M. Harrison - LIGHT

Bella Cray looked amused.

' "You got no call",' she mimicked. She stared interestedly up at Annie, who was perhaps twice her height, then went back to working with the lipstick. 'Who's this horse?' she asked Ed. 'Hey, let me guess. I bet you're fucking her, Ed. I bet you're fucking this horse!'

'Look,' Ed said. 'It's me you want.'

'That's clever of you, to work that out.'

Bella replaced the compact in her purse and started to zip the purse up. Then she seemed to remember something.

'Wait,' she said. 'You've got to see this-'

She had the Chambers gun half out when Annie Glyph's hands -big-knuckled and clumsy, callused from five years in the rickshaw shafts, trembling a little from all that cafй йlectrique- closed over it. Ed loved those hands but he never got the wrong side of them. There was a barely noticeable struggle then Annie had passed the pistol to him. He checked the load, which resembled a black oily fluid but was really a kind of particle-jockey's nightmare held in place by magnetic fields. He swept the shadows for tell-tale signs of gun-punks, which were generally raincoats, shoes with big soles, anyone with a nova grenade or a bd haircut. Meanwhile, Annie had one hand still clamped over both of Bella's: this simple grip she used to hoist Bella slowly off the floor.

'Now we can talk face to face,' she said.

'What's this?' Bella said. 'Is this your dubious shot at fame? You think you won't get hurt for this?' She raised her voice. 'Hey, Ed, you think I don't have guys out there?'

'That's a valid point,' Ed told Annie.

'There's no one out there,' Annie said. 'It's the night.'

Her free hand went up, curled all the way round Bella's neck and met itself coming the other way. Bella made a noise. Her face got red, she milled her arms about like a baby. One of her shoes fell off.

'Jesus, Annie,' Ed said. 'Put her down and let's get out of here.'

The fact was, it filled him with anxiety to see one of the Cray sisters treated like this. He owed his recent personality to being her victim. Bella was everywhere. In this city at least she was broadband, nationwide. She earned from everyone she saw. She had her finger in every pie from Earth-heroin to giftwrap. Bella bought gun-punks and love-kiddies. For relaxation she had a patch which made her come all day then, like a female mantis, eat Mr Lucky with her favourite sauce. This was the woman who had sworn to revenge herself after Ed killed her sister. If she proved so easy to show up on her own turf, where did that leave Ed? Besides, no one, as he knew from the personal evidence in the waste bin, turned the tables on Bella Cray for long. He shivered.

'There's a fog coming up, Annie,' he said.

Annie was explaining to Bella, 'You don't see the consequences of your acts, you might as well be in a twink-tank.' She forced Bella to look in the waste bin. 'I want you to understand what you did when you did this,' she said. 'What you really did.'

Bella tried to laugh. What came out was, 'Guck guck guck.'

Annie's grip tightened. Bella's colour deepened. She squeezed out one more guck and went limp. At that Annie seemed to lose interest. She dropped Bella on the floor and picked up Bella's purse instead. 'Hey Ed, look! It's full of money!' She sheafed the money into her hands and held it up and laughed like a kid. Annie's delight never knew any bounds. She was a rickshaw girl. Everything she did, she was full-on inside it. They would have called her simple in another age; but that was the last thing she was. 'Ed, I never saw so much money!' While she was counting it, Bella Cray scraped herself off the concrete and limped quickly away into the fog. She seemed a little one-sided.

Ed raised the Chambers gun, but it was too late to get a shot. Bella was gone. He sighed.

'No good will come of this,' he said.

'Oh yes it will,' said Annie. She rolled up the money. 'Better I have it than that little cow. You'll see.'

'She won't rest until you're dead too.'

Towards dawn the two of them trundled the waste bin across the concrete and into the dunes, where Ed buried Tig and Neena and stuck the Monster Beach sign in the sand over them. Annie stood in the fog for a moment, then said, 'I'm sorry about your friends, Ed,' and went to bed; but Ed stayed until the fog cleared, the seabirds began to call and the onshore wind ruffled the marram grass, thinking of Neena Vesicle and how when he was inside her she would tremble and say, 'Push harder. Oh. Me.' Something changed for Ed that night. The next show he did, he dreamed right through his childhood and into another place.

Michael and Anna Kearney, with their English accents, careful clothes and slightly puzzled air, drove north from New York City again. This time they were in no hurry. Kearney rented a little grey BMW from an uptown dealer, and they dawdled north into Long Island, then, back on the mainland, followed the coastline up into Massachusetts.

They stopped to look at anything that caught their eye, anything the highway signs suggested might be of interest. There wasn't much, unless you counted the sea. Kearney, with the air of a man suddenly able to accept his own past, browsed the flea markets and thrift stores of every town they passed through, unearthing used books, ancient videotapes and CD remasterings of albums he had once liked but had never been able to acknowledge in public. These had titles like The Unforgettable Fire and The Hounds of Love. Anna looked at him sidelong, amused: puzzled. They ate three times a day, often in waterfront fish restaurants, and though Anna put on weight, she no longer complained. They stayed a night here, a night there, avoiding motels, seeking instead the picturesque bed-and-breakfast offered by retired lipstick lesbians or middle-aged brokers fleeing the consequences of the Great Bull Market. Genuine English marmalade. Views of gull, tidewrack, upturned dories. Clean and seaside places.

In this roundabout way they came again to Monster Beach, where Kearney got them a clapboard cottage facing the ocean across a narrow road and some dunes. It was as bare inside as the beach, with uncurtained windows, scrubbed wooden floors, and bunches of dried thyme hanging in corners. Outside, a few shreds of pale blue paint clung to the grey boards in the onshore winds.

'But we've got TV,' Anna said. 'And mice.' Later she said: 'Why are we here?'

Kearney wasn't sure how to answer that.

'We're hiding, I suppose.'

At night he still dreamed of Brian Tate and the white cat, melting like tallow in the foetid heat of the Faraday cage: but now he saw them increasingly in situations that made no sense. Taking up bizarre formal seated postures, they toppled away from him against a fundamental blackness. The cat, though it looked exactly like an ornament on a shelf, was as big as the man. (This curious detail of scale, the dream's comment upon itself, caused Kearney a rush of misery-strengthless, stark, unbelievably depressing.) Still toppling, they became smaller and smaller, to vanish from sight, gesticulating hieratically, against a background of slowly exploding stars and nebulae.

Compared to this, the death of Valentine Sprake, though it lost in memory nothing of its grotesqueness, had begun to seem like a side-issue.

'We're hiding,' Kearney repeated.

During his third year at Cambridge, before he met Anna, or murdered anyone, he had glanced into a stationer's window one day on his way into Trinity College. Inside was a display of engraved wedding cards which, as he walked past it, seemed for a moment to merge indistinguishably with the discarded bus tickets and ATM receipts which littered the pavement at his feet. The inside and the outside, he saw, the window display and the street, were only extensions of one another.