After some minutes this activity declines. The oriental woman lights an unfiltered cigarette, watching him intently. She smokes for a while, removes a shred of tobacco from her lip, then prompts him:

'What do you see?'

'Eels. Like eels swimming away from me.'

A pause. His feet drum the floor again. Then he says thickly: 'Too many things can happen. You know?'

The woman blows out smoke, shakes her head.

'It won't do for an audience, Ed. Try again.' She makes a complex gesture with her cigarette. 'All the things it might be,' she reminds him, as if she has reminded him before: 'the one thing it is.'

'But the pain.'

She doesn't seem to care about the pain. 'Go ahead.'

'Too many things can happen,' he repeats. 'You know.'

'I do know,' she says, in a more sympathetic voice. She bends down to touch his knotted shoulders briefly and absent-mindedly, like someone calming an animal. It's a kind of animal she knows very well, one with which she has considerable experience. Her voice is full of the sexual charisma of old, alien, made-up things. 'I do know, Ed, honestly. But try to see in more dimensions. Because this is circus, baby. Do you understand? It's entertainment. We've got to give them something.'

When Ed Chianese came to, it was three in the morning. Sprawled face down on the oceanside at the back of the Dunes Motel, he gently felt his face. It wasn't as sticky as he had expected: though the skin seemed smoother than usual and slightly sore, as if he had used cheap exfoliant before a night out. He was tired, but everything-the dunes, the tidewrack, the surf-looked and smelled and sounded very sharp. At first he thought he was alone. But there was Madam Shen, standing over him, her little black shoes sinking into the soft sand, the Tract burning up the night sky behind her.

Ed groaned. He closed his eyes. Vertigo was on him instantly, an after-image of the Tract pinwheeling against the nothing blackness.

'Why are you doing this to me?' he whispered.

Sandra Shen seemed to shrug. 'It's the job,' she said.

Ed tried to laugh. 'No wonder you can't fill it.'

He rubbed his face again, felt in his hair. Nothing. At the same time knew he would never get rid of the sensation of that stuff, sucking at him. And this was the thing about it: it wasn't actually in the tank. Or if it was it was somewhere else as well…

'What did I say? Did I say I'd seen anything?'

'You did well for your first lesson.'

'What is that stuff? Is it still on me? What's it done to me?'

She knelt briefly beside him, stroking his hair back from his forehead. 'Poor Ed,' she said. He felt her breath on his face. 'Prophecy!' she said. 'It's a black art yet, and you're at the forefront of it. But try and see it like this: everyone's lost. Ordinary people, they walk down the street, they've all had bad directions: everyone has to find their way. It's not so hard. They do it on a daily basis.'

For a moment it looked as if she might say something more. Then she patted him on the back, picked up the fishtank and trudged off with it under her arm, up over the dunes and back to the circus. Ed crawled away through the marram grass to where he could throw up quietly. He had bitten his tongue, he discovered, while he was trying to lever the fishtank off his head.

He had already made up his mind to try and forget the stuff he saw in there. That stuff made tank withdrawal seem like fun.

NINETEEN

Chimes of Freedom

After he left the laboratory, Michael Kearney was afraid to stop moving.

It began to rain. It got dark. Everything seemed to be surrounded by the pre-epileptic corona, a flicker like bad neon. A metallic taste filled his mouth. At first he ran around the streets, reeling with nausea, clutching park railings as he passed.

Then he blundered into Russell Square station, and thereafter took tube trains at random. The evening rush had just begun. Commuters turned to watch him squat in the crook of a dirty tiled passage or the corner of a platform, his shoulders hunched over protectively as he shook the Shrander's dice in the basket of his clasped hands; turned away quickly again when they saw his face or smelled the vomit on his clothes. After two hours in the Underground system his panic diminished: he found it hard to stop moving, but at least his heart rate had decreased and he could begin to think. On a swing back through the centre, he had a drink at the Lymph Club, kept it down, ordered a meal he couldn't eat. After that he walked a little more, then caught a Jubilee Line train to Kilburn, where Valentine Sprake lived 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. Kearney knocked at Sprake'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. 'Sprake? 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.

Kearney put his hand out to the door. It swung inward, as if in response. Kearney 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 light 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. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night.

Valentine Sprake 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 Alice sat on a broken sofa outside the circle, her legs out in front of her. Kearney 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 Sprake's head at a picture on the opposite wall. From this strange cheap piece of religious art, a Gethsemane rendered stereoscopically in greens and bluish greys, the face and upper body of Christ yearned out into the room in a wrenched but determined gesture of embrace.

'Alice?' said Kearney.

Alice Sprake made a noise like, 'Yoiy. Yoiy yoiy.'

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

'Alice, 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.