"I see." Sod his interest, Marty thought, he could choke on it. They'd had as much of 
a confessional as they were going to get.
    "Can I go now?" he said.
    He looked up. Not at Toy but at Somervale, who was smirking behind his cigarette 
smoke, well satisfied that the interview had been a disaster.
    "I think so, Strauss," he said. "As long as Mr. Toy doesn't have any more questions." 
"No," said Toy, the voice dead. "No; I'm well satisfied." Marty stood up, still avoiding 
Toy's eyes. The small room was full of ugly sounds. The chair's heels scraping on the 
floor, the rasp of Somervale's smoker's cough. Toy was shunting away his notes. It was 
all over.
    Somervale said: "You can go." "I've enjoyed meeting you, Mr. Strauss," Toy said to 
Marty's back as he reached the door, and Marty turned around without thinking to see the 
other man smiling at him, his hand extended to be shaken. I've enjoyed meeting you, Mr. 
Strauss.
    Marty nodded and shook hands.
    "Thank you for your time," Toy said.
    Marty closed the door behind him and made his way back to his cell, escorted by 
Priestley, the landing officer. They said nothing.
    Marty watched the birds swooping in the roof of the building, alighting on the 
landing rails for tidbits. They came and they went when it suited them, finding niches to 
nest in, taking their sovereignty for granted. He envied them nothing. Or if he did, now 
wasn't the time to admit to it.
    
    6
    Thirteen days passed, and there was no further word from either Toy or Somervale. Not 
that Marty was truly expecting any. The chance had been lost; he'd almost stage-managed 
its final moments with his refusal to talk about Macnamara. That way he had expected to 
nip any trial by hope in the bud. In that, he'd failed. No matter how he tried to forget 
the interview with Toy, he couldn't. The encounter had thrown him badly off-balance, and 
his instability was as distressing as its cause. He thought he had learned the art of 
indifference by now, the same way that children learned that hot water scalds: by painful 
experience.
    He'd had plenty of that. During the first twelve months of his sentence he'd fought 
against everything and everyone he'd encountered. He'd made no friends that year, nor the 
least impression on the system; all he'd earned for his troubles were bruises and bad 
times. In the second year, chastened by defeat, he'd gone underground with his private 
war; he'd taken up weight training and boxing, and concentrated on the challenge of 
building and maintaining a body that would serve him when the time for retribution came 
round. But in the middle of the third year, loneliness had intervened: an ache that no 
amount of self-inflicted punishment (muscles driven to the pain threshold and beyond, day 
after day) could disguise. He made a truce that year, with himself and his incarceration. 
It was an uneasy peace, but things began to improve from then on. He even began to feel 
at home in the echoing corridors, and in his cell, and in the shrinking enclave of his 
head, where most pleasurable experience was now a distant memory.
    The fourth year had brought new terrors. He was twenty-nine that year; thirty loomed, 
and he remembered all too accurately how his younger self, with time to burn had 
dismissed men his age as spent. It was a painful realization, and the old claustrophobia 
(trapped not behind bars, but behind his life) returned more forcibly than ever, and with 
it a new foolhardiness. He'd gained his tattoos that year: a scarlet and blue lightning 
bolt on his upper left arm, and "USA" on his right forearm. Just before Christmas 
Charmaine had written to him to suggest that a divorce might be best, and he'd thought 
nothing of it. What was the use? Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded 
defeat, life was a feather bed. In the light of that wisdom, the fifth year was a breeze. 
He had access to dope; he had the clout that came with being an experienced con; he had 
every damned thing but his freedom, and that he could wait for.
    And then Toy had come along, and try as hard as he could to forget he'd ever heard 
the man's name, he found himself turning the half-hour of the interview over and over in 
his head, examining every exchange in the minutest detail as though he might turn up a 
nugget of prophecy. It was a fruitless exercise, of course, but it didn't stop the 
rehearsals going on, and the process became almost comforting in its way. He told nobody; 
not even Feaver. It was his secret: the room; Toy; Somervale's defeat.
    On the second Sunday after the meeting with Toy Charmaine came to visit. The 
interview was the usual mess; like a transatlantic telephone call-all the timing spoiled 
by the second delay between question and response. It wasn't the babble of other 
conversations in the room that soured things, things were simply sour. No avoiding that 
fact now. His early attempts at salvage had long since been abandoned. After the cool 
inquiries about the health of relatives and friends it was down to the nitty-gritty of 
dissolution.
    He'd written to her in the early letters: You're beautiful, Charmaine. I think of you 
at night, I dream about you all the time.
    But then her looks had seemed to lose their edge-and anyway his dreams of her face 
and body under him had stopped-and though he kept up the pretense in the letters for a 
while his loving sentences had begun to sound patently fake, and he'd stopped writing 
about such intimacies. It felt adolescent, to tell her he thought of her face; what would 
she imagine him doing but sweating in the dark and playing with himself like a 
twelve-year-old? He didn't want her thinking that.
    Maybe, on reflection, that had been a mistake. Perhaps the deterioration of their 
marriage had begun there, with him feeling ridiculous, and giving up writing love 
letters. But hadn't she changed too? Her eyes looked at him even now with such naked 
suspicion.
    "Flynn sends his regards." "Oh. Good. You see him, do you?" "Once in a while." "How's 
he doing?" She'd taken to looking at the clock, rather than at him, which he was glad of. 
It gave him a chance to study her without feeling intrusive. When she allowed her 
features to relax, he still found her attractive. But he had, he believed, perfect 
control over his response to her now. He could look at her-at the translucent lobes of 
her ears, at the sweep of her neck-and view her quite dispassionately. That, at least, 
prison had taught him: not to want what he could not have.
    "Oh, he's fine-" she replied.
    It took him a moment to reorientate himself; who was she talking about? Oh, yes: 
Flynn. There was a man who'd never got his fingers dirty. Flynn the wise; Flynn the flash.
    "He sends his best," she said.
    "You told me," he reminded her.
    Another pause; the conversation was more crucifying every time she came. Not for him 
so much as for her. She seemed to go through a trauma every time she spat a single word 
out.
    "I went to see the solicitors again." "Oh, yes." "It's all going ahead, apparently. 
They said the papers would be through next month." "What do I do, just sign them?" "Well 
. . . he said we needed to talk about the house, and all the stuff we've got together." 
"You have it." "But it's ours, isn't it? I mean, it belongs to both of us. And when you 
come out you're going to need somewhere to live, and furniture and everything. " "Do you