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cover.
    But while you
are
in there, you have to be careful. It’s dark and cold, and while you’re down there you can’t even remember what love
feels
like. Worse than that, you don’t want to. And there are things down there with you that will whisper things, and suggest things – that have an upside-down logic to them, and which seem quite appealing and sensible in the cold dark of day.
Come deeper
, they say. And it sounds so right. You never want to feel love again, and damaging it feels good. But they’re things that you really don’t want to listen to, and when the clouds come over forever you’ll wish that you hadn’t.
    Wilkinson asked me a few more questions about my relationship with Claire, coming back more than once to the concept of us having met outside the internet. I denied it, and then denied some more. At one point, I looked at my watch and saw it was after midnight.
We’ll be done, soon
, Wilkinson told me. But we weren’t.
    ‘I want to go home,’ I told him, as it reached one o’clock. ‘We’ve talked about everything there is to talk about, and I just . . . want to go home.’
    He sighed, leaning back in his seat. I stared at him, not letting him off the hook. Yes, I’d known her; yes, I’d had an affair with her; no, I wasn’t proud of it.
    Yes. I wanted to go home.
    ‘Okay, Jason,’ he said after a second. ‘I’ll have an officer drive you back.’
    ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’
    ‘You’ll walk?’
    ‘That’s right. I like walking.’ Which was true, especially at night when there was nobody around. ‘And I hate your fucking in-car music.’
    ‘But it’s pouring down.’
    ‘Then, I’ll get wet.’
    He slapped the table gently.
    ‘Okay, then. I guess that’s okay. We’re done, here, anyway.’
    Wilkinson showed me back to the main entrance. Outside, in the amber glow around the nearest floodlight, I could see the rain spitting through: invisible beforehand, up in the night, and then invisible afterwards, as it smacked into the pavement. When he opened the door, the cold hit me like a splash of sea-water: refreshing but slightly cruel. It was a bad night.
    As he opened the door, Wilkinson was wincing. Briefly, I wondered what he would be like if someone ever shot him, or something.
    ‘Take care, now.’
    And then he said something which made me realise that this wasn’t over yet – that we weren’t
done here
, at all. My private world, which I’d cultivated and focused, was no longer mine alone; my isolation was an illusion. Society had come knocking.
    He said, ‘We’ll be in touch.’

CHAPTER THREE
     
    I was drenched by the time I reached the end of the car park, never mind my house, but I find that there’s a certain level of rain that takes away worry. You get as soaked as it’s possible to be and think:
fuck it
. It had always struck me as a pretty good motto for life in general, and it had served me . . . not well, exactly, but at least I’d never been disappointed. And so that’s what I said to myself as I reached the edge of the freeway and turned down the footpath beside it.
Fuck it
. I was soaked already, and anything that didn’t include me slipping and falling on my ass in the mud could only be considered a bonus.
    The footpath followed the canal, which snaked under the freeway and fed back into the city centre, skirting within a few hundred metres of my house along the way. The actual water was stagnant and old. Ten years ago, when I’d been a boy, I remembered riding my bike along the footpath, the gravel crackling beneath my tyres and disturbing all the fishermen who were waiting patiently, like tents, on the banks. Nobody fished here now, though; and the only bikes that came along the footpath were motorbikes on an evening. It was a desolate, sad little route, made all the more so by the city in the distance, like an enormous cybernetic limb where one old vein still remained, unbeating and unused. Soon, they’d concrete it