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  'What happened? Where did you go?'

  He waved a hand. His fingernails were dirty.

  'We went to the pub. And then back to Bob's. It all got a bit out of control. He had some drugs. Some cocaine. We were up all night.'

  'It looks like it.'

  She went to the kitchen: brisk and businesslike.

  'Have you eaten?'

  'Yes.'

  'Eaten what?'

  'I went to a cafe.'

  Are you hungry now?'

  'No.'

  'Right.'

  She slammed the fridge door.

  'Holly, I'm sorry.'

  'There's no need.'

  'I've got this problem.'

  She hesitated.

  'With cocaine. I'm not an addict or anything. But I've got a problem with it.'

  'What sort of problem?'

  'Saying no. Knowing when to stop. How to stop.'

  'You never even mentioned drugs to me.'

  'Because I stay away from them. I just -- y'know. I was drunk. And my judgement was off. Believe me, I'm paying for it now.'

  She looked at him with something like pity. A knot of hope rose in him. Pity was good. He could start at pity and work up.

  She said, 'I tried it a couple of times. Cocaine. I didn't like it much.

  It made my heart all biddy boom.'

  He said, 'You're a dark horse.'

  'Well. There's a lot about me you don't know.'

  'I don't doubt it.'

  'Good.'

  He lay cold in the dark with his wife asleep beside him. When he cuddled up to her she made a sleepy noise and rolled away.

  At some point, he must have slept because he woke in the dark.

  Holly was raising herself above him. Her hair tickled his face. Her nipples brushed his chest. She was shaking his shoulder.

  'Are you all right?'

  'Why?'

  'You were talking in your sleep.'

  A fluorescence of terror.

  'What did I say?'

  'I don't know. You were mumbling.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'I'm worried, that's all.'

  'I'm fine.'

  'Is it the drugs?'

  'Probably.'

  'Don't touch them again.'

  'No chance.'

  'Your feet are freezing.'

  'I know. It's cold in here.'

  'It's boiling. It's like somebody turned up the thermostat.'

  He'd forgotten about that.

  'Anyway,' she said. 'Get some sleep.'

  "I'm sorry.

  'Don't be silly.' She turned over. She reached behind her and cupped his flaccid cock and balls in her hand. She gave them a friendly, gentle squeeze, and fell back to sleep.

  She phoned her parents and told them Nathan was too fragile for Sunday lunch. So they stayed home and Nathan had a long, very hot bath. With each tick of the clock, it got further behind him. Time - a few more days, weeks, years - would push it inside him like a prolapse.

  On Sunday night, as he showered and shaved and cleaned his teeth and laid out tomorrow's work clothes on the bed, he felt something like confidence, almost pleasure. It had been bad. It was still bad. But eventually it would go away.

  Sometimes he believed this for minutes at a time. Then he remembered what lay bundled up in the freezer, in Bob's garage, and the chill crept back into him.

  Monday morning, he went to work.

  Everything was the same: there was reception and there were Fiona and Maude, the receptionists. Here were the pot plants on either side of the lift doors, and here was the same lateral scratch across the door, like a key-vandalized car. And here was the first floor. Take the first turning on the left for the sales department. And here was the same open-plan office with the same furniture and the same computers, smudged with inky fingerprints. Here were the same novelty gonks and teddy bears and amusing mugs and family photographs, and here were the same staff, and here was the same glass-fronted office with the same laptop computer, and here were the same problems, the same cock-ups and blunders and lost orders and pissed-off reps, the same staff complaints and affairs and annual appraisals, the same marketing meetings and board meetings and finance meetings, and here was the same Justin, the same mendacious, pitiful Justin with his too-short trousers and his six-pint lunches and his little breath mints, and this was the calm place the dread had dumped him -- this was the place that did not change, and as long as he was here, he was safe.

  Two weeks later, Bob called.

  29

  'Hello,' said Bob.

  'Hold on,' said Nathan, cupping the mouthpiece. He leaned over and, with the tips of his fingers, closed the office door.

  'How are you? How's the research coming?'

  'Not good.'

  'You or the research?'

  'Both. We've hit a snag.'

  'What snag?'

  'I can't talk. Can you get over here?'

  'As soon as I can.'

  He put the phone in its cradle and consulted his diary. He had a meeting at 2.30. He told Angela he was stepping out for an early lunch -- it was 11.30 -- and he grabbed his coat and made straight for the door. Outside, the taxis weren't biting. He stood for a long time on the corner, hailing cabs that were already occupied. His tie flapped at his shoulder like a flag.

  Eventually, a taxi stopped for him. But they hit every red light on the way. It took forty-five minutes.

  Bob came to the door scrub-bearded and hollow eyed. Over his jeans and T-shirt, he wore a tatty, dirty pink chenille bathrobe; it looked like a woman's. He smelled bad, like milk left too long on a July windowsill.

  Nathan

  followed him downstairs. The bedsitting room was yet more shambolic. Improvised ashtrays had been placed on the tables, the bookshelves, the kitchenette, the windowsill, the arms of all three sofas, alongside the computers, the reel-to-reel tape machine. All of them were overflowing.

  Nathan said, 'What's wrong?'

  Bob lit a cigarette. His hand was shaking.

  'I want you to sit down and listen to something.'

  Nathan hitched his trousers and sat.

  Bob walked to the reel-to-reel. He manually rewound it several inches, saying: 'Now, this is going to be loud. Okay? I'll explain why in a minute.'

  'What is it?'

  'Just listen.'

  Bob pressed Play.

  He'd hooked the reel-to-reel through to a pair of floor-mounted loudspeakers. From them emanated a painful blast of white noise, like the static on an untuned television turned up to maximum volume. Nathan looked at him in baffled discomfort.

  Bob pressed Stop.

  The silence was sudden and total.

  Nathan shifted in his seat. 'What am I supposed to be listening to?'

  'You might have to listen a few times. It does that.'

  'Listen a few times to what?'

  Again, Bob was manually rewinding the machine, saying: 'Try to listen through the background noise.'

  Bob pressed Play again.

  The same abrasive static.

  Then, mumbled and indistinct, something like a voice. It was murmured, and very quick. When it was gone, Nathan doubted that he'd even heard it.

  Bob stopped the tape.

  'You heard it.'

  'Heard what?'

  Bob played the tape again.

  On a third listen, there was something behind the white noise, like someone murmuring through a hotel wall.

  'Okay,' said Nathan, in the ringing silence that followed. 'What is it? Someone speaking?'

  'I don't know about someone speaking. But it's a voice.'

  Nathan's palms were wet.

  'Whose voice?'

  'Elise's.'

  Nathan laughed. His mouth was numb.

  'And what do you think she's saying?'

  Bob swallowed.

  'I believe she's saying "I'm alive".'

  There was a long silence between them.

  Nathan said, 'You're mad.'

  It
's called EVP,' said Bob. 'Electronic voice phenomena. I've been researching it for years. You run a tape in an empty room. You make sure it's isolated from stray radio broadcasts, yada yada yada, you ask it a question. You go away. You come back, you've got voices on the tape.'

  'Whose voice?'

  'The dead.'

  'Who else?' said Nathan, and began to giggle. He said, 'Jesus Christ, Bob.'

  Bob waited until the laughter had passed.

  'Play it again,' said Nathan.

  Bob played it again.

  This time, Nathan heard a clear pattern beneath the shifting, oceanic hiss.

  It was the sound of a human voice. It was a woman.

  She was saying, 'I'm alive.'

  Or perhaps it was 'line five'.

  Nathan shouted over the noise, 'It's off the radio or something. It's one of your neighbours. It's somebody walking past the house.'

  Bob pressed Stop.

  'I have eliminated those possibilities.'

  'How?'

  'Trust me. I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this for twenty years now.'

  'And what? This is the first voice you've heard?'

  Bob reached under the table and drew out an old blue suitcase, worn white at the corners. He opened it. It was filled with reel-to-reel tapes.

  'There are voices on each one of these, sometimes dozens of them.

  I've also got several hours archived on the hard drives of these computers.

  They talk all kinds of shit - just like the Ouija board. That's what makes it so fascinating. They sound confused, disconnected.

  Maybe not even conscious. So no, Nathan, this is not my first voice.

  But it is the first voice I ever recognized.'

  Nathan felt something rise inside him. He said, 'You can't have recognized it. You only knew her for one night, and that was years ago. Ten years! And you'd been drinking. And taking cocaine.'

  'Listen again.'

  Nathan didn't want to hear it. But he didn't want to admit that. So he sat through it, once more.

  I'm alive

  'There's more,' said Bob. 'Wait.'

  He fast-forwarded the same tape. Nathan had learned how to filter the static by now, or perhaps to impose order on it. This time, quite distinctly, but as if at a great distance, he heard a woman's voice shouting: Bob! I'm here!

  Nathan stood up.

  'Fucking turn it off.'

  Bob hit the Stop button.

  'There's more.'

  'I'm not joking. Fucking turn it off 'Don't you want to hear what she says?'

  'She's not saying anything. It's, I don't know what it is. But one thing I know it's not, it's not Elise. All right. Jesus. Get a fucking grip.'

  Quietly, Bob said, 'I think you should calm down.'

  Nathan's legs were shaking. 'If you put your finger back on that fucking button, I swear to God I'll break it. I fucking promise you, Bob. Don't touch that thing again.'

  Bob sighed. He slumped in the office chair.

  'Usually there's more than one voice. Sometimes there's three or four. Sometimes half a dozen. Sometimes, there's twenty of them.

  Twenty distinct voices. They're temperamental and sarcastic.

  Sometimes they manifest at different speeds. Sometimes they talk gibberish. But on this tape, this entire tape, there is only one voice.'

  'Shut up,' said Nathan.

  'What are we going to do?'

  'I'm not joking. Shut the fuck up.'

  Bob pressed Play. Nathan heard it plainly. A young woman, clear and crisp behind the hiss, like someone shouting from the edge of the sea.

  Bob! I'm here!

  Nathan waited until he had some control over his voice and said, 'Bob, if you don't get a grip on yourself, this is all going to fall apart.

  All right?'

  'Don't kid yourself

  'Kid myself what?'

  'That it's not her.'

  'Fuck you.'

  Nathan was running before he reached the bedsit door. He sprinted up the stairs and ran on to the street. And he was panting and wheezing and had a stitch in his side when finally, a long way away, a taxi finally stopped to pick him up, and take him back to work.

  He sat through the meeting without making a contribution. When the meeting was over, Justin automatically invited Nathan to an afternoon meeting in the Cricketer's Arms.

  Nathan said yes.

  They sat in the pub. It was almost empty. A scrawny, prematurely wizened barman with baby-soft hair served them drinks at the table, Justin being a precious slow-time regular. Nathan ordered a double whisky with his lager. When the drinks arrived, he downed the whisky and ordered a second.

  Justin laid a hand on his shoulder.

  'What's wrong?'

  Nathan sipped lager. 'What's the worst thing you've ever done?'

  Justin pretended to think. 'I was best man once, for an old school friend. I shagged the bride the night before the wedding.'

  'That's pretty bad,' said Nathan, not believing him.

  'And I shagged her on the morning of it. She was wearing her bridal underwear, and her dress was all laid out on the bed. The full wedding cake. One of the white ones.'

  'Did you get caught?'

  'No. You don't want to worry about that. I had the bride's mother the same day, just after the speeches. I didn't really fancy her. It was for the thrill, you know?'

  Nathan took a long draught of his beer.

  'So, it's possible to do something you regret, and get away with it.' 'If you do it with enough style, nobody will ever know.'

  Nathan stared at him with sadness where the incredulity should be. He happened to know that Justin had been impotent for many years. He knew because Justin's wife had used his impotence as a pretext to attempt the seduction of several members of staff-and once, Nathan himself. Two or three of them had obliged her in the back of company Mondeos or in wine-bar toilets. Nathan hadn't.

  Justin never got away with anything. He just thought he did. And yet, here he was. Still here, long after he should be gone.

  'So,' said Nathan. 'What's your secret?'

  'Never sleep with anybody who has less to lose than you do.'

  Nathan pondered the wisdom of this, then drained his pint and raised his hand to order another.

  Justin said, 'So who is she?'

  'Who's who?'

  'Your guilty secret.'

  'Nobody.'

  'You can tell me. You know how good I am at keeping secrets.'

  Nathan knew exactly that.

  'It's nothing like that.'

  'It's always something like that. You wouldn't be human otherwise.'

  They

  stayed in the pub for hours. Justin seemed to think of it as a special occasion and, after the fourth pint, he ordered a bottle of champagne.

  He spent a long time talking about office politics. And he kept asking who she was. Nathan maintained that she was nobody.

  When Nathan got home, he was drunk. Holly was watching television in bed. She watched from the corner of her eye as he fell over, trying to get out of his trousers. When he leaned over the bed to kiss her, she turned her face away. She got up to visit the bathroom, and when she came back she was wearing a nightdress.

  He woke, as he always did when he'd been drinking, in the early hours of the morning, badly needing to piss. But he lay curled on his side, the duvet clutched over his head, trying to sleep.

  In the morning, he said, 'I'm sorry.'

  She said 'Fine, whatever,' and stomped downstairs. Halfway down, she paused, saying: 'You could've called.'

  'I know. I'm sorry.'

  'I don't care what you do. I just want to know that you're okay. I just want to hear your voice.'

  Nathan sat on the bed. Yesterday's clothes, reeking of smoke and beer, lay in a pile beside it. He wanted to burn them.

  30

  In Nathan's pigeonhole that morning was a tatty buff envelope.

  Because PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL had been scrawled a
cross it in red ink, Angela hadn't opened it for him - she'd placed it on top of his other post, internal and external.

  Sometimes, people were offended by one of Hermes' cartoonish and lewd greetings cards. The complaints often came in envelopes like this.

  He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter inside.

  DearN

  Naturally I understand your reaction.

  Here are some transcripts of further conversations. At all times, only a single voice (1) appears on the tape. I should reiterate how unusual that is.

  Tape 1, Monday, 12 am

  Duration: 17 minutes

  Bob, I'm here

  you bastard (Jew bastard?)

  cold here

  Tape 1, Monday, 3.40 pm

  Duration: 9 minutes

  didn't get there

  Bob!

  Tape 1, Tuesday, 7 pm

  ft Duration: 3 minutes

  my eyes

  my teeth

  Tape 1, Tuesday 11.30 pm

  Duration: 1 minute

  oh god

  horrible

  : The office door opened. Nathan jumped.

  It was Justin. He leaned, cross-armed, in the doorway -- working ,, at being rakish and hungover. 'Christ. You look awful.'

  Nathan crushed Bob's letter in his fist. 'Cheers.'

  'Can't take the pace?' He walked in, closing the door behind him.

  His perfumy bulk took up much of Nathan's little office and the smell -- stale booze and tiny breath mints and too much Issey Miyake - was intimate and revolting, like busy airport toilets. Nathan breathed through his mouth.

  Justin said: 'Just like old times.'

  'Yep.'

  'Before she tied you down.'

  'She didn't tie me down.'

  'Anyway. We should do it again.'

  'Yeah.'

  Justin said, 'Cool,' and left the office without bothering to close the door. Nathan leaned over to close it, then called Bob from his desk phone.

  'Bob. It's me --'

  'Did you get it?'

  'Yes, I got it. What the fuck did you think you were doing?'

  'Did you read it?'

  'No,' said Nathan, and glanced through the office window. The new graduate trainee stood, infinitely bored, at the photocopier.