It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniac worry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. There were hardly any Arrivals, apart from me. The business of the airport was all Departures. As I stood in some stalled passage and listened to the canned instructions I looked down on the lots and runways through the layered insult of dawn rain: all the sharks with their fins erect, thrashers, baskers, great whites — killers. Killers every one.

Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming - his one tragic flaw. When the moment arrived, in the office by the loading bay at the plant off the M4 near Bristol, with his great face crammed into the prickling nylon, and the proud woman shaking her trembling head at him, and Chick Purchase and Dean Pleat both screaming Do it. Do it (he still remembered their meshed mouths writhing), Keith had definitely failed to realize his full potential. He had proved incapable of clubbing the Asian woman to her knees, and of going on clubbing until the man in the uniform opened the safe. Why had he failed? Why, Keith, why? In truth he had felt far from well: half the night up some lane in a car full of the feet-heat of burping criminals; no breakfast, no bowel movement; and now, to top it all off, everywhere he looked he saw green grass, fresh trees, rolling hills. Chick Purchase, furthermore, had already crippled the second guard, and Dean Pleat soon vaulted back over the counter and self-righteously laid into the woman with his rifle butt. So Keith's qualms had changed nothing — except his career prospects in armed robbery. (It's tough at the top, and it's tough at the bottom, too; Keith's name was muck thereafter.) If he could have done it, he would have done it, joyfully. He just didn't have ... he just didn't have the talent.

I told him. Keith looked sceptical. This just wasn 't right. 'Mostly for theatre and television,' I said. Now all was clear. 'TV?' he said coolly. For some reason I added, 'I'm in TV too.'

Keith nodded, much enlightened. Somewhat chastened also; and I have to say it touched me, this chastened look. Of course (he was thinking), TV people all know each other and fly to and from the great cities and borrow each other's flats. Common sense. Yes, behind all the surface activity of Keith's eyes there formed the vision of a heavenly elite, cross-hatching the troposphere like satellite TV -above it, above it all.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bit­terness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.

Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not purposeful, but not difficult. Guy Clinch looked round his life for a dimension through which some new force might propagate. And his life, he found, was sewn-up, was wall-to-wall. It was closed. To the subtle and silent modulations of Hope's disgust, he started to open it. Guy had a job. He worked for the family business. This meant sitting about in a bijou flatlet in Cheapside, trying to keep tabs on the proliferating, the pullulating hydra of Clinch money. (It, too, was like Marmaduke: what would it get up to next?) Increasingly, Guy stopped going in and just walked the streets instead.

So one dud writer can usually spot another. When we were alone together in the kitchen Guy asked me what I did and I told him, stressing my links with various literary magazines and completely inventing a fiction consultancy with Hornig Ultrason. I can invent: I can lie. So how come I can't invent? Guy said, 'Really? How interesting.' I sent a sort of pressure wave at him; in fact I was rubbing my thumb and forefinger together beneath the table when he said, 'I've written a couple of things . . .' 'No kidding.' 'A couple of stories. Expanded travel notes, really.' 'I'd certainly be happy to take a look at them, Guy.' 'They aren't any good or anything.' 'Let me be the judge.' They're rather autobiographical, I'm afraid.' 'Oh,' I said. 'That's okay. Don't worry about that.

Every time he pushed open the plywood door, every time Trish came to welcome him on her knees, Keith was that little bit angrier. For this he would give Trish payment. God save us, what was he doing to himself? Why was he here, with her, with that, when he had funloving little Debbee, and sinuous Analiese (and Peggy and Iqbala and Petronella and Fran) ? Well, it was true that Trish had something to be said for her. Trish had a certain quality. She was nearest.

Earlier in the summer, while completing (with infinite pain and difficulty) his entry form for the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, the knockout interpub darts competition in which he was doing so well now, Keith pondered and agonized for several days before filling in the section marked hobbies. He wanted to put darts and leave it at that. But darts was work. It would be like saying that his hobbies were cheating, burgling and receiving. Besides, he had in the past won two self-sufficiency awards from the British Darts Organization — darts bursaries, darts scholarships, as it were, to help him in his bid to go pro. He wasn't too clear on all this (and the cash grants had kept Keith self-sufficient for about fifteen minutes each in the turf accountants), but a struggler in the world of small businesses wouldn't tell you that his 'hobby' was expanding a timber-yard or running a fag shop, now would he? What, then, were Keith's hobbies? He couldn't put birds. It might get back to Kath. He couldn't put horses or walking Clive or going to the pub. Pool and fruit machines had, if little else, the stamp of authenticity ... He toyed with certain fictions: potholing, rallying, growing vegetables. But his pride rebelled against the imposture. Growing vegetables? You must be ... In the end he searched his soul for the last time, white-knuckled his grip on the biro, and put TV.

In the days after their first meeting, the image of Nicola Six began to work on Keith's mind. It worked like television. He thought of her often — while inspecting a shop window in Oxford Street, while baring after his scattered urges in the last moments before sleep, while finishing himself off with Trish Shirt. Although many of these thoughts were frankly pornographic (but class porn, you know? Not like the rubbish you get here), by no means all of them were. He saw himself in lace-up swimming-trunks, on a lounger, frowning over a balance-sheet by a personal plunge-pool, and Nicola walking past in bikini and high heels, bringing him a drink and tenderly tousling his hair. 'LA innit,' he whispered. Or Keith in a tuxedo, on a patio, outside Palermo: glass table and candles, and her in a flowing gown. An international entrepreneur with wide business interests. Re­deemed, and freed from sorrow. On the other side. Where darts might yet take him. Where he belonged.