He pushed past her and into the apartment. It was seven or eight rooms one after the other, the connecting doors open so you could see the length of it. A bank of identical windows ran all the way down on the left, lighting it like a single artfully divided space, a restaurant or a gallery. Vic could feel her standing behind him, pulling the coat closed across her breasts, watching him with that continuous bland puzzlement of hers. She smelled of Anai's Anai's, and also some expensive flowered soap.

"You knew that," he insisted, without looking back, "but until now you've never had to acknowledge it." He held up the diary. "Why give this to me?"

She shut the door quietly behind her.

"You're angry," she said. "I don't know why you're so angry."

"I can't work with uncertainties on this side."

"Would you like to have a drink?" This idea seemed to restore her. "I was asleep when you knocked," she said. "Please come in and have a drink."

"I want to know what you think I can give you," Vic said.

"It didn't work because you were so angry. I was more afraid of you than that place."

"Maybe that's how it seems to you now," Vic said.

In the end, though, what could he do but shrug? He followed her down the curious linear apartment, accepted a drink, sat at one end of a sofa with a green chenille cover thrown over it and watched while she arranged herself at the other, in the corner as far away from him as she could get. She drew up her knees. She allowed the fur coat to fall loosely around her, and watched Vic in return. Vic made a pantomime of placing her diary carefully on a small table, which was perhaps his way of saying that was over now, he'd just leave that alone. There was a single narrow glass vase on the same table. In the mornings the light would fall harshly across it, tangle the transparent shadow of the vase in the shadows of the window frame. "Is that the drink you like?" she asked him. "Is that the way you prefer it?"

After a moment he said:

"When you walked into Liv Hula's bar, I thought you were a tourist. That was a mistake. It put both of us in danger."

"Mr Serotonin, I-"

"Look at me," Vic urged. "Listen. I'm telling you this. In there, the most unreliable people are the ones looking for something. Their lives were too difficult to solve. Now they hope something good will happen to them, but they've been hoping for too long and that's what makes them dangerous. You never know what will happen to them in there. They thought they wanted to find something-it would have been easier to stay this side of things." It was his standard speech to women like that. He usually gave it in a corner of Liv Hula's bar, or a suite at one of the tourist hotels.

He swallowed his drink. He leaned forward.

"Do you understand?" he said.

She shivered and pulled the coat back round her suddenly. "You're angry because you're afraid of everything," she said.

Vic shrugged and smiled.

"It's good we can agree," he said politely.

At this, she pursed her lips and turned her head away from him so that the long tendons of her neck stood out. Vic could see the tension in them. Her skin was a little darker than he remembered. "This morning," she said quietly, "I sat here for an hour without moving. I ache. I'm waiting for something to happen, and I don't even know what part of my life it will approach from." She turned back to him suddenly and asked, "Have you ever lost your way?" Her eyes, a curious colour between green and brown, were so wide and direct he couldn't look into them for fear of disappointing her in some obscure fashion.

"Would I know?" he said.

"People lose their way as an act of defence. Then they panic and decide they have to find it again."

She got up from the sofa and stood in front of him smiling. "Come and look," she said. "Come over here with me and look out of the window." When he didn't respond, she walked over to stare out anyway. "I won't wait for you," she said. Then:

"Look!"

Outside it was Saudade, rooftops and streets stretching away in the soft rain and dark. Lines of lights. Cabs and pedestrians flickering under the neon, adstreams like migrations of pastel moths. Distant cries came up; laughter. Past all that, past the tourist port and the military pits, out at the limits of vision, you could see something-a whitish, roiling strip like surf, the boundary of the event site, a stationary vapour of uncertain physics. Beautiful but very strange. Above it, the Kefahuchi Tract had stretched itself across the yielding black sky like the generative principle of some old cosmology. Vic Serotonin stood next to Mrs Kielar. He frowned briefly as if he had seen something out there he wanted to be certain of. Finally, he looked down at her.

"It's quiet tonight," he said.

She smiled to herself. "Is it?" she said. "Why did you come here?"

"I don't know."

"Tell yourself that if you like. It won't help."

The fur coat had fallen open again. City light splashed behind the narrow collarbones, and where the edge of the satin slip lay across it, her skin was the colour of balsamic cream. An unexpected warmth came up from her. The moment he became aware of that, she knew. She gave a low laugh and moved a step or two away from him. "You never had to see me again. What do you care about some tourist? It wasn't the diary. It was me." By then Vic had her by the shoulders, which were small and rounded.

"What's this?" he said, "what's happening?" and began kissing her.

His mouth safely on hers, she backed towards the sofa and pulled him down. Vic worked the coat off and tugged the slip up round her waist, felt the heat of her on his face; caught broken glimpses, through his own excitement, of the light on her skin. She was one of those women who writhe and push a lot. Some internal struggle with themselves-as urgent as their own narrow bones, skin over muscle-causes them to sweat immediately they touch your clothes. Everything is in their way. You don't know if they want you or not, but something won't stop in them. She bit Vic's arm. One foot pushed and kicked impatiently at the coat as she placed herself, then she had him in her.

"Christ," Vic said.

"You like this," she said. "You like it." She made a small agitated noise, as if she liked it too. She smiled at the ceiling for a moment, then drew up her legs and began to say yes, in a determined yet meditative voice, in time to Vic's thrusts: "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes," until he came.

"How you wanted to do that!" she said.

Vic, as puzzled as he'd ever been in his life, tried to roll away from her and sit up. She only wrapped her legs round him and held him by the shoulders until he couldn't avoid her eyes.

"Will you take me into the site, Mr Serotonin?"

He stared at her, shook his head. Pulled himself away. "It's Vic," he said thickly-then, sitting on the edge of the sofa staring at the window and talking to himself as much as her, "I'm Vic." He felt used. He didn't know what he felt. He sat there for half an hour with his back to her in a defensive curve. Neither of them said anything, then he turned round and had her again. Facing away to present herself, she whispered, "You have no idea who you are."

When Vic woke it was still night, and he was alone.

He toured the long apartment looking for her. White wainscoting and layers of ethnic rugs gave way to shoulder-height marble tiling over large black and white linoleum squares; then green silk wallpaper and dark wooden floorboards worn unevenly but polished to a high shine. Objects were everywhere-feathers from a dead alien, musical instruments casting angular shadows, three sketches of someone else's ancestors in thin, black-japanned frames. Ceramics from some culture no one knew the name of, a thousand lights down the Beach, a million years down the drain. Everything changed, room to room, except the row of windows, and through these the city light fell cleanly, downshifting colours, accentuating the museum values of the space, emptying everything out. He felt glad of the slight chill on his skin. It reminded him he was alive.