Wyndlesham  appeared drenched  in starlight but condemned  by its own pleasures: litter and dog-droppings,  discarded paper tissue, the bleak poached turf of the sports field with its goalposts as luminous as bone, a concrete culvert, a used condom hanging from a branch  over the water, long gardens  from which Anna heard quiet voices or loud bursts of music. Beyond that used space, out  along reaches fringed with reeds and  rushes, between long fields sloping shallowly up to woods, it was no longer the river she knew. The current  strengthened.  The water, its motives discernibly its own, moved darker and heavier between the banks. Anna wasn’t being swept away but she was certainly picking up speed, while the Moroccan air grew warmer still; and the night, clear and white to begin with, tinted itself a sourceless neon pink. Pink then blue, then both, then neither, a colour as faint and sourceless as neon seen a street or two away, as if the fields themselves were gently broadcasting it. Copper poppies nodded  and swayed over the water in a warm dry wind. Bit by bit she began to see things. Long shadows from short objects, falling across the landscape like pointing  fingers – stones,  simple, slate, shattered,  still upright, tumbled about at all angles. Then large isolated figures with a look of two dimensions, very still, placed at curiously precise distances from the river bank like some exercise in perspective. Complex in silhouette, uninterpretable except as 17th century illustrations of satyrs, they were men with the rear legs of horses. They had the cocks of horses too. Really, they were quite big. Their heads were turned away in threequarter  profile, frozen in stylised attitudes of listening. They meant  her no harm: it wasn’t certain they knew she was there. And beyond them so much was going on – bustling city streets, noises like a building site, powerful beams sweeping a horizon  which had withdrawn  and was withdrawing  still, to a considerable distance. That was the place, Anna suspected, where things would change completely and suddenly; if you left the water and walked up there, you might begin to learn things you didn’t want to know. Up above, subtly pulsing stars: a great ragged arc of them pulled and pushed into chaos by the black radio winds Michael Kearney had spoken of so eloquently before he walked into the sea. Michael Kearney, afraid of everything, yet rendered almost like an ordinary person by sex, for a brief time able to have feelings. Past every surface, he had taught her, at every level, things were so wrong and inhuman: get below any surface and instantly you saw how wrong things were for us. ‘Forget all the anthropic crap,’ he used to insist. ‘None of this made itself for us.’ His own advice would frighten him and he would be ready to fuck again. Anna had always felt like the calm one in those situations. ‘I was the least damaged one,’ she told herself now, looking up at the stars and then down at the satyrs in their inexplicable landscape, each one looking out of the corner of its eye at her, a faint sidelong glitter of intelligence, self-awareness, self-regard. She was leaving them behind now. They looked quite small again.