The Lives and Loves of Hana Lee

By KP Webster

Hana Lee has read more books than any other living person. She speaks nine languages, is fabulously wealthy and – on the downside – has killed somewhere in the region of 250 people. To be fair, however, most of them had it coming.

Concert pianist, nun, English teacher, sex worker, spy – Hana Lee has had such an uncommonly long and varied life that by the summer of 2012, she just wants to get it down on paper and get it over with. In the hope of finding an official biographer, she contacts ex-blogger and failed novelist Lucia Fornaciari and has her believe that she is the reincarnation of a 19th century concert pianist who accidentally killed her husband on the night of their wedding in 1830. In truth, however, Hana Lee's uniquely challenging gift is a great deal more bizarre than mere reincarnation.

Lucia, imagining Hana must be mentally ill, refuses to help her. Instead, feeling confused in a room full of clocks and a chair like an aphrodisiac, she tries to kiss her. It is only when Hana is attacked in south London and her attacker is killed in the process that Lucia agrees to help write the story of Hana's life.

Part contemporary love story, part historical biography, The Lives and Loves of Hana Lee is an extraordinary story of female love, rage and empowerment against the backdrop of two hundred years of male prejudice. By turns explicit, shocking, darkly funny and deeply moving, its cast of characters includes Parisian courtesans, ailing Samurai, sadistic gynaecologists and Sicilian sulphur miners. It also features walk-on parts for Toulouse Lautrec, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Palin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KP Webster
• Release date: Feb 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301248490

KP Webster

Karl Webster has written everything from dictionary definitions to Radio 4 comedy scripts, from translations for Italian cigarette-making machines to underground marketing campaigns. He has also worked as a researcher, an editor, a professional blogger, an actor, a travel writer, a teacher and a landscape gardener, of sorts. He was once fired by Loaded magazine whilst working for a different magazine entirely. He laughs about that.He wrote the book 'Bête de Jour :: The Intimate Adventures of an Ugly Man' under the name Stan Cattermole and as part of a rather strained publicity campaign, he appeared on Canada AM and GMTV with a paper bag on his head.His writing has been compared to the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Irvine Welsh, William Leith, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. He was also once accused of 'hovering somewhere between Dostoevsky, Wodehouse and Adrian Mole'. It is an accusation he vigorously denies.

Book preview

› A Mystery ‹

Chapter 1

Title: The Senator Who Got Old and Died

Body: So it’s been just over a month now since everybody’s favourite outspoken GOP homophobe, Senator Garry Thornlaw, died peacefully in his sleep in his Colorado home. (Already there will be those of you with faces twisted up in disgust that I’m even mentioning this poor guy’s name. ‘Let him rest in peace!’ I hear you cry. But wait – hear me out. This gets so much worse before it gets better.) (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t get better.)

So here’s the question: what if he didn’t die peacefully in his marital bed at all? Don’t worry, I’m not for one moment suggesting that he’s still alive – just that the circumstances of his death have been wildly misreported and were, if the state of his corpse was anything to go by, anything but peaceful.

Until just a couple of weeks ago, a 27-year-old Spanish guy named Alex Murcia was working as a desk clerk at the Merriweather Hotel in uptown Manhattan. Alex doesn’t work there anymore. In fact, Alex is no longer in the United States. What follows is a transcript of a letter I received this morning – an actual letter – in which Alex himself explains why....

...

I was working an all-nighter at the end of March. My shift was 11pm to 7am. It’s quiet. I’m the only guy on the desk. The Merriweather is a small hotel but it’s expensive so you don’t get deadbeats and junkies bothering you through the night like some places I’ve worked. To be honest, even weekends, usually you’re on your own from 1am. Generally I read, surf the net, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes outside in the street to keep myself awake and don’t see anyone till the first early risers get up to catch a flight out of town. But tonight this middle-aged guy in an expensive suit pulls up in a cab around 3.30am. As soon as he reaches the desk, I realise I recognise him, but at first I can’t place him. When he signs in as Horatio Alger, a name I definitely don’t recognise, I think maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I don’t recognise him after all.

He doesn’t say much to me but he’s polite and smiling. His eyes are glassy like he’s been drinking but he isn’t exactly drunk. He’s wearing a black pin-stripe suit, carrying a leather briefcase. A normal guy, I think, probably in town for a conference, been out late having a few drinks. Before he goes upstairs, he says to me, ‘I wonder if I could ask you to bring me a pot of very strong coffee at 7am tomorrow morning. It’s very important I get out of here by 7.30. Would that be possible?’ Like I say, he was very polite. I told him that I would make sure he received his coffee, no problem. Then he looks me in the eyes and he says, ‘Ah, you’re Spanish?’ I give him a nod. ‘Good people,’ he says. ‘Very hard workers.’ Now this strikes me as a pretty dumb thing to say – he should meet my brother Miguel if he thinks the Spanish are all hard workers – but also, it’s at that point that I remember who he is. I remember seeing him on TV talking about immigration and how he doesn’t mind certain nationalities being allowed into the country, certain God-fearing, hard-working nationalities. I mumble something – I thank him actually, like a schmuck – then I hand over the pass for his room and wish him a good night. Then he disappears into the elevator.

As soon as he’s gone, I get online and do a search. I remembered his name right off, as soon as he said, ‘Good people’. And there he is: Senator Garry Thornlaw. I switch to images and gaze at the fat American pie of his pasty white face, the flash of white hair and white bushy eyebrows, those little dark slits for eyes staring out at me from billboards and that bony finger pointing at the camera in that accusatory way he has. And it’s weird to think that he’s upstairs, directly overhead in Room 404, maybe no more than 50 metres away from me. I mean, I know there must be people out there who like this guy – he did get voted into the Senate after all – but I haven’t met any of them. All I know is there are people out there who want this guy dead.

So then I do a search for Horatio Alger to see if there’s a reason he’s pretending to be this guy. Turns out he’s some wholesome, family-values, rags-to-riches, American Dream advocate from a hundred years ago, which I suppose is pretty funny.

The rest of the night was quiet, things only starting to liven up after 6am. My shift was over at 7 but because I was pretty curious to see him again, I took his coffee up myself. Why I was curious to see him again I don’t really know. Personally I thought the guy was an asshole. He was everything that’s wrong with this country. Don’t get me wrong, I love the USA – I’ve been here nearly ten years and on the whole it’s been really good to me. But there’s a lot about it that sucks and this guy, and guys just like him, kind of sum all that up for me. You know what I’m talking about – people don’t count for shit and the bottom line is always dollars and cents. So I guess I wanted to see him again because it’s not often you get close to these people. It’s like you’d want to go and look at Bin Laden if he was still alive and staying upstairs, just to see if he’s a real person, like you and me.

Anyway, so I take him up his coffee and when he doesn’t answer after three knocks, I let myself in. He said it was important so I figure, sure, I’ll wake him up.

So I’ve worked in some pretty godawful places in the time I’ve been in New York, including strip joints, brothels and soup kitchens, so I’ve been around the block and seen pretty much all there is to see. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not easily shocked. And what I saw in that room, taken at face value, maybe wasn’t that shocking. It was just an old naked guy dead on a bed – believe me, he wasn’t the first naked dead guy I’ve seen. But if you’d seen him smiling at you just a few hours before, that made it different – that and two other important factors. One was the look on the guy’s face. He looked terrified – I mean, REALLY TERRIFIED, like there was a whole lifetime of fear pouring out of his eyes and his mouth and it was stuck there, frozen on to his face like a Halloween mask.

The other thing was that when he said goodnight and got into the elevator, he was 47 years old and probably looked a little younger because of the Botox and what-have-you, but less than four hours later, naked and dead on that hotel double bed, he looked, I don’t know, 65, 70 years old? It was that that really shocked me. What has a guy got to do to age more than 20 years in the space of a few hours?

Plus, he hadn’t been alone. There were two glasses on the table in the room and the senator and whoever he was with had been working their way through the mini-bar. So he must have had a visit from someone else already staying in another room, because nobody else came through reception. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to find out who that might be.

Naturally I went straight back down to reception and called the police. Within half an hour the place was infested with guys in suits. No uniformed cops, just Feds and CIA guys. I was taken downtown and questioned for six hours straight. Six hours. And I spent another four hours waiting around between interrogations. And they wanted to know EVERYTHING, like everything I’d ever done in the States, also back home in Spain, they wanted to know about my family, where they worked, what my grandparents did. They wouldn’t let me eat or sleep or even smoke a cigarette. I thought they always let you smoke a cigarette, man, at the very least. They treated me worse than an animal and I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not a thing. They wouldn’t even let me get a lawyer when I asked. They kept talking about terrorism and special cases. Terrorism. Suddenly I was a terrorist.

Then when they finally let me go, they told me in no uncertain terms that if I ever spoke to anyone about anything I’d seen or heard that night – they said if I even mentioned the senator’s name to anyone – I would be arrested and charged under the Patriot Act, and I’d be lucky if ever saw the light of day again. That’s what they told me. The light of day. And this is under Obama, man. It was the last straw.

At first I was frightened enough to do as I was told, but then when the story came out that the senator had died at home in bed with his wife and everything was all perfectly normal and apple pie and family values and Horatio Alger, I started to get angry.

Eventually I got to thinking, ‘To hell with America’. I’ve already been thinking of moving on for various reasons, and this whole thing has made up my mind for me. I’m done with it. By the time you receive this, my written testimony, I will be long gone. I don’t want to live here anymore. And if you print this story, you can bet your ass it will be denied. You’ll also be putting yourself at risk. You’ll probably think I’m paranoid or crazy but I swear that since that day, my every move has been monitored. That’s why I’m sending this on paper. And getting someone else to post it for me. I hope it makes it to you. If not, I don’t know. At least I tried.

People will say the picture is fake too. It isn’t.

Good luck, man. I’ll be watching, from a long, long way away.

...

So far, so crazy, huh?

To be honest, that’s what I thought too. There was no way this could be real. The guy ages 20 years overnight? Yeah, yeah, sure he does. So I talked to a couple of people I know who, if there was anything at all to the story, they would definitely know about it. One works for the NYPD, one for a prominent newspaper. Both of them advised me, and strongly, not to touch the story with a ten-foot pole. The cop told me outright there was nothing in it. He practically told me I was an asshole for believing what was tantamount to an urban myth. The journalist, however, told me there was a shutdown. All Thornlaw conspiracy stories, he told me, are embargoed. Permanently. He also said that if I knew what was good for me, I would keep my mouth shut.

Hell, if I knew what was good for me, Never Mind the Bandwidth wouldn’t be ‘New York City’s most precarious political blog’ (The Huffington Post).

And here’s the clincher.

Murcia gave me details of an email account he’d set up in an internet café. In that account, in a draft email, he’d uploaded a photograph he took in the Merriweather Hotel at 7.07am on March 1st, shortly before he went downstairs and notified the police. In the picture was the man he claimed to be Senator Garry Thornlaw, terrified, petrified and way, way old.

To be honest, I was in two minds about publishing this photograph. But then I was told not to, and I don’t like being told what to do. So hey, if this is fake, I’ll take it down and apologise. Hell, you can even have my blogger’s badge and gun. But if this is what it looks like – Senator Garry Thornlaw, shrivelled up, naked and dead in an NYC hotel room when he was supposed to be passing away peacefully in Crystal Springs, Colorado, then there’s some serious news being repressed here.

Image: Reproduction of iPhone photograph

Internet – you be the judge.

As always, comment, share, discuss. The truth is out there. Let’s track it down and shine an unfeasibly bright light in its face.

_

Posted by: Steve Band. May 2, 15:34.

...

Four minutes and 28 seconds after the above blog post was published, Steve Band’s website was shut down.

Chapter 2

Hana went home, took off the clothes she’d been wearing the night before and, swearing that this was definitely, definitely the last time, burned them in the large metal bin in the corner of her garden. She knew she didn’t have to burn her clothes – she was safe enough – but it had become something of a ritual. Standing over the flames, her green kimono wrapped tight around her white body, she watched the black smoke billowing from the beige overcoat and the cream dress with the single red wine stain. She burned the whole outfit, one garment at a time, then she returned to the ground floor of the three-storey Georgian townhouse where she lived alone in SW1, and enjoyed a long, almost unbearably hot shower.

After the shower, in kimono and slippers, Hana padded downstairs to the ground floor living room with the sky-blue walls, the improbably high ceiling and the enormous marble fireplace that had been converted into a work-area. The brown leather sofa and matching armchairs were barely ever used, but Hana was unusually fond of them. They made her feel human.

Kicking off her slippers and letting her kimono slip to the floor, Hana walked towards the large bay window with the wooden blinds closed to the outside world, and gazed into the first of two freestanding, full-length mirrors. Slowly, as if she were gazing upon a very intricate piece of Japanese art for the first time, she examined her face.

Her eyes were a little too bright and clear for her to be entirely comfortable with them. The irises were the same milk chocolate brown as the hidden hues of her hair and they sparkled just a fraction too intensely. Her nose was long but satisfyingly bulbous at the tip. Her lips were thick and fleshy and she had a natural pout that all at once appeared both petulant and seductive. She frowned.

Still frowning, she deepened the crease in her brow and narrowed her eyes so that she might gauge more clearly how old she looked. Somewhere around 30, she thought. Thirty-two at the most. She blinked at herself and sighed. It never got any easier.

Noticing that her skin was paler than it used to be and her face a touch shorter, she untied her still damp hair and let it fall onto her shoulder blades. It was wavy, full-bodied and not quite black. If she’d allowed it to dry and had examined it in natural light, Hana would have noticed that the chocolate brown of her eyes seemed to emanate from its layers. But that would never happen.

Finally, Hana stepped back from the mirror, altering the angle so that she could examine the rest of her body in both reflections.

Her breasts seemed slightly larger and were fuller and firmer than she remembered. She lifted them in her hands and let them drop and sway. Then she ran her hands across her newly flat stomach, her high, sharp hip-bones and over the smooth knoll of her buttocks. Turning to watch herself in the second reflection, she lifted her hands and performed a quick shimmy. The smile that toyed briefly with her lips was the first of the day and although she was in no mood to indulge it, there could be no doubt – she was in better shape than she’d ever been.

Although she was a little too attractive to be wholly content with the changes, Hana knew how to play it down. It began with the clothes.

Glossy plastic bags from the department stores she’d visited on her way home that morning were where she’d left them on one of the leather armchairs. She went to fetch them and dressed quickly. White sports bra and knickers, a simple green cotton vest, a grey hooded top and matching jogging bottoms. On her feet, short green socks and bright red trainers. Everything was brand new and unnecessarily expensive.

Picking up her house keys from the hook behind the front door, Hana left the house. She covered her head with the grey hood of her top, sauntered down the six stone steps, along the short path and through the wrought iron gate, where she turned left and began to run.

Hana loved to run. It gave her a distinct sense of purpose, even now, when every other purpose she’d ever found for her life was exhausted.

On this grey spring morning in April, Hana made for Green Park. After running for ten minutes and thinking hard about the options available to her, the ominous black clouds over London cracked open and drifted apart like a special effect in a Hollywood movie, allowing an eager sun to spread its careless smile across the city. For a moment it felt like a sign. Although she’d been alive long enough to know that in reality, signs were just something people invented to help convince themselves they were going in the right direction, she was still not averse – every once in a while – to reaching out for one. The clouds parting as they did, dramatically, almost self-consciously, felt like a straw of confirmation, so she clutched at it and made a firm decision: it was time to let go.

She had tried hard to make the world a less painful place, and felt on the whole that she’d had more than her share of success, but ultimately, one woman couldn’t really make that much of a difference. So she decided – as she drove her near perfect body through the city’s imperfect streets – enough was enough.

It was time to put an end to the killing – or whatever she chose to call it – and actively prepare for her own death.

Her preparations would begin with an email.

Chapter 3

Lucia Fornaciari was looking for work. She would do anything – anything at all – except write. Writing – out of necessity – was dead to her.

Lucia had been attempting to become a professional writer – a novelist – for 12 years and she figured that 12 years to fail at anything was at least a couple of years too many. It had got to a point where it was no longer steely determination, it was merely a pointless, painful waste of time.

She had been writing since she was 18 years old and in that time had completed 11 novels in which, as far as she could see, absolutely no one was interested. Not really. Not sufficiently. In the end, she self-published them all on the internet and that had been the final straw. Self-publishing was apparently no longer the shameful last resort of the perennial failure that it used to be, but that was only if you found enough readers to make a success of your work. Lucia had sold between 13 and 180 copies of each of her novels. It wasn’t enough. It was nowhere near enough.

Her website, where she’d been publishing short stories and talking about her life as a would-be writer for almost ten years, received an average of 40 visits a day. Most of those seemed to show up by chance because one of her short stories was entitled The Billion-Dollar Breasts That Killed Pornography. As well as the title, the story contained quite a few words that regularly appeared as the search items of bored, porn-fed adolescents.

In order to survive and pay her rent, Lucia had worked – ironically enough – as a writer. You could even say that she was a writer of fiction, but it was no fiction that she believed in. Lucia was a copy writer. She wrote words for advertising and publicity – sometimes direct mail, so-called because it tends to go directly from letterbox to recycling bin, sometimes advertising that appeared in magazines and occasionally even on television. She did very well as a copy writer and earned a good living, but with every day that went by, she felt just a little bit closer to hell.

‘All the words that no one ever reads,’ she wrote on her website on April 20th, the date of her 30th birthday. ‘That’s what I wrote. That was my speciality, my raison d’être. Some of them I really cared about – the stories and the novels – and nobody paid me for those. Some of them I really could not have cared less about – the junk mail and the endless bumf – and for those I was paid really quite well. Ultimately, the irony was too much to bear.

‘As regular readers will know – and I know there are a few of you out there, and I love you with all of my heart – when I was 28, I gave up copy writing. I’d saved enough money to devote myself, for two years, to the writing I love. I decided then that if I hadn’t got anywhere by the time I turned 30, then that was it. I’d quit. This morning I turned 30. Therefore, woman of my word that I most assuredly am, that’s it. I have given up. And already I can feel the relief coursing through me like ... like whatever – like is no longer my concern. All I see now is a future without the daily torture of being ignored. The handcuffs are off. I’m free!

‘Let’s face it – I’m facing it – there has to be more to life than the feeling that you’re wasting your time, and with that in mind, from now on I’m devoting myself to the things that everyone else has, or at least wants. I want a relationship that fulfils me, a job in which I’m appreciated, and one day a family in which I can find love and contentment. It’s not too late for those things I hope. I also want to travel. I want to drive across the United States and swim in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Mauritius. I had hoped that writing would pay for these excursions, but I was wrong. I’ll just have to get a proper job and save up like everybody else.

‘So this, my virtual friends, is the last time you’ll hear from me. I’ll leave this site here till the domain expires, then it will fall off the edge of the internet like the last leaf of a dying tree. Then, like that song you heard in a dream that wasn’t quite catchy enough to stay in your head through breakfast, I will be gone.

‘Thanks for reading.’

Lucia knew what was next. She’d thought about it a lot as her cut-off point for writing inched closer. She wanted to teach, specifically English, figuring that if she couldn’t create it with any degree of success, at least she could pass on her love of it to others. She wasn’t yet sure whether she wanted to teach children or adults. She loved the idea of helping little kids fall under the spell of words and stories, and maybe she could even inspire some of them to tell their own stories, and maybe they’d have more luck than she had with finding an audience. But she also loved the idea of teaching adult literacy. She knew there were many people whom society and the education system had failed, adults who had never experienced the unique pleasure of deciphering a series of symbols and squiggles on paper or screen, and finding themselves laughing or crying and somehow less lonely, enlightened by the feeling of connection to other human beings.

She would decide later. The first part of the teaching course was the same either way. She was enrolled to begin studies as a mature student in September. That gave her almost six months in which to enjoy a little part-time bar-work, maybe meet a few new people, and relish the freedom of the first summer in many years where she wasn’t obsessed with finishing what she hoped would be her breakthrough bestseller.

Then, on an indecisive afternoon on the first day of May, she received an email.

‘Dear Lucia,’ it read. ‘You don’t know me but I feel like I know you quite well. I’ve read everything you’ve ever written – or at least everything you’ve made available on your website and on Amazon. I think you’re an exceptional writer and I would love to talk to you about writing something for me. I know you said that you were through with writing and while I completely respect that, I hope that this project might make you reconsider. Also, I will be more than happy to pay you very well for your efforts. What do you think? I live in south London too, so if you’d like to meet just to talk, that would be no problem. Even if you’re not interested in the job, I would still love to meet you. I’m a really big fan. And I promise I’m not a weirdo!’

Lucia read the email through three times, trying to imagine what the job might be. The promise of not being a weirdo worried her. Who but a bona fide weirdo would promise off the bat that she wasn’t a weirdo? It was a hugely tempting and intriguing proposition, and the promise of financial reward was almost too much to resist. But she had given her word. She had to be strong.

Before she had the chance to change her mind, Lucia clicked the reply button and typed the following words: ‘Dear Hana. That’s so sweet of you. I’m really touched by your words, but my mind is absolutely made up. It’s too late now. No more writing for me. So thanks – thanks so much for thinking of me – but I have to decline.’

She sent the email and slapped shut the lid of her visibly battered laptop. She had done the right thing, she told herself. Nothing would have come of it.

Chapter 4

When Steve Band pressed the publish button on his piece about Garry Thornlaw, his heart was thumping loudly in his chest. He had landed himself in trouble before by posting what had turned out to be rather rash and unseemly allegations about right wing figureheads, but never before anyone who had recently died. Neither had he ever published anything against the advice of the NYPD. Neither had he ever published a photograph of a dead body. He wasn’t sure but he suspected he might be breaking some or other law right there. Ultimately, however, he had felt compelled to do so.

Steve trusted his instincts and his instincts told him that Alex Murcia’s story was true and that the picture he had posted on his blog was indeed a photograph of the dead senator, miraculously aged and apparently fatally horrified. How it had happened he had no idea, but Steve knew that there was a story there somewhere and if he got himself in trouble trying to get that story out into the open, then so be it. That was why he had one of the most widely read political blogs on the East coast. He figured that if he never got himself into trouble, then he wasn’t doing his job properly.

Having said that, he was scared.

The second the blog post went live, he stepped away from his desk as he always did, left his bedroom in the rented brownstone he shared in downtown Brooklyn and sashayed into the kitchen for coffee and snacks. His roommate Calvin was sprawled across a giant bean bag in front of a big screen TV, watching an episode of Family Guy and smoking a joint. ‘Hey,’ said Steve.

‘Yo, Bandwidth!’ Calvin raised a lugubrious hand and held it in the air like a scorecard.

Steve wandered through into the kitchen and prepared himself a pot of coffee. He was about to open the door to their refrigerator when he noticed Calvin silently offering him the joint. Steve immediately crossed the room and took it from him. ‘Thanks, man.’

‘Oh, shoot,’ said Calvin. ‘I forgot to tell you. Your mom called while you were out this morning. She said not to forget it’s your brother’s birthday.’

Holding smoke in his lungs, Steve’s eyes expressed exasperation. He handed the joint back to Calvin, then exhaled. ‘I am such an asshole,’ he said.

Back in the kitchen, Steve pulled his cellphone from his pocket and touched through to his brother’s work number. After two rings, his brother responded. ‘Hey, Jeff, it’s Steve. Happy birthday, bro ... No, mom did not just call... Of course I’m sure, you douche – she called this morning but I just got the message.’ He laughed a little excitedly, the grass from Calvin’s joint already buzzing in his brain. ‘How’s it going? You still got to work today, huh?’ He foraged in the refrigerator as his brother chatted. He found some old pizza and brought it out into the open, laid it on the work surface and checked his coffee impatiently. ‘No, I’m at home. Oh, you should check out the post I just put up, man. I think it’s going to upset a lot of people. Hell, it upset me and I wrote the goddamn thing ... No, I got this photo of Garry Thornlaw that’ll freak you out, it’s ... Excuse me?’ Steve’s tone had turned to stone. ‘It’s down?’

He tossed his half-eaten pizza slice onto the side and raced back into his bedroom, furiously clicking his mouse and reactivating the monitor of his Mac desktop before sitting down. He refreshed his blog page and sure enough, his site had disappeared. In its place was a 404 error message. Never Mind the Bandwidth could not be found.

‘Unbelievable!’ cried Steve. ‘How is that even poss... Jeff? Hello?’ Steve looked away from the computer screen to the phone in his hand. He tried calling his brother back but his phone was dead. He stared at the handset with his mouth open and his brain bouncing around in his skull like a pinball. Immediately he assumed that someone was closing him down, presumably as a result of the Thornlaw post. The CIA? That’s what Murcia had said. Homeland Security? The Feds? Who had the power to demand that his ISP take down his site without even issuing a warning? Was that even legal? He looked at the time on his computer. It had been less than 10 minutes since he’d published his blog post. He switched tabs to check his email, thinking at least he’d be able to see if any comments had made it through, but his email wasn’t loading. He tried refreshing other sites still open in other tabs. None of them refreshed. His connection had been severed. Knocking over his swivel chair in his sudden hurry to get out of the bedroom, he tore back through to the living room. ‘You’ve still got cable,’ he yelled.

‘It’s a DVD, man,’ Calvin mumbled, still wholly relaxed.

‘Do me a favour and check the cable reception, would you? Please.’

When Calvin clicked the remote and switched to cable, the screen turned to snow. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s out.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Steve stared at the TV screen, which seemed now to be broadcasting live from inside his own brain.

‘Why is cable out, dude? I can’t possibly live here without cable.’

‘I gotta go out,’ said Steve. ‘I gotta go see someone. If anyone wants to know, I’ve gone to San Diego to see my brother. I’ve been there all week, OK?’

‘What’s going on, man? Your coffee!’

But the front door had already banged shut and Steve was hurtling down the stone steps like he was racing a backdraft. He had a friend in Williamsburg. An ex-law student and something of a political activist. He’d be able to help him out. He could even hide out there if necessary. It was a 20-minute walk. A five-minute paranoid sprint.

Sweating and already out of breath, he darted out of the front door and onto the sidewalk. Two men in suits were closing the doors of the black Oldsmobile they’d just parked across the street. Steve froze as one of the men pointed a finger like it was the barrel of a gun. ‘Steve Band,’ he shouted. ‘We need to have a word with you.’

That was the moment that if there had been a soundtrack, it would have kicked in. It would have been pounding dance music, something loud, industrial and vaguely sinister. Early Prodigy would have been good. Full Throttle would have been perfect. As Steve hurled himself along the sidewalk, his heartbeat and breakbeat breath took the place of a soundtrack. He turned left at his first opportunity, managing to ascertain as he did so that he was not being pursued on foot. Dodging pedestrians like a pro-footballer, he kept moving, kept heading for Williamsburg. Williamsburg was sanctuary.

He slowed at a set of lights at a crossroads, and when the walk-sign flashed and the crush of pedestrians moved across the street, he tried his best to disappear into it, just for a moment, but then he was off again, straight on and through the other side like a paranoid torpedo. Too many people on the sidewalk so he cut into the street, tearing up the channel between the line of parked vehicles and the line of oncoming traffic. Cars honked at him. Drivers shouted abuse. He ran on regardless. He could hear the wind filling his ears, cutting into his throat and making his eyes water. If I get through this, he thought, I quit smoking. For good this time. Another junction was coming up ahead. Another right turn and he was home free. He was going to make it.

It never occurred to the driver in the car up ahead to check the street in front for crazy kids running in the road. Instead, he checked behind for traffic and on finding none, inched out into the street. He heard the thump of Steve Band’s leg cracking against his bumper and the crumple of his body falling into the street. Steve thought for a second he’d been shot. The pain cracked through his left knee, up his leg and directly into his chest like electric current. He went down instantly. Luckily the lane was momentarily free from traffic. You’re OK, he thought. You’re OK.

Unfortunately, it was his final thought, as the momentum of his paranoid sprinting sent him sliding over the traffic-free lane and directly into the path of a braking bus travelling in the same direction on the other side of the street. Steve’s upper body slid directly into the path of its front left wheel, crushing his chest and killing him instantly.

Unlike the body of Senator Garry Thornlaw in Alex Murcia’s photograph, Steve Band, dead, still looked like a little boy. He was 27.

Chapter 5

Hana’s second email came a week later. ‘Thanks for getting back to me. Although I can’t help feeling a little disappointed, I completely respect your decision and I won’t attempt to dissuade you from it – much as I might secretly like to. Just as a matter of interest, however, I want you to know that I read your short story, Donna Decent’s Plea For Good Form, when it was on your website and it completely destroyed me. It was and remains absolutely the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read. It left me feeling genuinely, physically distressed and ever since then, I’ve hoped you might be able to help me. And I definitely need help. I can write fairly well I think – not as well as you but well enough. The problem is that I just don’t enjoy it. In fact, I kind of hate it. Writing makes me want to rip my own eyes from their sockets and throw them through the nearest window. I would go that far. Even writing this email is giving me palpitations. The other thing that made me approach you is that you once wrote on your blog that you regretted not having any supernatural stories to tell. You see, my story is a little ... peculiar, let’s say. Anyhow, I swear I’m not trying to dissuade you.

‘My own selfish concerns aside, I do hope that at some stage you decide to go back to writing because you have a rare gift and I do hate to see rare gifts go to waste.

‘Good luck with everything that comes your way.

‘Lots of love,

‘Hana.’

Lucia cursed out loud. Then she let out a low growl of frustration. She was sitting on the living room floor of her Brixton one-bedroom flat, pushing her back against the metre-wide strip of wall between the two front windows, attempting to keep it straight, trying hard to stop it hurting. She’d had a grumbling, burning pain in and around the small of her back since she was a teenager. It recurred frequently, like a bad dream or a nasty memory she couldn’t quite bury, no matter how hard she tried. She visited an osteopath when she could afford to and she swore it made a difference, but deep down she wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘Damn it,’ she spat.

Finally, Lucia’s boyfriend, sitting on the fake leather armchair in the centre of the room, responded. ‘What’s up, babes?’ His name was Hector. He preferred Heck.

Hector was watching a recording of The Weakest Link on Lucia’s TV. He enjoyed all television quiz shows. He enjoyed the feeling he got when he answered a question that the contestants on the show had failed to answer. The Weakest Link was one of his favourites. He had gone so far as to apply to be a contestant. ‘Bank!’ he yelled before pausing the show with the remote control in his left hand. With his right hand he held a dumbbell with 20 kilograms of iron weights attached to it and while he watched, he completed 20 slow curls before switching hands. Hector had biceps like honeydew melons and had, on occasion, been known to refer to himself as ‘a physical intellectual’. The first time he’d said it to Lucia, she’d had to ask him what it meant. ‘My body is my brain,’ he’d told her. She had nodded slowly. ‘Then what is your brain?’ He’d shrugged, unsure. ‘Don’t spoil it,’ he’d said.

‘That bloody woman has written back to me,’ Lucia replied. ‘The one who wants me to write something for her.’ As she spoke, Lucia moved her body at the waist from left to right, as slowly and as far as she could.

‘Trash it,’ said Hector. ‘You’ve already told her you’re not interested, right? Bin her. Simples.’

Lucia pulled a face. ‘Did you just say, simples? Jesus, Heck. You’re simples.’

‘Oy!’ Hector replied. ‘I just got six questions in a row!’

Lucia rolled her eyes. ‘The thing is, though, Hector, she seems to have read everything I’ve ever written. She’s even read the Donna Decent story and nobody’s read that. That was only online for a week or two. That’s the one I took it down because it was too depressing. Even for me. You won’t remember.’

‘Did I read that one?’

‘Of course not,’ Lucia snapped.

Lucia and Hector had been together for three and a half years. They were 18 months in when Hector finally admitted that he didn’t like the things that Lucia wrote. ‘It’s just too harrowing,’ he said. ‘You know? I like to laugh when I read things. I like a bit of a fantasy, a bit of escapism. You know?’ Lucia had been upset. Not so much that he didn’t like what she wrote, but that he’d pretended for so long that he did. ‘But I do like the way you write!’ he insisted brightly if unconvincingly. ‘I like the way you tell the story and everything. You’ve definitely got a way with words. I just don’t see why it all has to be so sad. You’re not like that in real life.’

Lucia had no response. She liked to write sad stories, that’s all there was to it. She felt that if she didn’t write it out, the sadness might come out of her in other ways and she might end up depressed like her mother, mad like her mother, harassing people on the underground with copies of The Watchtower like her mother. Lucia didn’t like to talk about her mother.

Hector didn’t like to talk about anything, but he hadn’t always been like that. Or if he had always been like that, it hadn’t mattered so much because there’d been plenty on the surface to keep Lucia happy. Hector used to be gentle, before his physical intellectualism took over, and very attentive. They would do things together – cinema, theatre, exhibitions, hotels, weekends away. Every week they would do something. Then, wearied by time, it just began to slide. Lucia felt it was as much her fault as it was Hector’s. They’d just grown accustomed to one another, the same way one grows accustomed to an old cardigan, before eventually, one tires of it entirely and throws it in the bin.

‘That was the one about the girl who’s abused by her uncle,’ said Lucia, waiting for the discomfort that Hector would not even try to suppress.

‘Whoa!’ cried Hector. ‘TMI, Lucy. TMI.’ Hector didn’t like to talk about anything dark or sad or real. He liked a bit of fantasy, a bit of escapism. At first, that aspect of his personality had come as a relief for Lucia, as there was plenty that she didn’t particularly want to talk about either, but after three and a half years, it didn’t feel quite right that there were still hugely important events in her life about which he had no idea.

‘The point is though, she has read it, this woman, this stranger, and I think she might be the only person who ever has, or at least the only person who’s ever said anything about it to me, and that means something.’

Hector swapped the dumbbell back over to his right hand, and the remote control over to his left. Lucia could see that he was itching to get back to his quiz show. Hector sighed. ‘You know what I think, babe. I’m made up that you’re moving on from the writing, you know I am. I’m not about to deny it. I never thought it was healthy, all this doom and gloom. And if this woman’s trying to drag you back into it ... I don’t know. You know it doesn’t make you happy though.’

‘Oh, so your advice is that I should just bottle it all up, is it? Just bury all the sadness deep inside and pretend it isn’t there – tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, BANG! Is that what you want?’

Hector placed the dumbbell on the floor. He was becoming annoyed. ‘Hold on a minute – how did this happen? How come I’m the bad guy all of a sudden? You’re the one who wanted to stop writing. If you want to start again, go right ahead.’

Lucia closed her eyes and placed the backs of her hands on her knees. After a long, slow sigh, her eyes still closed, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Hector. It’s not your fault, I know. It’s my fault. I don’t know what I want.’

A furrow formed in Hector’s brow. That sounded like the kind of thing that preceded a split-up, he thought. He placed the remote control and the dumbbell on the floor and moved across the carpet to his girlfriend. He took the laptop from the cross of her calves and tossed it on to the settee. Then he placed a huge white hand on one of Lucia’s cheeks and kissed her hard and slow on the other. His mouth felt like a foreign language on her face, and not