For a moment Mangon panicked, unable to visualize why she should have left, immediately assuming that she had discovered his plot with Alto.

Then he realized that never before had he visited the studio until midnight at the earliest, and that Madame Gioconda had merely gone out to the supermarket. He smiled at his own stupidity and sat down on the couch to wait for her, sighing with relief.

As vivid as if they had been daubed in letters ten feet deep, the words leapt out from the walls, nearly deafening him with their force.

‘You grotesque old witch, you must be insane! You ever threaten me again and I’ll have you destroyed! LISTEN, you pathetic—’ Mangon spun round helplessly, trying to screen his ears. The words must have been hurled out in a paroxysm of abuse, they were only an hour old, vicious sonic scars slashed across the immaculately swept walls.

His first thought was to rush out for the sonovac and sweep the walls clear before Madame Gioconda returned. Then it dawned on him that she had already heard the original of the echoes — in the background he could just detect the muffled rhythms and intonations of her voice.

All too exactly, he could identify the man’s voice.

He had heard it many times before, raging in the same ruthless tirades, when deputizing for one of the sound-sweeps, he had swept out the main boardroom at Video City.

Hector LeGrande! So Madame Gioconda had been more desperate than he thought.

The bottom drawer of the dressing table lay on the floor, its contents upended. Propped against the mirror was an old silver portrait frame, dull and verdigrised, some cotton wool and a tin of cleansing fluid next to it. The photograph was one of LeGrande, taken twenty years earlier. She must have known LeGrande was coming and had searched out the old portrait, probably regretting the threat of blackmail.

But the sentiment had not been shared.

Mangon walked round the stage, his heart knotting with rage, filling his ears with LeGrande’s taunts. He picked up the portrait, pressed it between his palms, and suddenly smashed it across the edge of the dressing table.

‘Mangon!’

The cry riveted him to the air. He dropped what was left of the frame, saw Madame Gioconda step quietly from behind one of the flats.

‘Mangon, please,’ she protested gently. ‘You frighten me.’ She sidled past him towards the bed, dismantling an enormous purple hat. ‘And do clean up all that glass, or I shall cut my feet.’

She spoke drowsily and moved in a relaxed, sluggish way that Mangon first assumed indicated acute shock. Then she drew from her handbag six white vials and lined them up carefully on the bedside table. These were her favourite confectionery — so LeGrande had sweetened the pill with another cheque. Mangon began to scoop the glass together with his feet, at the same time trying to collect his wits. The sounds of LeGrande’s abuse dinned the air, and he broke away and ran off to fetch the sonovac.

Madame Gioconda was sitting on the edge of the bed when he returned, dreamily dusting a small bottle of bourbon which had followed the cocaine vials out of the handbag. She hummed to herself melodically and stroked one of the feathers in her hat.

‘Mangon,’ she called when he had almost finished. ‘Come here.’

Mangon put down the sonovac and went across to her.

She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly very steady. ‘Mangon, why did you break Hector’s picture?’ She held up a piece of the frame. ‘Tell me.’

Mangon hesitated, then scribbled on his pad: I am sorry. I adore you very much. He said such foul things to you.

Madame Gioconda glanced at the note, then gazed back thoughtfully at Mangon. ‘Were you hiding here when Hector came?’

Mangon shook his head categorically. He started to write on his pad but Madame Gioconda restrained him.

‘That’s all right, dear. I thought not.’ She looked around the stage for a moment, listening carefully. ‘Mangon, when you came in could you hear what Mr LeGrande said?’

Mangon nodded. His eyes flickered to the obscene phrases on the walls and he began to frown. He still felt LeGrande’s presence and his attempt to humiliate Madame Gioconda.

Madame Gioconda pointed around them. ‘And you can actually hear what he said even now? How remarkable. Mangon, you have a wondrous talent.’

I am sorry you have to suffer so much.

Madame Gioconda smiled at this. ‘We all have our crosses to bear. I have a feeling you maybe able to lighten mine considerably.’ She patted the bed beside her. ‘Do sit down, you must be tired.’ When he was settled she went on, ‘I’m very interested, Mangon. Do you mean you can distinguish entire phrases and sentences in the sounds you sweep? You can hear complete conversations hours after they have taken place?’

Something about Madame Gioconda’s curiosity made Mangon hesitate. His talent, so far as he knew, was unique, and he was not so naïve as to fail to appreciate its potentialities. It had developed in his late adolescence and so far he had resisted any temptation to abuse it. He had never revealed the talent to anyone, knowing that if he did his days as a sound-sweeper would be over.

Madame Gioconda was watching him, an expectant smile on her lips. Her thoughts, of course, were solely of revenge. Mangon listened again to the walls, focused on the abuse screaming out into the air.

Not complete conversations. Long fragments, up to twenty syllables.

Depending on resonances and matrix. Tell no one. I will help you have revenge on LeGrande.

Madame Gioconda squeezed Mangon’s hand. She was about to reach for the bourbon bottle when Mangon suddenly remembered the point of his visit. He leapt off the bed and started frantically scribbling on his wrist-pad.

He tore off the first sheet and pressed it into her startled hands, then filled three more, describing his encounter with the musical director at V. C., the latter’s interest in Madame Gioconda and the conditional promise to arrange her guest appearance. In view of LeGrande’s hostility he stressed the need for absolute secrecy.

He waited happily while Madame Gioconda read quickly through the notes, tracing out Mangon’s child-like script with a long scarlet fingernail. When she finished he nodded his head rapidly and gestured triumphantly in the air.

Bemused, Madame Gioconda gazed uncomprehendingly at the notes. Then she reached out and pulled Mangon to her, taking his big faun-like head in her jewelled hands and pressing it to her lap.

‘My dear child, how much I need you. You must never leave me now.’

As she stroked Mangon’s hair her eyes roved questingly around the walls.

The miracle happened shortly before eleven o’clock the next morning.

After breakfast, sprawled across Madame Gioconda’s bed with her scrapbooks, an old gramophone salvaged by Mangon from one of the studios playing operatic selections, they had decided to drive out to the stockades — the sound-sweeps left for the city at nine and they would be able to examine the sonic dumps unmolested. Having spent so much time with Madame Gioconda and immersed himself so deeply in her world, Mangon was eager now to introduce Madame Gioconda to his. The stockades, bleak though they might be, were all he had to show her.

For Mangon, Madame Gioconda had now become the entire universe, a source of certainty and wonder as potent as the sun. Behind him his past life fell away like the discarded chrysalis of a brilliant butterfly, the grey years of his childhood at the orphanage dissolving into the magical kaleidoscope that revolved around him. As she talked and murmured affectionately to him, the drab flats and props in the studio seemed as brightly coloured and meaningful as the landscape of a mescalin fantasy, the air tingling with a thousand vivid echoes of her voice.

They set off down F Street at ten, soon left behind the dingy warehouses and abandoned tenements that had enclosed Madame Gioconda for so long. Squeezed together in the driving-cab of the sound truck they looked an incongruous pair — the gangling Mangon, in zip-fronted yellow plastic jacket and yellow peaked cap, at the wheel, dwarfed by the vast flamboyant Madame Gioconda, wearing a parrot-green cartwheel hat and veil, her huge creamy breast glittering with pearls, gold stars and jewelled crescents, a small selection of the orders that had showered upon her in her heyday.