were twenty-eight participants in the upper room, and Hettie to arrange everything. Twenty-seven of them had been there for ever, and had their names in everyday life: there was Sad Child, Harriet, Lucinda, Weeping Real Tears, My Little Pony One and Two, Wedding Dress My Little Pony, Kafka, Horseradish, Little Hattie, the Lady Mayoress of Reckham, Cappuccino, Bloodstained Victim, Dead In Childbirth, Mother, Big Hattie, Death, Widow, Child Pornography, Slightly Jewish, Shitface, Pretty Girl, One Eye Doesn’t Work, Dressed As A Man, Rebecca Holden, Lipstick and Hole. Rebecca Holden in real life was a girl in her class with lovely hair, straight down, and thin, who had never spoken to Hettie, though Hettie always got better marks than her. Today they were lined up, twelve of them, including the ponies, in two rows; they were the jury. Two barristers and two juniors and a Clerk of the Court. Then there were members of the public and the victim’s family and the press, and Child Pornography was the judge because of her white curly hair a bit like a wig. The new doll with only one arm didn’t have a name. Hettie wasn’t going to waste one on her. She was just The Accused.
‘Do you have anything further to say,’ Child Pornography said, in a gruff, legal voice, ‘before sentence is passed upon you?’
‘I have something to say,’ called Slightly Jewish from the relatives’ box. She lisped for some reason. ‘She was my little girl and you took her away from me.’
‘Murderer! Beast! Paedophile!’ Two members of the public had called out, Little Hattie and the Lady Mayoress of Reckham, jumping up and down excitedly in either hand. Then one of the ponies, the one with the wedding dress, forgot that she was in the jury and started shouting, ‘You fucking bastard.’
‘Silence in court,’ Child Pornography said, in the special low voice she had when she was the judge. ‘I have heard the jury’s verdict and all the evidence and it is clear that you are guilty of all the charges and that you kidnapped and paedophiled this innocent victim, who was as beautiful as the day is long. I sentence you to twenty years of being done with the hatpin.’
The Accused hadn’t spoken so far, but now he leapt into Hettie’s left hand and started pleading for anything at all but the hatpin, waving his one arm about. Too late! The hatpin and Hole the executioner were already in Hettie’s left hand, and now began to stab the Accused, once, twice, three times. There were little screams and grunts as the punishment proceeded. In a moment or two it got too hard to hold Hole and the hatpin in one hand and to stab the new doll at the same time. Hettie dropped Hole, and went on stabbing with the hatpin into the doll’s head, body, legs, now silently. In fifteen minutes, the doll was torn, small scraps of rubber bearing the imprint of half a mouth on the carpet; the pathetic little eye, scraps of hair torn from the fascinatingly meshed scalp; and all around, the twenty-eight dolls lined up and looked with satisfaction on what happened to people who did bad things, and on the hatpin. ‘There,’ Child Pornography said, but it was in Hettie’s voice now, and she only moved her up and down for the sake of it. ‘Let that be a lesson to you not to kidnap and torture in future.’
‘You know it’s my book group this evening,’ her mother called from downstairs.
‘Yes, I know,’ Hettie said. She could hear how her voice sounded excited and stifled.
‘What are you doing up there?’ the voice called, with a definite inquisitorial edge.
‘Nothing. Just mucking about.’
‘Well, you know you’re welcome to come and sit in on the book group,’ the voice said.
‘I’ll sit up here and watch telly,’ Hettie said. There was a sigh, meant to be heard up a staircase and through a solid bedroom door.
‘Really,’ Kafka said, in an unusually sophisticated and mature voice, ‘Miranda should, to be perfectly honest, have overcome her disappointments by now. It’s not as if she doesn’t know perfectly well that—’
‘That’s right,’ Hettie said, cutting Kafka off. You never knew what Kafka might or might not say when she was in a certain mood.
Kenyon was running for his train across the broad and half-aimless crowd at Paddington station. The gormless, slow and humourless west began with the prevailing manners of Paddington station, and across it, Kenyon ran like a Londoner with somewhere to go. Knees up, his jacket and briefcase-cum-weekend-bag in the other, he had only two minutes, perhaps not that, to catch his train. (The ticket, bought parsimoniously six weeks before, had cost thirty pounds, but was for this exact train. If he missed this one, and caught the next, his ticket would be invalid and he would have to pay sixty-three pounds for a new one; so he ran.) Kenyon led an orderly life, organized weeks in advance, planned in accordance with the convenience of the First Great Western train company. But there had been a last-minute query from the Department about the reported Ugandan infection rates in a paper he’d written for them; the Underground had groaned inexplicably to a halt shortly after Euston Square; pushing aside massively laden Spaniards who did not know which side to stand on, he had run up the black and greasy steps and iron escalators of the Underground, diagonal, hung and groaningly floating over great unspecified voids, like public transport envisaged in a nightmare by Piranesi. Now he ran across the ‘piazza’, as it was now festively renamed. The holidaymakers heading for the west, with their surfboards, rucksacks the size of a sheep, square brown suitcases dug out of wardrobes, sat in his path like deliberate obstacles, like a miniature village. He jinked and swerved among the slow-witted and the heavy-laden like a man divided between his consciousness of an almost certainly lost something, and his fierce intention towards that train, there, that particular one, behind the barrier.
He had read somewhere that the identity of the 16.05 train to Anytown resided in its distinction, its differences, and that presumably a train that ran only the once could have no identity at all. It remained the same from day to day, still the same 16.05, despite being constituted out of different engines, different carriages, staffed by different individuals and carrying entirely different complements of passengers. Philosophically true that might be, but the identity of this one, beyond the barrier, did not seem remotely mutable, at all capable of replacement with different units as he fumbled with his ticket and limbs and thrust-out bags in the general direction of the ticket-checking machine at the barrier and ran towards the first carriage. A guard already stood by the door of the first-class carriage, arm raised. This train, he felt, was unique, and he hardly noticed the youth on this side of the ticket barrier who seemed in no hurry to get on the train, kneeling by an open black case on the platform between waiting trains. It was as if he had nowhere very much to go. But at the time Kenyon barely gave him a thought.
‘Only just made it,’ said the guard, in tones of quite pointless admonition. Kenyon clambered on, and into the first-class carriage, where the other passengers gave him half a glance before raising their newspapers against him, lowered their faces to their books, or just turned their heads away. Kenyon, dripping, purple-faced, crumpled, stumbled up the aisle panting with his detritus-like luggage. He fell into his reserved seat. It faced the wrong way, with, as a man of Kenyon’s age and class still put it, its back to the engine. This was either due to Kenyon’s vagueness when booking or the railway company’s incompetence. Around him, everyone was tactfully engaged in things that meant they didn’t have to look at Kenyon just for the moment.
Out of the window, the guard blew a whistle and raised an arm. Some sort of electronic signal within signified the locking of the doors. Almost at the same moment on the platform, the young man in the nondescript camel-coloured duffel coat, completely wrong for the temperature and the time of year, raised himself in a leisurely way from his crouching position over the black case. Somewhere further away there
