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Chapter OneDisillusioned by the Actual1999: Towards the end of things, someone asked Michael Kearney, "How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium?" This was their idea of an after-dinner game up in some bleak Midlands town where he had gone to give a talk. Wintry rain dashed at the windows of the private dining room and ran down them in the orange streetlight. Answers followed one another round the table with a luminous predictability, some sly, some decent, all optimistic. They would drink until they fell down, have sex, watch fireworks or the endless sunrise from a moving jet. Then someone volunteered:"With the bloody children, I expect."This caused a shout of laughter, and was followed immediately by: "With somebody young enough to be one of my children."More laughter. General applause.Of the dozen people at the table, most of them had some idea like that. Kearney didn't think much of any of them, and he wanted them to know it; he was angry with the woman who had brought him there, and he wanted her to know that. So when it came to his turn, he said:"Driving someone else's car between two cities I don't know."He let the silence develop, then added deliberately, "It would have to be a good car."There was a scatter of laughter."Oh dear," someone said. She smiled round the table. "How dour."Someone else changed the subject.Kearney let them go. He lit a cigarette and considered the idea, which had rather surprised him. In the moment of articulating it-of admitting it to himself-he had recognised how corrosive it was. Not because of the loneliness, the egocentricity, of the image, here in this enclave of mild academic and political self-satisfaction: but because of its puerility. The freedoms represented-the warmth and emptiness of the car, its smell of plastic and cigarettes, the sound of a radio playing softly in the night, the green glow of dials, the sense of it as an instrument or a series of instrumental decisions, aimed and made use of at every turn in the road-were as puerile as they were satisfying. They were a description of his life to that date.As they were leaving, his companion said:"Well, that wasn't very grown-up."Kearney gave her his most boyish smile. "It wasn't, was it?"Her name was Clara. She was in her late thirties, red-haired, still quite young in the body but with a face already beginning to be lined and haggard with the effort of keeping up. She had to be busy in her career. She had to be a successful single parent. She had to jog five miles every morning. She had to be good at sex, and still need it, and enjoy it, and know how to say, in a kind of whin- ing murmur, "Oh. That. Yes, that. Oh yes," in the night. Was she puzzled to find herself here in a redbrick-and-terracotta Victorian hotel with a man who didn't seem to understand any of these achievements? Kearney didn't know. He looked round at the shiny off-white corridor walls, which reminded him of the junior schools of his childhood."This is a sad dump," he said.He took her by the hand and made her run down the stairs with him, then pulled her into an empty room which contained two or three billiard tables, where he killed her as quickly as he had all the others. She looked up at him, puzzlement replacing interest in her eyes before they filmed over. He had known her for perhaps four months. Early on in their relationship, she had described him as a "serial monogamist," and he hoped perhaps she could now see the irony of this term, if not the linguistic inflation it represented.In the street outside-shrugging, wiping one hand quickly and repeatedly across his mouth-he thought he saw a movement, a shadow on the wall, the suggestion of a movement in the orange streetlight. Rain, sleet and snow all seemed to be falling at once. In the mix, he thought he saw doze