"Hi, Vic," Liv Hula said. "Get you something?" Then, as if he couldn't already see, "Your client's here."

It had been a quiet night. Earlier, a few tailors from the franchise chopshops along Straint came in to celebrate a win at the fights; they had been followed back from Preter Coeur by some tourists off a Beths/Hirston ship-probably the Pro Ana, to which, outbound on her twice-yearly loop of creatively selected Beach destinations, Saudade was little more than a fuel stop. For twenty minutes this was the cause of unhealthy excitement among Liv's shadow operators, but then one of the tourists remembered the name of a new venue off Antarctic Boulevard and they all left. That was the bar trade in a nutshell, Liv thought, as she tidied tables, added up the money in the till and washed the empty glasses, letting the warm water lave her hands. She had the blues for her old life, which was different than this. That afternoon, in her room upstairs, two things had happened.

First, she had encountered herself by accident in the mirror. The face she saw was too much her own, and too little like Elizabeth Kielar's face. It was tired of never owning a fur coat. It was tired of always being what it was. Its eyes looking out were no longer calm. Up in the Halo you could beat that, you could always reinvent, move yourself on. Because empty space is kind. Everything's negotiable out there. There's so little to run into. But down here your room is what you are.

The second thing that happened to Liv was this: waking from a shallow sleep, she sat on the edge of the unmade bed and looked out the window and saw Antoyne Messner walking past with Irene the Mona on his arm. Irene had on a new outfit, cropped mohair bolero, latex pedal-pushers, acrylic stilt-heels, all in popular neoteny pink; while the fat man was wearing the pale blue suit she made him buy when he started working for Paulie DeRaad, with his hair arranged in a ridged oily wave on top of his head. They looked ridiculous, but at the same time mysteriously dignified just by being together. They looked like the king and queen of the affect. Seeing them in that unaccustomed light, she had wondered if she should run downstairs, ask them why they never drank at her bar any more. Now, as she watched Vic Serotonin usher his client to a table by the window where they sat down and began to talk earnestly, she found herself thinking the same thing she had thought about Antoyne and the Mona:

Those two believe they've discovered something new. Good luck to them, then.

In fact Vic Serotonin was saying, "Maybe in four days we can risk it," and Mrs Kielar was already beginning to shake her head, no. It had to be sooner for her, she said, this was such bad news for her. Her nerves were worse. She wasn't sure, she said, she could wait another day. "I'm not sure I can wait an hour." And it was true, he thought. Whatever was consuming her from inside had upped its ante since she fucked Vic in the Hot Walls apartment.

"Three days, then," he offered.

She shook her head. He took her hand, which she was already beginning to pull away as he reached for it, and explained, "It's only because things are going on here I don't understand."

"No," she said.

"Two days," Vic said. "Two days, Mrs Kielar, you can allow me that. Something's wrong with Paulie, something's wrong in the site. The police are all over everything like a cheap suit."

Mrs Kielar, trying to avoid this information the way you would avoid a physical blow, got to her feet so suddenly her chair toppled over. She stared down at it as if a chair being knocked over was already the worst thing that could happen to either of them.

"I can't," she whispered.

At that point Vic didn't see a way forward. He was as puzzled by his own behaviour as by hers. "I'm waiting for something to happen," he remembered her saying, "and I don't even know what part of my life it will approach from." He got up and put his arm round her and set the chair back on its feet. "Look," he said, "there. You see? It's OK. It's no problem." Where his hand touched it, he could feel the whole thin apparatus of her right shoulder rigid and trembling. He was aware of the hot bones, Elizabeth Kielar inscribed through every one of them. "We'll be in there in forty-eight hours' time," he said. "I promise." She was like a hologram; if you looked, every part of her would prove to contain the whole you didn't understand. He tried to persuade her to sit down again. She clung to him instead. They ordered more drinks and sat on opposite sides of the table, not speaking but holding hands. Much later, when Edith Bonaventure walked into the bar dressed in her maroon wool coat and holding her father's site-journal, that was how she found the two of them. "Vic, you cheap shit," Edith said.

She went over and asked Liv Hula to give her a drink. "I'll take that here at the bar," she told Liv. "You don't mind if I sit on the stool and talk?"

"You're the customer," Liv Hula said.

"That's good, that's nice," said Edith. "It's nice because if I face you I don't have to look at that shit by the window." She assessed the bar a moment. "It's a nice business you have here," she advised Liv Hula, "but a little kicked about. It needs a refit. It needs a theme, something cheerful." She put down half her drink in one swallow and wiped alcohol out of the faint down on her upper lip. "Hey, Vic," she called, holding the journal up high in one hand so he couldn't mistake what it was, "Emil was right about you. See this? I walked all the way across town to give it you, now you can whistle."

"Jesus," Vic said.

"You can fucking whistle for it, Vic, because you're a cheap toilet and in the end where have you been? Nowhere." Edith finished her drink and stood up. "Thanks for that," she said to Liv Hula. "I enjoyed that. Goodnight."

Vic Serotonin was on his feet by then. He got to the door first and caught her by the wrists.

"Edith, we can talk," he said.

Edith laughed lightly. "No we can't, Vic," she said. "You made an error there."

Vic tried to think what to say to her. "Listen," he began, "whatever Emil says, something is changing in there." He already saw that this wasn't what she wanted to hear, but he couldn't stop. "A// our experiences of it might be false."

"How nice it would be if you grew up," she said wistfully, "either of you."

"Edith-"

"You know what this reminds me of?" Edith asked him, and her gesture seemed to take in all of it, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar, Liv Hula's bar, the long perspective of Straint Street that she wasn't even looking at, Saudade itself, which was nothing but sand on the Beach, a refuelling stop on someone else's big tour. "It reminds me of the fights."

"Edith-"

"It reminds me of that night at the fights," she said.

She looked down at his hands imprisoning her wrists, then back up at his face. "I don't give a shit what's in there, Vic." Unable to reply, he released her and she walked off down Straint in the rain, stopping once to add without turning round, "And you know it isn't about Emil either," after which the sound of her heels diminished along some simple, exact, inevitable acoustic curve. Vic watched her go. Back inside he found that Mrs Kielar had smashed a glass against the wall and was now sitting huddled like a child on the blackened floorboards by the window, staring along Straint Street towards the event site aureole-which could be seen, at the limits of vision, as a line of rusty walls, broken windows, concertina wire-and refusing to speak.

Liv Hula patiently swept up the broken glass.

"I'm losing my sense of humour for this," she told Vic. "Maybe you should find another office." While she thought to herself: This afternoon I was just down. Afternoon is a bad time to be alone anywhere.