‘Did your father ever make you feel guilty, Saul?’

Something had been poisoned between the two of them when Saul was about sixteen. He had been sure this was an awkwardness that would pass, but once it had taken root the bitterness would not go. Saul’s father forgot how to talk to him. He had nothing more to teach and nothing more to say. Saul was angry with his father’s disappointment. His father was disappointed at his laziness and his lack of political fervour. Saul could not make his father feel at ease, and his father was disappointed at that. Saul had stopped going on the marches and the demonstrations, and his father had stopped asking him. Every once in a while there would be an argument. Doors would slam. More usually there was nothing.

Saul’s father was bad at accepting presents. He never took women to the flat when his son was there. Once when the twelve-year-old Saul was being bullied, his father came into the school unannounced and harangued the teachers, to Saul’s profound embarrassment.

‘Do you miss your mother, Saul? Are you sorry you never knew her?’

Saul’s father was a short man with powerful shoulders and a body like a thick pillar. He had thinning grey hair and grey eyes.

The previous Christmas he had given Saul a book by Lenin. Saul’s friends had laughed at how little the ageing man knew his son, but Saul had not felt any scorn — only loss. He understood what his father was trying to offer him.

His father was trying to resolve a paradox. He was trying to make sense of his bright, educated son letting life come to him rather than wresting what he wanted from it. He understood only that his son was dissatisfied. That much was true. In Saul’s teenage years he had been a living cliche, sulky and adrift in ennui. To his father this could only mean that Saul was paralysed in the face of a terrifying and vast future, the whole of his life, the whole of the world. Saul had emerged, passed twenty unscathed, but his father and he would never really be able to talk together again.

That Christmas, Saul had sat on his bed and turned the little book over and over in his hands. It was a leather-bound edition illustrated with stark woodcuts of toiling workers, a beautiful little commodity. What Is To Be Done? demanded the title. What is to be done with you, Saul?

He read the book. He read Lenin’s exhortations that the future must be grasped, struggled for, moulded, and he knew that his father was trying to explain the world to him, trying to help him. His father wanted to be his vanguard. What paralyses is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear. This is tar, and this is what it does, and this is the world, and this is what it does, and this is what we can do to it.

There was a long time of gentle questions and monosyllabic answers. Almost imperceptibly, the pace of the interrogation built up. I was out of London, Saul tried to explain, I was camping. I got in late, about eleven, I went straight to bed, I didn’t see Dad.

Crowley was insistent. He ignored Saul’s plaintive evasions. He grew gradually more aggressive. He asked Saul about the previous night.

Crowley relentlessly reconstructed Saul’s route home. Saul felt as if he had been slapped. He was curt, struggling to control the adrenaline which rushed through him. Crowley piled meat on the skeletal answers Saul offered him, threading through Willesden with such detail that Saul once more stalked its dark streets.

‘What did you do when you saw your father?’ Crowley asked.

I did not see my father, Saul wanted to say, he died without me seeing him, but instead he heard himself whine something inaudible like a petulant child.

‘Did he make you angry when you found him waiting for you?’ Crowley said, and Saul felt fear spread through him from the groin outwards. He shook his head.

‘Did he make you angry, Saul? Did you argue?’

‘I didn’t see him!’

‘Did you fight, Saul?’ A shaken head, no. ‘Did you fight?’ No. ‘Did you?’

Crowley waited a long time for an answer. Eventually he pursed his lips and scribbled something in a notebook. He looked up and met Saul’s eyes, dared him to speak.

‘I didn’t see him! I don’t know what you want… I wasn’t there!’ Saul was afraid. When, he begged to know, would they let him go? But Crowley would not say.

Crowley and the constable led him back to the cell. There would be further interviews, they warned him. They offered him food which, in a fit of righteous petulance, he refused. He did not know if he was hungry. He felt as if he had forgotten how to tell. ‘I want to make a phone call!’ Saul called as the men’s footsteps died away, but they did not return and he did not shout again.

Saul lay on the bench and covered his eyes.

He was acutely aware of every sound. He could hear the tattoo of feet in the corridor long before they passed his door. Muffled conversations of men and women welled up and died as they walked by; laughter sounded suddenly from another part of the building; cars were moving some way off, their mutterings filtered by trees and walls.

For a long time Saul lay listening. Was he allowed a phone call? he wondered. Who would he call? Was he under arrest? But these thoughts seemed to take up very little of his mind. For the most part he just lay and listened.

A long time passed.

Saul opened his eyes with a start. For a moment he was uncertain what had happened.

The sounds were changing.

The depth seemed to be bleeding out of all the noises in the world.

Saul could still make out everything he had heard before, but it was ebbing away into two dimensions. The change was swift and inexorable. Like the curious echoes of shrieks which fill swimming pools, the sounds were clear and audible, but empty.

Saul sat up. A loud scratching startled him: the noise of his chest against the rough blanket. He could hear the thump of his heart. The sounds of his body were as full as ever, unaffected by the strange sonic vampirism. They seemed unnaturally clear. Saul felt like a cut-out pasted ineptly onto the world. He moved his head slowly from side to side, touched his ears.

A faint patter of boots sounded in the corridor, wan and ineffectual. A policeman walked past the cell, steps unconvincing. Saul stood tentatively and looked up at the ceiling. The network of cracks and lines in the paint seemed to shift uneasily, the shadows moving imperceptibly, as if a faint light were being moved about the room.

Saul’s breath came fast and shallow. The air felt stretched out taut and tasted of dust.

Saul moved, reeled, made dizzy by the cacophony of his own body.

Above the stripped-down murmurings, slow foot steps became audible. Like the sounds Saul made these steps cut through the surrounding whisper effortlessly, deliberately. Other steps passed them hurriedly in both directions, but the pace of these feet did not change. They moved steadily towards his door Saul could feel vibrations in the desiccated air.

Without thought, he backed into a corner of the room and stared at the door. The feet stopped. Saw heard no key in his lock, but the handle turned and the door swung open.

The motion seemed to take a long long time, the door fighting its way through air suddenly glutinous. The complaints of the hinges, emaciated with malaise stretched out long after the door had stopped moving.

The light in the corridor was bright. Saul could not make out the figure who stepped into his cell and gently closed the door.

The figure stood motionless, regarding Saul.

The light in the cell performed only a rudimentary job on the man.

Like moonlight it sketched out nothing but an edge. Two eyes full of dark, a sharp nose and pinched mouth.

Shadows were draped over the face like cobwebs. He was tall but not very tall; his shoulders were bunched up tight as if against the wind, a defensive posture. The vague face was thin and lined; the long dark hair was lank and uncombed, falling over those tight shoulders in untidy clots. A shapeless coat of indiscriminate grey was draped over dark clothes. The man plunged his hands into his pockets. His face was turned slightly down. He was looking at Saul from beneath his brows.