After it's over we cut to another scene and there's somebody who might be the little guy again and he's still strapped to a chair but this time it's a tall hospital chair with wheels and a little fold-away table in front of him and the straps holding his torso would be easy to undo but his hands are limp. There's some sort of board behind his head and a towel or something round his forehead holding his head upright but the eyes Christ the eyes there's nothing there and McDunn says Persistent Vegetative State they call it apparently; Persistent Vegetative State and it looks it man it looks it.

And then of course there are the other two. First it's Azul and his girlfriend. She's traumatised and dehydrated but otherwise unharmed but he's got soul brother's limbs where his own ought to be; necrosis like frostbite, blood-death at the extremities but the extremities start at shoulder and groin; he's alive but if you were him you'd rather not be. Arms salesman; okay the Avenger the Equaliser the Total Fucking Nutter went for the legs too but still, and the editor spiked, and the rapist — lenient judge raped and the pornographer poisoned and stroked and the man who was so callous about the bloodshed in the Iran/Iraq war forced to watch his penned animals die like cattle like soldiers like cattle and then bled to death in his own private fountains of blood and the businessman who put profits before safety and not only helped kill a thousand people but then tried to get out of paying the survivors and dependants any compensation gets his own gas explosion — blevey is the technical term apparently — and fuck me whoever he is (assuming he is a he), he's got a sense of humour or at least irony why he's produced what's almost a snuff video effectively a snuff video if you mean brain-death anyway it's the closest anyone will admit to ever having seen or found one even the Obscene Pubs Squad who've been looking for years but although everybody assumes they exist nobody's ever seen one until old gorilla man comes along and just makes his own, specifically to warn off any other porn merchants thinking of dealing in snuff! It's hilarious, it's really ironic and you explain all this to McDunn and you laugh because it actually isn't the fault of the police you're not sleeping it's the nightmares where you're stalked by a gorilla with the voice of a baby and a huge syringe and he wants to fuck you with it, isn't that hilarious? You can't sleep you're actually providing your own sleep deprivation and you say hey, next thing you know I really will be falling down the stairs! but he doesn't seem to get the joke and then it's back to the cell and then the interview room with the barred, opaqued windows so you can't see out and they switch on the tape-machine recording everything as usual and it's getting more bizarre; they get me to do a Michael Caine voice! They ask me to impersonate Michael fucking Caine, can you believe that? And then there's this technician or something here and they ask me to breathe in helium from a mask and make me repeat some of the things gorilla man said on the video so I feel like I'm becoming him they're trying to make me him; I don't think I sound the same as the guy on the brain-snuff video but fuck knows what they think there are too many to know what the fuck they think; loads of them, officers from all over the fucking place with different accents, London, Midlands, Welsh, Scottish, elsewhere, God knows, it's not just Flavell and McDunn though I still see them now and again especially McDunn who looks at me kind of weird most of the time like he can't really believe it was me did all these things and I get this bizarre feeling that he thinks I'm kind of pathetic I mean that in a grudging, still-determined-to-bust-the-fucker way he actually has more respect for gorilla man than he does for me because I've just gone to pieces under the questions and the things they put in my head with those photographs and that video (ha which means gorilla man has already put stuff into my head, already has fucked my brains, filling my head with the idea of that, the vision, the meme of that) and I thought I was some tough cookie but I was wrong I'm just a dunked digestive baby I'm soft I'm flopping I'm disintegrating and that's why unless I'm the best fucking actor he's ever seen McDunn can't accept I was capable of the things gorilla man did, yet so much of the evidence, especially the dates and times that sort of stuff, points at me not to mention that piece of TV-crit I did that reads like a hit-list now.

And it just goes on keeps going on another night another nightmare and then back to the interview room again and the tape machine again and more questions about Stromefirry-nofirry and Jersey and flights and that's when they tell me about the other one that's when they say oh by the way your best friend Andy is dead blown up in the hotel when it burned down; probably beaten to death first head stoved in but of course you probably know all that because you did that too, didn't you?

I lied about something. Earlier. I told it the way it felt, not as it actually was. Or the way it feels and actually is. Whatever.

'Andy; Yvonne."

'Hi," she says, shaking his hand.

'And that's William out there," I tell Andy. "With the big sword."

Andy turns and watches William. William; masked, clad in white, grasping his sabre and suddenly lunging forward, one leg darting ahead. His opponent jumps back and tries to fend off the blows with his own sabre but he's off-balance and William presses forward, swinging the sabre in a hacking, sweeping motion, whacking the edge of the heavy curved blade into the side of his opponent's torso.

"Aw, rats," the other guy says, as William stands back, relaxing. They take off their masks and William conies over to us, mask under his arm, sabre hanging from his hand, his face red and sheened with sweat, glistening in the sports hall's brilliant lights. I introduce him and Andy.

Andy with his short hair and his blazer and neatly creased jeans, face handsome but a little spotty, expression slightly disdainful and wary. He's twenty-one; two years older than us, but William looks the more confident and assured.

"Hi," William says, tossing back some blond hair fallen over his forehead. "So you're Cam's soldier boy."

Andy smiles thinly. "You must be… Willy, is it?"

I sigh. I'd hoped these two would get on.

Yvonne taps William on the shoulder with her mask. She's been fencing too, her long black hair tied back from her face, her face bright with sweat. I think she looks like some Italian princess, daughter of an ancient minor house with no real pretensions but still casually opulent; huge faded villas in Rome and on the Grand Canal and in the Tuscan hills. "Shower," she tells him. "We have to get stuff ready for tonight." She smiles at me. "Quick drink in the bar, ten minutes?"

"Great," I say. Andy is silent; Yvonne turns to him.

"Coming to the party?"

"Yes," he says. "If that's all right."

"Of course." She smiles.

"Ah! Hot hot hot!"

"What?"

"Took the hot chilli… crunched on a whole fucking green chilli… ha…" Yvonne says, fanning her mouth and hanging onto my arm. "Woof; thanks." She reaches into my vodka and lemonade and hoiks out an ice cube. "Here," she says thickly, handing a joint while she rolls the ice cube round in her mouth and tries to breathe through it at the same time. I'm grinning widely at her; she's frowning hurtfully at me. Andy is at my side but then ducks away into the throng. The music is loud, the campus flat packed with people. It's a warm May evening, the exams are over and everybody's partying. The windows are open to the night, spilling the sound of the Pretenders" first album out over the slope of grass towards the small loch and the lights of the library and Admin buildings on the far side.