the plain and whether they deserved what they got. There 's a lot of good stuff going on now.'
Adam's eyes held his. 'Be careful you don't burn. You can change your ways.'
'Are you two all right?' Rob was standing in the doorway. 'Would you like some tea?'
'Ad?' Adam didn't respond. 'Well, I'd like some anyway. Thanks,' said Gabriel.
When Rob came back with two cups, Gabriel said, 'So how's he been?'
'Pretty good,' said Rob. 'Dr Leftrook's still trying to get the balance absolutely right with the medication. It's a delicate thing.'
'Yes, I know,' said Gabriel. 'She explained to me once.'
'You can control the delusions, but at a price. How does he seem to you?'
'Well ... I don't know. How you feeling, Ad?'
Adam lit another cigarette. 'It's better to shed blood than not to believe,' he said. 'You have your chances to believe. You make the choice. And if you choose not to ...'
Adam's fingers made a gesture of rising flames.
In Holland Park, Finbar Veals was having another evening on his own. His father was at a business dinner and his mother had gone out to a Japanese restaurant with the members of her book group - not for a discussion, she said, just for some sushi.
Finn stood up unsteadily from the floor. The skunk had not had the usual effect. There was a cold sweat on his forehead and a dryer than usual taste in his mouth. The joy of weed was the feeling of time dislocation that spread from the belly; the sense of the body being too heavy to register the speeding beauty of thought; the failure of words to express the depth of music, when the jaw grew too weighty to move.
What he felt was none of those things. It was more like a severance. He had moved into the alternative reality the drug provided, but had somehow become detached from the original world. So there was no joyous, comic interplay between the two ways of being - just a sense of separation.
He was shaking a little and he knew his face would be ultra-pale. He was undoubtedly doing what his best friend Ken called 'throwing a whitey'.
'Shit,' he said, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where he struggled with the security locks on the French doors. Eventually he made it out into the garden for some air. Teenage wisdom didn't go so far as to recommend any cure for a 'whitey' apart from just waiting for it to pass. There was nasty sweat on his forehead and in his palms, which the cold night air did nothing to dry.
He breathed in deeply as he walked up and down the lawn, glancing up at the big expensive houses all about him. He felt an odd sense of envy for their inhabitants - people he'd previously pitied. They were in their boring rooms, watching television or washing up after dinner, reading books or entertaining neighbours with their mind-numbing chat about schools and business and dreary people that they knew in common. But at least they were attached to the physical world.
To Finn, the piled brick courses of his parents' PS10 million house looked of doubtful solidity. When he glanced up, he saw the giant idle cranes on the Shepherd's Bush skyline where they were building a monument to greed and possession - Europe's biggest shopping centre, slap in the middle of the shop-lined streets of the world's most well-provided consumer city - and he saw above them an airliner dipping down through the clouds, wing lights flashing, as it descended towards Heathrow.
He felt a clutch of panic in his abdomen. He imagined himself in the tight little tube of the plane's fuselage, strapped in, going down to hit the ground. He tilted his head back quickly to find a bigger view, but found that the sudden movement made him feel sick, with blood raging up behind his eyes. He sat down on a stone step that led up to his mother's small rose garden. He put his head between his hands and squeezed his eyes shut. It was no good. There were too many images of light and furious colour. He was better with his eyes open. He leaned against the trunk of a pleached hornbeam that separated the two parts of the garden and trained his gaze up towards the restful infinity of space.
Something about the light pollution gave a colour-flattening grey to the lower sky, but made the upper reaches seem not infinite but obviously domed. His