M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Come and look!' she urged him. 'Isn't it nice?'

'It's a motel room,' Kearney acknowledged, eyeing with distrust the ruched faux -gingham curtains.

'It's a Boston motel room.'

They were in Mann Hill Beach longer than New York. There was a coast fog each morning, but it burnt off early and for the rest of the day everything was bleached out in clear winter sunshine. At night, they could see the lights of Provincetown across the bay. No one came near them. At first Kearney searched the room every couple of hours and would sleep only with the headboard lamp on. Eventually he relaxed. Anna, meanwhile, wandered up and down the beach, collecting with a kind of aimless enthusiasm the items the sea washed up; or drove the Pontiac carefully into Boston, where she ate little meals in Italian restaurants. 'You should come with me,' she said. 'It's like a holiday. It would do you good.' Then, examining herself in the mirror: 'I've got fat, haven't I? Am I too fat?'

Kearney stayed in the room with the TV on and the sound turned down-a habit he had picked up from Briar: Tate-or listened to a local radio station which specialised in music from the 1980s. He quite liked this, because it made him feel convalescent, half asleep. Then one night they played the old Tom Waits song 'Downtown Train'.

He had never even liked it; but with the first chord, he was flung so completely back into an earlier version of himself that a terrible puzzlement came over him. He couldn't understand how he had aged so savagely, or how he came to be in a motel room with someone he didn't know, someone he had yet to meet, a woman older than himself who, when he touched her thin shoulder, looked sideways at him and smiled. Tears sprang into his eyes. It was only a moment of confusion, but it was carnivorous, and he sensed that by acknowledging it he had allowed it in. Thereafter it would follow him as relentlessly as the Shrander. It would always be waiting to spring out on him. Perhaps in a way it was the Shrander, and it would eat him moment to moment if he didn't do something. So the next morning he got up before Anna was awake and drove the Pontiac into Boston.

There, he bought a Sony handicam. He spent some time searching for the kind of soft plastic-covered wire gardeners use; but found a carbon-steel chefs knife quite easily. On an impulse he went to Beacon Hill, where he picked up two bottles of Montrachet. On his way back to the car he stood for a moment on the south side of the Charles River Basin looking across at MIT, then on an impulse tried to phone Brian Tate. No answer. Back at the motel, Anna was sitting on the bed naked with her feet tucked up, crying. Ten o'clock in the morning and she had already pinned notes to the doors and walls. Why are you anxious? they said, and: Never do more than you can. They were like beacons for a bad sailor, someone lost even in familiar straits. There was a faint smell of vomit in the bathroom, which she had tried to disguise by spraying perfume about. She looked thinner already. He put his arm round her shoulders.

'Cheer up,' he said.

'You could have told me you were going.'

Kearney held up the Sony. 'Look! Let's walk on the beach.'

'I'm not speaking to you.'

But Anna loved to be filmed. The rest of the day, while seabirds flickered over the shallows or hung like kites above the beach, she ran, sat, rolled, posed looking out to sea, against the white sand in the coastal clarity of light. 'Let me look!' she insisted. 'Let me look!' Then screams of laughter as the images poured like a stream of jewels across the little monitor. She wouldn't wait to see them on the TV. She had the impatience of a fourteen-year-old-that life had not allowed her to remain fourteen, she could sometimes imply, was her special tragedy.

'Here's something you don't know,' she said. They sat for a moment on a dune, and she told him about the Mann Hill Sea Monster-

November 1970: three thousand pounds of rotting flesh is washed on to the Massachusetts sand. Crowds gather all the next day, motoring up from Providence and down from Boston. Parents stare, startled by the blubbery flippers. Kiddies dart and dash up close enough to frighten themselves. But the thing is too decayed ever to be identified; and though its bone structure resembles that of a plesiosaur, consensus has it that the gale has brought in nothing more exotic than the remains of a basking shark. In the end, everyone goes home, but the arguments continue for thirty years-

'I bet you didn't know that!' said Anna, leaning back against Kearney's chest and encouraging him to put his arms around her. 'Though you'll say you did.' She yawned and looked out over the bay, which was darkening like the fine crust on a blob of mercury. 'I'm tired out, but in such a nice way.'

'You should go to bed early,' he said.

That evening she drank most of the wine, laughed a lot and took off her clothes, then fell asleep suddenly on the bed. Kearney pulled the covers over her, drew the faux -gingham curtains, and plugged the handicam into the TV. He turned off the lights and for a while ran idly through the stuff he had taken on the beach. He rubbed his eyes. Anna snored suddenly, said something indistinct. The last of the handicam images, ill-lit and grainy-looking, showed her in the corner of the room. She had got as far as unbuttoning her jeans. Her breasts were already bare, and she was turning her head as if Kearney had just spoken to her, her eyes wide, her mouth sweet but tired with acceptance, as if she already knew what was going to happen to her.

He froze that image on the screen, found a pair of scissors and cut two or three lengths of the wire he had bought that morning. These, he placed close to hand on the bedside table. Then he took off his clothes, stripped the chefs knife out of its plastic wrap, pulled back the bedclothes and looked down at her. She lay curled up, with one arm placed loosely round her knees. Her back and shoulders were as thin and unmuscled as a child's, the spine prominent and vulnerable. Her face, in profile, had a sharp, hollo wed-out look, as if sleep was no rest from the central puzzle of being Anna. Kearney stood above her, hissing through his teeth, mainly in anger at the things that had led her here, led him here. He was about to start when he thought he would throw the Shrander's dice, just to be sure.

She must have heard them tumbling on the bedside table, because when he turned back she was awake and looking up at him, dull and fractious with sleep, her breath sour from the wine. Her eyes took in the knife, the wire, Kearney's unaccustomed erection. Unable to understand what was happening, she reached up with one hand and tried to pull him down towards her.

'Are you going to fuck me now?' she whispered.

Kearney shook his head, sighed.

'Anna, Anna,' he said, trying to pull away.

'I knew,' she said, in a different voice. 'I always knew you'd do it in the end.'

Kearney detached himself gently. He put the knife back on the bedside table. 'Kneel up,' he whispered. 'Kneel up.'

She knelt up awkwardly. She seemed confused.

'I've still got my knickers on.'

'Shh.'

Kearney held her with his hand. She moved against him, made a small noise and began to come immediately.

'I want you to come!' she said. 'I want you to come too!'

Kearney shook his head. He held her there quietly in the night until she buried her face in the pillow and stopped trying to control herself. He fetched the bottle of wine and gave her half a glassful and they lay on the bed and watched the television. First Anna on the beach, then Anna undressing, while the camera moved slowly down one side of her body and up the other; then, as she grew bored, a CNN news segment. Kearney turned the sound up just in time to hear the words '… Kefahuchi Tract, named after its discoverer.' Flaring across the screen in colours that couldn't be natural appeared some cosmic object no one could understand. It looked like nothing much. A film of rosy gas with a pinch of brighter light at its centre.