There was pink light that seemed to permeate everything and a gentle murmuring somewhere in the distance. All around him was smooth still liquid and he, this tiny bundle of cells just gaining awareness, was beginning to experience the world at its most cushioned. A soft throbbing echoed throughout the cavernous depths of his universe, but did not disturb him as it beat in tandem with his newly formed heart. Below him was the most beautiful sight of the few his lidless eyes had seen: an endless stream of something unnamed and unnameable to him, a million million shining golden spheres in incessant train, all flowing into him and filling him and letting him grow. The tiny helpless thing, his yet curved spine giving him the bizarre appearance of being deformed when his deformation was yet to come, waited in the stillness and caught the golden stream; waited suspended in the golden stream for what marvels would come next.

Above this, the teeth of the girl, who had been pregnant just two months, sank into a burger. They were long, white, canine teeth, which were too healthy and white and brilliant to be contained by her painted lips. They tore into the meat savagely but economically, thoughtlessly precise.

She was beautiful - that was the only way Joseph could describe her then. A small, pale figure, deceptively fragile-looking, whose dark hair hung like the robes of some embittered queen from the world of fairy tales. For all that, she was astonishingly beautiful, yet it was a dark beauty that screamed her danger in the subtlest way. And as for what lay beneath her beauty, that was darkest of all - as Joseph would see.

She swallowed her mouthful and took a long drink of water. Opposite her, staring out the window at the car park of the roadside restaurant in which they sat, was Joseph. He wondered how she could eat so calmly knowing what they were about to do. He supposed that she cared so much about the health of the baby that she would not skip a meal, even if her stomach were quivering as much as Joseph's was; but that was a laughable thought. He remembered the trip with her to the abortion clinic:

'Isn't it against your.'

'It's not that black and white, Joseph. A book of rules in Rome is not infallible.' Her philosophy thesis had been on human choice. Oh, she was all for choice, but her going to the clinic made Joseph ineffectually question her humanity; the way she made the decision sitting in the doctor's leather chair, fickle finger in her mouth. 'No,' she had said, 'I'll keep it.' Like a defective product at the supermarket checkout, like an unwanted Christmas present. And it seemed she didn't have the abortion just out of spite. I won't solve his problem that easily, her defiant look had said - I won't let him forget, I'll make him pay. Doctor Furlong had eyed her a little strangely when he saw that look, as though none of his confused and world-weary patients had ever taken such a stance as the girl before him. That was when Joseph had spotted that there was something horrific hidden behind the girl's beauty.

And now here was the tangible evidence of her horror: the talentlessly stolen car outside - for he had played his part in this, though he could not say why - the can of petrol in the boot with a brown rag stuffed down the spout, the gold lighter which felt too solid in his pocket. Amidst the orange phantom forms of the lamplight in the car park, the battered red car also seemed enormously real: sinister, dangerously charged with potential guilt.

Inside, a family was seated at one of the nearby tables: a man with a parchment face and grey-red eyes, a woman with a fat frame and purple creases under her eyes, and three dark little boys like clones of one another. The children, surely not older than three and four and five, ran around their chairs and pushed one another with a little more than playfulness; a knee was grazed, the tears came. The woman greatly overreacted by slapping the most conveniently located one around the head, perhaps drawing a little more blood, the red scarf that bound her hair flapping angrily. Now Joseph saw where the children got their violence from. The father sat by passively, munching stoically on his chips.

'Sit down!' whispered the woman in a powerful tone. 'If you don't sit down, there will be hell to pay when we get home.' The implied threat was evident, and it seemed as though the presence of people not a part of the family was the only thing that stopped her from striking the boys dead. In stunned silence, but maintaining a little of their mutinous spirit, the boys slumped into their chairs and began to eat.

So that is my future, then, Joseph thought. The house and the bills and the job and the children, all detestable beyond belief - and no way to change any of them. And that was the proposition the girl would inevitably offer - for she was very religious, people said - and which he knew he would accept. Acquiescence was his basic character trait.

The man they were going to kill was at least not so submissive as Joseph, whatever else the girl said he was. There was something terrifying in a 'life-long union', becoming 'one flesh', with the dark unsmiling girl, and he had seen that as Joseph had. The difference was that Joseph would walk into the trap anyway, with eyes wide shut.

The girl knew this of Joseph. She also knew her own cleverness and her own attractiveness and what these two things could make up for in the way of sentiment, which she lacked. When they'd discussed it, she knew from the start she would come out on top.

'You can't just kill him!' Joseph had said to her inside his little flat, his wide fixed smile absurdly inappropriate to his feelings. Some irrational part of him was still trying to make it a joke, but it was beyond that.

She had just sat on the couch, hands crossed neatly on her knees, staring intently at him where he stood. Her tiny silver crucifix glittered from her neck like something of beauty warped. It reminded Joseph of marriages at midnight done like dirty deals, of neon lights on American churches, of fake green grass around gaudy headstones.

'Joe. He wouldn't marry me - of course, now we've met that doesn't matter' - she put a modicum of feeling into a warm smile - 'but it did then - and he even hinted he wouldn't live with me, not that I'd live like that in sin.' For yes, she was a very religious person, everyone said; but to whom did she truly pray, locked at night within the cellar of her own lifeless soul? 'And I wonder if he'd even want to know about it if he didn't feel he had to. I get the feeling sometimes that he wished this had never happened.'

Joseph had thought along similar lines. He issued a pointed silence, which the girl pointedly ignored.

'A human life! He wishes a human life had never happened! Can you believe that? Oh, God. Is killing a person like that such a crime? Eye for eye, tooth for tooth - but this doesn't even come close, because he nearly destroyed two lives. He ruined mine, and we almost killed the baby because of him. This is no different, so don't lie to yourself. A life's a life. And you're saying his is worth more consideration than our baby's is? Or mine?'

She managed to twist things, somehow. She managed to distort the facts in some mystical way. She had changed her attitude to her baby markedly since a week before in Dr Furlong's office, trembling on the edge of execution.

Joseph had to stick to solid ground.

'You can't kill him.'

'Why shouldn't we?' she asked, smiling as well now.

Joseph had the sudden feeling he was locked inside a soap opera. He paced his ragged carpet.

'There are rules, okay? There are some things you just can't do. You're the one with the philosophy degree. Don't you understand that?'

'Don't tell me what I can and can't do,' she said, still simpering. There was nothing some people couldn't do, Joseph saw. 'Tell me why I can't.'

'It's immoral.'

'Not to me.'

'To everyone else, then.'

'What does that matter?'

'It'll get you... It'll get us thrown in jail.'

'That's no reason not to do it.'

'Of course it is!'

'Why?'

'Don't do that childish "Why?" stuff. You know why.'

'Don't try that meaningless "You know" stuff when clearly I don't.'

'You say you love God!'

'I do. How can you judge? Do you love God, Joseph? No, I remember when we first met you said, "I'm an atheist," the same way you might have said, "I'm so clever and I see through it all..."'

'But how can you love Him if you -'

'Please don't lecture me, Joseph, on subjects you don't understand.' The crucifix was there like a reminder of hidden depths to her, but who could tell really what lay in those unplumbed waters?

A pause, drawing back.

'You mustn't want to go to prison,' Joseph reasoned.

'Of course not.'

'Then don't kill him. Simple.'

'Oh, punishment. That's what matters, is it? Simple control over brutes. So the only reason we shouldn't kill him is because we're afraid we'll get caught, afraid we'll get punished. Is that how we should be: hedged in by laws, only deciding not to do what people deem wrong because we're afraid we'll be punished? Jesus, what a world this would be if people like you could live without laws! Sometimes you have to use your own judgement in these things, Joe, not the law's.'

'I don't care about laws. I don't want to kill him. It's you who wants to kill him!'

'Oh, so you're on his side, are you?'

'Now that is childish.'

'No. Tell me the truth. You think he should get away with it?'

Joseph sighed. 'No. But there are ways and means.'

She threw her arms up in the first evidence of exasperation. 'There are no ways. We have no means but this one. If the system of crime and punishment - which you're so well controlled by, by the way - if the system had its way, he wouldn't suffer at all. Wouldn't even have to send me a few miserable tenners a week. Not that I'd want it.' Her nose rose high in the air; Joseph imagined that she was a caricature of - of what? Of something that didn't belong in a cartoon, that much was certain.

'So we should kill him?'

'Repeat what you just said, but make it a statement.'

'You're crazy.' It wasn't joking, it wasn't lovers' talk (there was always a noticeable lack of that); it was a simple clinical fact.

'And you're weak and you're feeble and I thought I knew you but maybe I don't.' She pouted. To his own amazement, Joseph began to fret about her and reason with her and let her beat him down with her resilience.

Yes, she was beautiful - a dark child, really, who felt she had been wronged; though everyone else saw that she gained her kind of victory all the time. Others worshipped her beauty, abased themselves before it in the hope of a smile or a good word or some generous flicker from behind the great dark beautiful eyes, like the cold face of the world, like the inky blackness above in which stars glitter not as tears but as crystals of ice. But those eyes held just a killing protectiveness of all she had, and a cruel jealousy of what little she did not - call it a soul, if churches don't strike you as ridiculous; or compassion, if emotions don't.

Thus it was decided, in the manner in which most arguments are decided - ego versus ego, personality versus personality.

It was no contest.

A man had got her pregnant. The man was unconcerned. They would kill the man.

Going to the car, the darkness of the night strangely cold, Joseph opened the passenger side door for her. This might have elicited some trite remark - unusually kind, like a crust thrown to a beggar on Christmas day - about chivalry being resurrected from her, but not tonight. She was pensive and a little overawed for the first time in Joseph's memory.

'So,' he said after a mile of road, 'reconsidered?'

She had not. Her mind was set like a rock in the sea of Joseph's protestations, and he felt that he was still less firm than the sea. They didn't speak again until they reached the garage where the man worked - the man whom Joseph had never seen, who had been given an awful aspect in Joseph's mind only through the girl's words. Strange how persuasive those words could be, how charged he was to commit the deed now that it was begun.

ESSO glimmered feebly, redly in the lights of passing cars. Sitting in the car, Joseph knew it would be pointless to argue, pointless even to speak. He knew also that his role in this had already been decided, and some part of him had accepted the decision for a long time. He got out, stumbling in the darkness, feeling as he often did: barely alive, an observer of his own unremarkable actions.

'You won't even help?' he asked desperately, leaning in through the door.

'I'll be waiting here,' she murmured, eyes like oily pools in the yellow light of the car. 'If anyone comes, I can warn you.'

He sighed, closed the door and walked towards the car's boot. On the way he slipped in the dark on a patch of gravel and got up quickly, hoping for no reason he could place that she had not seen him fall. It felt as though he'd been falling for weeks now - maybe all his life before had just been the trek to the cliff's edge - and he now also felt humiliated and incompetent. There would be no rewards for the coming act, he knew as he took the can from the boot, just a lifetime of misery and pain and guilt and false forgetfulness. He was destroying himself, selling out for nothing and forever, and he wondered if even she would gain from it.

The trickle and splash and smell of the petrol, the unreal weight of the can on his arm. The puddles of sparkling water in the rough surface about the garage which he polluted with petrol, as he corrupted himself with an aimless lazy feeling of dread and self-loathing... and love in there, somewhere, trying in vain to gloss over it all.

When he rounded the corner of the building, reaching the back of the garage, he saw there was a wide open door that spat harsh yellow light into the cold still air and on to the gravel path on which he stood. He panicked a moment, wondering if anyone was inside, then became worried that, if so, they might hear the noise of the petrol pouring on to the ground - and then was both relieved and irritated to notice that he had run out of petrol.

He was still looking at the empty can in his hand when he heard a cracked voice ahead of him: 'H-hello?'

A black scarecrow figure was set against the light from the door. It strode towards him suddenly on pipe-cleaner legs and tatty shoes, leaving no time for escape.

'All right, m-m-mate?' A face hovered in the air a few feet from Joseph.

'Fine,' mumbled Joseph, gesticulating unintentionally with the petrol can.

'Oh. Ru-ru-r...' The reedy stuttering voice trailed off and was silent a moment as its owner rephrased the sentence. 'Haven't got any p-petrol left? In y-your car?'

Each word was a struggle, each pause an apology. The boy who stood before Joseph was sixteen or seventeen, dressed in grey overalls, and spattered with grease and engine oil. His oversized Adam's-apple and his yellow-white teeth leapt out when he smile embarrassedly. He was the classic gawky teenage assistant, the perennial bad fit.

This was the 'man' Joseph had come to kill.

'Sorry?' asked Joseph.

The boy sighed. 'Y-your car. H-h-has it not g-got any petrol in it?'

'Oh,' said Joseph, understanding at last, remembering the empty can he held. 'No. Erm...'

'W-would you like some? I can g-g-give it to you for f-free, i-if it's only a little you want.'

Joseph followed him grimly into the back of the garage, in which rational electric light kept the night at bay, for now. There were long wooden shelves of tools and chemicals spread around the small back room without any order, somewhat belying the cool white plastic front of the place which customers usually saw. Some cards were laid out in the lonely, orderly pattern of solitaire on a rough wooden table in a corner, along with a newspaper and some coffee and a radio. The boy's face took on a guilty look, as of a man, cut off from the world for an interminable time, who at last realises his loneliness when it is reflected in another's eyes.

The boy quickly found a can of petrol, a third full.

'I'm s-sorry,' he said with terrible irony, through his awful stutter. 'T-there's some more s-somewhere if you need it...'

'No,' said Joseph, taking the can and weighing it unconsciously as one would weigh a gun. 'This will do.'

Joseph found himself hanging around after he'd been given the petrol, suddenly cold and wanting to delay the poor boy's death, the way a speaker on an unpopular subject might hesitate a moment before going onstage. And as difficult as it was for the boy, he desperately wanted to talk too, and the things troubling people seem to rise most irrepressibly to the surface in a conversation with a stranger.

'No,' he said, 'no girlfriend.' A statement of fact, no need for nervousness. No stutter.

'Too much trouble, eh?' Joseph wondered why he was doing this, trying to find out about her. Maybe this was a way of seeing her from a different angle, a truer angle. But the idea of talking at all with the boy was so absurdly incongruous to the image of burning him to death that the whole encounter took on a strange surreal character for Joseph.

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