some of Rory’s diaries, gritting my teeth at the impenetrable paucity of their desiccated information. I turned on the Compaq and looked at the letter I’d written that morning. Damn; found a spelling mistake that had got through the spell-checker; ‘saw’ where I’d meant to type ‘was’.
I started drinking whisky after dinner, sitting at the desk in the study at first, craning over its leather surface, sifting through the various papers and diaries, my eyes getting sore. I nearly spilled my whisky into the Compaq at one point, so I turned off the little green-shaded light on the desk and went over to the couch, taking all the bits and pieces with me. I switched on the standard lamp behind me and lay lengthwise on the couch, surrounded by paper. I had the TV on with the sound turned down most of the time, using the remote to turn it up whenever it looked like there was something interesting coming in from the Gulf. I heard James go to bed about eleven-thirty. Mum looked in to say good-night about twelve. I waved, wished her pleasant dreams and kept on reading.
I woke up just after two with the whisky glass balanced on my chest and my eyes feeling gritty. I finished the whisky even though I didn’t really feel like it, then went to bed. I drank some water before I fell asleep.
The clock said 4:14 when I woke up, my bladder just at that point where it might or might not be possible to fall asleep again without having to go for a pee (it didn’t usually wake me with so poor an excuse). I lay there for a bit, listening to soft rain hitting the bedroom window. Maybe that was what had woken me. I turned over to go to sleep again, then suddenly started to wonder if I’d turned the computer off. I had the feeling that I had, but I couldn’t actually remember doing so. Fuck it, I thought; it would be safe enough. I rolled over onto my other side.
But my bladder had woken up properly in the meantime and was demanding attention. I sighed, swung out of bed, not bothering with my dressing gown even though the house had grown a little chilly by now. There was an orange night-light plug in a socket in the corridor; I decided to save my eyes from the shock of putting on any more powerful illumination and navigated the anyway familiar route to the bathroom by the plug’s pale orange glow.
I sat in the darkness, peeing. A sort of quarter-erection had made it advisable to sit down. I smiled, remembering Lewis’s spiel about trying to pee when you had a full bladder and a full erection at the same time. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands and drank some water from the tap. Mum must have been varnishing some part of the harpsichord earlier, judging by the smell in the corridor. I padded along to the study.
I could just make out the dim shape of the desk and computer on the far side of the room when I opened the study door. I couldn’t hear the Compaq’s fan running, or see a light on, but I went over to it anyway. I stood with my thighs against the wood and leather back of the desk’s chair, and leant forward, pressing the computer’s disk eject button in case I had switched it off but had left a disk in it. No disk. I yawned, straightened, and rubbed the inside of my right fore-arm where it had brushed against the glass shade of the little desk light. The shade had been hot.
There was a little red dot glowing on the dark screen of the computer monitor; must be the reflection of the TV on the other side of the room. Ha; so I had left it —
I froze, suddenly wide awake.
Why was the light shade hot?
The little red light reflected on the screen winked out, as though suddenly obscured.
I threw myself back from the desk, just starting to sense movement behind me; I fell backwards as something dark scythed past in front of my face and a noise like the wind terminated in a splintering crash. Somebody - just a silhouette in the dim vague shadows of the room, lit only by the feeble light spilling from the hall night-light - stumbled forward, just behind where I had stood, arms reaching in front of them, pulling something long and