Текст книги "Teranesia"

Автор книги: Грег Иган

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

He said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He put the notepad down on the pillow and climbed off the bed. ‘Just the cheeks, though, not the tongue. And when you’re older, you have to help me pull the truck.’

Madhusree didn’t make commitments lightly; she examined the picture of her father again. Prabir leant over her. ‘Look at their faces. If it hurt, they wouldn’t be smiling, would they?’

Madhusree considered the merits of this argument, then nodded solemnly.

‘OK.’

PART THREE

6

Prabir worked late to finish a project, to keep it from nagging at his thoughts all weekend. It was nothing out of the ordinary, but there were some minor problems that demanded his concentration; he lost himself in the details and the time flew by. But when he was done, instead of dashing for the elevators with a clear conscience, gleefully consigning the bank to oblivion, he sat for fifteen minutes in a kind of stupor, staring out across the rows of deserted cubicles.

He turned back to his work station and reran the tests on the credit card plug-in, one more time. It was a standard piece of anthropomorphic software, an ‘investment adviser’ with voice and appearance tailored to the customer’s psychological and cultural profile, who appeared on the card and offered suggestions for shuffling money between various financial instruments. It was a sales gimmick, more than anything else. People who played the markets seriously had to arm themselves with far more sophisticated tools, and know how to use them; anyone who didn’t want to waste time becoming an expert was better off relying on one of the bank’s standard low-risk algorithms. And most people did just that. But the bank had identified a demographic of potential customers who’d be attracted by this kind of novelty: the illusion of technology labouring ceaselessly on their behalf, but only to put the facts at their fingertips, always leaving the final decision to them.

It was worth doing anything well. Even this. But as Prabir watched the array of sixteen sample advisers reacting flawlessly to a barrage of test data, he just felt tired and ridiculous, as if he’d stayed back to straighten all the pictures in the corridors. He wasn’t even impressing his superiors, making his position more secure; the only way to do that would be to spend his evenings studying advanced financial voodoo at quant school, a prospect he found dispiriting beyond words. But he’d probably be idle now for half the day on Monday, before the sales consultants and market researchers made up their minds on the next gimmick.

As he stepped out of his cubicle, the screen and the desk light flickered off; a sprite in the ceiling guided him through the darkness to the elevators. Wasting a few hours on a Friday night was no great tragedy, but he felt the same sense of anticlimax every time he went looking for some kind of satisfaction from the job. He had to be stupid, or morbidly compulsive, to keep on acting as if there was any to be found.

It was only half past nine, but as he walked out on to Bay Street he suddenly felt light-headed with hunger, as if he’d been fasting all day. He bought a glutinous foil-packed meal from a vending machine, and ate it waiting for the bus. It was a crisp winter night; the sky looked clear, but it was a blank starless grey behind the street lights.

When he arrived home, Madhusree’s door was closed, so he didn’t disturb her. As he sank into the couch the TV came on, with no sound and the picture half-size. Watching an image three metres wide was fine if you wanted to get drawn in, but all that activity in your peripheral vision was counter-productive if you were really just hoping to doze off as soon as possible. Prabir kept thinking about work—even with the adviser finished, there were half a dozen things he could be tinkering with—but the bank had a strict policy of no remote access for software development.

Someone rang the doorbell down on the street; a window appeared in the corner of the screen, showing Felix shuffling his feet against the cold. Prabir felt a rush of guilt; he’d been meaning to call him all week. Felix spread his arms and looked straight into the camera, comically imploring. Prabir said, ‘Come on up.’

Felix entered the apartment smiling, looking around. ‘So what are you up to?’

Prabir indicated the TV. ‘Stupefaction therapy.’

‘Do you want to go somewhere?’

‘I don’t know. I just got home; I’m pretty tired.’

Felix nodded sympathetically. ‘Me too.’ He didn’t look tired. ‘I came straight here; I had a batch of coins in a reducing bath I couldn’t leave.’

‘Have you eaten?’ Prabir took a few steps towards the kitchen. ‘We’ve got plenty of food, if you don’t mind something reheated.’

‘No, it’s OK. I grabbed something at work.’ Felix took off his jacket and they sat on the couch.

Prabir said, ‘What kind of coins?’

‘English. Eighteenth century. Nothing very interesting.’ Felix was a preservationist at the Royal Ontario Museum; his job was a mixture of everything from art history to zoology. He often complained that most of what he did was mundane lab work, but he seemed to have a very different notion of ‘mundane’ than anyone who’d worked in retail banking.

He leant forward and kissed Prabir, then moved closer and put an arm around him. Prabir did his best to respond enthusiastically, kissing back, trying to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to be at ease, to be as unselfconscious as Felix was, but his heart still skipped a beat out of sheer panic at the first touch.

Even when Madhusree had first moved in with him, nine years before, Amita hadn’t fought him for custody; she’d resigned herself to Madhusree’s decision. But Prabir had never felt confident that there wouldn’t be a legal challenge from somewhere, and an eighteen-year-old guardian who slept with men under the same roof as his ten-year-old sister would hardly have been placing himself in the most secure position imaginable. He’d heard of established, respectable gay couples winning custody battles, but his own situation could not have been more different, and the prospect of his first clumsy attempts to find a partner not only costing him Madhusree but ending up as evidence in court was all the discouragement he needed.

The risk had begun to seem far less dramatic when Madhusree was a few years older, but Prabir still hadn’t been willing to gamble. By the time she’d turned eighteen and the danger of losing her had evaporated, Prabir had grown so accustomed to celibacy that he’d had no real idea how to end it. He’d had no social life for eight years; aside from not wanting to leave Madhusree with sitters in the early days, everything his old schoolfriends or colleagues had been into had seemed to demand either that he faked being straight, or that he tempted fate. But once there was nothing holding him back, he felt like a stranger in the country all over again. He knew he could have found Toronto’s gay bars and nightclubs listed in any tourist guide, but he had no reason to believe that he’d belong in that world, any more than anywhere else.

Felix began unbuttoning Prabir’s shirt. Prabir came to his senses and pulled away. He whispered, ‘What are you doing? She’s just in the next room.’

‘Yes?’ Felix laughed. ‘Somehow I don’t think your sister has a problem with us.’ It was Madhusree who’d introduced them. ‘And I wasn’t planning to tear all your clothes off until we were in your bedroom.’

‘I’m serious. She’s trying to study.’

‘I can be as quiet as you like.’

‘Quietjust makes it obvious.’

Felix shook his head, more amused than annoyed.

Prabir protested, ‘Don’t try telling me it’s not distracting, knowing that someone’s having sex ten metres away. She has a cladistics test on Monday.’

‘That’s why Darwin invented Sunday afternoons. Listen, I did my entire degree sharing a house with six other students. It was quadraphonic fucking twenty-four hours a day. Madhusree has it easy.’ Felix stretched his legs and sat back on the couch.

‘Yeah, well I’m sorry you were stranded in a bohemian nightmare, but it’s not my role to put character-building hurdles in front of her. She’s entitled to some peace in her own apartment when she needs it.’

Felix said nothing. He glanced at the TV.

Prabir said, ‘If you’d called me at work we could have met at your place.’

Felix kept his mouth shut, refusing to prolong the argument. He reached over and ran the back of his hand along Prabir’s forearm, a gesture that seemed both conciliatory and erotic, but Prabir wasn’t willing to let the matter drop. He said, ‘Just admit that I’m not being unreasonable.’

Madhusree emerged from her room. ‘Hi Felix.’ She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then addressed Prabir. ‘I’m going out. Don’t wait up.’

‘Where are you headed?’

‘Nowhere special. I’m just meeting some friends.’

‘That sounds good.’ Prabir tried to read her clothes, but he didn’t know the codes any more. She could have been on her way to a diplomatic reception in a five-star hotel, or a demolition party, for all he could tell.

He said, ‘Have fun.’

She smiled at him, you too, then raised a hand goodbye to Felix.

When she was gone, Felix feigned interest in the TV. The Zeitgeist Channel—a redirection filter that automatically displayed whatever the greatest number of people in the same town or city were watching—was showing a bland office comedy. Prabir said, ‘Did I ever tell you that one of my foster-parents wrote a ten-thousand-word academic paper called “Second-Level Mutual Inter-Sitcom Self-Reference as a Signifier for the Sacred”?’

Felix cracked up. ‘Who published it? Social Text?’

‘How did you know that?’

In the bedroom, Felix said, ‘Any chance of a visual cortex massage?’ Prabir knelt over him and gently peeled the electrode sheet from his back. The skin beneath was slightly pale, but it wasn’t waxen like the skin beneath a cast or a bandage; the polymer let through plenty of oxygen. Felix claimed to wash the twenty-thousand-dollar device in the laundromat along with his shirts, but Prabir had never actually witnessed this.

When Felix had been born with malformed retinas, in 2006, artificial replacements were just coming into use. But there’d been no prospect then of wiring the photosensor arrays directly to his brain. Instead, circuitry in the sheet received the signals from his eyes, and the electrodes stimulated nerves in his back. From infancy, he’d learnt to interpret the sensations as images.

Prabir started kneading, cautiously. Felix said, ‘You can be a lot rougher. It’s not hypersensitive. It’s just skin.’

‘But… do you feel my hands, or do you see something?’

‘Both.’

‘Yeah? What do you see?’

‘Abstract patterns. Rows of dots, starbursts. But it’s all pretty faint and unconvincing. The whole point is to get a strong sensation that’s more compelling as touch than as imagery, so I don’t lose the original function of the nerves.’

Prabir had found software on the net that let him transform a camera’s image into something comparable to the information flowing through the sheet. The impressionistic, monochrome version of his own face that it had shown him had barely been recognisable as a face at all, but Felix could spot people from fifty metres. Experience made all the difference. An operation to connect the artificial retinas directly to his brain had been available for about five years, but he would have found it as hard to adjust to the new way of seeing as Prabir would have found adjusting to the sheet.

Prabir’s hands began to stray. After a while, Felix rolled on to his back and pulled Prabir down on top of him. As they kissed, Prabir felt a warmth like liquid fire spreading through his veins, and a growing tightness in his chest, as if he’d been robbed of his breath by the sight of something astonishing. This was what he wanted, more than sex itself. He had no word for it: it was far too physical to be mere tenderness, far too tender to be mere desire.

He said, ‘You know what I like most about being with you?’

‘No.’

‘Stealing this together.’ Prabir hesitated, afraid of sounding foolish. But if he couldn’t speak now, when could he? ‘Sex is like a diamond forged in a slaughterhouse. Three billion years of unconscious reproduction. Half a billion more stumbling towards animals that weren’t just compelled to mate, but were happy to do it—and finally knew that they were happy. Millions of years spent honing that feeling, making it the most perfect thing in the world. And all just because it worked. All just because it churned out more of the same.’ He reached down and slid his palm over Felix’s penis. ‘Anyone can take the diamond; it’s there for the asking. But it’s not a lure for us. It’s not a bribe. We’ve stolen the prize, we’ve torn it free. It’s ours to do what we like with.’

Felix was silent for a while, just smiling up at him. Then he said, ‘Do you know what an oxbow lake is?’

‘No.’

‘When a river meanders sharply, sometimes the water in the bend ends up cut off from the flow. The river throws off an oxbow lake. That’s how I’ve always thought of it: we’re in an oxbow lake, we’re not part of the flow. But the river keeps making those lakes. There’s something still in it, generation after generation, that makes it happen.’

Prabir conceded, ‘Maybe that’s a more honest way of putting it. We had no choice; we’re just stranded here by chance.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m glad I’m cut off, I’m glad I’m stranded.’

Felix reflected on this, then suggested cryptically, ‘Maybe you’re not, though. Maybe it just looks that way.’

Prabir laughed. ‘You think I’m moonlighting as a sperm donor?’

‘No. But you have to ask yourself: why are there genes in the river that keep making the lakes? What does any lineage have to gain by retaining that trait, in the long run? Swapping the sex of the object of attraction might be the least risky way to make someone infertile; it’s less dangerous than messing with anatomy or endocrine function—and a hundred thousand years ago it might not even have entailed getting the crap beaten out of you.’

Prabir had his doubts, but he was willing to accept the premise for the sake of the argument. ‘What’s the advantage of being infertile, though?’

Felix said, ‘Under the right conditions, infertile adults might be able to contribute more to the survival of the lineage by devoting their resources to close relatives, rather than children of their own. It takes so long to raise a human child that it might be worth having the occasional infertile offspring as a kind of insurance policy—to look after the others if something happens to the parents.’

Prabir disentangled himself and sat on the side of the bed. His heart was pounding, and there was a red streak across his vision, but he’d pulled away without even thinking. He still lost his temper too easily, but through eight long years with Keith and Amita he’d trained himself to withdraw, not lash out.

‘Prabir? Shit. I didn’t mean—’ Felix swung his legs around and sat beside him.

Prabir waited until he could speak calmly. ‘I really set myself up for that one.’

‘Come on, you know I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No!’ Felix managed to sound both contrite and indignant. ‘Even if the theory’s true… all it’s describing is the survival of the trait through a statistical advantage. It says nothing about the actions of individuals.’ There was an awkward silence, then he conceded, ‘But it was pretty crass of me to bring it up like that. I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it.’ Prabir stared down at the worn linoleum at his feet, his anger draining away. ‘You know, in high school I used to try to start relationships with girls I thought Madhusree would look up to?’ He laughed, though the memory of it still made him cringe. ‘Which probably would have been enough to doom the entire endeavour, even if I’d been straight. And when I finally stopped kidding myself that there was any chance of that… I just felt like I’d fucked up again. I couldn’t even give her a sister-in-law with attitude, to make up for my stupidity in bringing her to Amita.’

Felix said, ‘You should have trusted her more. You should have known she didn’t need it.’

Prabir snorted derisively. ‘That’s easy to say now! But why should you trust a child to overcome being brought up by fools? Was I supposed to assume that she was genetically endowed with so much innate good sense that nothing anyone could do would harm her?’

‘Hmm.’ Felix seemed genuinely lost for a reply, though maybe he was just being diplomatic.

‘But you’re right,’ Prabir admitted. ‘Madhusree didn’t need role models. By the time we left Amita, I understood that. And I finally stopped worrying about all the ideology Amita would have tried to foist on me if she’d ever found out that I was gay. I started thinking about what it meant for me, instead of what it meant for everyone else.’ He stopped abruptly, his courage waning; he’d already made enough of a fool of himself.

But Felix squeezed his shoulder and said, ‘I’m listening. Go on.’

Prabir kept his eyes on the floor. ‘I thought: maybe I should be glad. Evolution is senseless: the great dumb machine, grinding out microscopic improvements one end, spitting out a few billion corpses from the other. If I’d dragged just one good thing clear of it—if I’d found a way to be happy that cheated the machine—then that was a kind of victory. Like dragging Madhusree clear of the war.’ He looked up and asked hopefully, ‘Does that make any sense to you?’

‘It makes a lot of sense.’

‘But you don’t believe it’s true, do you? You don’t believe I’ve cheated the machine.’

Felix hesitated, then made an exasperated noise, as if he’d been trapped into a choice between arguing with him or humouring him.

He said, ‘I don’t believe it matters.’

Prabir was suddenly sick of talking. He’d bared his soul, and it had brought them no closer. He took Felix by the shoulders and drew him down on to the bed.

‘Ah, that’s what I like: less theory, more practice.’ Felix kissed him deeply, then ran a hand down the centre of his body. ‘You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’

Prabir said, ‘I’ll race you to the edge of the lake.’

‘I have a favour to ask you.’

Madhusree was washing the breakfast dishes; Prabir was drying. Felix had left, but they’d arranged to meet in the evening. Winter sunlight filled the kitchen, revealing every speck of dust and every imperfection on the room’s worn surfaces. Prabir felt utterly contented. He had no problems in his life, just invented complications. They were safe, they were happy. What more did he want?

He said, ‘Go ahead.’

‘I need some money.’

‘Sure. How much?’

Madhusree grimaced, bracing herself. ‘Five thousand dollars.’

‘Five thousand?’Prabir laughed. ‘What are you planning to do? Start a business?’

Madhusree shook her head apologetically. ‘I know, it’s a lot to ask.’ She added, deadpan, ‘That’s why I was so glad when Felix showed up last night. I’ve been waiting all week to catch you in a good mood.’

Prabir flicked her on the arm with the tea towel. ‘Don’t be impertinent. And it makes no difference. I’m always in a good mood.’

‘Ha.’

‘So what’s the money for?’

‘I should be able to pay you back within a couple of years. Once I’ve graduated—’

Prabir groaned. ‘You don’t have to pay me back. Just tell me what you want it for.’ He scrutinised her face; she stared back at him with exaggerated nonchalance, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. She was actually nervous.

He was worried now. ‘If you’re in some kind of trouble, just tell me. I’m not going to be angry.’

Madhusree said, ‘I’ve been invited to go on a field trip. A joint expedition being mounted by several universities. It’s twenty-one people, mostly postdocs, but they’re taking two undergraduates. Only the funding doesn’t really cover us, so we have to pay our own way.’

‘But… that’s fantastic!’ Prabir’s anxiety gave way to relief, then pride. ‘Just two places for undergraduates, and they offered you one?’ He put down the plate he was drying and embraced her tightly, lifting her off the floor. ‘Of course you can have the money, you idiot! What did you think I’d say?’

When he drew away from her, Madhusree was blushing. Prabir berated himself silently; he hadn’t meant to go overboard and embarrass her.

‘So where’s the expedition going?’ he asked. ‘Not the Amazon, I hope. Apparently they’re so sick of naturalists there that they shoot them on sight.’

‘Not the Amazon. The South Moluccas.’

Prabir said, ‘That’s not funny.’ Neither was getting murdered in Brazil, actually, but he felt as if she’d responded to a playful jab by kicking him in the head.

‘It’s not meant to be.’ She met his gaze; she was more nervous than ever, but she wasn’t lying, or teasing him. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

‘Why?’ Prabir folded his arms awkwardly; he suddenly felt ungainly, his body strangely skewed. ‘Why there?’

‘Don’t get upset.’

‘I’m not upset. I just want to know.’

Madhusree led him to her room and picked up her notepad. ‘This screen’s too small. I’ll show you on the TV.’ They sat on the couch and she summoned up a succession of images from news reports and scientific papers.

The first discovery to attract the attention of the world’s biologists had been a fruit pigeon with strange coloration, a hitherto unseen mottled camouflage of green and brown. MRI scans and DNA analysis had yielded more radical differences; Prabir listened in a dreamlike state as Madhusree described structural anomalies in the bird’s internal organs, and a catalogue of useful mutations in key blood proteins. The Javanese zoologist who’d brought the specimen to light six months ago had only traced it as far as a bird dealer in Ambon, but after word had spread that anything unusual would fetch good money, two other genuine cases had emerged from a torrent of fakes and minor novelties. There was a dead tree frog with young that had apparently been maturing in a water-filled pouch. And there was a bat with the bones in its wings rearranged in an efficient, albeit unspectacular, fashion—thanks to a fully functioning gene for a protein controlling embryological development that did not exist in any other species on the planet. Both had been found on the island of Ceram, more than three hundred kilometres north of Teranesia.

Madhusree had to fight to contain her enthusiasm. ‘These are amazing discoveries—just like the butterflies, but who knows how many species are involved now? And there is noexplanation. There’s no way of making sense of this. Whatever the cause turns out to be, it’s going to shake up biology like nothing since Wallace.’ Madhusree would have none of this Darwin nonsense; Alfred Wallace might have been too much of a doormat to take the credit he was due, but that wasn’t going to stop her putting the record straight.

Prabir was numb. ‘You didn’t tell anyone? About the butterflies?’ The reports made no mention of any earlier find; apparently neither his parents’ academic colleagues in Calcutta, nor their sponsor at Silk Rainbow had felt inclined to volunteer anecdotal evidence about their unpublished work.

Madhusree said, ‘I probably should have, but I was afraid they’d suspect I was making it up just to get in on the act.’ She smiled proudly. ‘But I’m on the team by merit alone. I even said “no” on the questionnaire when they asked about “jungle experience”.’ She mused, ‘Maybe the best thing would be for me to keep my mouth shut, and let the expedition stumble on the evidence. I mean, the huts should still be standing, and most of the equipment should be recognisable. There might even be some records intact.’

Prabir regarded her stonily. She took his hand and said, ‘Don’t you think they’d be glad if one of us went back? Now that it’s safe?’ Prabir felt a chill at the base of his spine: whether by choice or out of habit, she’d slipped into the hushed voice she’d used when they’d talked about their parents in his room at Amita’s.

He said, ‘It’s not safe. Why do you think it’s safe?’

Madhusree examined his face. ‘Because the war’s been over for almost eighteen years.’

Prabir pulled his hand free, irritated. ‘Yeah, and there are lunatics in government in West Papua—’

‘I’m not going to West Papua—’

‘Who want to claim half the islands—’

‘That’s nowhere nearwhere we’re going!’

Prabir’s head was beginning to pound. If this wasn’t a dream, it was some kind of test. He’d brought her to safety, and now she was standing on the edge of the cliffs, babbling childish nonsense about diving back into the water.

He said, ‘There are still mines on those islands. Do you think someone’s gone through and de-mined them all?’

Madhusree rummaged through files, then waved her notepad at the TV. ‘You strap this device to your belt. If there’s any chemical explosive within twenty metres, it tells you.’

The gadget was about as big as a matchbox. Prabir said, ‘I don’t believe you. Buried explosives? How?You know the Indonesians had NQR-aware mines? If you send out a radio pulse, they’ll triangulate your position and give you a gut full of shrapnel.’

‘It doesn’t use Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance; it’s entirely passive. There’s a radiation signature from the explosive: secondary particles emitted from the constituent atoms due to background and cosmic radiation.’

‘And… that thing’ssensitive enough to identify chemical composition from secondary radiation?’

Madhusree nodded earnestly.

Prabir stared at the screen, feeling like a doddering centenarian who’d blinked and missed a decade. ‘I’ve been in banking too long.’

‘Isn’t that a tautology?’

Prabir laughed, and felt something tearing inside. He could give in; it would be easy. He could shout, ‘Go! Go!’ and dance around the room with her, playing proud supportive big brother. Then she’d fly off to salvage her parents’ reputation and complete their work, like a fairy-tale princess returning from exile to right all wrongs and avenge all injustices.

He said, ‘I can’t afford it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

He turned to her. ‘Five thousand dollars? I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t even have that much in my account. And without collateral…’ He raised his hands apologetically.

Madhusree bit her lip and eyed him with frank disbelief, but Prabir was almost certain that she wouldn’t call his bluff. She might have argued all weekend about the risks the expedition would face, but she wouldn’t make a scene over money.

She said, ‘OK. I knew it was a lot. I’ll have to see about raising it some other way.’

‘Some other way? How long do you have?’

‘Two months.’

Prabir frowned sympathetically. ‘So what were you thinking of doing?’

Madhusree shrugged and said casually, ‘I’ve got some ideas. Don’t worry about it.’ She stood and left the room abruptly.

Prabir put his face in his hands. He hated lying to her, but he was certain now that he’d made the right decision. Even if there really was some revolutionary discovery waiting to be made on the island—and not just a very unpleasant mutagen that left a vast number of stillborn victims rotting in the jungle for every spectacular survivor—she could read about it like everyone else.

That would make her angry. But it wouldn’t kill her.

‘Are you sure it’s all right for me to be here?’ Felix’s work room looked like a biology lab in which an eclectic art thief had stashed a few million dollars’ worth of stolen goods. Prabir didn’t recognise any of the paintings awaiting assessment, hanging in a rack like posters in a shop, but the richness of the pigments and the skill of the execution was enough to make him nervous just being near them. ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Felix was glued to a microscope, manually removing the last flakes of corrosion from an arrowhead after electrochemical treatment. ‘We have visitors back here all the time. You can’t steal anything; the building’s too smart. Try swallowing one of those coins and see how far you get.’

‘No, it’s the frog collection that’s starting to look tempting.’

Felix groaned. ‘I know, the booking’s for nine. I won’t be much longer.’

Prabir watched him working, envious and admiring. Anything involving fine visual detail was tricky for Felix, but with stationary objects he could build up a mental picture with higher resolution than the electrode sheet provided at any given moment, accumulating extra data as his eyes swept back and forth across the scene. Apparently the process had become partly instinctive, but it still required a certain amount of sheer doggedness, a constant mental effort to maintain the model in his head.

Prabir said, ‘I wish I’d met you nine years ago.’

Felix replied without looking up. ‘I was fifteen. You would have gone to prison.’

‘This is a hypothetical: we both get to be eighteen.’

‘That would have been even worse. You wouldn’t have wanted to know me then.’

Prabir laughed. ‘Why?’

‘Oh… I did a lot of stupid things.’

‘Like what?’

Felix didn’t respond immediately; Prabir wasn’t sure whether the question discomforted him, or whether he was merely concentrating on his work. ‘I used to go out with the sheet off, just to prove I didn’t need it. To convince myself that I could have lived a hundred years ago, and still got by.’

‘What’s so stupid about that?’

‘It wasn’t true. I’d grown up with it, I didn’t have the skills to cope without it. I knew that, but I kept pushing my luck.’ He laughed. ‘I met this guy in a club one night. He hung around talking to me for about three hours. There was a lot of touching: hands on shoulders, guiding me through the crowd. Nothing overtly sexual, but it was more than just polite. He was pretty evasive, but after a while I was almost certain that he was coming on to me—’

‘Three hours of this, and he wasn’t?’

‘I found out later that he had some complicated theory about picking up women. You know: outdoors you can walk a dog as a kind of character reference, but they don’t let you do that in nightclubs. It’s just a pity he didn’t tell me I was meant to be playing tragically disabled spaniel.’ Prabir was outraged, but Felix started laughing again. ‘I lured him out into an alley to see what he’d do with no one else around. I ended up spending a month in hospital.’