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eyes swung around the room to take in the rebellious sepoys. He sat down heavily and began to sob.
    He sobbed and sobbed. His heavy shoulders heaved and shook. His wails filled the room. When Simmo opened the door to the corridor they filled the corridor as well. Eventually the Headmaster came with Mr Doherty, the gym teacher, and they led Mr Vello away, for ever.
    So now you know how it was that I killed Mr Vello. Murdered him. You don’t think that’s enough? You think I’m being hard on myself? Children can be nasty after all – without meaning to be. But I meant to be, I really meant to be.
    Last night I had one of my worst Mr Vello dreams yet. I was in Calcutta, it was 1857 – the Indian Mutiny was in full swing. Screaming fourteen-year-old sepoys broke into my villa and dragged me away. Their faces were distorted with blood lust and triumph. Dhiran Vaz hauled me along by the collar of my tunic. He and Rhamon took me and threw me in a cell, a tiny close cell, no more than twenty-feet square. And then they threw in the others, the other victims of the Mutiny: all my guests. All the guests I’ve ever had on Fein Time Tonight, one after another they came pressing into the cell, and each time one entered there was new roar of approval from the crowd of sepoy classmates massed on the dusty parade ground outside. I was pressed into the wall, tighter and tighter. My eyes filled with sweat but my throat was parched. I got a pain as sharp as a stuck bone when I tried to swallow. My thirst was oppressive, I longed for something, anything to drink.
    And then Mr Vello arrived. He was in his Yorkshire County Cricket Club blazer, as ever. The chat-show guests passed him over their heads and then wedged him down beside me. He was still crying. ‘Why did you do it, Fein?’ he whimpered. ‘Why did you do it?’ And he was still whimpering when I buried my teeth into the leathery dewlap of his throat; still whimpering when I began to suck the life out of him.

A Short History of the
    English Novel

‘All crap,’ said Gerard through a mouthful of hamburger, ‘utter shite – and the worst thing is that we’re aware of it, we know what’s going on. Really, I think, it’s the cultural complement to the decline of the economy, in the seventies, coming lolloping along behind.’
    We were sitting in Joe Allen and Gerard was holding forth on the sad state of the English novel. This was the only price I had to pay for our monthly lunch together: listening to Gerard sound off.
    I came back at him. ‘I’m not sure I agree with you on this one, Gerard. Isn’t that a perennial gripe, something that comes up time and again? Surely we won’t be able to judge the literature of this decade for another thirty or forty years?’
    ‘You’re bound to say that, being a woman.’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘Well, insomuch as the novel was very much a feminine form in the first place, and now that our literary culture has begun to fragment, the partisan concerns of minorities are again taking precedence. There isn’t really an “English novel” now, there are just women’s novels, black novels, gay novels.’
    I tuned him out. He was too annoying to listen to. Round about us the lunchtime crowd was thinning. A few advertising and city types sipped their wine and Perrier, nodding over each other’s shoulders at the autographed photos that studded the restaurant’s walls, as if they were saluting dear old friends.
    Gerard and I had been doing these monthly lunches at Joe Allen for about a year. Ours was an odd friendship. For a while he’d been married to a friend of mine but it had been a duff exercise in emotional surgery, both hearts rejecting the other. They hadn’t had any children. Some of our mutual acquaintances suspected that they were gay, and that the marriage was one of convenience, a coming together to avoid coming out.
    Gerard was also a plump, good-looking man; who despite his stress-filled urban existence still retained the