It must have been ages since he left the others. They were probably ordering the bill by now. Short of breath, but with insane urgency, he stuffed the wet syringe back into his breast pocket and hurried back through the bar, into the hall, and up the main staircase.

In the dining room he saw George, Tom, and Ballantine still reading the menu. How long had he kept them waiting, politely postponing their lunch? He moved clumsily towards the table, the strands of curving, twisting sound bending the space around him.

George looked up.

‘Ziouuu . . . Ziouuu . . . Ziouuu . . .’ he asked. ‘Chok-chok-chok-chok,’ said Ballantine, like a helicopter.

‘Aioua. Aioua,’ Tom suggested.

What the fuck were they trying to tell him? Patrick sat down and mopped his face with the pale pink napkin.

‘Sot,’ he said in a long elastic whisper. ‘Chok-chok-chok,’ Ballantine replied.

George was smiling, but Patrick listened helplessly as the sounds streamed past him like a photograph of brake lights on a wet street.

‘Ziou . . . Ziou . . . Ziou . . . Aiou. Aiou. Chok-chok-chok.’

He sat astonished in front of the menu, as if he had never seen one before. There were pages of dead things – cows, shrimps, pigs, oysters, lambs – stretched out like a casualty list, accompanied by a brief description of how they had been treated since they died – skewered, grilled, smoked, and boiled. Christ, if they thought he was going to eat these things they must be mad.

He had seen the dark blood from the neck of a sheep gushing into the dry grass. The busy flies. The stench of offal. He had heard the roots tearing as he eased a carrot out of the ground. Any living man squatted on a mound of corruption, cruelty, filth, and blood.

If only his body would turn into a pane of glass, the fleshless interval between two spaces, knowing both but belonging to neither, then he would be set free from the gross and savage debt he owed to the rest of nature.

‘Ziou . . . Ziou . . . wan?’ asked George.

‘Um . . . I’ll . . . um, eh just,’ Patrick felt remote from his own voice, as if it was coming out of his feet. ‘I’ll . . . um, eh, have . . . another . . . Bullshot . . . late breakfast . . . eh . . . not really hungry.’

The effort of saying these few words left him breathless.

‘Chok-chok-chok-chok,’ objected Ballantine. ‘Aioua sure. Aioua ziou?’ asked Tom.

What was he saying ‘Ziou’ for? The fugue was growing more complicated. Before long George would be saying ‘Chok’ or ‘Aioua’, and then where would he stand? Where would any of them stand?