“Wow,” I said, looking in the full-length mirror. “Maybe I’ll just take myself back to my hotel.”

“Yeah, you’re hot,” Todd said, without apparent emotion. He’d worked the transformation with a sort of impersonal concentration, and now it was done I very much had the impression he had other places to be, other men to turn into women. “Go up and down in here a few times to get used to the heels.”

The disguise followed my natural dark colouring. I looked like a plain big-boned woman who’d availed herself of maximum cosmetic assistance but about whom there remained something eerily unfuckable. No denying slight titillation. The tights in particular delivered secret arousing snugness. An erection halfheartedly threatened. You’ll be delighted to hear, dear Harley, that—

Todd’s assistant put her head round the door. “Car’s here,” she said.

The vampire attack in Cornwall had put WOCOP in a stir, though Harley’s snooping had thus far turned up nothing. Calls had gone back and forth between the London HQ and most of the Fifty Houses, but the head families, Casa Mangiardi included, were feigning ignorance, or were ignorant. Laura Mangiardi, allegedly, had forfeited familial rights by running around with pariahs, illegally made vamps who’d eluded the annual cull. The Dons’ line was they were just as irked as WOCOP. Efforts would be redoubled, controls tightened. A regrettable glitch, no harm done, long tradition of mutual respect blah blah blah. Harley, of course, remained sceptical. It doesn’t matter, I’d told him. None of it matters. In seven days—

Shut the fuck up, will you? he’d said.

The male receptionist at the Leyland made two assumptions. First, since I went straight to the lifts with barely a glance at him, that I was a prostitute. Second, since I wasn’t attractive, that I was a prostitute of dizzying kinkiness or filth.

“Your concierge thinks I’m a hooker,” I said to Harley by way of hello. He was standing, leaning heavily on the bone-handled stick. “A coprophilia specialist. And these fucking shoes, I don’t mind telling you, are killing me.”

Harley smiled, but we both knew my tone wasn’t up to the task. I’d been in the room five seconds and already the atmosphere was frail. (Don’t come onto the platform with me, we say, knowing how it’ll be: the forced levity, the nonconversation, the minutes that can’t be left empty.) The suite was large, dully corporate, decorated with too much navy blue: drapes, bedspread, corduroy couches. The window looked over puddled roofs, air vents, skylights, the rear yard of a pub with its umbrellas closed and plastic furniture wet. A few dirty scabs of snow remained, irritating now that the big white dream was over.

All the ID documents were crisp, to my eye flawless, but once Harley had tossed them to me where I sat on the bed we didn’t mention them. They’d been his last hope, talismans to bring the dead magic back to life. He’d done everything he could—and proved that nothing he could do was enough. For what felt like minutes we remained in silence, me on the edge of the bed with nyloned legs crossed, him in profile by the window, all but silhouetted by London’s milky grey afternoon light.

“What will you do?” he said.

“Go to Wales. Snowdonia. I never have been back, you know.”

He opened his mouth to say something—an objection reflex—then closed it again. Both of us had imagined there would be things to say, that we’d find things to say, but Harley stared out over the shivering roof-lakes and I knew he was getting the first true flavour of his life without me in it, an effect like the rubbery antiseptic taste of a dentist’s surgery. All those people Marlowe killed .

“The vision I have of you,” I said, “is in South America. White cotton pyjamas. Mango trees. A dusty courtyard. Hot blue sky and half a dozen static pure white clouds. You go where there’s beauty. You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.” I lit a Camel, watched myself in the mirror, a noirish unattractive woman, sitting on a bed, smoking. Somewhere in the back of our minds had been the belief that my being in drag would leaven the horror. And if I laugh at any mortal thing / “ ’Tis that I may not weep . It had failed in the way that comic music at a funeral can fail. He sat down on one of the blue corduroy couches and set the walking stick between his knees and abstractedly lit a Gauloise and slowly scratched the big dome of his forehead.

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

“Harls, come on.”

“A parent doesn’t expect to bury his child.” Cigarette smoke swirled as if struggling to form a representation of something. The room’s memories were of masturbating sales reps and adulterous couples.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Saying it gave me my first inkling of how sorry, of how exhausting this leave-taking had the capacity to become. It was as if the decision to die had taken the energy required to get me to death.

“I’m leaving too,” Harley said, then with satirical brightness: “A month’s holiday. Don’t want to be here when they cut your head off, do I?”

“Where are you going?”

“Caribbean. Barbuda. A Ballardian enclave. The bored wives of neuro-surgeons. Retired astronauts. Pharmaceuticals executives. The brochure looks like a virtual world. White concrete and ultramarine sky. A pristine end point of modernity. I imagine silence that’s really the low hum of air-conditioning and humidors.”

“Well, you’ve got the wardrobe for it. I still think you should go to Brazil. For the boys if nothing else. You’re not dead, Harls, so live.”

“Yes, well, physician heal thy fucking self.”

A silence began to solidify between us. Unaffordable. I stood up, with a wobble on the high heels, saw him immediately thinking not yet, not so soon, not like this, wait.

“Nothing’s going to be the right thing to say,” I said. He stared at the carpet. Cigarette ash fell on his trousers. “We’re hanging around waiting for this not to seem so painful when the fact is it’s only going to get more painful the longer we hang around.”

He didn’t move. His eyes were filling. He took an aggressive drag on the Gauloise, exhaled through his nose. A tear fell, with an audible putt onto his lapel. The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis. The heart of standing is you cannot fly .