V.

Wars begin in August. In the temperate zone and twentieth century we have this tradition. Not only seasonal Augusts; nor only public wars.

Hung up, the phone now looked evil, as if it schemed in secret. Profane flopped on the air mattress. In the kitchen the Saint Bernard began to lap beer.

"Hey, he going to puke?"

The dog puked, loud and horrible. Winsome came charging in from a remote room.

"I broke your alarm clock," Profane said into the mattress.

"What, what," Winsome was saying. Next to Murray Sable a girl-voice began talking drowsy in no language known to a waking world. "Where have you guys been. " Winsome ran straight at the espresso machine; broke stride at the last moment, jumped on top of it and sat manipulating the taps with his toes. He had a direct view into the kitchen. "Oh, ha, ho," he said, sounding as if he'd been stabbed. "Oh, mi casa, su casa, you guys. Where is it you've been. "

Charisma, head hanging, shuffled around in a greenish pool of vomit. The Saint Bernard was sleeping among the beer bottles. "Where else," he said.

"Out rollicking," said Fu. The dog began to scream at humid nightmare-shapes.

Back in August 1956, rollicking was the Whole Sick Crew's favorite pastime, in – or outdoor. One of the frequent forms it took was yo-yoing. Though probably not inspired by Profane's peregrinations along the east coast, the Crew did undertake something similar on a city-scale. Rule: you had to be genuinely drunk. Certain of the theater crowd inhabiting the Spoon had had fantastic yo-yo records invalidated because it was discovered later they'd been sober all along: "Quarterdeck drunkards," Pig called them scornfully. Rule: you had to wake up at least once on each transit. Otherwise there'd only be a time gap, and that you could have spent on a bench in the subway station. Rule: it had to be a subway line running up and downtown, because this is the way a yo-yo goes. In the early days of yo-yoing certain false "champions" had admitted shamefaced to racking up scores on the 42nd Street shuttle, which was looked now on as something of a scandal in yo-yo circles.

Slab was king; after a memorable party a year ago at Raoul, he and Melvin's, a night he and Esther broke up, he'd spent a weekend on the West Side express, making sixty-nine complete cycles. At the end of it, starved, he stumbled out near Fulton Street on the way uptown again and ate a dozen cheese Danishes; got sick and was taken in for vagrancy and puking in the street.

Stencil thought it all nonsense.

"Get in there at rush hour," said Slab. "There are nine million yo-yos in this town."

Stencil took this advice one evening after five, came out with one rib to his umbrella broken and a vow never to do it again. Vertical corpses, eyes with no life, crowded loins, buttocks and hip-points together. Little sound except for the racketing of the subway, echoes in the tunnels. Violence (seeking exit): some of them carried out two stops before their time and unable to go upstream, get back in. All wordless. Was it the Dance of Death brought up to date?

Trauma: possibly only remembering his last shock under ground, he headed for Rachel's, found her out to dinner with Profane (Profane?) but Paola, whom he had been trying to avoid, pinned him between the black fireplace and a print of di Chirico's street.

"You ought to see this." Handing him a small packet of typewritten pages.

Confessions, the title. Confessions of Fausto Maijstral.

"I ought to go back," she said.

"Stencil has stayed off Malta." As if she'd asked him to go.

"Read," she said, "and see."

"His father died in Valletta."

"Is that all?"

Was that all? Did she really intend to go? Oh, God. Did he?

Phone rang, mercifully. It was Slab, who was holding a party over the weekend. "Of course," she said, and Stencil echoed of course, silent.

Chapter Eleven

Confessions of Fausto Maijstral

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have committed, or the humours we do go in and out of. It may be only the rooms cube – having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault.

Let me describe the room. The room measures 17 by 11 by 7 feet. The walls are lath and plaster, and painted the same shade of grey as were the decks of His Majesty's corvettes during the war. The room is oriented so that its diagonals fall NNE/SSW, and NW/SE. Thus any observer may see, from the window and balcony on the NNW side (a short side), the city Valletta.