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her. Thirty seconds on that motorway and they’d be locked bumper to bumper all the way back to Westway. What the hell am I talking about? Why blame them, Maitland? The rain’s going off … must get away from this island before my strength goes. Head hurts, might be concussion … cold here, bloody leg…’
    As the sun came out again, its rays sweeping through the unkempt grass like the tines of an invisible comb, Maitland shivered in his soaked clothes. He drank frugally from the reservoir bottle. The rain-water was well aerated but tasteless, and Maitland wondered whether he had suffered some minor brain damage that had dulled his perception of taste. He knew that his physical strength was moving along a perceptible downhill gradient. Losing interest in the water which he had worked so hard to collect, he climbed from the car and opened the trunk.
    Maitland stripped off his jacket and shirt. The wet rags fell from his hands into the pool of muddy water at his feet. It was now little more than twenty-four hours since his accident, but the skin of his arms and chest had blossomed into a garden of bruises, vividly coloured weals and markings. Maitland put on the spare dress-shirt, and buttoned on the dinner-jacket, turning up the collar. He threw his wallet into the trunk and locked down the lid.
    Even in the sunlight he felt frozen. In an effort to warm himself, he forced the cork into the wine bottle and sipped at the Burgundy. For the next hour he hobbled between the breaker’s yard and the embankment, carrying all the tyres and fenders he could find. The area around the cars soon became a quagmire in which he slid about like a scarecrow in his mud-spattered dinner-jacket.
    Around him the last of the day’s sunlight fell on the deep grass, drawing the stems even further into the air. This luxuriant growth seemed to Maitland an almost conscious attempt to inundate him. He set the tyres into the slope of the embankment, laboriously cutting the earth away with the crutch. The rain-washed soil liquefied around him in a soft avalanche. The fenders sank through the surface. As the first sounds of the evening rush-hour began, Maitland managed to climb half-way up the embankment, dragging the injured leg after him like a dying companion on a mountain wall.
    The traffic drummed over his head, no more than twenty feet away, an unceasing medley of horns and engines. At intervals the high face of an airline bus sped past, the passengers visible behind their windows. Maitland waved to them as he sat in the shifting mud.
    He was ten feet from the top, too exhausted to move forwards any further, when he saw that the palisade of wooden trestles had been replaced and strengthened. A few steps above his head, on the inverted beach that led up from the island, was the footprint of a steel-capped industrial boot, its stud-marks visible in the fading light. Maitland counted five other imprints. Had the highway maintenance staff repositioned the damaged trestles? The workmen had come down the slope, presumably looking for any injured driver or pedestrian at the time when he was hobbling about on the far side of the island.
    The sun fell behind the apartment blocks at White City. Giving up for the time being, Maitland crawled back to the car. As he clambered into the rear seat he knew that he was showing the first signs of fever. Hunched in the mud-stained dinner-jacket, he clutched at the wine bottle, trying to warm himself. The traffic moved through the dusk, headlamps flaring under the route indicators. The siren of a police car howled its way through the dusk. Maitland waited for it to stop, and for the police crew to come down the embankment with a stretcher. In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size. The illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations, the names of