'Hey,' he said. 'Rita.'

'Cut the flannel, Chinese Ed,' said Rita. She tapped her fingers and looked out the window at the crowded street. She had come here from Detroit looking for something new. But this was just another sulphur dioxide town, a town without hope full of the black mist of engines. 'Don't put that sugar on me,' she sang.

Chinese Ed shrugged. He was halfway out the door of Sullivan's when he heard her say:

'Hey, Ed. You still fuck?'

He turned back. Maybe the day was looking better now. Rita Robinson was grinning and he was walking towards her when something weird happened. The light was obscured in Sullivan's doorway. Rita, who could see why, stared past Ed in a kind of dawning fear; Ed, who couldn't, began to ask her what was wrong. Rita raised her hand and pointed.

'Jesus, Ed,' she said. 'Look.'

He turned and looked. A giant yellow duck was trying to force itself into the diner.

'But you never phone!' Anna Kearney said.

'I'm phoning now,' he explained, as if to a child.

'You never come and see me.'

Anna Kearney lived in Grove Park, in a tangle of streets between the railway and the river. A thin woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because she preferred it to her own. Her flat, originally council housing, was dark and cluttered. It smelled of handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early on in her tenancy she had painted fish on the: bathroom walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with Polaroid photographs and memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.

If you don't want to do something you don't have to, Kearney read. Do only the things you can. Leave the rest.

'You look well,' he told her.

'You mean I look fat. I always know I'm too fat when people say that.'

He shrugged.

'Well, it's nice to see you anyway,' he said.

'I'm having a bath. I was running it when you called.'

She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and a handful of pebbles which still smelled faintly of the sea, arranged carefully in front of a framed photograph ofhimself at seven years old.

Though it was his own, the life these objects represented seemed unreadable and impassive. After staring at them for a moment, he rubbed his hands across his face and lit the candle. He shook the Shrander's dice out of their little leather bag: threw them repeatedly. Larger than you would expect, made from some polished brownish substance which he suspected was human bone, they skittered and rolled between the other objects, throwing up patterns he could make nothing of. Before he stole the dice, he had cast Tarot cards for the same purpose: there were two or three decks in the chest of drawers somewhere, grubby from use but still in their original cartons.

'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.