The cab dropped me half a mile away, on a road that wound up the hill. It was after two a.m. Sunrise in three hours and fifty-six minutes. I didn’t want time. I wanted to have to get in and out, fast. Time was like someone alongside me who could be unpredictable, could nudge me into something stupid. The Thai air was the way I remembered it—soft and crammed and warm—but ramped-up by my new nostrils. Sweating asphalt and the land full of the sweet dense greenhouse stink and somehow no matter where you were the smell of frying ginger and coconut and rice starch and drains. The hill had palm trees growing three or four deep on either side of the road. White gravel tracks led off to each of the couple dozen houses. Halfway up I looked back. There was a floodlit driving range down below I hadn’t noticed on the way here. A few guys smoking and laughing and whacking golf balls. They looked a little drunk. I wondered for a moment if he was down there, if he was one of the guys. But when I focused I saw they were young and dressed in the gear, those dumb check pants and v-necks, even the prissy shoes. I couldn’t see him in anything except the dark blue overalls that stank of engine oil and cigarette smoke and sweat.

At the wall running around the pool patio I stopped. My hands were shaking. There were two lights on in the house (a bungalow, though it couldn’t have been more different to Leath’s shithole), one behind the frosted glass window of what I guessed was a bathroom, the other in a bigger room at the other end of the house. I’d kept asking myself what I’d do if there was someone with him. I’d kept telling myself I’d know how to handle it if it happened. Except I hadn’t, really. It had just kept going round in my head like clothes in a dryer. I’d just let it keep going without knowing what I’d do. Without really even believing it was possible.

I went over the wall.

That helped. The ease of it. The strength and silence I was still getting used to. That was like a friend that would be with me now, always.

The front door was unlocked.

It led into a small, white-tiled hallway with nothing in it except a wet pair of bathing shorts on the floor. There was a smell of bleach and burnt onions. The room with the sound of the TV was two doors up, on the right.

71

HE WASN’T ASLEEP. He was sitting in a rattan chair next to the bed in his underwear, with his feet up on the bed and a laptop on his lap. Details come at you. The first thing I noticed was that the big toenail on his right foot was black. His feet were big and fat. He was big and fat. His chest was full of cobwebby dirty grey hair. The room smelled of whiskey and cigarettes. His face had a bulldog underbite (badly fitting dentures) and jowls like pears. His thin hair was grey, swept back, but his sideburns and eyebrows still had black in them. His head seemed huge. There was a drink and what looked like some sort of croissant on a small white plastic table next to him.

I felt the floor pitch under me. Had to grab the door handle to stop myself falling. The noise startled him, violently.

The laptop fell. I didn’t look at what was on the screen. I knew what was on the screen. The screen was something I’d fall into.

It would have been comical, the way he tried to pick up the computer and cover the front of his underpants. In the panic he accidentally kicked the laptop further away from himself. It hit the base of the bed and half-shut. He fell on his knees trying to grab it. It was like a fist in my gut, the way a separate part of me could see it would look comical on a YouTube video. There was a book at home in LA. Ways of Seeing. There was a sort of exhaustion, if you saw things enough ways.

“What the fuck—What the fuck? Who are you? Get the fuck … What the fuck do you think you’re doing in here?”

“Nothing,” I said. It seemed to take a long time to say that one word.

“Who are you? This is a fucking … This is a private …”

Something about the way I was looking at him. I could feel how still I’d gone. I could feel him suddenly thinking I had a gun. Because there was no fear coming off me.

I wasn’t afraid. Only pressed down on again by the temptation like a heavy drug to just lie on the floor and let whatever was going to happen happen. Let it all happen again. The thought of his life, all these years—images came: him pushing a shopping cart around a supermarket, bored; him emptying an ashtray; him lying on a sun lounger squinting at a beer in the sun—and nothing had happened to him for what he’d done. He’d won the lottery. He’d won a fortune. I’d heard a Catholic nun on TV once saying that bearing suffering was the route to grace. Forgiving those who inflicted suffering on you was the route to grace. I remembered Fluff saying: If there’s a God he’s addicted to faith. Because without evil there’s no need for faith. I can’t get excited about a God whose divinity depends on a drug habit.

“What are you on, fucking crack?” he said. His erection had gone. Now that he stood upright I could see the little pouches of soft fat above his knees. His gut was big and shiny. I could feel the panic in him subsiding. Now he didn’t think I had a gun. He just thought I was on something. Yet at the same time, because of what he’d done, because of what he was, because of all the seconds and hours and days and years of hiding it, his mind was still racing over all the possible ways this might be connected to it, might be because of what he was.

The disgust came up again. The disgust which, if I didn’t act—

If he hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t taken a step closer, I might have stayed paralysed.

He went over when I hit him. I don’t remember. My feet were off the ground. I felt the air moving under me. A cheap white-framed oil painting of a matador sticking a bull (heart as big as a bull’s head flashed, the beguilement) in reds and golds went by. A digital clock with a flickering number nine that reminded me of when you’re short of sleep and your eyelid twitches.

Don’t drink.

Because I didn’t want to know.

My fingernails went so easily through the soft flesh of his throat. I was on top of him. His body was like a tough waterbed. His face came close. I could see the capillaries in his eyeballs. Smell the whiskey dehydration on his breath. I could feel the bull’s head heart. The familiarity of it butting me.

Honey, I’m gonna make you so dirty you ain’t never gonna scrub clean.

Don’t drink.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t. I didn’t.

I got a grip on the wet tubing of his throat and pulled. A lot of it came out. His eyes couldn’t open wide enough to fit this surprise in. Miles away, his legs were kicking, trying something, some shift of weight. It wouldn’t help him. His feebleness brought the tiredness and disgust up in me again. The power I had over him made me furious and empty. I felt my thumbnail go through a big slippery vein. An artery, I guess. Blood went through the air like a Spanish fan. I wanted something, I didn’t know what—for it to be more, for it to be enough, for it not to be ordinary. The ordinariness of the facts—the veins, the blood like a weakening water fountain, his fat heels thudding, his face going through all its pointless expressions—just made the fury and emptiness worse. I knew, suddenly, that I wouldn’t go see my mother. She’d be just another collection of facts. A small collection. This was what happened, I realised: the ordinariness of the facts shrank a person—or rather, made you bigger, once you could see them, made you bigger than them, made them something you could contain, whether you liked it or not.