They capture Nótt. This happens before Mother but after Sebastian. I’m having trouble with words, with time. I’m different now, transformed. A buzzard climbing the updrafts of Smoke. My bones hollow, my body a husk: reinhabited. I, the dark twin of my former self, flesh of my own liver. I am my own father and mother; Renfrew my midwife; the mask my baptism and my last rites. Children cower when I pass them in the streets.

They take Nótt away. A man with a billy club, breaking her legs. They tie a rope around her neck and drag her; her jaws snapping, a whine in her throat, not a bark. I watch them do it, and I do nothing. It is of no consequence. Nótt is the past, my boyhood, my becoming. I trained her nose for Smoke. My own nose is better now, better than hers. I can smell your needs across the chill of a city square, can sort their flavours, weigh each urge: taxonomise. What I like, though, is to get close, inhale you like a flower. Dogs with their noses up each other’s arses. I understand it now. The bouquet of vice. Bottle it and you’ll be rich.

But, of course: I am already rich.

London is an ocean of Smoke. People float on it like scum: waterlogged, helpless, half aware of others circling in the depths. I came to it and plunged, handed myself over to its rhythms; its storms and tides; its eddies and swells. Cold, rich, salty. I plunged and I gorged. Not on food, mind. I don’t remember what I ate. Refuse, wild things scuttling in the alley; scoops of old, encrusted Soot. My head is light these days, my stomach a knot. My clothes hang from me like rags.

Here is how I pass the hours. I walk the streets. Stand in the thoroughfares, openmouthed, imbibing every current, belching it back into the air. Smoke flowing through the filter of my body. Irritation turning to anger; drunken joy to mischief; boisterousness to wounded pride: behind me a dark wake, dragging others off their paths. Whirlpools of corruption. I am Smoke’s slave and also its master; drift like flotsam yet command its tides. Dialectics. A Fritz philosopher called Hegel. I am Aufhebung: my own cancellation; a new, a higher version of myself. I am the end of history. I played dice with a gang of child thieves in Hampstead; wrestled a beggar in a ditch by Covent Garden and bit off his nose; danced the polka with a lunatic from Palestine, loused his hair and broke his face. I am a leech, a dog, a sparrow. I am a moraine eel. I am, I am, I am. I’m having trouble with words, with time, with order.

Order!