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The next morning Jimmy saw Connor in his office. He talked about the friction that existed between himself and Tony Ruddle. It seemed to be personal, he said, a matter of chemistry. There had been, and he paused, outbursts.

Connor's head lifted slowly, but he didn't say anything. At
times he could seem almost oriental. The half-moon eyelids. The use of silence.

Jimmy waited.

At last Connor spoke. ‘I believe Mr Ruddle's having some kind of domestic problem. His wife.'

‘I see.' Jimmy thought he'd probably said enough. ‘Well, I just wanted you to be aware of it,' he added. ‘I didn't want anything to jeopardise the project.'

Connor nodded. ‘I appreciate that.'

‘As a matter of interest,' Jimmy said, ‘how's it going?'

Connor's veiled look cleared. He rose to his feet and began to pace up and down in front of the blinds, his arms behind his back, his left wrist enclosed in his right hand. ‘You know, James,' he said, excited suddenly, ‘I hadn't imagined the scale of it.'

‘The scale?'

Connor said that Lambert had taken him to see the project at the beginning of the week.

‘What's it like?' Jimmy asked.

‘Peaceful.' Connor smiled.

He had watched subjects sleeping in their private cubicles, he said. It was a strange sight. Outside the ward a control room had been set up. The subjects were kept under strict medical surveillance. They were also monitored on video. Lambert had hired three assistants who worked round the clock, in shifts. Every night they processed between twenty and twenty-five people. That was, roughly speaking, one hundred and fifty people a week. Six hundred a month.

‘In mid-July,' Connor said, ‘we hit two thousand.'

‘July? I thought it was a three-month programme.'

‘Since it seems to be running so smoothly,' Connor said, ‘I can think of no reason why we shouldn't extend it for another month.' He stopped and looked at Jimmy levelly, from under his heavy eyelids. ‘Can you?'

‘Well, no.' Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘Do you think I could see it too, sir?'

‘No, I'm afraid that –'

‘I'd be very interested,' Jimmy said. ‘After all,' he added gently, ‘it was my idea.'

‘I'm aware of that. But Lambert's in charge up there and this is his directive. “No sightseeing tours” was how he put it.'

No sightseeing tours. Jimmy could imagine Lambert using those exact words. He was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. His involvement in the project had never been one hundred per cent.
There are things I'm keeping from you.

‘By the way,' he said, brightening a little, ‘did you hear about the balloons?'

Connor nodded.

The day before, a dozen of the Kwench! balloons had been caught in a freak air current over Central London. Swooping down into Westminster, almost to ground level, they had bombarded Prince Charles as he arrived at the Abbey for a memorial service. The balloons had appeared on TV as the last item in the early evening news, the anchorman referring to Kwench! in passing as a ‘marketing phenomenon'. That morning the
Mirror
had published a photograph of Prince Charles looking startled as a Kwench! balloon bounced off his shoulder. Jimmy was thinking of having T-shirts printed. The national media had become involved, the Royal Family too. There was no doubt about it. Kwench! was well and truly launched.

On a humid evening halfway through June, Jimmy ran up the steps that led out of Piccadilly Circus tube. A man stood on the street-corner, selling Japanese-style paper fans; the heatwave was in its second week. Jimmy turned north, loosening his tie. Simone had invited him to an opening, and he was late, as usual. It had been a momentous day, though. Truly momentous. At a meeting of the project team that morning he had finally been able to demonstrate the impact Kwench! had had on the soft-drinks market in the six weeks since its launch. The Nielsen off-trade figures had come in, revealing widespread availability in supermarkets throughout the country. The on-trade figures were looking healthy too. Kwench! appeared to have cannibalised almost every sector of the market: the fruit carbonates, obviously, but also the lemonades, the juices, and even, to some extent, power brands like Coke and Pepsi. Sales were a staggering 24 per cent ahead of budget, a statistic that could only partly be explained by the hot weather. Jimmy's personal contribution to this early success couldn't be quantified, of course, but, then again, it couldn't be underestimated either. Just recently, with Tony Ruddle still away on holiday – some kind of rest-cure, presumably – there had been talk of a re-shuffle. According to one rumour, Jimmy was being considered for a promotion in the autumn. As a member of Connor's inner circle, as Connor's protégé, in fact, he was
beginning to feel that there was no limit to what he might achieve.

Seven-thirty was striking as he arrived at the gallery, and it was so crowded that people had spilled out on to the pavement. Jimmy pushed through the glass doors and on into a huge white space where spotlights burned like miniature suns. Simone was deep in conversation with two men. One of them had eyes that seemed to float in their sockets, as if suspended in formaldehyde. Jimmy decided not to interrupt – at least, not for the time being. Instead, he moved towards the bar.

He drank his first drink quickly, and was just reaching for a second when he noticed an old woman standing at his shoulder. Her eyebrows had been drawn on in brown, and she was smoking a cigarette in an extravagantly long tortoiseshell cigarette-holder. But it was her glasses that intrigued him most: with their dark-yellow lenses and their thick black frames, they looked as if they might have been made during the fifties, in a city like Istanbul or Tel Aviv.

‘I hope you don't think I'm one of those people who wear sunglasses at night,' she said when he complimented her on her appearance. ‘They're for my eyesight. I have photophobia.' She looked past him, into the room, and, drawing on her cigarette, let the smoke dribble from one corner of her mouth. ‘Ah, here's my niece.'

They were joined by a girl in her early twenties, wearing a sleeveless orange dress. Her hair was black, and hung in tangled ropes below her shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes looked shaded-in, as if she had not been sleeping well.

‘This wine,' and she made a face, ‘it's foul.'

‘Yes, it is,' said the older woman, though she didn't seem particularly disturbed by it.

‘I wish they had Kwench!.' The girl turned to Jimmy. ‘It's a new soft drink. You should try it.'

Jimmy couldn't believe what he was hearing.

‘What,' the girl said. Because he was staring at her, not saying anything.

‘Kwench!?' the old woman said. ‘What's Kwench!?'

The girl began to explain Kwench! to her aunt. Jimmy was still staring at the girl. Could she really be one of his ambassadors? She was certainly saying the right things. But maybe that was just a coincidence; after all, the secretary on the tube would have sounded exactly the same. That orange dress, though – was that coincidental too?

Touching him on the arm now, the girl told him she was getting through three or four cans of Kwench! a day. Her fridge was full of it. In fact, she said, and she began to laugh (a happy ambassador!), she was probably going to have to buy a bigger fridge. And she opened her eyes wide, signalling that things had got completely out of hand.

He was laughing as well. He had never imagined that an ambassador could be funny. Earnest, yes. Remorseless. But not funny. This girl, though – she was like someone you might meet at a party, someone you might think of taking home …

He watched her push her hair away from her face, as if she was walking in a forest and her hair was a stray branch or bramble that blocked her path. He noticed how her bracelet tumbled down her forearm towards the dark crease of her elbow –

Imagine if he told her where he worked!

All of a sudden he began to feel claustrophobic. The girl was still talking, talking, talking – and always about the same thing, the only thing she could think of. He received a vivid, flashed image of the inside of her head. Her brain appeared to have liquefied. Not only that, but it was carbonated too, each cell brimming with frenetic orange bubbles. He could almost hear it fizzing.

The spotlights burned; the room blackened at the edges. Muttering an excuse, he turned and plunged into the crowd …

He emerged at last and stood on the pavement, sweating. Cool air, car horns. The mingled scents of jasmine and fast food. He doubled over, retching. Nothing there. He slowly straightened up again. Lambert had been right to deny him access to the project. Obviously you could get too close.

He leaned against an iron railing, let his head tilt backwards on his neck. A solitary pale-pink cloud floated in the sky above Hanover Square. It looked like something that had been mislaid, he thought, and the strange thing was, its owner hadn't even realised.

Sitting high above the swimming-pool on a wooden bench, Jimmy watched the officials walk up and down in their white outfits, name-tags dangling on frail silver chains around their necks. At the shallow end, the girls stood about in bathrobes, their faces serious and eager, their voices hushed. Instrumental music filtered at low volume through the sound system. Crystal Palace on a Saturday afternoon.

During the last month and a half he must have phoned the baths at Marshall Street and Seymour Place on at least a dozen different occasions with enquiries about the synchronised swimming, but the training sessions always seemed to take place at midday, or in the early evening, and he rarely left the office before seven. Then, one lunchtime that week, he had tried a new approach. He called Marshall Street and asked if they had a girl training there, a girl with short blonde hair.

‘You mean Karen?'

He took a chance. ‘Yes. That's her.'

‘She's just leaving.'

‘Could you put her on?'

There was a jumble of sounds, a silence, then a voice said, ‘Karen here.'

‘My name's Jimmy Lyle,' he said. ‘I met you at the Kwench! party. In that hotel in Kensington.' He paused, hoping he wasn't talking to the wrong person. ‘You were part of the exclamation mark,' he said, ‘remember?'

‘That was weeks ago,' she said.

His heart turned over. ‘I know.' he said. ‘I'm sorry. Slow of me.'

She laughed. ‘You weren't slow the last time I saw you.'

No, he thought. But there were reasons for that.

‘Are you doing anything this weekend?' he asked.

‘I've got a competition. At Crystal Palace.'

‘Maybe I could come along.'

‘It'd probably be boring for you.'

He smiled. ‘Probably.'

So far, though, he had no regrets. Leaning forwards, with his arms resting on the bench in front of him, he felt lulled by the atmosphere, almost drugged.

For half an hour the girls warmed up. They swam rapid, stylish widths of crawl, or else they simply floated in the shallow end, rolling their shoulders so as to loosen the muscles. He noticed Karen immediately. She was wearing a white rubber hat that said WARNING on the front, and on the back, in smaller letters, SWIMMING CAN SERIOUSLY IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH. He watched her drink from a litre bottle of Evian, one hand propped on her hip. He watched her smooth some kind of gel on to her hair. He didn't think she'd seen him yet.

Then, at two o'clock, there was an announcement, the words merging under the glass roof, blurring into one continuous hollow sound. The judges took their seats. According to the programme, the first part of the competition – ‘Figures' – was scheduled to last three hours. Only one Karen appeared on the list of entrants –
24. Karen Paley.
So now he knew her name.

And suddenly, it seemed, the competition was beginning. A girl in a black one-piece costume swam towards the deep end, moving sideways through the water, almost crablike. When she drew level with the judges, she flashed a smile that was wide and artificial – the smile of an air hostess, a beauty queen. She turned on to her back. Floated for a moment,
so as to compose herself. Then executed the required figure – which, in this case, was called FLAMINGO BENT KNEE FULL TWIST. One by one they came, the girls, in seemingly endless succession. They all smiled the same smile, all followed the same sequence of movements, yet Jimmy didn't find it in the least monotonous. If anything, the opposite was true. He felt he could have watched it almost indefinitely. It was like a highly esoteric form of meditation. The warm air, the green water. The repetition … Looking around, he saw that most people had fallen into a kind of trance – not just the spectators and the officials, but the girls themselves: the way they swam to the side of the pool when they had finished, so languorous, so dreamy, as if they had been hypnotised by their own performances. And, all the time, that music playing – slowed-down, slurry versions of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow' and ‘Lara's Theme', Officials in white uniforms, the continual murmuring of voices, music that echoed eerily under a high glass roof … it reminded Jimmy of visiting a hospital, somehow, or an asylum: all this going on, but separate, parallel – cocooned.

At last he heard Karen Paley's number called, and there she was below him, rolling on to her back and straightening her legs. He couldn't help noticing her body as she lay on top of the water, her breasts just lifting clear of it, the fabric of her costume clinging. He saw her take a breath. Slowly her hands began to revolve, slowly her head and shoulders disappeared beneath the surface. In less than a minute it was over, and she was reaching for the silver steps and climbing from the pool. While she waited for her marks, she caught sight of him, high up on his wooden bench; the smile she gave him was quite different to the smile she had given the judges only moments before. Afterwards, she walked the length of the pool, her blonde head lowered, as if deep in thought. She moved like a dancer, her bearing upright, her feet slightly splayed. He watched her pick up an ice-blue cloth and, bending, rinse it in the water at the shallow end. She wrung it out and wiped
the moisture off her body, then she put on a dark-green robe and a pair of stretchy socks with soles, not unlike the slippers you get on aeroplanes sometimes.