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Sprake nodded, as if she had said something. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and examined the flattened, porous, spittle-stained end of it. “You lot, now,” he said. “Well, you look like a lot of self-satisfied bullies.” They were corporate IT workers and estate agents in their mid twenties, passing themselves off with a designer tie or a padded shoulder as dangerous accountants from the City. “Is that what you want?” He laughed. “We should bomb our names onto the prison walls,” he shouted. They edged away from him, until only Kearney was left.

“As for you,” he said, staring interestedly up at Kearney with his head at an odd, bird-like angle on his neck, and dropping his voice to a barely audible murmur:

“You just have to keep killing, don’t you? Because that’s the way to keep it at arm’s length. Am I right?”

The encounter already had the same edge of unease—the aura, the heightened epileptic foreboding—many events had taken on in the wake of the Shrander, as if that entity cast some special kind of illumination of its own. But at the time Kearney still considered himself as a kind of apprentice or seeker. He still hoped to gain something positive. He was still trying to see his retreat from the Shrander as accompanied by a counter-trajectory—a movement
towards
it—from which something like a transformational encounter might yet proceed. But the truth was that, by the time he met Sprake, he had been throwing the dice, and making random journeys, and getting nowhere, for what seemed like a lifetime. He felt a flicker of vertigo (or perhaps it was only the train starting up again, to drift, slowly at first then faster and faster, towards Hampstead South) and, thinking he was going to fall, reached a hand out to Sprake’s shoulder to steady himself.

“How do you know?” he said. His own voice sounded hoarse and threatening to him. It sounded disused.

Sprake eyed him for a second, then chuckled round at the occupants of the carriage.

“A nudge,” he said, “is as good as a wink. To a blind horse.”

He had slyly removed himself as Kearney reached for him. Kearney half fell into the woman hiding behind the
Daily Telegraph,
righted himself with an apology, and in that instant saw how good the body is at making metaphors. Vertigo. He was in flight. Nothing good would ever come of this now. He had been falling from the moment the dice came into his hands. He got off the train with Sprake, and they walked off across the noisy, polished concourse and out into Euston Road together.

In the years that followed they developed their theory of the Shrander, though it contained no elements of explanation, and was rarely articulated except by their actions. One Saturday afternoon on a train to Leeds, they murdered an old woman in the draughty space between the carriages, and, before stuffing her into the toilet cubicle, wrote in her armpit with a red gel pen the lines, “Send me an eon heart/Seek it inside.” It was their first joint effort. Later, in an ironic reversal of the usual trajectory, they flirted with arson and the killing of animals. At first Kearney gained some relief, if only through the comradeship—the complicity—of this. His face, which had taken on a look so hollow he might have been dead, relaxed. He gave more time to his work.

But in the end, complicity was all it turned out to be. Despite these acts of propitiation, his circumstances remained unchanged, and the Shrander pursued him everywhere he went. Meanwhile, Sprake took up more and more of his time. His career languished. His marriage to Anna ended. By the time he was thirty, he was sclerotic with anxiety.

If he relaxed, Sprake kept him up to the mark.

“You still don’t think it’s real,” he would say suddenly, in his soft, insinuating way: “Do you?”

Then: “Go on, Mick. Mickey. Michael. You can admit it to me.”

Valentine Sprake was already in his forties and still lived at home. His family ran a secondhand clothes shop in North London. There was an old woman with a vaguely middle-European accent, who spent her time staring up in a kind of exhausted trance at the curiously wrenched space of the religious art on the walls. Sprake’s brother, a boy of about fourteen, sat day in and day out behind the counter of the shop, chewing something which smelled of aniseed. Alice Sprake, the sister, with her heavy limbs, vacant heavy smile, her olive skin and faint moustache, regarded Kearney speculatively from large brown eyes. If they were ever left alone together, she sat next to him and put her damp hand softly on his cock. He became erect immediately, and she smiled at him in a possessive way, revealing that her teeth weren’t good. No one ever saw this, but whatever their other limitations that whole family had a withering emotional intelligence.

“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 onto 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 Euston train he had been looking for a cause to attach himself to, the
folie à 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.

“We went to the pictures in Fulham, to see a Tarkovsky film, I think it was
Mirror
. But I went to the wrong cinema, and it was bitterly cold, and I was sitting on the steps outside waiting for you for an hour. When you got there, all you could look at was my Russian hat.”

“I remember that hat,” Kearney told her. “You said it made your face look fat.”

“Broad,” said Anna. “I said it made my face too broad. And you said, without a moment’s hesitation, ’It makes your face your face. That’s all, Anna: your face.’ Do you know what else you said?”

Kearney shook his head. All he really remembered was angrily searching the cinemas of Fulham for her.

“You said: ‘ Why spend any more of your life apologising?’ ”

She looked down at him, and after a pause said, “I can’t tell you how much I loved you for that.”

“I’m glad.”

“Michael?”

“What?”

“I want you to fuck me in my Russian hat.”

She brought her arm from behind her back and there it was in her hand, a silky grey fur thing the size of a cat. Kearney began to laugh. Anna laughed too. She put the hat on her head and instantly looked ten years younger. Her smile was wide and pretty, as vulnerable as her wrists. “I never could understand someone who wore a Russian hat to watch Tarkovsky,” he said. He gathered her nightgown up into the small of her back and reached down. She groaned. He was still able to think, as he often thought, Perhaps this will be enough, release me at last, push me through the wall between me and me.

He thought: Perhaps this will save her from me.

Later he made a phone call, and that afternoon, as a result, found Valentine Sprake wandering up and down the taxi rank at Victoria station with two or three blackened pigeons running in and out between his feet. They were all lame. Sprake looked irritated.