threatened to become less polite. Well before his neighbours started glaring at him he'd had enough. He could hardly ask the librarian to wield the mouse, and all the other terminals were in use, although was the computer the problem? He sent the chair stumbling backwards and blundered away from the source of his feverish embarrassment, looking, at nobody. Even the automatic doors that had admitted him no longer worked for him. He was making to haul them apart when he realised what the librarian had just called out to him. 'Isn't anything right round here?' he blurted as he dashed along the counter to the exit doors, which swung open at once.
He could easily have imagined that the word over the arrow above the stairs was a joke at his expense. The three women had vacated the steps outside the building, but the men were still at their chess. One used both hands to move the black knight backwards, a sidling retreat that bewildered Hugh. He needn't feel compelled to take so devious a route, but a flurry of metallic drumming wouldn't let him think. He felt as if his confusion were being observed, which made it worse. Straight ahead seemed to be the safest direction, though he hardly knew where he was going until a roof closed over him.
It belonged to the market, where he'd often been as a child. He remembered the smells of cloth and Asian spices, and the stalls piled with exotic vegetables and bright clothes, and the motto above one stall that announced WE CAN ALTER ANYTHING, but he seemed to have forgotten there was no direct route through. At each junction he had to dodge one way or the other to find the next aisle that led forwards. Soon he would be out and capable of seeing which way to proceed, but why couldn't he now? As he hesitated at yet another intersection boxed in by boxy stalls he realised where his haste was leading him. He was heading away from Cybernet, even if the place was open now. Worse, he was heading away from home.
He had only to retrace his steps, but which way had he come? He turned around, though not too far, to see the last junction. 'Stupid,' he muttered and thought it best to say 'Not you' to a pair of Indian grocers who were eyeing him across their stall. He retreated to the junction and almost ran along the next aisle to the blind end. 'Which way now?' he wondered, surely not aloud. This way and then this, past WE CAN ALTER ANYTHING, followed by the opposite direction, although shouldn't that be showing him the exit? It must be this way instead, but that led to an aisle where Hugh had to twist around more than once before he could decide which route to take out of it. His decision brought him back to WE CAN ALTER ANYTHING, which was approximately in the middle of the market. Surely he could use the other exit and head home around the outside of the building. 'Back again,' he told the grocers, whom he suspected of conducting an unsubtitled discussion about him. He bore his blazing face out of their sight and along the side aisle before backhanding his forehead to brush away sweat if not to rub his brain alert. This didn't restore his sense of direction, since he carried on turning blind corners until he grasped that there couldn't be so many between him and the exit or even, he was beginning to dread, in a building the size of the market. Indeed, he was being told WE CAN ALTER ANYTHING again, and had that befallen his mind? The smell of cloth grew stale in his nostrils as if he were being tracked by someone in disagreeably old clothes. He backed away from the sign towards the entrance opposite the library, but as soon as he left the aisle behind he lost his sense of where the next one led. He fled into it anyway, and its staggered continuation, and please not many more. A stalled intersection and another, both of which made him feel like a rat in a maze as the heat trapped beneath the roof parched his mouth, and WE CAN ALTER ANYTHING, and an airless junction smelling of dusty cloth together with something mustier, which hardly explained why he felt watched. Of course stallholders were observing him, however surreptitiously. Why hadn't he asked one of them the way out before he was too shamefaced to admit the need and too panicky to speak? The Indian grocers were undoubtedly discussing him. That dismayed him less than his having somehow wandered back to their stall, and he was retreating when the stocky slick-haired man said 'Pardon me, what is your name?'
Hugh might have ignored the question and kept moving if he'd had any idea of where. 'Who wants to know?' he felt childish for retorting.
'My wife.'
His portly partner took this as her cue. 'Are you looking for somebody, please?'
'Who would I be looking for?' Belatedly aware that this could sound insulting, Hugh had to admit 'The exit, that's all.'
The couple had a brief though passionate untranslated dialogue, and then the woman lifted a flap in the counter. 'Come along with me.'
She was vanishing around a corner before Hugh moved, and he was afraid she would be out of sight by the time he reached the junction. She was waiting more or less patiently for him, however, and he followed in her faintly spicy wake until a fourth turn brought them out of the market on the far side from the library. As he blinked both ways along the narrow street Hugh felt more lost than ever, unable to recognise left or right or to determine what became of them if he turned around. 'All right now?' his guide said and peered at him. 'Where are you wanting to go?'
The answer was almost too desperate for words. 'Home,' he begged.
'Just stay there.'
She trotted into the market and was lost to view before Hugh thought of a response. Did she mean he shouldn't have left home while he was in this state? He was trying to prepare to venture one way or the other in the desperate hope that some familiar landmark would restore his bearings when the male grocer emerged from the market. His frown made Hugh wonder if he intended to deal with some slight to his wife, especially since he complained 'You still have not said your name.'
'Hugh Lucas,' Hugh felt powerless for confessing.
'Rakesh.' The man delivered a terse soft loose handshake and turned away. 'Come quickly now.'
'Where?'
Rakesh renewed his frown over his shoulder. 'You are on the corner, are you not?'
'Of what?' Hugh pleaded, feeling yet more disoriented.
'Of the road.' Having gazed at him and seen no comprehension, Rakesh added, 'The road where we live.'
In a moment, far too tardily, Hugh recognised him. He and his wife and twin daughters lived at the far end of the terrace opposite Hugh's. 'I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I didn't know you at first,' Hugh babbled and, as his face grew hotter, couldn't stop. 'It's just that I'm, you know, you saw how I am.'
Rakesh gave him a last slow blink before facing forwards. 'I will take you home.'
He led Hugh to a white van speckled with rust above its wheels and watched closely until his passenger was strapped in. A devious series of turns led to the ring road, which the van hardly sooner joined than left. As he drove past a factory into the sudden shade of trees Rakesh said, 'I hope our girls will not see you like this. You should be careful of whatever you are doing.'
It was clear that he had drugs in mind. Hugh would have denied ever touching them – at least, the single joint he'd shared with Rory had left him coughing tearfully for several minutes – if the foliage hadn't loosed the sun, bleaching his vision. As the van swerved into a street and then another the pallor drained away, reinstating the shapes of houses along with their sandy colour. 'Do you know where you are now?' Rakesh said, halting the van.
Clothes flapped on lines in the narrow front gardens, dancers pranced on plasma screens in more than one front room. As Hugh released the seat belt and clambered clumsily out of the vehicle, he heard a sitar racing up a scale, pursued by the drumming of a tabla. He was home. He thanked Rakesh, who watched him hurry up the weedy path through the weedier garden to the house at the windy end of the terrace. When he unlocked the door he tried to find the house – hall and two rooms downstairs, three rooms and a bathroom above – reassuring in its simplicity. There was surely no space to get lost in it, and he did his best to believe that only the sunlight had distracted him during the journey. That didn't quite explain why he had absolutely no idea which way he'd just come home.
ELEVEN
He shouldn't keep putting Hugh down, Rory thought. It was such a habit that Hugh seemed to expect it if not invite it, but it did neither of them any good. When had Rory fallen into it? Perhaps once their parents had betrayed they found Hugh's teacher training worthier of respect than Rory's ambitions, and their refusal to own up only made
