My own body felt crazy good. There was live restless strength in my calves and fingers. I wanted someone to attack me on the way home, to give all the power somewhere to go.

I dressed. Used a towel to wipe away everything I thought my hands had touched, which seemed sort of lame since it’s all micro-fibres and DNA now. Then, using toilet paper to prevent prints (I congratulated myself on not forgetting this last set—the idiot set—on the door handle), I let myself out and closed the door behind me. If my geography was right, it was no more than a half-hour walk to my hotel. I wanted to walk, to feel the night and the living human beings around me.

63

Walker

SHE’S GONE. IT’S a relief. Endings always are.

I spent the morning and afternoon checking the systems. You give yourself things to do. Couldn’t face being with the kids. Lorcan’s his usual superior self, but Zoë doesn’t like letting me out of her sight. She forgets for a little while—lets Lucy read to her or Maddy try nail polishes and lipsticks out on her—then suddenly remembers and goes: Where’s Walker? At least as often as she goes: Where’s Mommy?

Mommy has gone to see a witch-doctor, honey. Mommy has gone on a wild motherfucking goose-chase. We don’t say it, but it’s what we’re thinking. Tough to screen it from them. Maybe they know. Kids always know more than you think.

“Would you take it?” I asked Lucy. I was up on the walkway, or rampart, or balcony, checking the gun mountings. They’re hidden under concrete flower boxes that’ll roll back at the flick of a switch. “If you could go back to being normal, get a fresh start—would you?”

She was leaning against the parapet wall, drinking a glass of white wine. She was barefoot, wearing a pale green summer dress with a print of tiny yellow flowers. Every now and then the breeze blew her hair forwards, made her skirt flap. The sky was crisp and blue, a few white clouds travelling happily. I was thinking: We could hold out for a long time here. But not forever. If they came in real numbers, sooner or later, we’d go down. (And they will come in real numbers, eventually. Of course they will. It’s only a matter of time.)

“This was my fresh start,” Lucy said. “I don’t need another one. I don’t want another one.” She took a sip of her drink. I could smell the grapes in it. It made me want one myself. “But then I don’t have kids to worry about,” she said. “If I had kids, then maybe, for them.”

Lucy’s ready for a man. I can feel it. Not me. But it’s coming off her. It’s in her radius. Our little clan’s not enough for her. Why should it be? It’s not enough for me, now. It would’ve been. I tell myself it would’ve been. With Talulla.

Later, in the small hours, there was a knock on my door. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the floor. I’d just taken a long, hot shower. Shaved for the first time in a week. Cut my finger- and toenails. It felt ritualistic. Like making a commitment to going on. It felt pathetic, too. When I looked ahead into the future I couldn’t see anything. The world seemed small. Full of rooms to be alone in. I’d been going, in my mind, to situation after situation—travelling with Mike and Natasha; finding a new crowd; starting an organised force to prepare for what was coming—but all the visions drifted into seeing myself sitting in airport departure lounges, or walking in the quiet, depressing streets of small Mediterranean towns, or in a pick-up, driving through the nowheres of the Midwest. Jake had done more than a hundred and fifty years in that kind of solitary. I couldn’t see how.

“Come in.”

It was Madeline. I’d known it would be. I’d wanted it to be. Or part of me had. She was in an ivory silk nightie that stopped a long way above her knees. She came over and stood in front of me. For a long while neither of us spoke.

“I’m not the consolation prize,” she said, eventually. “This isn’t for you. It’s for me.”

64

Talulla

HAVING ALL THE travel arrangements taken care of made me realise what a fucking horrendous journey it would have been if I’d had to make them myself. Zagreb to Delhi, Delhi to Kolkata, Kolkata—via small, precarious jet—to Bhubaneswar, where Olek’s gofer, Grishma (a natty little guy with a small but dashingly dark-eyed and high-cheekboned face) met me with a car. From there what felt like an interminable drive southeast to Jogeswarpur, five miles north of the Balukhand Konark Reserve Forest.

I felt lousy by the time I got there, anyway. Full moon was just over forty-eight hours away and wulf was busting the usual tedious moves, the premature lunges and twists, the pointless clawed spasms and swipes. I hadn’t slept properly since Zagreb. My eyes were raw. The nerves in my nails throbbed.

Olek’s … what? laboratory?—was a former ashram on the edge of the reserve, but barring a few weathered statues of the smiling Buddha in the garden, you’d never have known it. The garden itself was spectacular, dense, lush, a sort of willing stereotype of the exotic East, blood-reds and splashy yellows and simmering pinks, though with the exception of bougainvillea, jasmine and oleander I didn’t recognise any of the flowers. There were two huge banyans and, dotted here and there, lemon, tamarind, guava and peach trees, all heavy with fruit. Three green ponds with long, fat, drowsy fish—koi carp?—and a paved, semi-circular patio at the front on which a large abstract sculpture—a torqued ovoid with a hole in the middle, in some kind of polished blue stone—took pride of place. The building itself was three large, intersecting, flat-roofed concrete rectangles, with three floors above ground (on arrival there was no telling how many below, but I had to assume at least one) with tinted windows and an iron-railed balcony going all the way around between the second and third storeys. He’s dug-in here, I thought. Maybe that’s what happens in the end. The wandering stops and you just accept a place as home. No matter how many centuries you have ahead of you. I hadn’t noticed any security on the drive in, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any.

Grishma looked at his watch. “Mr. Olek will be with us shortly,” he said. “Can I offer you anything in the meantime? Tea? Something stronger?”

I’d been led through an entrance hall of white plaster walls and a terra cotta floor into a library of floor-to-ceiling books. Furniture was three green leather Chesterfields, a large glass desk and a white, futuristic recliner, all on three or four big blue and gold-fringed Indian (or for all I knew Persian or Chinese) carpets of exquisitely intricate design. A huge benign asparagus fern on a dark wooden plant stand cast a stretched shadow the full length of the room in the last of the low sunlight. A tall art deco standard lamp stood in one corner, twin nymphs holding a glass globe. There was a book open face-down on one of the couches.