Frugoil station looks deserted, or is a grinning face flattened against the inside of the window? We're past before I can determine whether it's a poster. Beyond Staines the sky is full of lights that put me in mind of sluggish fireworks, and as the Volvo speeds alongside the airport our progress snags a take-off and does its best to drag the airliner to earth. I open my eyes to find we're miles away along the Great West Road. I don't relish this kind of instant travel, and so I try to make conversation. 'You didn't say what you thought of the film.'
Rufus and Colin keep the backs of their heads turned to me. 'Maybe we thought we couldn't improve on your performance,' says Colin.
'Give it a shot,' I urge and am immediately afraid that they'll take this the wrong way. 'I mean, give me your critical opinions.'
'I'd say he has a future,' says Colin.
'I don't see how I can disagree,' Rufus says.
I would say there's too little to disagree with. Are their comments so rudimentary because they feel I've withheld mine? I'm loath to risk trying to share them; I don't think I could cope with another helpless struggle to speak. Streetlamps make my companions' eyes gleam at me in the mirror, a glassy artificial glitter that reminds me of dolls' eyes. I find it so irrationally threatening that I squeeze my eyelids shut. When I look again we're miles ahead in the West End.
Revellers of an unsettling variety of shapes and sizes are dancing in Piccadilly Circus. A glare of light on a street sign blots out most of the letters, leaving only I ILL US. As we turn along Shaftesbury Avenue figures seem to lurch at my back in the mirror, prancing and jigging and hopping over or even onto one another. Do I glimpse an impossibly tall shape composed of dwarfish acrobats bowing towards me like a worm? Surely it's a shadow, and a shadow can't bear even a single grin. It falls behind – it doesn't spring apart and scurry in fragments along the pavement – as the Volvo inches through the crowd. If stunted figures appear to be skipping in the side streets, they must be shadows too.
I lose sight of them as we reach Charing Cross Road. As the car takes its pace from the crowds all the way to Tottenham Court Road I feel as if we're part of a procession, but in whose honour? I'm glad when the last of the merry faces stop clustering close to the windows, turning the glass and themselves pale, as the car veers across the road. A dizzy bout of swerving through the side streets brings us to the office.
The dark sky lends the brows of the attics an extra frown. Their windows glint as my publishers' eyes did in the mirror. I can still hear distant explosions and rejoicing, but the bells seem to have pealed their last. As Rufus slips his key, a plastic card from a different era than the door, into a slot I hadn't noticed beneath the brass doorknob, I say 'Watch out for the guard.'
'There's no guard here,' says Rufus.
He must mean the watchman is off duty. The door opens without a sound to reveal that the lobby is lit and deserted. Although the handwriting on the blotter that occupies much of the top of the reception desk is reversed, it looks familiar. Before I can examine it, if indeed I want to, Colin pokes the button to open the lift and reveal my face. It's decidedly too plump, though I might say the same of my companions. The mirrors on the walls insist on it while the lift quivers upwards. However hard I stare at the doors, I'm still aware of faces multiplying on both sides of me. I have to fend off the impression that a grin is spreading through them out of the dark.
As soon as the doors part I step into the low narrow corridor, which is illuminated so dimly that the source is unidentifiable. At least it doesn't seem to be relying on the skylights. I hurry down the corridor and around the corner, only to have to wait for Rufus to open 6-120 with a card, presumably not the one he used downstairs. He shoves an obstruction aside with the door and switches the light on.
There's very little in the room apart from two basic white desks, each bearing a computer and attended by a scrawny chair. Beyond the dormer window the night sky flickers with fireworks, which look oddly colourless. Rufus gestures me to precede him and Colin, then indicates the flattish object behind the door. 'That'll be you, will it?'
I grab the envelope and refrain from hugging it protectively. 'Where's the copier?'
'We use the one next door,' he says and glances at the computers. 'Everything settled at the bank?'
Is it too early for the mistake to have been fixed? In any case I can show him and Colin what I've had to suffer. 'Can I find out?'
'See your fortune,' Rufus says and turns on the left-hand computer.
I don't care for his joke, which suggests he isn't taking my situation seriously enough. As I sit behind the desk, his and Colin's faces seem to quiver. Perhaps it's a symptom of whatever condition I'm in, or the effect of the fireworks behind me. I type the address of the site for the bank and then my various secret codes. At last the page for my account reveals that I'm as much in debt as ever. 'No change,' I complain.
'Not even a penny?'
'It isn't funny, Colin. Not everything's funny.'
'You sounded like you thought it was.'
Can this be true? The memory of my own voice is already out of reach. 'I'm saying there's been no – '
My words blunder into one another as if they've fetched up against silence. A transformation is indeed overtaking the amount on the screen. My debt has just acquired an extra zero. For an irrational moment I try to joke that it's nothing, and then my skull grows fragile with realising that now I owe ten times as much. 'No, that's not right,' I protest as if whoever is responsible can hear me. 'No.'
Rufus and Colin step around either side of the desk. As they stoop to the monitor, another zero appears to greet them. Rufus is the first to laugh. 'Well, that's a new one.'
'I've not seen that before,' says Colin.
Do they think it's too absurd to take seriously? It's their job to deal with it. I don't know what sound I utter when a further pair of zeros swells my debt. They put me in mind of eyes pretending to be too blind to watch me. All the noughts might be the eyes of nothingness – and then I realise whose glee I can almost sense. 'It's him, isn't it,' I blurt. 'He's doing it. He's here.'
'Who?' says Colin.
'Where?' says Rufus.
'Don't talk like a pair of clowns. Our emeny, our ennenny. The one who's been after me ever since I started writing about Tubby.' While this isn't quite accurate, since I first wrote about him in my thesis, at least I seem to have regained control of my words. 'Let's see what he's saying now,' I shout loud enough to be heard in the next room. 'Let's see if he gives himself away.'
Rufus and Colin are watching me oddly, but how do they expect me to behave? Perhaps we can collaborate on a response to my persecutor; perhaps they can edit my post. I scrabble at the keys to log onto my Frugonet account. Is it my haste that brings up an altogether different site? In the moment before I expel it from the screen I glimpse fat naked shapes crawling slug-like over one another. In the greyish light I can't tell whether they're babies or some even more primitive life form, and they're gone before I'm sure how widely they're staring and grinning. I don't even know whether the clammy guilt that clings to me is on Rufus's behalf or my own, since my typing managed to locate the site. I try to log on fast enough to pretend I saw nothing and nobody else did.
Hundreds of emails on subjects as nonsensical as the names of their senders are waiting for me. I leave them unopened and move to the newsgroups. Too many to count have a single message for me.
Yes it is.
Perhaps the words and the message are too short to give him the scope to misspell, but I have the disconcerting notion that he has forgotten to. I glare at the screen until it begins to throb. 'What's he mean by that?' I demand.
'What do you make of it?' says Colin.
I wouldn't admit to my feelings if I hadn't been asked, but who can I trust to be sympathetic if not my friends and patrons? 'It sounds as if he's answering me, doesn't it? It sounds as if he heard what I said about him.'
Colin turns away before he speaks. 'I'll check next door.'
'You think he's there?' I whisper. 'Did you hear him?'
Colin glances back too briefly for me to read his expression. 'Check,' he says as he steps into the corridor, 'that we've got access to the copier.'
Does he think I'm being too paranoid? He hasn't been through all I have. At least he has reminded me that there's one aspect of my thoughts Smilemime can't touch – my book. As Colin's footsteps and their flapping echoes veer beyond audibility I brandish the envelope at the screen. I don't care if Rufus hears me snarl 'Try and alter this,
