Then I tried to remember if anyone had seen him or heard from him lately, but I drew a bit of a blank. And it wasn’t until then that I began to think it was a bit funny that he hadn’t published anything at all about his travels in all the time he’d been away. On previous trips he’d either been earning his keep by giving lectures, or he’d covered his airfare by printing bits and pieces for the papers. Maybe he didn’t need to do that anymore? Maybe he’d passed the point of hack work? He must have made quite a bit out of his last couple of novels, since he won the Booker. Then I thought that perhaps he’d just got pissed off with old England, and had really wanted to disappear. If anyone might take it into his head to do a bunk, it would be Stephen. And if he wanted to disappear, who were we to try to stop him?

But Liz Headleand’s phone call nagged me. She’d sounded a bit rattled, which wasn’t like her, or not what I thought of as her. I’d always seen her as Super Competent. Offensively competent. With that big house, and all those children.

I had a feeling that somebody I knew had bumped into him within living memory in either Singapore or Bangkok, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember which or who, or when, or what they’d said. I tried to remember, but how on earth does one will oneself to remember? I mean, how does one make the memory brain cells work? Mine have all gone funny, I’m afraid, and I’d never have got the name back if it hadn’t been for a programme on telly (it sounds as though I watch a lot of telly, which I do) about the Opium Triangle and Burma, and suddenly, as I was watching this shot of little child soldiers marching up and down in the jungle with some donkeys, it came to me. John Geddes, that’s who it was. And it had definitely been Bangkok. I was so pleased with myself that I poured myself another Scotch, which might have been a mistake, but wasn’t—odd how drink sometimes makes the memory work better, when most of the time it buggers it up. Anyway, it all began to come back. John Geddes had been out there looking for locations for Carlo’s script of Victory and had run into Stephen in a bar in Bangkok. Stephen had been looking pretty good, according to John. Flush, I think was the word he’d used. Not flushed. Flush. So whenever that had been, Stephen was still doing fine, and wasn’t languishing in a Khmer Rouge prison or a fever hospital or a leper colony, or wherever it was that Liz thought he’d ended up. A bar in Bangkok. I rang John, to check, but not surprisingly he wasn’t in. He never is. His lover (who, rumour has it, is HIV-positive, poor bugger) was there, sounding pretty glum, which he would be, and he said John was in Peru trying to find locations for a movie about the Shining Path (not another Vargas Llosa adaptation, he said, wearily, an original screenplay). I asked if he could remember when John had been in Bangkok, and he said which time, for the Rain Forest movie or for the Khmer Rouge movie, and I said neither, it was for the Victory movie, and he said was that the Vietnam movie, and I said no, it was the Conrad movie, and he said he hadn’t the faintest idea. He sounded so sad that I arranged to meet him for a drink, but that’s another story. Well, almost another story, because when we met at the Spoils of War we worked out (but this is jumping ahead a bit) that John must have met Stephen in late ’85, in the Hotel Nirvana, which didn’t tell us anything much. The lover (he’s called Indra) said John said that Stephen took him to a very up-market brothel, but Indra thought he might have been saying that to annoy him, that is him, Indra. Anyway, that’s jumping ahead, or back, and anyway it was a dead end.