'I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know.'

Vesicle went back to the tank farm. The head-ends of the tanks protruded a couple of feet from their shoulder-height plyboard cubicles, like stupidly baroque brass coffins covered with cheap decorative detail. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT, claimed the shoot-up posters on the back wall of each cubicle. Chianese's tank was warmer than it had been. Vesicle could see why: the twink was out of credit. He had maybe half a day left, this was according to readouts in the tank fascia, and then it was the cold world for him. The tank proteome, a mucoid slime of nutrients and tailored hormones, was beginning to prepare his body for the life he left behind.

Three thirty on a grey Friday afternoon in March. The East River was the colour of puddled iron. Since midday, westbound traffic had been backing up from Honaluchi Bridge. Chinese Ed stuck his head out the side window of his ramrod Dodge, into the smell of burned diesel and lead, and tried to get a look at what was ahead. Nothing. Something was broken up there, the lights were oil, someone had melted down; the people up there were on overload-office overload, 2.4 kids overload, shitcan overload-and had left their cars and were dully beating on one another to no good purpose. Who knew what had happened? It was the same old life. Ed shook his head at the futility of mankind, turned off the Capital traffic report and turned instead to Rita Robinson.

'Hey, Rita,' he said.

Two or three minutes later her peppermint and white candy-stripe skirt was up around her waist.

'Steady, Ed,' advised Rita. 'We could be here some time.'

Ed laughed. 'Steady Eddy,' he said. 'That's me.'

Rita laughed too. 'I'm ready,' she said. 'I'm ready, ready Eddy.'

It turned out Rita was right.

Two hours later they were still there.

'Doesn't this just suck?' said the woman from the pink Mustang parked a couple of cars in front of Ed's Dodge.

She looked in at Rita-who had pulled down her skirt and adjusted her garter belt and was now examining herself with a kind of morose professional intensity in the pull-down vanity mirror-and seemed to lose interest. 'Oh hi, honey,' she said. 'Just freshening up there?' Everyone had turned their engines off. People were stretching their legs up and down the pavement, A hot dog guy was working the queue, moving west ten or a dozen vehicles at a time. 'I never knew it this bad,' said the woman from the Mustang. She laughed, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip, examined it. 'Maybe the Russians landed.'

'You got a point there,' Ed told her. She smiled at him, stepped on the butt of her cigarette, and went back to her car. Ed turned on the radio. The Russians hadn't landed. The Martians hadn't landed. There was no news at all.

'So. This Brady thing,' he said to Rita. 'What are they saying in the DA's office?'

'Hey, Eddy,' Rita said. She looked at him for a moment or two, then shook her head and turned back to the mirror. She had her lipstick out now. 'I thought you'd never ask,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice. The lipstick didn't seem to suit her, because she put it away with an irritable gesture and looked out the window at the river running by.

'I thought you'd never ask,' she repeated bitterly.

That was when the big yellow duck started to push its head into the car through Ed's open side-window. This time, Rita didn't seem tonotice it, even though it was speaking.

'Come in, Number Seven,' it was saying. 'Your time is up.'

Ed reached inside his baseball jacket, the back of which read Lungers 8-ball Superstox, and took out one of his Colts.

'Hey,' the duck said. 'I'm joking. Just a reminder. You got eleven minutes' credit to run before this facility closes down. Ed, as a valued customer of our organisation, you can put more money in or you can make the most of what's left.'

The duck cocked its head on one side and looked at Rita out of one beady eye.

'I know which I'd do,' it said.

When Michael Kearney woke it was deep night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone breathing harshly in the room.

'Who's there?' he said sharply. 'Lizzie?'

The noise stopped.

A single minimally furnished space with straw-coloured hardwood floors, galley kitchen, and a bedroom on the second floor, the apartment belonged to his second wife Elizabeth, who had moved back to the US at the end of the marriage. From its upper windows you could see across Chiswick Eyot to Castelnau. Rubbing his face, Kearney got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth's clothes which had remained to haunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath a greyish skin. He wasn't sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn't enough saliva to speak.

'I can't begin to describe the grudgingness of my life!' it shouted suddenly. 'Ever feel that, Kearney? Ever feel your life is threadbare? Ever feel it's like this worn-out curtain which barely hides all the rage, the jealousy, the sense of failure, all those self-devouring ambitions and appetites that have never dared show themselves?'

'For God's sake,' Kearney said, backing away.

The head smiled contemptuously.

'It was a cheap enough curtain in the first place. Isn't that what you feel? Just like the ones at these windows, made of some nasty orange stuff with a fur of age on it the day after it was hung.'

Kearney tried to speak, but found that his own mouth had dried up.

Eventually he said: 'Elizabeth never hung curtains.'

The head licked its lips. 'Well let me tell you something, Kearney: it didn't hide you anyway! Behind it that horrible thin body of yours has been writhing and posturing for forty-odd years, laughing and making faces (oh yes, making faeces, Kearney!), shaking its huge Beardsleyesque cock about, anything to be noticed. Anything to be acknowledged. But you won't look, will you? Because pull that curtain back once and you'd be burned to a crisp by the sheer repressed energy of it.'

The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:

'Ever feel like that, Kearney?'

Kearney considered.

'No.'

Valentine Sprake's face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. 'No?' he said. 'Oh well.'

He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he hid been crouching, an energetic-looking man perhaps fifty years old, with stooped shoulders, sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless eyes were wilful and absent-minded at the same time. He had on a brown fleece jacket too long for him, tight old Levis which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrell trail boots. He smelled of rolling tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand-its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness-he held a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Kearney.

'Look at this.'

'I don't want it.' Kearney backed away. 'I don't want it.'

'More fool you,' said Valentine Sprake. 'I got it off the shelf there.' He tore out two or three pages of the volume-which, Kearney now saw, was Elizabeth's beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics edition of Madame Bovary-and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. 'I can't be bothered with people who don't know their own minds.'

'What do you want from me?'