One

Becky's hands on his shoulders. He thumbed off the bicycle mask and the goggles and stood blinking in the candlelit room. She gave him a little half-smile; she knew she'd won. She slipped a hand into his. 'Come on,' she said.

They took the steps up through the oak-panelled stairwell and pushed through a door into an area filled with old bookcases. Some had collapsed against each other and had not been righted. Magazine racks were loaded with newspapers and glossies bloated and dulled by time and water that had coursed down the walls from a crack in the roof. Ranks of PCs with shattered screens sat on tables cluttered with cups and mugs and soup bowls.

A circular window in the dome of the library was filling with shade. Candlelight flickered from the far end of the room. They bypassed the loans desk and headed for the light. Sleeping bags were wadded into the gaps between the bookcases. There was a silence of deep sleep, the kind of sleep that punched people unconscious as soon as their head hit the pillow, the result of little food and much exertion.

There were two empty sleeping bags in the corner. Becky's bag and coat marked her territory. She undressed quickly and slipped into her bag, pulling the corner up over her body, but not before he saw the rippled sandbar of her ribs, the deep shadow of her stomach. She patted the space next to her. Jane smiled. He looked out at the Marylebone Road as it sought the heart of the city. Figures drifted across it or along it. A fog was rising, or the clouds were sinking. Everything grey. Somebody screamed, far away, and he almost didn't register it. You got to a point where you didn't hear the tragedies unfolding around you. Wasn't it always this way?

Becky unhooked her bra and he touched her breasts haltingly, as if the lambent light around them was being manufactured from within. They made love quietly, although Jane doubted whether anybody would have been roused had they given their fucking full volume. Jane withdrew at the moment of his climax and she held his penis as he came on her stomach. He didn't look. She wiped herself clean and fell asleep almost immediately, her head on his chest, the smell of their sex rising from the sleeping bags whenever she moved. Bitter thoughts of Cherry. A shameful wish that she might walk in on them like this.

He raised himself up slightly and balled a coat and put it under his neck. He pulled a dead mobile phone from his pocket and dialled the number.

'Hi, Stan,' he said. 'What you doing?'

'Colouring in. I done a Batman but it got boring because he's only blue and grey.'

'What did you have for dinner?'

'Pasta. And parmigiano.'

Jane laughed. He'd taught Stanley to say 'parmigiano' at a very early age, with a cartoon Italian accent, and it always tickled him when he said it.

'You had a bath? Brushed your teeth?'

'Roger, roger.'

'Sleep tight, then. See you soon.'

'Night, Dad.'

Jane was about to press the end-call button when a sharp bill shot out of the casing in an explosion of brushed steel and embedded itself in his cheek. He smelled the cloaca of the bird, and the carrion of what it had last dined upon. But he was so tired, so exhausted, that the nightmare could not impinge. He slept, looking down on himself, disinterested, as the bill stripped away the flesh of his face to reveal a thin white bowl filled with dust.

18. RAGCHEW

In the early morning the tiger broke down the library door and killed two men who tried to stop it from cantering up the stairs. Jane saw it happen. He'd been coming down to use the toilet and to check that Aidan had made it back from the river. The tiger swung its great spoiling head his way as Jane pushed his own scent down the stairs before him. There was a frozen moment, almost as if the air pressure they each produced had caused them to be still as it collided. Jane backed off; the tiger approached. Blood from the broken men in the foyer had created large fans across the floor. It appeared solid; you might lift up an edge and it would all follow, like a confection set to dry on baking parchment.