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always deserted. That was why it first attracted him. He bought a packet of cigarettes and a copy of the Eagle from the station newspaper stand and cycled down towards the canal. Then, leaving his bike safely concealed in the undergrowth, he walked along the canal path, pushing his way through great drifts of ripe willowherb and sending cloudsof white seeds into the air. When he reached the old lock, he sat down on the stones and smoked as he watched the railway, occasionally counting the coal trucks as they passed, or making faces at the passenger trains as they clattered to their distant, envied destinations. He threw stones into the clotted canal. A few times he walked all the way to the river and made dams with turf and the accumulated garbage it had brought with it: car tyres, branches, railway sleepers and once a whole mattress with the springs poking out of the ticking. That was really how it began; the place got a hold on him somehow. Perhaps because it was a secret place, an old, forbidden place. Jay began to explore; there were mysterious raised concrete-and-metal cylinders, which Joe later identified as capped pitheads and which gave out strange resonant breathing sounds if you went close. A flooded mineshaft, an abandoned coal truck, the remains of a barge. It was an ugly, perhaps a dangerous place, but it was a place of great sadness, too, and it attracted him in a way he could neither combat nor understand. His parents would have been horrified at his going there, and that, too, contributed to its appeal. So he explored; here an ash pit filled with ancient shards of crockery, there a spill of exotic, discarded treasures – bundles of comics and magazines, as yet unspoiled by rain; scrap metal; the hulk of a car, an old Ford Galaxie, a small elder tree growing out of its roof like a novelty aerial; a dead television. Living alongside a railway, Joe once told him, is like living on a beach; the tide brings new jetsam every day. At first he hated it. He couldn’t imagine why he went there at all. He would set out with the intention of taking a quite different route and still find himself in Nether Edge, between the railway and the canal, the sound of distant machinery droning in his ears and the whitish summer sky pushing down the top of his head like a hot cap. A lonely, derelict place. But his, nevertheless. Throughout all that long, strange summer, his. Or so he assumed.

5
London, Spring 1999
    HE WOKE UP LATE THE NEXT DAY TO FIND KERRY ALREADY GONE , leaving a short note, through which the disapproval showed like a watermark. He read it idly, without interest, and tried to remember what had happened the night before.
    J – Don’t forget the reception at Spy’s tonight – it’s very important for you to he there! Wear the Armani – K
.
    His head ached, and he made strong coffee and listened to the radio as he drank it. He didn’t remember a great deal – so much of his life seemed to be like this now, a blur of days without anything to define them from each other, like episodes of a soap he watched out of habit, even though none of the characters interested him. The day stretched out in front of him like an empty road in the desert. He had a tutorial that evening, but was already considering whether to miss it. It was all right; he’d missed tutorials before. It was almost expected of him now. Artistic temperament. He grinned briefly at the irony.
    The bottle of Joe’s wine was standing where he had left it on the table. He was surprised to see it still over half full.Such a small quantity seemed too little to account for his pounding hangover and the dreams which finally chased him into sleep as dawn bled into the sky. The scent from the empty glass was faint but discernible, a sweetly medicinal scent, soothing. He poured a glassful.
    ‘Hair of the dog,’ he muttered.
    This morning it was only vaguely unpleasant, almost tasteless. A memory stirred at the back of his mind, but it was too distant to