“Arabella had never seemed so desirable to me,” I said, “yet every time I went near her something stopped me. Not impotence. I could have broken stone with the erections I had. It was, rather, a compulsion to wait, to wait …”

Madeline opened the condom and reached back slowly for my cock. Between us we fitted the rubber with minimal ugliness. Another dip into the omniscient handbag yielded lubricant, which she applied with measured prodigality to the first and second fingers of her left hand. I got up from the bed with great care, as if anything—a twang from the mattress—could set the moment haemorrhaging. She backed towards me on all fours, stopped at the bed’s edge, knees together, arse raised in elemental submission. Whatever interest she’d had in the story, her only interest in it now was professional, as aphrodisiacal instrument. This called for wisdom, she knew; it was the sort of thing that could backfire on her. She reached around a second time to work the lubricant into her anus. “What happened next?” she whispered.

Arabella forced back over the bed, naked, a version of her face I’d never seen. Myself reflected in the gilt cheval glass Charles had given us as a wedding gift, the fantastic absurd prosaic reality of my Changed shape.

I pushed my cock into Madeline’s arsehole as the image shifted to one of her, Madeline, pertly shopping on the King’s Road. She made a small noise in her throat, fake welcome. What will survive of us is nothing . “I don’t tell that part of the story,” I said.

This is the deep reason I only have sex with women I dislike.

7

IT WAS A long night after Madeline fell asleep around three, leaving me alone in the inaptly named small hours, when so many big things happen in the heart. I lay for a while on the bathroom floor in the dark. I smoked. I went out onto the suite’s roof terrace, where the undisturbed fall was deep (and crisp, and even) and looked across the roofs of Clerkenwell. Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void. I thought of waking Maddy to share the scene’s queer quiet beauty—and felt the impulse immediately sucked into the furnace of absurdity, where all such impulses of mine must go, accompanied by a feeling of dead hilarity. After a while the only thing you can do with loneliness is laugh at it. I drank the minibar’s spirits, one by one, with reverence for their different personalities. I watched television.

I don’t tell that part of the story .

Haven’t told. Yet.

Gritters worked with jovial British inadequacy through the darkness, but by the time the Zetter’s kitchen started up snow was falling heavily again. Londoners would wake, look out, be grateful: not business as usual. Thank God. Anything, anything but business as usual. Daybreak was the slow development of a daguerreotype. Madeline woke—she does this with startling high-energy abruptness—and made it obvious by twitching her ankles that she was waiting for the sexual all-clear. “Why don’t you jump in the shower,” I said, “and I’ll order us some breakfast.” Which was what I assumed had arrived when, fifteen minutes later (the mere preamble or tune-up to Maddy’s ablutions barely begun) there was a knock on the door.

“Hey,” Ellis said with a smile when I opened it. “Not room service.”

He knew there was only a moment before I’d slam the door or jump at him, so immediately put his hands up and said: “Unarmed. Just here to talk.” Soft voice, Californian accent. Three years ago on a freezing night in the Dolomites he and Grainer had hunted and almost killed me. He looked the same: waist-length white hair centre-parted over a candlewax face with a big concave drop from cheekbones to jaw. For a second you thought albino—but the eyes stopped you: lapis lazuli, full of weird self-certainty. At an average height he would’ve been a grotesquely striking man. At six-four he entered the margins of science fiction. You couldn’t shake the feeling he’d started life as a willowy San Franciscan hippy girl then had his genes diabolically fiddled with. He was wearing black leather trousers and a faded Levis jacket.

“May I come in?”

“No, you may not.”

He rolled his eyes and began, “Oh come on, Jake, it’s—” then kicked me with high-speed gymnastic accuracy between the legs.

I’ve been good at fighting, in the past. I’ve been dangerous. I know karate, kung-fu, jujitsu, how to kill someone with a Yale key. But you’ve got to keep your hand in, and I haven’t humanly hit anyone for decades. I did what a man does, inhaled, suddenly, through the white light detonation and dropped, first to my knees, then, parts cupped, onto my side, knowing I’d never exhale again. Ellis stepped over me in a draught of damp biker boots and mushroomy foot odour and closed the door. In the power shower, Madeline sneezed. He ignored it, sat on the edge of the bed.

“Jake,” he said. “We want you to know something. Do you know what I’m going to say?”

I didn’t, but responding was out of the question. Everything other than staying curled up holding my balls and inhaling more and more air was out of the question.

“What I’m going to say is: You’re the last. All the resources are dedicated. There’s no one else left. It’s all for you.”

I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. I opened them again. All I wanted was to breathe out but my lungs were annealed. Ellis sat knees apart, elbows on thighs. Behind him the windows were filled with pale cloud against which the snow looked like a fall of ash. History’s given snow new evocation options: ticker-tape parades; Nazi crematoria; World Cup Finals; 9/11 fallout.

“Did you know?” he asked.

I very gently shook my head, no. He gave a dismissive shrug—obviously if I’d known I’d hardly admit it and prove WOCOP had a leak—then bowed his head and rolled his neck as if to ease mastoidal tension. He breathed deeply a couple of times, loosened his shoulders, then straightened, staring at me. “I’m supposed to be the leering villain,” he said. “I can feel it, a sort of narrative coercion in the ether. It’s here in this room, you know, that I should get up and take a piss on you or something.” His fingers were long and knuckly, possessed of the ugly dexterity you see in virtuoso lead guitarists. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to. I just felt I wanted to see you before we … you know, come to it. The last hurrah.” He looked out at the snow and said, “Jesus, this weather. ” For a few moments we both watched the down-swirling flakes in silence. Then he turned back to me. “To be honest,” he said, “I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. It’s all ambivalence, now, right? Grey areas. Morality reduced to approximations. I know you know this, Jake, that everyone’s more or less okay, all things considered. Look at this guy whatsizname, Fritzl, raping his daughter in the cellar for years. We don’t mind him, really. We know there’ll be psychology, we know there’ll be causes . It’s shock-fatigue. Beyond good and evil.”