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  – Nick, are they alright? said Paolo seriously, bending down to investigate.

  – Yes! said Nick. Yes, the flasks are alright! Am I alright? No, I am fucking not! I have got mud all over me! There’s no fucking shower!

  – Nick! Paolo hissed.

  – I should never have listened to you and your stupid fucking scheme. Nick struggled to get back upright. You and your bloody phone call. You’ve ruined my Nikes! My girlfriend is going to fucking kill me…

  Nick paused a second, then resumed grumbling to himself, wiping his shoes angrily on the bracken.

  – Che cazzo! said Paolo, staring at him. What is wrong with me?! That’s what you went back for, isn’t it? That’s why you went back to the house! You fucking told Sonia where we went?!

  Nick looked up, opening his mouth and blinking a few times.

  – What?! he said eventually. Just… What the fuck is it to you, anyway? What the fuck’s it to you, even if I did?!

  – Oh, porcoddue! No! said Paolo, putting the bag and the case on the ground and sinking into a squat. Frocio di merda! What the fuck have you done?! My God!

  Nothing had changed about the cottage in the short time they’d been away. Paolo and Nick arrived on the grass outside the front door, silent as they’d been since the exchange about Sonia. Nick smoked, scraping mud off his feet. Paolo untied his hair and ran his hands through it a couple of times. In the living-room, Pete was snoring noisily.

  – Alright, said Paolo finally, his voice inexpressive. We might as well get this bloody thing set up, since we can. What did you see when we were upstairs? Could we get into the attic?

  Nick cleared his throat. He squashed the cigarette beneath his shoe.

  – Yeah, he muttered. There’s a trapdoor at the top of the stairs.

  – We’d better check it out, then, said Paolo.

  He kicked off his shoes and walked quietly towards the stairwell. Nick removed his trousers as well as his shoes – throwing them all in a heap against the door to the utility room – and crossing the kitchen in a pair of polka-dot boxer shorts, leaving a trail of footprints across the flagstones.

  Just outside the upstairs mouth of the stairwell there was a square hole in the white plaster ceiling, an ornate black picture frame surrounding it and a piece of chipboard blocking it off. The hole was little larger than a record sleeve. Paolo eyed it dubiously.

  – I’d never get through there, he said. You’re going to have to do it.

  He went through to the spare bedroom and collected a large, heavy naval trunk, standing it on one end. Then he removed the papers and candlesticks from the stool beside the bed – pouring them onto the bedspread – and stood it on top.

  Nick, in a slightly less dirty pair of jeans, scaled the construction carefully. Once he’d got on the stool he was able to push the chipboard to one side and poke his head through the hole.

  There was light – coming in beams through the cracks between the tiles, holes beneath the eaves and around the chimney – but it was a few seconds before Nick could see around the roofspace clearly. The space was prismatic – a smaller version of the attic in Kingston – that much was obvious. It had no insulation or floorboards, just widely spaced joists that the plasterboards below were tacked to. As his eyes adjusted, Nick became aware of three or four old planks in a square near the eaves which someone had presumably once used to help in repairing the roof. He also made out what seemed to be a number of large piles of leaves and twigs towards the far end, above the spare bedroom.

  – I think we can use it, said Nick with some conviction. There’s planks we can sit it on and, like, if I’m careful, nothing should get any light on it.

  – Alright, said Paolo. He was halfway down the stairs, keeping an eye on the door to the living-room, listening to the regular snores.

  – Well, come on, then! said Nick anxiously. You going to pass them me or what?

  He lifted his arms above him like a diver and managed to get his shoulders through the hole; then he gripped a joist on either side of him and slid his skinny frame into the roofspace. He reached immediately for the nearest of the planks – a knee on adjacent joists – pulling them towards him one by one and rearranging the square directly beneath the ridgepiece.

  – Okay, he said, peering down through the hole. Let’s have them then.

  Paolo got himself onto the trunk – less agilely than Nick had – and reached down for the metal case. He held it gingerly, fiddling with the angle till Nick could get a hold on it.

  They were halfway through repeating the procedure with the cool-box when Paolo realised suddenly that the snoring downstairs had stopped. There was a spate of coughing and the sound of footsteps moving between rooms. A chair was pulled back in the kitchen and the wheel of a Zippo rasped a couple of times.

  – Pete! Paolo hissed. Nick… Here!

  He thrust the sports bag up through the hole and lowered himself to the floor as quickly as he could. Already tobacco smoke was drifting from the stairwell.

  Nick’s face appeared in the frame on the ceiling. Paolo pointed downstairs, opening his eyes very wide, then at the trunk, then at the spare bedroom. Then he mimed Nick recovering the hole with the chipboard, and himself – two fingers for legs – walking downstairs, sitting down on a chair and smoking a joint – the same two fingers pressed to his lips.

  Nick shifted his balance on the joists, inspected the distance to the floor and nodded reluctantly.

  With the chipboard back in its place, the roofspace was now even darker. Nick crouched silently where he was for a moment, listening to the voices downstairs and the sound of the breeze in the leaves all around him.

  – Alright, Pete? Sleep well?

  – Er… not bad. A pause while he smoked. You’re looking wired, Paolo. What’s up?

  – Oh, nothing. I’m, er… It’s just nice here, in the countryside. You know?

  Nick unzipped the sports bag, taking out a cubic battery and connecting it to the wires at the back of the cool-box. Almost imperceptibly it began to hum to itself and Nick moved it out of the way, sitting it with the battery on a joint between two joists. He then pulled out the frame of the lightproof tent – a spindly four-legged structure – which he erected on the square of planks and covered with its coating before pulling on the gloves and climbing inside with the case and the open sports bag.

  As Nick worked his mind drifted over many things: Sonia in the morning, smiling as he put his arms round her but not yet able to open her eyes. Her hair, sandy and chaotic across the pillows. The snuffling laughing noise she made when he kissed her neck. It was only now that he was really starting to realise how much he missed her. How could he not have told her where he was going, for Christ’s sake?

  – Let’s get outside, Paolo was suggesting, his voice rising and falling with enthusiasm. Check out the stream. There’s some weed in Nick’s… Infatti, I think I’ve got some skunk. It’s such a nice day. It’d be a shame to waste it, huh?

  Nick turned on the torch with the red bulb, hanging it from the frame above him and wiping down the boards with a rag. He only had details left to attend to – the last stages of purification – it was the main reason that he hadn’t got round to sorting everything out while Paolo was away. He’d already made over two and a half flasks of d-LSD tartrate: nine hundred thousand trips’ worth. They were in the cool-box, in solution, and frankly he was starting to get a bit fed up with kneeling in darkened attics, running through column chromatographies.

  It had been quite good fun to start with. They’d faked the signature of one of the technicians in the Chemistry department and ordered the case, the chemicals and several boxes of ergotamine tartrate migraine tablets through the usual channels of the university. Amazingly, no-one seemed to have noticed. They’d started work in the laboratory about a week after everything was delivered, extracting d-lysergic acid from the migraine tablets and converting it into lysergic acid diethylamide.

  The problem had been purification. I
n truth they hadn’t really thought that they’d get that far without messing everything up, but then Paolo had arranged the deal with Steve and – once they looked into it – the procedures had turned out to be far simpler than most of the ones they were supposed to be doing anyway, for the course. Except the purification took time – undisturbed hours with restricted light – and ultimately the attic was a far safer place to do it.

  Two hundred grand, though! For a million trips that they didn’t even have to fix to paper. Two hundred fucking grand! Eighty grand for him!

  Nick flicked on the UV light a moment, checking the progress of the fluorescent lines in the chromatography column, following the fastest: the LSD line. He thought about tipping up at his dad’s with eighty grand, casual-looking. Alright, dad? Yeah, not bad. What’s in the briefcase? Eight fucking thousand tenners, that’s what! Nick grinned to himself in the darkness. Less the balding smart-arse college-boy then, eh?

  q: what makes a gander meander in search of a goose?

  – You see, it’s an amazing coincidence, Belle was explaining, pinned to Angus’s left arm. Quite extraordinary. Like synchronicity, you know? I decided about the charity thing, and the very next day I found out that my great-aunt was a director at Oxfam!

  They were crossing the common beneath the nose of Hay Bluff, the ground almost brown with Liberty Caps: waves, pools and circles of them, two inches high and fiendishly hallucinogenic. Tim was stumbling around like a toddler a hundred yards behind them, dropping suddenly to his knees, picking with both hands and gibbering unintelligibly.

  Even without Belle there, the scale was bewildering enough in itself. The Malverns were a crest a county away. The Beacons were notches in the sky above Powys. Llandefalle – Angus’s normal benchmark of height and distance – was just one among dozens of little hills.

  – Wow! he said feebly, trying to smile.

  Belle’s wide, wondering eyes locked onto his. Her face was radiant, faultless as ever. Angus found it impossible to look anywhere else.

  – So she could give me all the advice I needed, then I could get some funding, which should be quite easy because I think Daddy knows some people who would help… Then I could run a charity! Wouldn’t that be the greatest!

  Angus was aware of Fay, her hair loose and shoulders bare, heading away towards the mountains; of Tim, shouting Ang! behind him. But he only seemed able to move as he was guided, automaton-like: thoughts and anguishes swarming irrelevantly around inside him.

  To their right, the hill fell down through dingles, woods and slope-small fields towards the Wye valley. To their left, the twin faces of the Black Mountains receded twelve and fifteen miles from the Bluff, scarred by streams which cut across the common land, radiating outwards in their own tiny valleys. It was one of these, so far as he could tell, that Belle was aiming them for.

  She wound her arm round the tangle of his left and her right arms, letting her head fall sideways onto his shoulder, lips parted, possibly in invitation.

  – Well, she resumed, having nuzzled him a moment. So long as we remain in constant communion with God, everything’ll be okay, huh?

  She withdrew her head and looked up at him for confirmation.

  – Er, said Angus. Belle, you haven’t become a Christian, have you?

  – Oh no! said Belle, tightening her arms and giggling. I just meant the Divine Source!

  – Then who have you been talking to?

  – Here in the countryside, she continued, It feels so much closer. I really must move to the countryside. Mmm! Somewhere with a lake! And perhaps an avenue… I can hardly keep going back to Clapham forever, can I?

  The side of one of the tiny valleys was dropping away beneath them: grass-sided, ten or so feet deep with a small, fat, muddy stream at the bottom. Belle talked a moment more about dovecots and rose-girded archways, and they continued down the slope in silence: Belle with her curves, her eyeliner and her long blonde hair; Angus with his short-sleeved shirt open halfway down his chest, his eyes blue and intent-looking.

  – You know the last time we did this? she said. In Norfolk? Jumping those channels. Remember? Come on! We jump at the same time!

  Angus stumbled as he landed on the other side, his legs weak like an invalid’s. Belle kissed him suddenly, her tongue snaking between his lips. She bounded a few more feet up the bank then span back round to face him, the sun blinding, directly above her head so he had to cover his eyes.

  – Angus! she said reginally. Make love to me! Come on! You know you have to. Here, on the ground!

  She was probably smiling feverishly, munching on the sensation of munching; but all Angus could see were after-images – a storm of shapeless lights.

  – Belle, he managed. Belle, you’re off your face…

  – Ah! she said gleefully. But I’m on the pill! Come on, let’s just do it! No-one will see.

  She took hold of his right hand and, lifting the left-hand side of her croptop, placed his hand on her breast, closing his fingers around her nipple and groaning with pleasure. Weakness flooded his stomach. Faint through the lights, she was reaching for his jeans.

  He stumbled backwards, his feet slipping on the bank.

  – Angus?! she said. What… What the hell are you doing?!

  – What am I doing? said Angus, finding a voice from somewhere. What am I doing?! Belle, how the fuck can you ask me that? Once upon a time, you… You didn’t even dump me. You just began shagging Rob whenever I went out of the house. There was an incident involving you tied down to our bed, with your arse in the air and Rob – how shall I put this? – where the sun does not shine… I walked in on you, if you recall?

  Belle looked startled. There was a lot of white in her eyes. Slowly she covered her bare breast with her right hand.

  – Perhaps you don’t, he said. Who knows? But you’ve just turned up, unannounced, three months after this sordid incident and under the impression that we’re back in the glory days… Belle, just because no-one else knows about what happened doesn’t mean to say that it didn’t! It did! I swear to you, it very, very much did! Belle?

  Belle said nothing. Her eyes had turned to her feet. Angus waited a moment.

  – I loved you, he said. Really, Belle, I did. More than I can possibly describe. You were… You made me whole. You know? You made me feel complete. I would have forgiven you. I’d have appreciated it so much if you’d just apologised or something. Or just, you know, given me some little intimation that I existed in your eyes. Because I didn’t have anything else… Do you know that?

  Belle was standing now as she had been, on a slight hummock in the miniature hillside. She lifted her eyes hesitantly – wounded – blinking a little.

  – I know about this, she said eventually. She faltered and pulled a cigarette packet from her bag, lighting one and filling her lungs a couple of times. I know about this. I know what you’re doing. You’re manipulating me through guilt!

  – Belle, said Angus sadly. If you feel guilty, you know it’s not my fault.

  – Well then, she said, sliding the cloth perfunctorily back over her breast. If I’ve come all the way out here just to be insulted, I’ll… go and talk to someone else!

  Angus leapt from stone to stone across the stream splitting the Bluff from the Twmpa. The ground on the other side twisted sharply to the right. It was steeper, confused by bracken and gorse bushes, striated with sheep paths and a lane some way downhill.

  He felt, he supposed, as you would after several particularly violent months at sea. The ground was trapped in a moment of tipping; so the glacial wave of the mountains didn’t seem frozen but perpetually breaking on top of him. There were buzzards, circling on the updraught, a kite above Rhos Dirion, crows in the trees around the lane. He didn’t feel like enough carrion to go round.

  After ten or fifteen minutes’ scrambling, he came to a bare patch of grass where he sank into a crouch, closing his eyes, waiting to start vomiting.

  The after-images were still there inside
his eyelids – shard-like lights and pieces of silhouette – fainter now, of course, but charged all the same with a sense of juncture. In the queasy darkness, his eyes began to follow them, radiating out from a central point and vanishing, surprising him when he realised like REM can when you’re drifting uneasily into sleep. Then it struck him – suddenly – that the burning had gone.

  There was nothing but a pinprick of whiteness.

  His eyes blinked open. About fifty yards in front of him, a red Nissan hatchback was moving tentatively towards the ford of the stream he’d crossed earlier. Lining the lane’s lower verge was a ramshackle wall with a scrawny hawthorn hedge poking above it. The hedge, it seemed, had been unmaintained for years. Like miniature Burnham Woods all four of the field’s hedges were advancing across the grass, their vanguards the tattered remnants of nettles and jack-by-the-hedge.

  Beyond the lowest of these boundaries the ground dropped quickly. Angus could see nothing else before the foothills: the heavy green pine plantations, the fiery browns of oak woodland, a valley cut by the stream that forded the lane, continuing on its obdurate way towards the Wye.

  Sitting on a carrier bag with the rangy red bracken all round him, Angus was clueless what to do next. There were tears on his cheeks – he could feel them – sticking and drying on his erratic stubble; but he didn’t really feel sad, or numb, or even empty.

  They were still some way back up the hill behind him when Angus first heard the squelching of feet. They came only in moments – the spaces between bird calls or gusts in the bracken – but then they were slithering closer and louder. He wiped his eyes hurriedly on his shirt.

  – Alright, Ang? Tim droned, arriving in the clearing. He sat on the ground beside him, discovered it was wet, frowned and stood back up again.

  – Alright, said Angus.