And maybe that cheap music and those sounds were love, really, real love, the only love. Truer than Henry's kind, at least, this longing full of nausea and apprehension and irresolution. and guilt. But forget guilt - listen instead to the dark, Henry, or else to `love'. And he did, and the more he did, the more suddenly amusing it seemed.

He thought of Des - it was perverse, he knew, and would have intrigued the counsellor at school - it seemed sick, that he well knew - but he thought of Des, bald and burly Des and his raw red face, and the back of his raw red head bobbing, and what else was raw and red only God knew. And he giggled in the dark, hearing the drunken Des grunt so earnestly. That Nicole could spring from that! Love was a sham. Love was ugly. Love was the bestial instinct of a ram in a field idealised beyond reason. Love was Des. Love was unwholesome and stuffed with lies.

The act, though, did require a certain daring. You had to give it that. To feel you were breaking sacred rules and to open yourself to the criticism of a person whose opinion mattered so much. Difficult, but there was also the reward to impel you. And love was a convenient fa�de to use to gain the reward. Was the reward love as well, real love?

No. Henry giggled again, listening to the desperate sound in Des' mouth. Love was so ridiculous, suddenly, any love. Love was a drunken man telling himself lies, a wasted woman with her separate set of lies. Love was two people lying with dishonest closeness, one staring at the ceiling and the other at the pillow and contact severed as soon as humanly possible. And when he heard Des' wife's histrionic screams - bloodcurdling outside the context of the truthless matrimonial bed - he fairly rocked with laughter. Was this what he wanted with Nicole? True, what he called love was not pure and yearning through choice, but it would be ruined by that kind of greedy animal lust. He chuckled at their rising chorus, the plaintive sounds, like those of caterwauling cats playing in cans of trash. Was there nobility and tenderness in that? Henry could not see it. They were running down the stairs now! He could hear objects tumbling to the soft carpet, their bare feet on the steps, their equally incoherent noises, like children in public baths. Thump! Thump! Thump! What fantastic mixtures of Tarzan-Juliet-Jane-Romeo were going through their suddenly primed middle-aged minds? He tried to picture it, and could not for his sudden uncontrollable laughter, and then could a little, then laughed so much the tears came.

And just then, as though the tears had been prescient, Henry heard the large back window-pane next door shatter, and the tinkling of glass shards on stone, and a woman's scream that was very genuine and very sad and very defeated and wounded and wronged, and Nicole howling somewhere below. And he suddenly stopped laughing.

Things were not as they had seemed.

How horribly mistaken we can be! Henry rose, cold, to the window again. This time he did not look up at the sky, but down on to the patio next door. Yellow light shone from Nicole's bedroom window, always a mere agonising foot or two from his own, and also from the shattered window down below. Amidst the slivers and shapes of glass that lay on the slabs lay also Des' wife (fully clothed, Henry noted), her face to the ground and her arms and legs all at odds with one another. Her dress was very bloody where it clung stickily to her shin, and she made a small sound. Henry heard that romantic music playing again from inside, much more loudly because of the broken window, and it waded out into the night air and swept over her bloody immobile form, ungainly and mindless and ugly, like a bad joke in a humourless bar-room:

`Lady in red.'

Cut off by:

`Did ye feck him then? Did ye?' The asinine voice issued from the hot, cave-like domain in which Nicole had lived her life, and still did, to this awful moment. Henry's parents were waking up, as were people all along the terraced row in response to the interesting sounds of injury. But their lights did not come on. Nobody's did. Other people's problems are very darkly fun to listen to, but you do not get involved.

Henry hid, rapt, behind the white net curtain as in a veil. It was coal black out there, and the one place where light fell was filled with simple horror. And now the battered figure moved. The woman stood slowly and uncertainly in her spotlight on the milky patio, looking up and down the row of houses, up and up with disbelief at the lightless windows like shuttered eyes - the nightmare of indifference. She wondered briefly - as her daughter had - why people did not love more, did not make more and more and stronger and stronger bonds of care and trust between each other, to cradle the whole world and protect us all. Stupid as it sounds, that is what we need. But the house-fronts stayed unlit, like faces devoid of feeling, and anyway she was very dazed and very confused, and she walked slowly - incredibly - back inside the house, tiptoeing carefully around the glass.

And Henry felt suddenly - not pity or outrage or pain - but as though he were implicated in the attack. He had thought he cared about people, but when it came down to it, he didn't care enough to become engaged in others' pain, to mix himself in with their suffering in order to dilute it and make it bearable. It was a failing that stretched beyond this night, a shameful deficiency possessed by nearly all the world. The unwillingness to help, at the cost only of involving oneself. Instead of helping, Henry had laughed uncomprehendingly at pain, and then watched quietly and disinterestedly as it was laid bare for him. And he'd thought he'd been listening in the darkness to something harmless and ridiculously funny, whereas it was in fact the dumb noises of `domestic violence', caused by the dumb and commonplace Des.

But it struck him too, suddenly, there in the shadows in which he hid: how easily you could mistake for love the sounds of anger, jealousy, hatred.

Well, someone in one of the many houses cared - at least enough to pick up the phone. For eventually, with all due ceremony, a purring blue-lighted police car arrived out front and Des was `taken away' - with very undue ceremony. Undue because his case was not peculiar, did not call for such officious application of handcuffs, or such a read-the-bastard-his-rights attitude, or so much peering out of windows and cooing by owlish neighbours, after the event. He had done nothing remarkable, as a sad, bearded, disenchanted sociologist would say, lecturing, showing his reams of figures to prove his passionless point. No, Des had done nothing so remarkable, as any person with a clear-sighted view of human nature would tell us. Every soul in every darkened house of the street did the same that night.

`I thought: I could kill him, right here, right now. It wouldn't have been so wrong, after all, would it? An end to pain - my pain and hers. We could get on with our lives, not having to worry about him any more. I stood there and thought, very coldly: I could do it, I know I could.'

`And you'd have been caught. However right it seemed, you couldn't have expected to get away with -'

`But, don't you see? I might have. I could have. It was that close. It really was. And even if I were caught, well, things would be better than they were with him alive.'

`This is a stupid thing to be discussing, Nicole,' said Henry. `You never would have done it.'

`That's not true,' she said, and her eyes were hard and he knew she was right. `I was standing in front of the kitchen drawer and I opened it. I could see Mum in the garden through the window. I could see his shadow hunched in the doorway. I could hear him. And my hand was round the knife handle. The blade was very long and bright, like silver, the handle was very black, and I wondered where I should drive it to make him feel the least pain.'

Henry was horrified. `But you didn't. That's what matters. You didn't. You phoned the police instead.'

`That's not what matters at all. Don't you see? It was a choice. Killing was a real option. Not just a thought, a whim, something you dream and never do. It was a plan, with a purpose.'

He shook his head and felt afraid.

`It came very close,' she said. `I would have killed him. You don't believe me?'

He shook his head again. Henry had always abhorred stories of knives in the dark, bow-ties choking necks, cyanide eased into a sleeper's veins. Nuclear war was all right. He did not bat an eyelid at grey-shaded Nazi concentration camps on TV documentaries. Walls of fire tearing through distant naked villages with bombers screaming overhead were simply facts of life. But he shuddered at the contact involved in true murder. Even as a child, he literally couldn't hurt a fly. Other children craned diabolically over their amputated spiders and their beetles whose immediate future held just a squish!, but even a moth in his own bedroom, flapping shadow-like round the bulb as though inviting death, gave him a keen desire to escape, not to kill. And what was he escaping, of what was he so afraid? Not of killing itself - for he felt horror of, and not pity for, the moth by the light, the spider on his arm - but of the responsibility entailed in destroying another creature. Of connecting himself with the great looping circus of life and death. Of the personal contact his hand must make with the furry wings before the flapping shadow would go away. Hence, all his life, he had tried to stay uninvolved, to extricate himself from everything, to stop his fingers brushing against.

`I don't think you could stab your dad in the back,' he said after a pause.

`I think I could.'

`I couldn't.'

`No,' she said, `I don't think you could.' She smiled. This was their great difference, and Henry saw she admired it as he had admired her pity in the waiting room. `You're very good, Henry. The world needs more good people.'

The word `good' did not sound like a compliment, not really, but he blushed anyway.

`You speak,' said Henry, 'as though you were evil.'

`Yes?'

She was looking at her knees, and he could not see her face.

`You're not evil,' he assured her.

`Maybe it's not that simple. We're none of us blanket good or evil people.'

Henry wasn't so sure. Yes, he admitted, she had thought clinically of holing her father's back with the bright, bright blade - but somehow he saw that compassion and love ran even through that black plot, like beautiful gullies of li trying to avoid the sorest parts.

`Me too. It's time, I suppose.'

`Would you like me to go with -'

`No, thank you. It's sweet, but I don't think so.'

`Okay,' he said.

`I think it'd be better to go alone, you know?'

`I understand.'

`He looked so awful before.'

`I know.'

`His hair.'

`I know, I know. Are you sure you want to go alone?'

`Yes. It would be easier alone.'

`All right. You're right. It's just that I was going tomorrow anyway.'

`Oh.'

`Don't worry. We don't have to run into each other if you don't want.' He noticed that he was being sensitive, and felt very good about it. `What time are you going?'

He became aware of the grey massing at the window, the round earth rolling into dusk, as she considered. It would rain tomorrow.

`Three, I think,' she said, watching him.

She was about to ask him what time he would be there, before or after, when he looked again at the window and his watch and stood. He said in too loud a voice, `Right. I won't see you then, then.' It was meant to be a joke. Dark shadows slanted across the blue room. Henry did not have the knack of telling jokes.

`Are you leaving?' she asked, alarmed.

Henry noticed that she moved instinctively towards him as he rose, to stay him, to keep him. He thought of ice splitting under sudden intense sunshine and of spring beginning prematurely. She cared that he was going! She wanted him to stay! He wanted to stay too - but the spring would still be fresh tomorrow, so what did it matter? He had the feeling that life was going to start at last, as the grey swept in outside. `Yeah.' he said. `I have to work this evening. Duty calls, I'm afraid.' He grimaced. (No, Henry did not have the knack of telling jokes at all, even little ones.)

She smiled generously, relaxing her tensed muscles, leaning back again against the wall by her bed. `Okay. I'll see you.'

He looked at her and felt something like privilege and possession mixed high in his chest. He did not notice the thinness of her smile, the sudden dreary acceptance behind her cloudy eyes as her skull rested against the wall. `Right,' he said. `Bye.'

And he was happy for the first time in a long while. Was this love?

He walked out of her room and closed the door with a smooth click. The hall was very brown and gloomy and cramped, and he thought of a prison tower and the room at the top. But he was happy. Nicole and he had talked like old friends. She had wanted to talk more, to share more of herself with him. Well, tomorrow. She had wanted Henry to remain with her in preference to the blond-haired ghost of Gavin. He would, tomorrow. Her visit to the hospital might be the final exorcism. Gavin would disappear quite naturally from their lives, as he should. Tomorrow. Finally, as Henry had been crudely wishing, she would just get over it.

On the landing he took a deep breath, and prepared himself to go downstairs - to descend and to try to avoid seeing the bruised face and ruined friendly smile of Nicole's mother on his way out, for he was too happy for such sights.

The park was grim and wet today. Henry hated crossing it to visit the hospital on days like this. To trudge through the crisp fragrant autumn was pleasant; he was indifferent to the greens of the brighter seasons; but the route into winter, with each day darker than the last, was depressing and monotonous and dreary. There was no beauty in such complete demise. The leaves were plastered to the paths, all one-tone yellows and blacks, trodden, bruised, the relics of some other time. All was a soggy mess. Rain fell swiftly like the wax with which letters were sealed once: it came in thick droplets, trickled along branches and sought out Henry's hooded head. His coat kept coming open at the neck, and the cold air stung him hotly as he walked, slipping from slimy leaf to slimy leaf. It was a bad day.

Without doubt, a bad day. But it was made better by the chance of seeing Nicole. That was at least a partial compensation for spending yet another wearisome hour or so - or whatever was required to placate his conscience - before his brother's ever-sleeping stone-like shape, in the maddening hospital. It seemed cruel to think of these visits in such terms, but Jesus, what was the point? Life goes on, doesn't it? Shouldn't it? The visits were nothing but an inconvenience, really, a bore - insane like a sacrifice of the living to please the dead. Nonetheless: small sacrifice really. What mattered was, he had Nicole and Gavin did not. did not live any more, so how could he have anything at all, anyway? Henry now visited Gavin with vague mockery, as an adulterer might go to a party thrown by the man whose wife he had been with, alone, just hours before. But of course he did not see it quite like that.

Things had worked out in the end, he mused. To think he had considered, in his darker dreams, killing Gavin!

On he walked. The trees were craven and black, shrinking away from him and each other, their branches rattling like claws against a window-pane. There was no comfort in anything. There were other people in the park, wrapped in dark woollen clothes and coats, but they were far away, even when they passed him by and almost brushed against him. Something about the cold freezes friendly words in our throats. Eyes are colourless and mouths stay tight shut and we wrap ourselves up as for a funeral.

But the figure entering the park now, walking very strangely towards Henry, was dressed in white and blue and wore no coat. He knew it was Nicole by a thousand signs, even from this distance. He had grown up studying her hair, her skin, her motion, and now like a clever scholar he could say with total certainty, That, there, is Nicole. But it was a Nicole altered somehow. She moved in staggers and stops, like a car trying to start, and her hair was blown in thick wet clumps by the wind or else pinned to her face. She disappeared intermittently behind the spread-armed chestnut trees as she walked the curved path towards Henry. As she drew nearer and nearer to him, he felt the day's cold slip itself beneath the folds of his coat, and a chill began between his shoulders and spread through him. He became momentarily frightened and stopped, but he soon realised the futility of that, so he took a few hesitant steps forwards, and then resumed his previous pace.

`Nicole,' he said as they met. `Nicole.' His tone had a horrible ingratiating quality to it, pleading, Be quiet, please stop crying - crying, Stop, please stop. `I'm sorry. Was it that bad for you? You don't have to go see him any more, not if -'

She waved her hand to quiet him as though she were choking. Her face was wet and the skin seemed very fine and delicate and glistened with rain. She was choking, it seemed, for her head threw itself backwards and her throat pulsed and she sobbed.

`Nicole? Are you..?'

The hand waved again and she fixed him with an appallingly coherent look for a spell of seconds, like a moment of complete bitter concentration coming in the middle of an ugly, eye-rolling, tongue-lolling fit, asking God to witness what He has made. This sorrow was not what Henry had loved before, but animal hurt and pity and the inevitable self-pity that has no time for nobler thoughts. Henry's bones petrified and his soul squealed, and then the look had passed.

Nicole let loose a scream, a wavering and cracked scream of agony, then pushed past Henry, loping like something too lost even to hold up its head. She fell to the floor and wailed, picked herself up, and fell, wailed and went on, further and further away from Henry, on into the dizzy greyness and drizzle that led home.

Now, where should Henry go? Should he follow the pale form that was stuttering away from him with a suddenly ugly gait, someone with courage enough to make a choice but who now was suffering for it? Or should he go instead to the hospital, where lay Gavin, whose eyes had moved a flicker, as if in mild irritation, as Nicole had strangled his supply of mechanical life? Where a young gape-mouthed nurse was standing by his bed and whispering, `I didn't see her come in, I couldn't, I wasn't. I mean.' - as though any single person could really take responsibility for death or love or anything else so large and terrifying.

Where should he go?

That is Henry's problem: he cannot decide.

Finished: 18/11/1999

The End

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