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By Root 522 0

his wrists, straining hard against the leather bands. Something was tickling his heart with thick strong fingers. He was grappling with unconsciousness in dark water. He was dying alone. “All right,” one of them said as his body slackened, “he’s ready.” Denton opened his eyes for the last time. The leader was staring closely at his face. Denton had no strength; he frowned sadly. The leader understood almost at once, smiling like the father of a nervous child. “Oh yes,” he said. “About now Denton always likes a hand.” Denton heard the second switch click and he felt a long rope being tugged out through his mouth.

The leader held his hand firmly as life poured away, and Denton’s death began.

Suddenly Denton realized that there would be three of them, that they would come after dark, that their leader would have his own key, and that they would be calm and deliberate, confident that they had all the time they needed to do what had to be done. At first, he took a lively, even rather self-important interest in the question of who had hired the men and their machine. Within a few days, however, the question of who had hired them abruptly ceased to concern Denton. He sat all day in his empty living room, thinking about his childhood. Later still, his mind gave itself up entirely to the coming of the men and their machine, and his childhood vanished along with all the other bits of his life. At night, exultant and wounding dreams thrilled and tormented him. When would they come? What would his death be like? Late that night Denton opened his eyes and they were there, “Yes,” said the leader, “we’re here again” “Oh don’t tell me that,” said Denton, “—not now.” The machine was ready. The leader held his hand firmly as life poured away, and Denton’s death began.

Encounter, 1976

STATE OF ENGLAND

1. MOBILE PHONES

BIG MAL STOOD THERE on the running track in his crinkly linen suit, with a cigarette in one mitt and a mobile phone in the other. He also bore a wound, did the big man: a shocking laceration on the side of his face, earlobe to cheekbone. The worst thing about his wound was how recent it looked. It wasn’t bleeding. But it might have been seeping. He’d got his suit from Contemporary Male in Culver City, Los Angeles—five years ago. He’d got his wound from a medium-rise car park off Leicester Square, London—last night. Under high flat-bottomed clouds and a shrill blue sky Big Mal stood there on the running track. Not tall but built like a brick khazi: five feet nine in all directions … Mal felt he was in a classic situation: wife, child, other woman. It was mid-September. It was Sports Day. The running track he was strolling along would soon be pounded in earnest by his nine-year-old son, little Jet. Jet’s mother, Sheilagh, was on the clubhouse steps, fifty yards away, with the other mums. Mal could see her. She too wielded a cigarette and a mobile phone. They weren’t talking except on their mobile phones.

He put the cigarette in his mouth and with big, white, cold, agitated fingers prodded out her number.

“A!” he said. A tight sound, sharp pitched—the short “a,” as in “Mal.” It was a sound Mal made a lot: his general response to pain, to inadvertency, to terrestrial imperfection. He went “A!” this time because he had jammed his mobile into the wrong ear. The sore one: so swollen, so richly traumatized by the events of the night before. Then he said, “It’s me.”

“Yeah, I can see you.”

Sheilagh was moving away from the clump of mums, down the steps, toward him. He turned his back on her and said, “Where’s Jet?”

“They come up on the bus. Christ, Mal, whatever have you done to yourself? The state of your face.”

Well that was nice to know: that his wound was visible from fifty yards. “Load of bollocks,” he said, by way of explanation. And it was true in a sense. Mal was forty-eight years old, and you could say he’d made a pretty good living from his fists: his fists, his toe caps, his veering, butting brow. Last night’s spanking was by no means the worst he’d ever taken. But it was definitely the weirdest. “Hang