down. The bag and everything in it was covered in thick soft even layer of dust. This image gave him such a sense of his life draining away that he was filled with terror again. Alexa woke up in the other room.

"Matthew ?" she said. "Is that you ? That's you isn't it ?"

"Go to sleep," Carten advised her. "I just came for some things."

There was a pause while she assimilated this. Then she said:

"I'll make you a cup of tea. I was just going to make tea but I fell asleep. I was so exhausted I just fell asleep."

"There's no need to do that," he said.

He heard the bed creak as she got up. She came and leaned in the doorway, yawning and rubbing her face. "What are you doing ?" she said. She switched the light on suddenly. Carten made a futile gesture with the bag in his hand. They stood there blinking at each other.

"You're leaving."

"Alexa," Carten said, "it's for the best."

"How can you bloody say that!" she shouted. "How can you bloody say it's for the best ?"

Carten began to speak, then shrugged.

"I thought you were going to stay! The other day you said this was good, you said it was good."

"We were fucking, Alexa. I said that was good."

"I know. I know. It was good."

"I said it was good fucking you, that's all," he said. "That was all I meant."

She slid down in the doorway and sat with her knees drawn up.

"You let me feel as if you were going to stay."

"You did that yourself," Carten tried to persuade her.

She stared up at him angrily. "You wanted it too," she insisted. "You practically said as much to me." She sniffed, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Oh well," she said. "Men are always so stupid and frightened." She shivered suddenly. "Is it cold in here ? I'm awake now anyway. At least have some tea. It won't take a minute."

It took longer. Alexa fussed about. She wondered if there was enough milk. She began the washing up, then abandoned it. She left Carten to finish the tea while she went into the bathroom and ran the taps. After that he heard her rooting about somewhere else in the flat. Drawers opened and closed. "Hugh phoned me after you left," she called. This was so transparent Carten didn't bother to answer. "He was worried about me." Carten stood in the kitchen, staring at the things on the shelves and drinking the weak Earl Grey he had made. He kept hold of the courier bag, feeling that if he put it down he would weaken his position. Every so often a wave of anxiety licked over him, starting from somewhere deep in the brainstem.

"I've got to go," he said. "Alexa ?"

He emptied his cup into the sink. When he got to the door she was already there, standing so he couldn't open it. She had dressed for going out, in a big cable-knit cardigan and Versace skirt, and there was a bag at her feet. She saw him looking down at it. "If you can go I can go too," she said. Carten shrugged and reached over her shoulder for the knob of the Yale lock.

"Why don't you trust me ?" she said, as if it was already established that he didn't.

"It isn't anything like that."

"Oh yes it is. I try to help you--"

He made an impatient gesture.

"--only you won't let me."

"Alexa," he said quickly, "I help you. You're anorexic. You're ill most days, and on a good day you can barely walk down the pavement. You're always in a panic. You barely live in the world we know."

"You bastard."

"So how can you help ?"

"I'm not letting you go without me," she said. "I'm not letting you open this door."

She struggled against him.

"Jesus, Alexa."

He got the door open and pushed past her. She caught up with him on the stairs and held on to the collar of his jacket and wouldn¹t let go even when he started to drag her down the stairs.

"I hate you," she said.

He stopped and stared at her. They were both panting.

"Why are you doing this, then ?"

"Because you have no idea!" she shouted. "Because no one else will help you. Because you're the useless one, the damaged one. Are you so stupid you can't see that ? Are you so stupid ?"

She let go of his coat and sat down suddenly.

"Kill me," she said. "Just kill me, too. Keep it away from you for another day."

She glanced up at him, then away again. Tears poured down her face. Her skirt had ridden up as she fell, and he found himself staring at her long, thin thighs as if he had never seen them before. When she saw that, she blinked her tears away and pulled the skirt up further. "Christ," Carten whispered. He turned her over and pushed her into the cold stone stairs, while she pushed back hard against his hand, sniffing and crying throughout. Above them both, in an oblong of orange streetlight, a shadow formed and faded on the wall. There was a suggestion of movement, a few small motes of light which soon vanished. When, ten minutes later, Carten dragged himself away and walked off towards Camden, Alexa followed.

"I won't let you go."

copyright M John Harrison 2004