The curtains of musty-smelling velvet—outsiders would be shocked if they were to enter the villas of the upper class and see the run-down, decayed condition of the furniture, which the upper class considered befitting of their status—were pulled halfway closed. The father—a Sir, by the way—was sitting with his head resting on his hands in a dark corner of the room. On the bed where nine generations of relatives had already lain dead now lay Thome’s mother. A stern woman with large breasts. She’d been. And the breasts, which even now towered toward the ceiling, had been the greatest source of shame over the course of her life, the low-class bosom which hindered her while hunting. Contrary to her silent wish, which she included in her drunken evening prayers, she hadn’t expired while on a hunt, but from breast cancer. A disease about which people always whispered: “She fought so bravely.” As if that would interest the cancer cells. Cancer cells were humans in miniature form. Eat everything that crosses their path with no regard for the damage, taking for granted, out of greed, that the host will eventually cease to exist. Thome’s mother had chosen an unlucky moment to become ill. Biosensors had only just been invented. Programmable bacteria that could be read from the outside. Later they’d track down cancer and set to work right in the middle of the tumor. But yeah, that was later. Thome stood at the side of the so-called deathbed and explained away his absence of grief or sympathy with a string of quirky and absolutely hip mental diseases. Asperger, ADHD, giftedness, WTF. He felt nothing and could only think: Oh well, gone is gone. Thome had survived—somehow—his boarding school years at Manchester Grammar School as the catchment basin for the perversions of his fellow students. Now it was off to university. His grades were middling, but the contacts of his parents—sorry, his father—eliminated any misgivings. So it would be Cambridge, and so his way forward would be sketched out. If he didn’t completely screw it up, a comfortable life lay before him. A family villa on a private road on Holland Park, an influential post somewhere, first in IT, due to his aptitude for nerdy explanation, later politics, then a stroke. Until then: membership in a first-class college society, and perhaps he’d get to know a woman who loved cashmere twinsets and would live out her last few unencumbered years at Cambridge attending group sex parties. And later, as a moderate alcoholic with a weakness for hunting dogs, produce a couple degenerate children for him. Incidentally, the mother had just died of cancer in a region of the body people like her never referred to by name. Amusing detail. An astonishingly inappropriate sigh echoed through the silence of the room.

THOME’S FATHER

SEXUALITY: S&M fetish, prodigious Viagra consumption

HOBBIES: collects medals and used panty liners