M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Things here are truly fucked up,' Ed whispered. 'Lucky I can just run away.'

Sandra Shen smiled up at him.

'I'm afraid not, Ed,' she said. 'This isn't a tank parlour. There are consequences out here. Do you want the job or don't you?' Before he could answer this, she went on: 'If not, Bella Cray would like a word.'

'Hey, that's a threat.'

She shook her head fractionally. Ed looked down at her, trying to see what colour her eyes were. She smiled at his anxiety.

'Let me tell you something about yourself,' she suggested.

'Oh ho. Now we get to it. How you know all about me though you never saw me before?' He grinned. 'What's in the fishtank?' he said, trying to see past her to where it lay on the floor. 'I've wondered about that.'

'First things first. Ed, I'll tell you a secret about yourself. You're easily bored.'

Ed blew on his fingers to indicate scorching.

'Wow,' he said. 'That's something I never once thought of.'

'No,' she said. 'Not that boredom. Not the boredom you manage from a dipship or a twink-tank. You've been hiding the real boredom behind that your whole life.' Ed shrugged a little, tried to look away, but now her eyes held his somehow, and he couldn't. 'You have a bored soul, Ed; they handed it to you before you were born. Enjoy sex, Ed? It's to fill that hole. Enjoy the tank? It fills the hole. Prefer things edgy? You aren't whole, Ed: it's to fill you up, that's the story of it. Another thing anyone can see about you, even Annie Glyph: you have a piece missing.'

Ed had heard this more often than she thought, though usually in different circumstances he had to admit.

'So?' he said.

She stepped to one side.

'So now you can look in the fishtank.'

Ed opened his mouth. He closed it again. Suckered in some way he didn't follow. He knew he would do it, out of that very boredom she mentioned. He looked sideways in the light leaking through the open door. Kefahuchi light, which made Sandra Shen harder, not easier, to see. He opened his mouth to say something, but she got there first. 'The show needs a prophet, Ed.' She started to turn away. 'That's the opening. That's the deal. And you know, Annie could do with a little more cash. There's not much left after she scores the cafй йlectrique. '

Ed swallowed.

Sea shushing behind the dunes. An empty bar full of dust and Tract-light. A man kneels with his head inside some kind of fishtank, unable to pull himself free, as if whatever smoky yet gelid substance that fills it has clutched him and is already trying to digest him. His hands tug at the tank, his arm muscles bulge. Sweat pours off him in the shitty light, his feet kick and rattle against the floorboards, and-under the impression that he is screaming- he produces a faint, very high-pitched whining noise.

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.

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.