‘I really like you, Lorimer, you know? I’d really like to get to know you better.’
She reached out and took his hand. Lorimer felt his spirits begin their slow slide.
‘Give us a kiss, then,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
‘Dymphna. I’m seeing someone else.’
‘So what? I just want a fuck.’
‘I’m… I’m in love with her. I can’t.
‘Lucky you.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘It’s hard, meeting someone you like. Then when you do, you find they’ve got someone else. Or they don’t fancy you.’
‘I do like you, Dymphna, you know that.’
‘Yes, we’re great “chums”, aren’t we.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Who is this damn girl, then? Do I know her?’
‘No. She’s an actress. Nothing to do with us, our world.’
‘Wise. What’s her name?’
‘Flavia. Listen, have you heard of a singer, a rock singer called David Watts?’
‘Flavia… What a horribly attractive name. Is she very la-di-da? David Watts? I love David Watts.’
114. REM Sleep. You have a lot of REM sleep, much more than the average person. Could this be because your brain is in need of more repair each night?
REM sleep. The brain wave patterns are on a far faster frequency, there is a higher heart beat and respiration, your blood pressure may rise and there is significantly more motility of the facial muscles. Your face may twitch, your eyeballs move behind your closed eyelids, there is increased blood flow to the brain, your brain becomes hotter. Sometimes in REM sleep your brain is firing more neurons than when you are awake.
But at the same time your body experiences a form of mild paralysis: your spinal reflexes decline, you have heightened motor inhibition and suppressed muscle tonus. Except in one area of your body. A further identifying characteristic of REM sleep is penile erection or clitoral engorgement.
The Book of Transfiguration
The steel crescents set in the toes and heels of his shoe soles clicked militaristically on the concrete floor of the multi-storey carpark, the white fluorescent bulbs leaching the primary colours from the rows of shiny cars, the noise of his shoes contributing to the mood of incipient threat which always appeared to brew amongst these stacked decks after dark, with their unnatural luminosity, their oppressively low ceilings, their bays crowded always with empty cars but unpopulated by their drivers or passengers. He was thinking about Hogg and his mood swings, his bully-boy provocations. Behind the bluffness and the banter he and Hogg had always got along and there was in their exchanges an implicit sense – often jocularly remarked on by his colleagues – that Lorimer was the golden boy, the chosen one, the dauphin to Hogg’s Sun King. But today that had not been the case: the huge confidence that allowed Hogg to swagger through his little fiefdom had been absent – or rather, it had been there, but forced and strained for, and therefore uglier. He had seemed, frankly, worried, and Lorimer had never before associated Hogg with that particular state of mind.
But what was troubling him? What could Hogg see coming down the pike that he couldn’t? There was a bigger picture here but Lorimer was not staring at the whole canvas. He was right, too: the news about Torquil’s sacking was an attempt at entrapment, a blatant one. Hogg was waiting to see whom he told, waiting to see, Lorimer realized, if he would tell Torquil himself. But why would Hogg think this of him, his golden boy? Why would Hogg test him in this way?
Lorimer’s steps slowed as the answer came to him. Hogg, troubled, unsettled, aware of these larger dimensions that Lorimer could not yet grasp, saw – or thought he saw – a role in them that was being played by Lorimer himself. Hogg, Lorimer realized with a genuine shock, was suspicious of him. He stood still now, some yards from his car, his brain working. What was it? What could Hogg see that he could not? Something was eluding him, some pattern in recent events… This uncertainty was alarming and it was even more alarming when he considered the natural consequences of suspicion: if Hogg was suspicious, then that implied only one thing – George Gerald Hogg no longer trusted Lorimer Black.
Someone had done something to the front of his car. Most curious. He saw as he drew near that letters had been made from sand, sand poured on to the bonnet and moulded into two-inch-high ridges to spell – BASTA.
He looked around him. Had the perpetrator been alerted