"Why are you asking all this?" he said. He tried to sound a little more jocular than he felt.

"I wanted to know..." Sara began,'... how you feel."

"Feel free," Graham said, laughing. Sara looked at him, calm and white, and he stopped the laughter in his throat, killed the smile on his face. He cleared his throat. What was going on here? Sara sat for a moment, silent, while her fingers lay on the table, inspected and observed

Perhaps he should show her the drawings he'd done of her, he thought. Perhaps she was upset about something, or just depressed in some general way. Maybe he ought to try and take her mind off whatever it was. Sara said, "You see, Graham, I've deceived you. We have. Stock and I."

Graham felt his stomach go cold inside him. At the mention of Stock's name something happened deep inside him, a gut reaction of ancient, evolved fear and distress.

"What do you mean?" he said.

Sara shrugged jerkily, the tendons on her neck standing out like taut ropes. "You know what deception is, don't you, Graham?" Her voice sounded odd; not like hers at all. He formed the impression that she had thought this out, that like him she had thought in advance about the things she would say (but she, choosing the ground in advance, had the advantage), so that her spoken words were more like lines, something to be acted out on the tense stage of her body.

"Yes, I think so," he said, because she was silent, and it seemed they would go no further until her question was answered.

"Good," she said, and sighed. "I'm sorry you've been deceived, but there were reasons. Do you want me to explain them to you?" She looked up again, once more just for a second or so.

"I don't understand," Graham said, shaking his head, trying, by the expression on his face, the tone of his voice, to make it clear that he wasn't taking all this as seriously as Sara was. "How do you mean 'deceived'? How have you been deceiving me? I've always known about Stock, I've known about your relationship, but I haven't... well, I might not have been ecstatically happy about it, but I didn't -"

"Do you remember that time when it was raining and you rang up from... a callbox, I think you said?" Sara interrupted.

Graham smiled. "Of course, you were under the bedclothes with your Walkman turned up full blast to drown out the thunder."

Sara shook her head quickly, briefly, so that the movement looked more like some nervous spasm than a sign. She kept looking down at her hands. "No. No, I wasn't. What I was doing underneath the bedclothes was screwing Bob Stock. When you rang, and rang and rang, he took his... stroke from the pulses of the bell." She looked up into his eyes, her face quite serious, even unpitying (while his aching guts turned inside him). A cold, uneven smile crossed her face. "As a third party, you were quite a good screw. Rhythm and staying power."

He felt he could not speak. It was not the fact of the tawdry revelation itself so much as the tone of its delivery which hurt; this clinical, deadpan expression, the flat voice, even if this outer calmness was belied by that tensioned neck, the jerkiness of her movements and gestures. She went on:

"That time I talked to you from the window, when you were down in the street, the day we went to Camden Lock... Stock was behind me; he put the window down on my back. All I had on was that shirt. He took me from behind, you know?" The corner of her lips jigged nervously twice, then twisted with a tiny dry hint of a smile. "He'd always said he might do it, one of the times he was there when you called. I'd dared him to do it. It was very... exciting. You know?"

He shook his head. He felt he was going to be sick. This was absurd, insane. It was like all Slater had ever joked about, like all the most sexist caricatures of female deception. Why? Why was she telling him all this? What did she expect from him?

She sat on the far side of the circular black table, her hair severely gathered back, that thin, nearly translucent face brought to its own point, decks cleared for action. She was watching him now, he thought, the way scientists must watch a rat; some animal with its brain exposed, wires into it, hooked up to a machine with its tiny, electric, animal thoughts bleeped and phosphoresced, recorded by glowing green lines and the smoothly unrolled lengths of paper and the thin metallic scribbling of scratching pens. Why, though? Why? (And thought, does the rat ever know, could it ever comprehend, the reasons for the cruel uses it was put to?)

"You do remember," she said, voice purring, "don't you?"

"I... remember," he said, feeling broken, unable to look at her, and stared at the table's surface and one or two small crumbs lying on it. "But why?" he said, looking up at her. He could not keep his eyes on hers for very long. He looked down again.

"... even that first time," Sara said, ignoring his question, "when we met at the party. In the loo. Would you believe that Stock was in there? We had arranged it all in advance. He climbed up the drainpipe. I left that room we were in and went down there to meet him. That's what I was doing in the bathroom; fucking on the floor with Bob Stock." She pronounced the words carefully.

"Really?" he said. He had forgotten it all, forgotten all he had ever felt for her. He would feel it again, he knew, and it would hurt, but for now he was putting it out of his mind. It didn't matter any more. She had changed all the rules, put the whole relationship that had existed between them into quite a different category. He stored the old self, the hurt young man for the moment, concentrated as best he could, while still reeling inside from the sheer force and extent of the change, on what was being said now, on this new set of rules, this role he was being forced into, for reasons he didn't yet understand. "But why?" he said, trying not to sound hurt, trying to play it the way she was.

"Decoy," she said, shrugging. She gazed at her fingers again, spreading them out on the black paint surface. "That divorce of mine... my husband was having me followed. Stock couldn't afford to be involved, but we didn't want... couldn't stop seeing each other. So we decided to use somebody else to seem to have an affair with me. You were seen to go upstairs with me at that party; we figured that whoever my husband had tailing me would be at the party, gate-crashing; following me. We thought that he would assume we'd been screwing. I really had, of course, but that was just a little extra. We've been stringing you along ever since. Sorry, Graham. Anyway, our man doesn't seem to be following you. Perhaps he's been called off the case or something. Maybe my other half just didn't want to spend any more money on me; don't ask me."

"So," Graham said, feeling faint, sitting back in the chair as though nothing was wrong, trying to stop his lips quivering, one hand on the top of the seat-back (where, he remembered for no good reason, the fly had been), his other hand still on the table, like some strange animal in a black and circular arena, on the far side of it from her pale fingers. His hand, trembling very slightly, scratched at a fleck of white paint on the black surface as he said, "I'm not... of any use any more, is that it?"

"Sounds rather mean, doesn't it?" Sara said. She was still trying to sound calm, but her words sounded clipped. Graham laughed, shaking his head.

"Oh no; no, not a bit!" He felt tears starting to come to his eyes, and stopped them, determined not to show her what he was feeling. He shook his head, went on laughing, still watching his finger scratching at the white-paint fleck. "Not at all, no." He shrugged.

He was aware of a sort of tingling itch all over his body, as though the heightened awareness of his earlier anticipation was with him, in a single sense only, once again, and every nerve in his skin was receiving a maximum intensity, pouring into his brain a mass of static, average signals, a bodily white noise giving an impression of unattenuated, unsifted, exaggerated usualness; a paradigm of the pain of clearly felt normality.