M. Harrison: LIGHT

'Do you want something to eat?' Anna called from the bathroom. There was a sound of her moving in the water. 'I could make you something if you like.'

Kearney sighed.

'That would be nice,' he said.

He threw the dice again, then replaced them and looked round the room. It was small, with bare untreated floorboards and a window which looked out on the thick black foul-pipes of other flats. On the off-white wall above the chest of drawers, Kearney had years ago drawn two or three diagrams in coloured chalk. He couldn't make anything of them, either.

After they had eaten, she lit candles and persuaded him to go to bed with her. 'I'm really tired,' she said. 'Really exhausted.' She sighed and clung to him. Her skin was still damp and flushed from the bath. Kearney ran his fingers down between her buttocks. She breathed in sharply, then rolled away on to her stomach and half-knelt, raising herself so that he could reach her better. Her sex felt like very soft suede. He rubbed it until her entire body went rigid and she came, gasping, making a kind of tiny coughing groan. To his surprise this gave him an erection. He waited for it to subside, which took a few minutes, then said:

'I probably have to go away.'

She stared at him. 'But what about me?'

'Anna, I left you long ago,' he reminded her.

'But you're still here. You're happy to come and fuck me; you come for this.'

'It's you who wants this.'

She clutched his hand. 'But I see that thing,' she said. 'I see it every day now.'

'When do you see it? It doesn't want you anyway. It never did.'

'I'm so exhausted today. I really don't know what's the matter with me.'

'If you ate more-'

She turned her back on him abruptly.

'I don't know why you come here,' she whispered. Then, vehemently: 'I have seen it. I've seen it in that room. It stands in there, staring out of the window.'

'Christ,' he said. 'Why didn't you tell me before?'

'Why should I tell you anything?'

She fell asleep soon after that. Kearney moved away from her and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic cross Chiswick Bridge. It was a long time before he could sleep. When he did, he experienced, in the form of a dream, a memory of his childhood.

It was very clear. He was three years old, perhaps less, and he was collecting pebbles on a beach. All the visual values of the beach were pushed, as in some advertising image, so that things seemed a little too sharp, a little too bright, a little too distinct. Sunlight glittered on a receding tide. The sand curved gently away, the colour of linen blinds. Gulls stood in a line on the groyne nearby. Michael Kearney sat among the pebbles. Still wet, and sorted by the undertow into drifts and bands of different sizes, they lay around him like jewels, dried fruit, nubs of bone. He ran them through his fingers, choosing, discarding, choosing and discarding. He saw cream, white, grey; he saw tiger colours. He saw ruby red. He wanted them all! He glanced up to make sure his mother was paying attention, and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things-if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.

In that moment he was lost. Out of the sand, the sky, the pebbles-out of what he would later think of as the willed fractality of things-emerged the Shrander. He had no name for it then. It had no shape for him. But it was in his dreams thereafter, as a hollow, an absence, a shadow on a door. He woke from this latest dream, forty years later, and it was a pale wet morning with fog in the trees on the other side of the road. Anna Kearney clung to him, saying his name.

'Was I awful last night? I feel much better now.'

He fucked her again, and then left. At the door of the flat she said: 'People think it's a failure to live alone, but it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else.' Pinned to the back of the door was another note: Someone loves you. All his life Kearney had preferred women to men. It was a visceral or genetic choice, made early. Women calmed him as much as he excited them. As a result, perhaps, his dealings with men had quickly become awkward, unproductive, chafing.

What had the dice advised? He was no more certain than he had ever been. He decided he would try to find Valentine Sprake, Sprake, who had helped him on and off over the years, lived somewhere in North London. But though Kearney had a telephone number for him, he wasn't sure it was reliable. He tried it anyway, from Victoria station. There was a silence at the other end of the line then a woman's voice said:

'You have reached the BT Cellnet answering service.'

'Hello?' said Kearney. He checked the number he had dialled 'You aren't on a cellphone,' he said. 'This isn't a cellphone number. Hello?' The silence at the other end spun itself out. In the very distance, he thought, he could hear something like breath. 'Sprake?' Nothing. He hung up and found his way down to the Victoria Line platforms. He changed trains at Green Park, and again at Baker Street, working his way obliquely to the centre of town, where he would interrogate the afternoon drinkers at the Lymph Club on Greek Street, one place he might expect to get news of Sprake.

Soho Square was full of schizophrenics. Adrift in the care of the community with their small dirty dogs and bags of clothes, they were brought together at sites like this by an attraction to movement, crowd, commerce. A middle-aged woman with an accent he couldn't quite place had annexed a bench near the mock Tudor shack at the centre of the square and was staring around with a lively but undirected interest. Every so often her upper lip folded back and a fey, unpremeditated sound escaped her mouth, more than an exclamation, less than a word. When Kearney appeared, walking fast from the Oxford Street end, an educated look sprang from nowhere into her eyes and she began talking loudly to herself. Her topics were disconnected and various Kearney hurried past, then on an impulse turned back.

He had heard words he didn't understand.

Kefahuchi Tract.

'What does that mean?' he said. 'What do you mean by that?

Mistaking this for an accusation, the woman fell silent and stared at the ground near his feet. She had on a curious mixture of good quality coats and cardigans; green wellington boots; home-made fingerless mitts. Unlike the others she had no baggage. Her face, tanned by exhaust fumes, alcohol and the wind that blows incessantly around the base of Centre Point, had a curiously healthy, rural look. When she looked up at last, her eyes were pale blue. 'I wonder if you could spare me the money for a cup of tea?' she said.

'I'll do more than that,' Kearney promised. 'Just tell me what you mean.'

She blinked.

'Wait here!' he told her, and at the nearest Pret bought three All Day Breakfasts, which he put in a bag with a classic latte. Back in Soho Square, the woman hadn't moved, but sat blinking into the weak sunlight, occasionally calling out to passers-by, but reserving most of her attention for two or three pigeons hobbling about in front of her. Kearney handed her the bag.

'Now,' he said. 'Tell me what you see.'

She gave him a cheerful smile. 'I don't see anything,' she said. 'I take my medication. I always take it.' She held the Pret bag for a moment then returned it to him. 'I don't want this.'