M. Harrison - LIGHT

'You'd like to give her one, wouldn't you?' said Sprake. 'Give her a bit of a slippery hot one, Mikey old chap. Well I don't care, mind-' here he gave a shout of laughter '-but the other two wouldn't let you.'

It was Sprake who took them into Europe.

They killed Turkish prostitutes in Frankfurt, a Milanese dress-designer in Antwerp. Towards the end of what became a six-month spree, they found themselves in The Hague one evening, eating at a good-quality Italian restaurant opposite the Kurrhaus Hotel. The evening wind came up off the sea, blew sand into the square outside before it died away. The lamp swung above the table and the shadows of the wineglasses shifted uncomfortably on the tablecloth, like the complex umbrae and penumbrae of planets. Sprake's hand moved between them, then lay flat as if exhausted.

'We're like bears in a pit here,' he said.

'Do you wish we hadn't come?'

'"Crespelle and ricotta",' said Sprake. He threw the menu on to the table. 'What the fuck's that about?'

After an hour or two, a boy sauntered past outside in the twilight. He was perhaps five feet ten inches tall and twenty-six years old. His hair had been dragged back and plaited tightly, and he was wearing yellow high-waisted shorts with their own yellow crossover braces. He carried a matching yellow soft toy. Though he was slightly built, his shoulders, hips and thighs had a rounded, fleshy look, and on his face was the self-satisfied and yet somehow wincing expression of someone acting out a fantasy in public.

Sprake grinned at Kearney.

'Look at that,' he whispered. 'He wants you to put him in a death camp for his sexuality. You want to choke him because he's a prat.' He wiped his mouth and stood up. 'Maybe the two of you can get together.' Later, in their hotel room, they looked down at what they had done to the boy. 'See that?' Sprake said. 'If that doesn't tell you something, nothing will.' When Kearney only stared at him, he quoted with the intense disgust of the master to the apprentice:

'"It was a mystery to them that they were in the Father all along without knowing it."'

'Excuse me?' the boy said. 'Please?'

In the end these promises of understanding amounted to little. While their association never quite came to seem like anything as positive as a mistake, Sprake revealed himself over the years to be an undependable accomplice, his motives as hidden-even from himself -as the metaphysics by which he claimed to understand what was happening. That afternoon on the Huston train he had been looking for a cause to attach himself to, the folie а deux which would advance his own emotional ambitions. For all his talk, he knew nothing.

It was late. Candlelight flickered on the walls of Anna Kearney's apartment, where she turned in her sleep, throwing out her arms and murmuring to herself. Sparse traffic came out of Hammersmith on the A316, crossed the bridge and hummed away west and south. Kearney threw the dice. They rattled and scattered. For twenty years they had been his secret conundrum, part of the centralising puzzle of his life. He picked them up, weighed them for a moment in the palm of his hand, threw them again, just to watch them tumble and bounce across the carpet like insects in a heatwave.

This is how they looked:

Despite their colour they were neither ivory nor bone. But each face had an even craquelure of faint fine lines, and in the past this had led Kearney to think they might be made of porcelain. They might have been porcelain. They might have been ancient. In the end they seemed neither. Their weight, their solidity in the hand, had reminded him from time to time of poker dice, and of the counters used in the Chinese game of mah-jong. Each face featured a deeply incised symbol. These symbols were coloured. (Some of the colours, particularly the blues and reds, always seemed too bright given the ambient illumination. Others seemed too dim.) They were unreadable. He thought they came from a pictographic alphabet. He thought they were the symbols of a numerical system. He thought that from time to time they had changed between one cast and another, as if the results of a throw affected the system itself. In the end, he did not know what to think. Instead he had given them names: the Voortman Move; the High Dragon; the Stag's Great Horns. What part of his unconscious these names emerged from, he had no clue. All of them made him feel uneasy, but the words 'the Stag's Great Horns' made his skin crawl. There was a thing that looked like a food processor. There was another thing that looked like a ship, an old ship. You looked at it one way and it was an old ship. You looked at it another way and it was nothing at all. Looking was no solution: how could you know which way was up? Over the years Kearney had seen pi in the symbols. He had seen Planck's constants. He had seen a model of the Fibonacci sequence. He had seen what he thought was a code for the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the primitive protein molecules of the autocatalytic set.

Every time he picked them up, he knew as little as he had the first time. Every day he started new.

He sat in Anna Kearney's bedroom and threw the dice again.

How could you know which way to look at them?

With a shiver he saw that he had thrown the Stag's Horns. He turned it over quickly, shovelled the dice back into their leather bag. Without them, without the rules he had made up to govern their combinations, without something, he could no longer make decisions. He lay down next to Anna, supporting himself on one elbow, watched her sleep. She looked hollowed-out and yet at peace, like someone very old. He whispered her name. She didn't wake, but murmured, and moved her legs slightly apart. A palpable heat came up from her.

Two nights previously, he had found her diary, and in it read this passage:

I look at the images Michael made of me in America, and I hate this woman already. Here she stares out across the bay from Monster Beach with one hand shading her eyes. Here she undresses, drunk; or picks up driftwood, her mouth full of smiles. She dances on the sand. Now she is seen lying back on her elbows in front of an empty fireplace, wearing light-coloured trousers and a soft wool jumper. The camera moves across her. She is laughing out at the lover behind the handicam. Her legs are raised at the knees and slightly parted. Her body looks relaxed but not in the least sensual. Her lover will be disappointed because of this: but even more because she looks so well. Is it something about the room? That fireplace betrays her instantly, it makes too bare a frame, it throws her into high relief. Her energy is projected beyond the picture space. She is making eye contact. It is a disaster. He is used to a thinner face, gaunt cheekbones, body language pivoting between the grammars of pain and sex. Neither folded in on herself nor quivering with need, she is no longer the woman he knows. He is used to more urgency.

He will not be so attracted to someone this happy.

Kearney turned away from the sleeping woman and pondered the justice of this. He thought about what he had seen on Tate's flatscreen monitor that afternoon. He would have to talk to Sprake again soon; he fell asleep thinking about that.

When he woke up, Anna was kneeling over him.

'Do you remember my Russian hat?' she said.

'What?'

Kearney stared up at her, feeling stupid with sleep. He looked at his watch: 10 a.m. and the curtains were open wide. She had opened the window too. The room was lively with light, the sound of people, traffic. Anna had one arm behind her back, and was leaning forward with her weight on the other one. The neck of her white cotton nightgown had fallen forward so that he could see her breasts, which for some complicated reason of her own she had never encouraged him to touch. She smelled of soap and toothpaste.