Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-outshape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as shestared at it. Beyond it the houses on the other side of the street.The child’s bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, theslate anaemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind theroofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over WestLondon, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that wasall cloud, a shifting scudding mass whose details twisted and turnedand decayed leaving the totality unchanged.

Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missingor different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she sawthat it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all.In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.

She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.

She did not feel tethered at all.

She thought about Saul but she thought about basslines as well,and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggestitself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hearhis flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. Sherealized that she could not really think straight. She had not feltsecure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay downsome more flute.

Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all itsextraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by herpillow. She wanted to close the door and ignore the rest of her flatand just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milkinterference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tinymurmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune,making Wind City what she wanted.

A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian whenhe had called her, and he had made a joke about the title: abouteating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She hadbrought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put thereceiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how fuckingstupid and crass he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate hiscomment dispassionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even asshe understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian wasshaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.

He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his littleidiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could notempathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see whatshe saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked itand made it work so well it made her chest hollow?

To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish.She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it.This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, theinstrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of HappyHouse and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument thatsignalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeplyplaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remembermelancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is thissadness? it asked. I can’t recall. And under the piano she faded in,for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample ofradio static.

She had sought it for a long time, recording great swathes ofsound from all the bands on her radio, rejecting them all, until shefound and seized and created exactly what she wanted. And here shehinted at it.

The beat kicked in after the piano went around and came aroundseveral times, each time separated by a severe gap, a rupture in themusic. And the beat was all snares at first, fast and dreamy, and asound like a choir welled up and then resolved itself into electronicorchestration, fabricated emotion, a failed search for feeling.

And then the bassline.

A minimal program, a single thud, pause, another thud, pause,another, longer pause… double thud and back to the beginning. Andunderneath it all she began to make those snatches of radio static alittle longer, and longer still, and looping them more and morerandomly, until it was a constant, shifting refrain under the beat. Achunk of interference that sounded like someone trying to break outof white noise. She was proud of that static, had created it byfinding a station on shortwave and then just missing it, so that thepeaks and troughs of the crackling could have been voices, eager tomake contact, and failing… or they could have just beenstatic.

The radio existed to communicate. But here it was failing, it hadgone rogue, it had forgotten its purpose like the piano, and thepeople could not reclaim the city.

Because it was a city Natasha saw as she listened. She spedthrough the air at huge speed between vast crumbling buildings,everything grey, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated andempty, unclaimed. And Natasha painted this picture carefully, took along time creating it, dropping a hundred hints of humanity into thetrack, hints that could not deliver, dead ends, disappointments.

And when she had sucked her listener in to the city, all alone,Natasha brought on the Wind.

A sudden burst of flute mimicking the almost speaking of thestatic, a trick she had pilfered from a Steve Reich album — God knewwhere she had heard that — where he made violins mimic human voices.The static rolled on and the beat rolled on and the soulless pianorolled on and as the static rose and fell the flute would shudderinto existence behind it for a moment, a shrill echo, and then itwould disappear. Gusts of Wind sweeping rubbish off the streets. Thenagain. More and more often, until two gusts of flute would appear,overlaying each other. Another and another would join in, a cacophonyof simultaneous forces of nature, half-musical, half-feral,artificial, commentary, an intruder in the city that shaped itcontemptuously, sculpted it. A long low wail of flute piped up frombehind, gusting through everything, the only constant, dwarfing theeffect of the other sounds, intimidating, humbling. The peaks andtroughs in the static go, they are blown flat by the flute. The pianogoes, each trill of notes reducing by one until it is just a singlenote like a slow metronome passing time. Then that, too, disappears.The intricacies of flute are superseded and only the great singlewind remains. Flute, white noise, snares and bassline, stretching offfor a long time, an unbroken architecture of deserted beats.

This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone,entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of fluteclears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in itspath and blows them away like tumbleweed, and the city stands aloneand cleared of all its rubbish. Even the ghost of the radio proclaimsthe passing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound. Theboulevards and parks and suburbs and centre of the city were taken,expropriated, possessed by the Wind. The property of the Wind.

This was Wind City, the title that made Fabian laugh.

She could not talk to him after he had made his joke.

Pete really understood. In fact, when he heard pieces of thetrack, he told her that it was she who understood, that she reallyunderstood him.

Pete loved the track with an extraordinary passion. She supposedit appealed to him, the notion of the whole world possessed by theWind.

The little flat in Willesden had become the setting for Crowley’sdreams. He was no longer fooled by its nondescript architecture. Thisflat was a dynamo. It had been turned into a generator ofhorrors.

He was on his haunches, looking down at another ruined face.

The little flat was becoming steeped in violence. It containedsome vast attractive force luring people in to violent and bloodymayhem. Crowley felt trapped in some ghastly time-slip. Here we areagain, he thought, gazing at the destroyed and bloody mask beneathhim.