“Was it more like the Radio People, when you were little?”

Long pause. “Today it was as if I wasthe radio.”

“Like you were channeling someone else?”

“It’s hard to describe. It’s disturbing. Blanking out like that. Being in your body, but not being in your body. So embarrassing, too, coming back to myself with everyone standing round me like a—a Victorian deathbed scene. Christ only knows what the Webbers thought.”

I’ve always put inverted commas around Holly’s “psychic stuff” but today this same psychic stuff won us our daughter back. My agnosticism’s badly shaken. I kiss her head. “Write about it, one day, darling. It’s … fascinating.”

“As if anyone’d be interested in my bonkers ramblings.”

“You’re wrong. People acheto believe there’s more than …”

Screams from the funfair on the pier travel over the calm sea and through the slightly open window.

“Hol,” I realize I’m going to say it all, “Nasser in Baghdad, my minder, and Aziz Al-Karbalai, my photographer. They were killed in the car bomb at the Safir last week. They’re dead because of me.”

Holly rolls off me and sits up. “What are you talking about?”

HOLLY CLASPS HER knees to her chest. “You should’ve told me.”

I dab my eyes on the sheet. “Sharon’s wedding bash wasn’t the right time or place. Was it?”

“They were your colleagues. Your friends. S’pose Gwyn died, and I clammed up for days before telling you. Was there a funeral?”

“Yeah, for … the remains of them. But it was too dangerous for me to go.” Drunken laughter lopes down the corridor outside our room. I wait for it to pass. “It was too dark to see much at night, but at dawn, when the sun came up, there were just … twisted pieces of the bomber’s car, and of Nasser’s Corolla … Mr. Khufaji keeps a—a—a few topiary shrubs in pots up front, y’know, bushes clipped into shapes. A token gesture of more civilized days. Between two of those pots, there was a—a—a shin, with a foot attached and a—a canvas shoe. God knows, I saw worse in Rwanda, and your average grunt in Iraq sees worse twenty times a day. But when I recognized the shoe—it was Aziz’s—I puked myself inside out.” Get a grip. “Earlier, Nasser’d recorded interviews with patients from a clinic outside Fallujah. The next day, this is just one week ago, he was going to come over and transcribe them. He gave me the Dictaphone for safekeeping. We said good night. I went into the hotel. Nasser’s ignition was knackered, so Aziz probably got out to push-start it, or hook up a jump-lead, more likely. The bomber was aiming at the lobby, maybe hoping to bring down the building, I dunno, maybe it would’ve worked, it was a sizable blast, but anyway the car slammed into Nasser’s and …” Get a grip. “God, I’ve got tears coming out of my nose now. Is that even anatomically possible? So, yeah—Nasser’s daughters don’t have a daddy now because Nasser dropped me off late, at car-bombing time, at a Westerners’ hotel.”

From next door’s TV I hear a Hollywood space battle.

She touches my wrist. “You do know it’s not that simple? As you always told me when I used to beat myself up over Jacko.”

Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s 9/11, it’s Bush and Blair, it’s militant Islam, the occupation, Nasser’s career choices, Olive Sun and Spyglass, a clapped-out Corolla that wouldn’t start, tragic timing, oh, a million little switches—but also me. Ed Brubeck hired them. Nasser needed to feed his family. I amwhy he and Aziz were there …” I choke up and steady myself. “I’m an addict, Holly. Life isflat and stale when I’m not working. What Brendan denied implying yesterday, it’s true. The whole truth, nothing but the truth. I … I’m a war-zone junkie. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

HOLLY’S CLEANING HER teeth, and a slab of vanilla light falls across Aoife. Look at her, this bright, bonkers, no-longer-so-little girl, who revealed herself from the mystery of ultrasound scans, nearly seven years ago. I remember us giving friends and family the big news; surprised joy from the Sykes clan and amused glances as Holly added, “No, Mum, Ed and I won’tbe getting married. It’s 1997, not 1897”; and my own mum—whose leukemia was already getting to work on her bone marrow—saying, “Oh, Ed!” before bursting into tears and me asking, “Why’re you crying, Mum?” and her laughing, “I don’t know!”; and “Bump” swelling up until Holly’s navel was inverted; and Bump’s kicks; sitting in the Spence Cafй in Stoke Newington and compiling lists of girls’ names—Holly just knew, of course; and my irrational anxiety during my trip to Jerusalem about London ice and London muggers; then on the night of November 30 Holly calling from the bathroom, “Brubeck, find your car keys”; and a dash to the maternity ward, where Holly got axed and shredded alive by a whole new pain called childbirth; and clocks that went at six times the speed of time, until Holly was holding a glistening mutant in her arms and telling her, “We’ve been expecting you”; and Dr. Shamsie the Pakistani doctor insisting, “No, no, no, Mr. Brubeck, youwill snip the cord, you absolutely must. Don’t be squeamish—you’ve seen much worse on assignment”; and last, the mugs of milky tea and the plate of Digestive biscuits in a small room down a corridor. Aoife was discovering the joys of breast milk, and Holly and I found that we were both bloody ravenous.

Our very first breakfast as a family.

May 1, 2015

WELSH RAIN GODS PISS onto the roofs, festival tents, and umbrellas of Hay-on-Wye and also on Crispin Hershey, as he strides along a gutter-noisy lane, into the Old Cinema Bookshop and makes his way down to its deepest bowel, where he rips this week’s Piccadilly Reviewto confetti. Who on God’s festering Earth does that six-foot-wide, corduroy-clad, pubic-bearded, rectal probe Richard Cheeseman think he is? I shut my eyes but the words of his review slide by like the breaking news: “I tried my utmost to find something, anything, in Crispin Hershey’s long-awaited novel to dilute its trepanning godawfulness.” How darethat inflatable semen-stained Bagpuss write that after cosying up to me at the Royal Society of Literature bashes? “In my salad days at Cambridge, I got into a fistfight defending the honor of Hershey’s early masterpiece Desiccated Embryosand to this day I wear the scar on my ear as a badge of honor.” Who sponsored Richard Cheeseman’s application for Pen UK? Idid. I did! And how does he thank me? “To dub Echo Must Die‘infantile, flatulent, ghastly drivel’ would be an insult to infants, to flatulence, and to ghasts alike.” I stamp on the magazine’s shredded remains, panting and gasping …

TRULY, DEAR READER, I could weep. Kingsley Amis boasted how a bad review might spoil his breakfast, but it bloody wasn’t going to spoil his lunch. Kingsley Amis lived in the pre-Twitter age, when reviewers actually read proofs and thought independently. Nowadays they just Google for a preexisting opinion and, thanks to Richard Cheeseman’s chainsaw massacre, what they’ll read about my comeback novel is: “So why is Echo Must Diesuch a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding clichй that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?” Richard Cheeseman has hung a KICK ME sign around Echo Must Die’s neck, at the very time I need a commercial renaissance. It isn’t the 1990s, when my agent, Hal “the Hyena” Grundy, could pluck a Ј500K book deal as easily as a plug of mucus from his giant honker. Now is the official Decade of the Death of the Book. I’m hemorrhaging Ј40K a year on school fees for the girls, and the little pied-а-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood may have put a smile back on Zoл’s face but the expense has rendered me financially mortal for the first time since Hal the Hyena got me my book deal for Desiccated Embryos. My iPhone trills. Speak of the devil, it’s a message from Hal.