Heaven never helps the men who will not act. - Sophocles

The first time Henry's brother Gavin asked him to kill him was when Gavin was sixteen and Henry thirteen.

It was a beautiful day, the grass lying green as Astroturf and great white clouds drifting above, as though someone had spent hours placing them just where they belonged and now the faint breeze was having its fun. Henry was walking home from school with his older, taller brother, walking through a long sunny tunnel made by the trees in the park, drooping friendly hands of bushes reaching out to brush their legs as they walked by.

It felt good, walking along with his brother like this under the wide blue sky in the corridor of trees. The sun shone softly and swam through the air, and when it fell on Henry's hair, greasy and brown like an otter's fur, and on his face, it felt fine, and all the people they passed seemed to know his brother and smiled or spoke in voices not as calm or strong as his brother's, and the girls' eyes drifted swiftly and brightly over Henry as they made their way to Gavin. That hurt a little, but it was better than usual, and no eyes averted themselves and no tongues clucked and no sniggers came and no unwashed blokes suddenly filled the path and asked, 'Got a cigarette?' in a way that meant, `If you have a cigarette, I will take it one way or the other,' and the sky was the lightest blue like her eyes, and the blades of grass and the friendly hands brushing their legs were green like the sea, and people smiled and were smiling at him - mostly at Gavin, but a little at him, too, like the sunlight bouncing and twisting and reaching in the green corridor that smelled like moss, lightening the gloomy grey corners just a bit. And their feet crunched on the path and the mossy smell was still there, and the sun shone softly and swam through the air.

And then Nicole was there, suddenly, on the path before Henry - but more welcome than any bloke with his palm crooked to receive a cigarette, or some predatory group that would leg him through the park for lung-tearing, blood-quickening sport of terror. Henry thought he saw her eyes first, but they were of course not what he saw straight away - but her eyes were so pretty and so deep and so blue, easily as big as the sky hung up there - so deep and so pretty and so deep and so blue, the lightest blue, that you wanted to believe they appeared before the rest, like the grin of a Cheshire cat and then, slowly, the coiled feline form: but most of all the eyes, so deep and so pretty and so very blue. But she arrived with the eyes, and with all the purity he could wring from his heart, Henry couldn't look away when she arched her back and moved her sleeveless forearm across her stomach and rested so softly against the tree she stood before. And she swam beneath her school blouse as the sun swam through the air, and Henry couldn't look away - couldn't look away, though his stupid stare ruined the picture of her very blue eyes - then couldn't look at all any more as he saw she was facing his brother entirely now and the purr and the arch like a shameless invitation were not meant for him, but for Gavin.

Sudden thoughts of brutal killing interrupted the beauty of the yellow-washed day and the innocent rapture that beat in his heart. Sudden thoughts of murder and reaching out with long hands to reach his brother's neck, and reaching round with long fingers to reach around his neck, and bruises coming under the fingers like long gloves across his broken neck, shadowy fingers upon the white and smooth clean flesh...

Nicole's fingers had touched Henry once. She was talking to him idly while Gavin was somewhere else, passing time - she did not guess the significance of this time to Henry - and Henry said something funny and she smiled and laughed and her eyes laughed more loudly and softly and her hand touched his hair suddenly, then trailed away slowly like a ghost in the dusk, sending a shiver down his neck. It was a thing of habit, something anyone else might have done without his suspecting they loved him. But it was she - she - she who had done this, her golden hand, her shining eyes, and his mind liquefied suddenly at the thoughts that ran through it. It was a blur of seconds before he realised where he was and what he was and that by some miracle he was still standing, by which time Nicole had gone.

But still her hand was gold and he felt golden for its touch - its Midas' touch, but he wasn't golden really or else, if he was golden for a few seconds, the gold didn't last and faded and tarnished and flaked away like copper pyrites under the feet of time. His hair had not been made golden by the long and ivory fingers, had maintained its otterish dullness and oily sheen, and he had slunk away from the touch. But Gavin's hair was golden and it sparkled in the sun, and it was not gold because of her but for her, and it shone brightly in her eyes like the golden fairy dust that she'd sprinkled, once, precisely once, down Henry's neck.

The blood ran out of his backside and his legs, seeming to leak coolly and cleanly down their backs, as he realised she was looking at him now. And gold was in her eyes and in his head, and it was all dazzling sunlight, and looking at her was like staring at the sun. He thought dimly, briefly, of the man who made wings for himself in the old stories he'd been told, his wax melting, his feathers falling, he arcing - never reaching the shining golden sky but falling, instead, falling. The green tunnel and blue sky were not important now: just her skyish eyes flecked with white lines not quite clouds, and her marble face softer and more softly cut than any stone - like milk frozen but somehow made warm, he thought as her skyish eyes scattered his mind - and her long chestnut hair falling, tumbling, falling even when still, that looked so perfect, as though it would be springy to the touch, and a faint smell that filled the world for all its faintness, a smell of sweetness and love and orange blossoms that stood and smiled at him. And she was looking at him from the frame of the black-brown chestnut locks, twining and twining about her white face, her eyes like pale crystals with pale bright fire within.

And he wanted to run instinctively but was paralysed and loved it and the net result was that he stood looking like a boy who'd misplaced his brain.

And her eyes, those seeing crystals, gently absorbed the sight, and a smile was on her lips, and oh, he thought stupidly, oh. And was aware of his brother, all golden at his side, and saw her golden fingertip on the pale hand that lay across her stomach flat, and realised that she wanted him only to leave, and to do nothing else. And, `Oh,' he said helplessly, `oh.'

`D'you mind walking on a bit?' his brother asked him shyly, with a genuine deep kindness Henry loved at all times but times like this. And murder was in Henry's eyes and ran like poison through his soul, and the shadowy gloves were draped again across his brother's neck, like guides on which to place his hands, as Gavin looked back at him with sheer affection.

Henry looked at Nicole in pointless appeal, and realised there was nothing appealing to her in him, whatever his fantasies. And then back at his brother he looked, and the request still hung there, pointing at him. `Oh,' he said a third time, and Nicole's quiet eyes told him he was very stupid. `Oh. Right. I'll just walk on a bit, shall I?'

Both Gavin and Nicole seemed to feel that this was a very good idea of his, and as he walked away from the path, across the hard-caked fields of brown and green, he turned a few times unwillingly and saw them at the edge of the grass like a pair of conspirators conspiring for the sunshine. He felt like a child, for her smile at him had been like a sugary sweet given to quiet some irritating wailing nuisance. They wanted to be alone, and he wondered why that should mean he had to be alone, and he wondered why it wasn't `we', he and Nicole, not `they', who wanted to be alone, and Gavin, not himself, who was forced to be alone. He walked on and, though he turned again and again, he saw little and less and less through the hot half-moon wells of water springing to his eyes - pricking gently, leaking suddenly, sudden childish lines of wetness, hotly springing from his eyes. And when the root writhed round his foot he hardly felt it and did not see it, and did not really care that he was suddenly on the dusty floor.

And Gavin was there to help him with his arm outstretched, asking, `Are you okay?' with a cautious smile at his brother's stupidity on his lips, but real concern in his eyes. And hate hate hate stared through the cooling salty wetness in Henry's eyes, precisely because there was nothing there to hate but love. And how could you hate love?

`I'm fine,' he mumbled, but he was not.

Gavin helped him to his feet and suddenly was waving `Bye' to Nicole, who turned sadly in her clean white blouse, waving sadly with her clean white hand like ivory in the sunshine, chestnut hair clouding then shrinking sadly into the distance and the orange blossoms a withering memory in Henry's snivelling nose.

And that was just the moment when Gavin said, with stupid blond-haired, blue-eyed, distant, bubbling-over-the-silt-of-the-ocean-and-blazing-in-the-sun simplicity, `I love her. If I ever stop loving her, I want you to kill me.' He looked uncharacteristically awkward, then smiled brightly and laughed and they walked on without speaking, while Henry contemplated his words.

Henry thought his brother sounded like a greetings card, talking about love, and he snorted inwardly at Gavin's simplicity, and his luck that he could traipse through life with such simplicity. (Henry did not think he himself was simple: he had thought much about love, and unlike Gavin had never breathed a word of it; thus his knowledge of it had grown large and grotesque and strange, like fungus cultivated in the dark.) Yet, for all his hatred of it, he felt guilty for interrupting the thing between Gavin and Nicole, which had been developing as simply and sickeningly to him as the plot of a romantic comedy. He felt again like a child, who wrecks his friends' games to make his own that little bit greater, and a terrible sickness wrenched his stomach as he and Gavin walked together, silently, across the dusty field, out of the park.

The second time Henry's brother Gavin asked him to kill him was three years later. It was funny, really, because he didn't actually ask him to kill him this time, not at all; and of course that was why it was not funny, not at all.

Best to begin in the hospital, with the accident behind and the dilemma ahead and our memory of the park still bright. Think again of Nicole's clean white blouse and remove that unhygienic stench of orange blossoms and replace it with the beautiful aroma of disinfectant, and then you have these nurses who scurry always through wards but never to them, always going to a destination that keeps changing. And think of the corridor of mossy green and drain it of colour and sunlight and crawling anthills hidden in the bushes and hope and you have these hallways that serve as routes to nowhere. And think of the boundless green field of grass and fresh bark and trees and the starts of paths, and then bound it and fill it with chairs and splash it with hospital paint and you have this waiting room in which Nicole and Henry sit - he, despite the circumstances, quivering with their fortuitous proximity, she just worried sick.

Henry's mother and father had gone to a room somewhere to talk to someone. Vagueness is desirable in talking of this talk, for no doubt vagueness would feature strongly in it; the truth - even if it could be given - would not suit their haggard expressions and their frightened animal eyes that blinked hard in the headlights of tragedy.

So here they were, Henry and Nicole, all alone. It was, he realised with inscrutable shame, something he'd always prayed for. But like his parents, Nicole did not look her best, Henry thought, and then despised himself for it. Yet it was true: she had been awake a long night, sitting here in the ridiculously curved plastic seat, absorbing from the room those thoughts that had been thought here a million times before, their lack of originality no barrier to their creation: will he live, what are they doing to him in there, will he live, how long has it been, will he live, where can I get some coffee, will he live, why..? Questions like fists beating incessantly inside a room with no windows and no doors. The pale, flickering fluorescent lights shone grey like the November outside, and they gave her cheeks the look of a corpse that had been crying. Her face seemed to Henry the colour of sickening, sweet, milky tea, and, God!, how wonderful it was that she had such a capacity for pity - forget her temporary jaundice of tiredness, for he could see her generous soul here before the desk and the vending machines and the swinging, shining plastic doors that never moved to admit anyone who might bear news, but rather to let them pass through. And he worried about his brother - oh, he worried and tried hard for whole seconds at a time between loving her to worry more - but really it was just to show that he could never love or care or worry as much as the strained ghostly figure who sat beside him.

It had been a skiing accident, Henry had been told. In the French Alps, a holiday with some friends from university. He shouldn't have been there in the first place. Gavin wasn't as rich as they were, but he was a worker - as people say in a complimentary fashion Henry had never understood - and he worked and saved and, besides, he mixed so well with anyone. Henry thought bitterly about the world of endless holidays and Masonic handshakes and people introducing one another to one another, forming an ever-spreading oily web, and he thought he hated it for its decadence: a word he had read - for reading and knowledge were weapons against. against the decadent, he thought in his snobbish working-class way. (Their decadent world. It had a certain ring to it.) Now was not the time to be truthful with himself and admit he just hated all worlds to which he could never belong, and would gladly be what he loathed, but could not and that was why he loathed it. Briefly, unexpectedly, the word `love' tumbled through his head and he didn't understand and so he looked again at Nicole and thought, as Gavin had said back when he could speak, I love her. He worried flickeringly about Gavin, then his eyes fell to her again.

It had been a skiing accident, Nicole had been told. An empty ski-slope, thick drifts of snow, they'd thought of cancelling altogether. But they did not. No, they did not. Most of the skiers sat in caf� and bitched about the weather with their hands wrapped round mugs of coffee, but it was Gavin who had availed himself of the empty ski-slope. It had been evening, and she thought unwillingly of the dark precipitous drop of the 'expert' slope, the lip that beckoned sinisterly like her own imagination: the white empty descent and the faded empty sky. And what had he been thinking as he stood there, looking for stars that would not come? The vague green airbrushed shapes were the trees, the flickering red points were the flags, and Gavin would have been wearing the blue ski-suit and that pioneering smile of his she'd been privileged and obscurely frightened to see a few times before. Maybe he felt the terrible cold on his bare chin, but then maybe he did not. Then the leap, the lurch, the mind staying in one place and the body falling and the soul stretching to a wonderful size between. The bright eager shape that dropped at a sickening rate, she knew, had contained the eerie certainty of invincibility, the curious stillness and calm of a dream, the idiot optimism of life. It screamed, Here I am king; I was nothing before and might be nothing afterwards, but right now I am king, right up until - oh, God, she wanted to retch - right up until a tree hurtled towards its eyes, seeming to spin slowly through ninety degrees as it grew, like a die rolling and coming to a halt. Until Gavin realised that it was he who had spun and was now lying with his cheek against the cotton snow, broken, leaking blood without protest from many places and admitting the chill air into his skull through a small regular hole in the crown of his golden head. A hole the size of a five-pence piece - cold and common coinage.

Henry looked at Nicole's pale cheek and admired her pity again and again. I wish I could be like that. he thought, but he didn't mean it. You can only so deeply admire things you believe are smaller than yourself. She had shrunk in his mind over the years in which she had become, officially, an adult, and now he loved intensely just the small part of her he could still see, and the rest that he invented to suit his needs. He looked at the TV set in an upper corner of the room, which showed a wildlife programme with a strange montage of goats and monkeys, and tried to think more about his brother. Guilt provided resistance to the current he felt between himself and Nicole, and he wanted to purge his soul through worry in the way old pious ladies do, counting beads. How awful! God I love him! What will I do if.? I never realised how much he. He was so. Is so. Is so. God, how can You do this.? Nobodyknowswhensomethinglikethiswillhappen IwishicouldjusttalktohimCan'tyouletmehavethat OhgodwhydoyoupunishwhenyouLoveEverything? But the duplicitous prayer for his own happiness didn't work. Why should I still feel guilty? he asked, his senses drowning through some other flow, a pure bubbling spring that eroded his hollow monuments to mourning.

He noticed Nicole was crying. Somewhere, it seemed, there existed a well of tears he could no longer reach. Suddenly pity was mockery of his arid eyes, was not picturesque, had to be soothed quickly like a hated baby in the dark of a would-be bachelor's house. `Would you like anything?' he asked with a facsimile of care, feeling some honour in disguising, for her, the pain he felt he felt for Gavin, but really felt for himself. `Another cup of coffee? Anything?' And, When can we go and see my brother? he wondered with an irritation that he quickly transformed to grief to lessen the truer pain. And, Why won't she stop crying? he asked himself, quietly.

Nicole smiled sickly like a battered animal, `No, thank you, Henry.' And she sat and continued to lucidly dream of the snow falling, drifting, falling, soft and pale on to his still paler smooth and clean white flesh. The flakes falling, falling, falling, with slow, tender, murderous persistence on to the exposed mind she loved and the stained blue ski-suit she half-remembered and the wide white eyes that no longer knew how to move or to see.

Now, Nicole's dad was a bastard. Oh, the simplicity of it, reader, the mindless tasteless simplicity of it - oh, reader, the pity of it, reader. Des was such an artless bastard - so without artifice or cunning or anything, as to be mundanely awful: poor stuff for any character, but he has his place alongside the other wispish phantoms that surround Henry and Nicole and Gavin.

Standing in the hallway of Henry's house, having returned home from the hospital, having seen Gavin, they were all huddled in a group: Henry's mother and father, and Nicole, and Henry. Also present - a little set apart - was Des, who had come from the house he shared with his wife and daughter next door, ostensibly to see how Henry's family was bearing up. (Accept, reader, that clich� sometimes happen: Nicole was the girl next door.)

Henry's father, Simon, was an accountant - a man really of no account - and his pencil-neck and refractive glasses could not begin to calculate the awfulness of the day. He was, as people say with a strangely overstated understatement, `in shock', and his wife was comforting him, although she was quite `shocked' herself. Henry was ashamed of his dad, and he hated Des because his presence was what made him feel so selfishly ashamed; that anyone should see his dad like this! As for Nicole, her eyes were dead, and she stood as a passenger does on an overcrowded train, waiting only to get off.

These were the simple feelings crowded in Henry's hall: abject sorrow and love and confusion and shame and a total vacuum. But there is another: it is the quiet blurry amusement of Des that confirms Henry's shameful shame is justified. The big, bald, burly Des was looking intently at Simon's face, like a boxer analysing another fighter's guard. He thought the quivering lip looked silly on any man, even an accountant, but he was waiting dutifully to comfort any emotion from Simon that did not make him simply want to laugh. Des felt he had that honour in him, at least.

But then Simon had always been wet, he thought contrarily - the kind who'd have to pay some quack to tell him to get over it. Ah, he thought, you must be cruel to be kind.

`All right, Sye?' rolled the long Irish accent, squaring up.

A papery pause. Simon didn't seem to hear Des, but spoke at last, anyway.

`Well, he's gone.' said his watery voice; `he's gone now and we should. Well, I suppose we just have to. accept it.' Was that the proper word? He looked around like a dazed actor, unsure of his lines, and got a confirming nod from Des.

`Aye, that's right, Sye. No use pertending edderwise. You just have to face fects. He's gone, and nuttin' you ur Oi ken do ken change it.'

`You're right, of course, Des.'

Des paused and nodded, as though struck with his own profundity. Not wishing to spoil the effect, he said next merely, `Now, what say we go down to The Silver Dragon and soothe ourselves wid a drink or eight? Eh?'

`Oh, I can't, Des. It wouldn't be -'

`Oi insist, Sye.'

`Dad.' said Nicole distantly. Don't start - not here - not tonight.

`Really. Oi insist.'

`I can't.'

`Dad.' Please.

`Ah, Sye. Ye don't reject a man's hospitality like that. Come on. Be a man.'

`Des, I -'

`Come on, I said.'

`Dad.' Why be your clownish self when the time demands something - well, something more?

`Des.'

`Well, what da feck else ur ye going to do tonight?' he asked, eyes wide, turning suddenly on the whole group. He burped absurdly beneath his words. You have to be cruel to be kind, he thought, brain imbrued in beer.

`Dad.' Nicole's hands were on his arm now in a gesture at once pleading and hateful and impotent.

`Go through his things and mope to yurselfs? Aye, fine lotta good dat'd do ye.' It is a great and noble thing to feel, as Des always did, that you are in the right. Des was suckled by The Silver Dragon, morning, noon and night. The two facts are not unrelated.

`Dad,' Nicole said once more, tiredly - tiredly because tragedy was sacred even if awful, and shouldn't be intruded upon by the more banal shortcomings of her world - `you've been drinking.'

He issued another yeasty belch and declared with sudden violence, `Oi have net! Ye have to be cruel to be kind.' He affected the others like a heckler interrupting the most moving song. He was the hackneyed racial stereotype of an Irishman, and he was interfering with the most awful tragedy. In terms of pathos, it was like mixing tripe and caviar, and as they stood on the porch. But now it was unequivocal night.

Nicole looked up at the frosty stars above the front lawn, shining and static and fat in the vast canopy overhead. To her blurred, watering eyes, it looked as though there were two skies up there, two fields of stars shining down fatly into Henry's face and leering at her own.

`God,' she said, as though really speaking to something among those bright destructive lights up there. `He's dead. Oh, Henry. He's as good as dead.'

`I know. The word vegetable sounds so cruel, don't you think? To think, that doctor said that.'

It was very cold.

Nicole said, `Yes, I know.'

`But then I suppose it's the truth.'

`Hmm.'

`And the truth can be cruel.'

`Yes, you're right.'

It was very, very cold. The night crept about them silently: things triumphed and were killed within the trees and bushes out there, things blossomed or died in the wink of an eye, but there was no one to see. You had the feeling no one wanted to see, as though the darkness were just a shared illusion to spare the world's eyes, and the time for dawn had simply been arranged for, oh, let's say six hours' time, like a crime planned in advance.

`You'd almost think he'd be better off dead,' said Henry tremulously at last, as though he were quietly suggesting a fantasy to a girlfriend.

`No.' There was an odd vibrancy to the little word, a springboard thung like rejection. No, it simply said, that cannot be. Her eyes.

`Nicole. You know what the doctor said as well as I do.' He was starved of oxygen for over five minutes. The nerves in his spine were wrecked. He was virtually brain-dead. His heart had failed. All these things Henry's words signified, and she recoiled pitiably from them.

Oh, God. She was so beautiful. When she smiled she was beautiful, always she was beautiful, but now the harsh accidence of fate had given her beauty dignity. Henry lost himself in the sad down-turned aspect of her eyes as he said, `I loved him. I really did. You don't have a brother, but. Oh, I can't explain it. It's like something is torn out of you, you know?' That was very good, he thought, very strong, and he liked its effect upon Nicole.

`I think I can imagine.'

Those eyes. `It's awful, awful. You don't want to see him suffering.' Those eyes, oh.

`I'm sorry, Henry. But he deserves to stay alive, at least. And you never know.'

`Oh. No, I know - you never know.' Oh, and here was everything, right here - irony of ironies - in the shade of death. Her eyes. `I'm sorry too.' Oh.

He could sense her there in the darkness. Could she feel him in the same way? Yes, he decided suddenly. Yes: this was a communion of souls. Forget that it was carried out in a garden of pure blackness; a mass held fumblingly in the dark is still a mass.

He could not see in the dark how far away her soul was from his own.

Yes, this was love, real love. (It felt like a vile cunning trick in the night, but we can forget that as we forget everything - happily.) Henry loved being and talking and feeling with Nicole: it was as though she understood every nuance of his mind. He had only to say something and he knew that she felt as he did. It was an irrevocable bond; they fit. And as awful as it sounded at this precise unfortunate time - well, as awful as it sounded, it was destiny, and their stars had been crossed since first stars shone. And because it was so surreally deep a night on Earth, this night, it seemed the points up there shone brighter still. Stupid to stare at your feet in the darkness, when you thought of all the light up there, waiting to be grasped. No, to Henry the stars had never seemed so near.

Nicole, too, was in the faint golden glow from above.

Nicole wrapped her thin jacket around herself, hands clasped beneath it, eyes like deep white skies holding Henry's for an instant - and she sighed, and she said goodbye.

Oh. Henry had been very close. His hand had moved towards her of its own accord as she made the weak and wounded shape with her arms. How could she not feel this, even through the frosty air of this night? How, oh how.? But Henry held back - it would not be right, after all, not yet.

Coward! screamed the stars.

But nothing could move the intense love beyond the mental exercise to contact, to fellowship, to something besides the darkness - and the day ended, then, with that obscene timidity and self-sufficiency that so coloured Henry's life. And how could he not see? How, oh how, oh how could it be made any plainer to him? Here was life and he could see the stars and he could grasp them if he chose, and that was all right, however wrong it might seem. Nicole did not face the stars and wanted to grasp instead what she knew once, and that was all right too, however impossible it might seem. But, as it was, Henry just wanted desperately to grasp, and did not. Neither on Earth with the substantial skeletons of the dead beneath his feet, nor in the heavens with glittering frosty futures spinning round his head, Henry hung breathless in that space of freezing vapour between, where nothing can truly live.

And that was when he heard Gavin say, quite clearly, in the chill and the darkness after Nicole had gone, `Kill me,' like the Devil whispering into his ear.

`Hello, Gavin.'

He felt stupid.

The eyes looked emptily back at Henry, but only because they happened to point that way always. There was nothing in them. Gavin's face reminded him of nothing so much as a pile of mildly mashed potatoes; it was very white with a few ugly crinkles here and there, like the entryways of maggots into an apple, the almost imperceptible hints of rottenness inside. His hair also seemed too thin and dead of colour where it fell over his forehead - like the skin of an old, half-peeled banana - and there wasn't quite enough of it to hide a purple scar that curved back from the temple to where the bandages began. The idea came to Henry suddenly that this was no longer what Nicole had loved, so why. But the thoughts to which that led were too repulsive to be approached so directly.

There were also dark shadows beneath the eyes, which seemed strange: Gavin had had only bed-rest for some weeks now, and would have nothing else forever. Nicole also looked tired to Henry these days - though with more understandable reason - on the rare occasions that he saw her. Sick with worry for. for Gavin, such as he was.

This bothered Henry, and he considered thoughtlessly the impossibility of his ever triumphing over a ghost. But then thoughtfully stopped.

Gavin's head was still, always still, and Henry wondered if there were thoughts in there, yammering, screaming, trying to be seen through the dumb flesh like raw pastry. Then remembered the doctor had said there were not.

He could think of nothing to say. He wanted to believe the nurses hovering unobtrusively around the no-hopers' ward, even the no-hopers themselves lying in their eternal beds, were what stopped his tongue, what held up the torrent of feeling. But really it was a relief to have an excuse not to talk, because there was absolutely nothing that could be said.

An old woman was kneading the hand of a saturnine girl lying in another bed. (Looking at the girl, Henry thought: Before, I would have called her a... He was sickened, and nearly vomited as he thought `cabbage'. He seemed briefly to smell cabbage, too, in the sterile room, and blanched in disgust.) The old woman reminded Henry of church: musty pamphlets, God, hymnals, holy water, mothballs. Except for the human tears that slushed around in her mascara. Those were not borrowed or false like the very strong perfume she wore or the light brown dye in her hair. Grief seemed the one thing genuine in all the world.

And he noticed distractedly that he did not possess it.

Henry looked at the machinery maintaining his brother, like a drowning man's feet kicking mechanically to keep the lips to the air even knowing no helicopter is on the way. He could only name the catheter, and that just because it had a funny purpose. He scanned the brand names on the other equipment, and realised calmly that now this was his brother, this collection of efficient boxes and tubes and drips, like some controlled experiment in a science class. This and nothing else, and it was this that kept Nicole awake at night. She always seemed so abstracted, now. What would she think if she were here? Henry wondered, looking for emotion. Does he feel inside there, does it hurt? But she wouldn't even come to see Gavin. It was as if she were as dead - lifeless, rather, but the two are much the same - as he. Well, Henry thought, I come to see him at least. Maybe, somehow, beneath the inert corpse on the bed, Gavin had wits enough to appreciate the act.

The act. He nearly thought of something unpardonable, another decisive act - (Does it hurt? Yes, Henry thought, yes, it does, it hurts, let's make it stop, for all of us) - but he didn't truly think the thought. He didn't submit it to the harshly weighing part of his mind that could make the thought first feasible and then imperative. He left it lurking at the back of his head, like plans for a holiday a long way off.

And there was nothing - nothing - to say. So he stood and pulled on his coat and his shadow-grey gloves, like a surgeon preparing for an operation, and looked long at Gavin - and left.

A week later, Henry lay disconsolate in bed. Nothing had changed; his life, like Gavin's, seemed characterised by lack of change. He lay and tried not to think and listened instead to the noiseless night. Analysis would crush the vague fantasy he had that things were fine, that he was content with life as it was right now, so he let it alone to live an undisturbed, unreal life. But - Oh, Nicole. Oh, Gavin. Oh, me.

No. Listen to the dark instead.

And the more he listened, the more nothing he heard. Nothing above his head, pressing down like a smothering pillow or unrest or a sudden deficit of air. The stars were just beyond the curtain, and he got up on his knees and drew back the curtain to reassure himself they were still there, like a miser counting his treasure - and they were, the whole glittering multitude. They looked like lamplight or smudged candles in the dark, like thick blobs in some celebrated oil painting. He wondered why they would not come free from the sky, drip down on his sleepless head and chasten his sick soul. But no. There they hung, ever within sight and ever beyond touch.

He lay back and recommenced listening. Meditate, empty yourself: that was the next best choice to oblivion. Listen and listen to the humming of your own few simple thoughts and nothing else, like touching thick velvet, like being immersed in ink-black water, like.

But suddenly there was sound, something external to jar him gently back to reality.

Thud. Thud. Thud. And, muffled, `Ye bitch!'

Des. Stupid, grunting Des. He heard him through the thin partition wall of the house. Des and his wife. Next door, in their bedroom. And those were the sounds of love. He noticed too the thin romantic music. Had it started suddenly just now, or had it been there all along, unnoticed? He couldn't tell.

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In Kingfisher Blue 'Jennifer was with an older man when smitten barman Barry made his pitch - she accepted his offer and opened his eyes to darker side of life in London.' More

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