‘Tell me about it.’ Louis panned the camera across a group of female partygoers.

  Was he ogling their underwear? It wouldn’t have surprised me. And then I saw it: the word ‘Nightshot’ written on the body of the camera. I was about to challenge him when I spotted Clio, on the far side of the sitting room, wearing a long, dark red wig, vintage black strapless dress and matching full-length gloves. She was dancing wildly with Hannibal Lecter, dressed in a blue boilersuit and leather facial restraint.

  ‘Who’s Clio come as?’ I asked, nodding in her direction. She had her arms wrapped around Lecter’s shoulders.

  ‘Clio?’ Louis turned the camera towards her. The nightshot function works best with dark clothes in bright lighting. ‘Can’t you tell by the black satin dress? Rita Hayworth, of course. In Gilda. You know an image of her in that outfit was put on the first nuclear bomb to be tested after World War Two?’

  I looked again at Clio, the way she was dancing in her Rita Hayworth dress, eyes laser-locked on Lecter’s in his freakish leather mask. I didn’t recognise him, but there was a grotesque choreography about their dancing that made me want to throw up. She was right. I should never have come. But then, as I watched, unable to take my own eyes off her, he seemed to whisper something in her ear, and she abruptly pulled away from him. He stood there in his mask, gimlet eyes widening in surprise, as if he’d been stabbed.

  ‘Go after her,’ a voice said behind me, as Clio walked out into the courtyard. It took me a moment to realise it was Louis. I started to turn around. ‘Don’t look at the camera,’ Louis ordered. ‘Just walk across the room and find Clio outside.’

  I knew Louis was filming me as I made my way across the crowded room. It was so embarrassing. The party was brimming with the arts set, tomorrow’s stars, and there I was, a total fraud, an imposter. Why not point the camera at someone else? Like the guy in the corner in a Shawshank Redemption prison outfit, who had already starred in a BBC drama. Hollywood and the West End now beckoned. I was just a boring first-year medic who had scratched an acting itch.

  ‘Go on,’ Louis urged as I headed outside to find Clio, necking a bottle of Beck’s as I went.

  Would she want to talk to me? Not if Louis was filming over my shoulder. If anything, the music was louder out the back. A stack of speakers had been positioned beside open French windows in the courtyard and the sound was bouncing off the brick walls. I walked past, trying not to worry for my cochleas, and saw Clio by the back fence. She was on her own, smoking a cigarette.

  I glanced over my shoulder as I approached, sensing that Louis was no longer with me. Sure enough, he’d disappeared, melted into the night. No doubt he was still filming from somewhere, but I was glad that he wasn’t visible.

  ‘Rita?’ I said to Clio, with mock politeness. ‘Rita Hayworth?’

  She stared up at me. Her eyes were vacant, bloodshot, and she wasn’t smiling as she looked me up and down.

  ‘And you are…?’ she asked with barely concealed contempt.

  ‘Kiefer Sutherland,’ I said. ‘Apparently. You know – Nelson from Flatliners?’ This charade wasn’t working. ‘You never told me it was fancy dress.’

  ‘I told you not to come.’ She looked back at the house and inhaled deeply on her cigarette.

  ‘I enjoyed our trip to Grantchester,’ I said.

  ‘That was yesterday.’

  I hadn’t experienced Clio in this sort of mood before. I rode the silence for a few seconds, hoping that things might improve. They didn’t.

  ‘Are they comfortable?’ I asked, nodding at her long gloves, desperately thinking of something to say. They went all the way up to her shoulders, like stockings.

  ‘Better than asking if I come here often, I suppose.’

  Why was she being so off with me?

  Someone was approaching us. Lecter, the student she’d been dancing with a few minutes earlier. Clio had clocked him too. Mask off now, he was smoothing down his shiny hair, black as wet tar.

  ‘See you around,’ she said to me, walking back towards the house.

  ‘Charming,’ Lecter said, watching her go. His accent sounded American. Lecter was English in The Silence of the Lambs, except when he was impersonating Clarice Starling, so I guessed it was genuine, that he wasn’t in character. His eyes lingered on Clio’s arse as he took a sip of red wine. ‘The biggest cock-tease in Cambridge,’ he added, turning to me.

  ‘Is that what you said to her?’ I asked. I could feel my blood pressure rising. ‘When you were dancing together?’

  I surprised myself, speaking to him like that, but I had nothing to lose. The less time we spent chatting, the better for both of us.

  ‘You were watching us?’ He raised an amused eyebrow.

  ‘Not exactly. It was hard to miss.’

  He laughed sarcastically. ‘Do you really want to know what I told her?’

  I didn’t have time to say no.

  ‘I told her I wanted to fuck her French brains out. Dresses like a whore, what does she expect?’

  I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply through my nostrils, tried to shut out Lecter’s leery smile, his foul breath, control the anger rising through my limbs like floodwater, but all I could think of was what had happened that night in Newlyn. Images sped through my head. The red mist was descending, just like it had on the North Pier. It was as if I was right there again, hearing Tom moan as they started to swing him by his arms and legs over the edge. I attempted to reason with Tom’s tormentors, explain that he couldn’t swim, but they weren’t listening, told me to ‘get back to Bodmin’. I tried to physically intervene, but one of them stopped me. Tom yelled out again. He was desperate now, begging for his life, and that triggered something in me. I’m not a violent man, but I totally lost it with the posh bloke who was holding me back. I managed to break free, pushed him away with a guttural roar, and he slipped and fell. I didn’t care. I needed to save Tom.

  But I was too late. The sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea – followed by a brief, sickening silence. Did they realise that they’d gone too far? For a second, we all just stood there, shocked in our different ways. And then I noticed that the student I’d pushed was still on the ground. Why hadn’t he moved? Got up? Had he hit the back of his head on the cobbles when he slipped? I wanted to help him – I was scared by his stillness, the thought that I might be responsible – but then something bobbed to the surface of the sea. Tom. He was floating, face down in the water. I scrambled down the metal ladder on the quayside, managed to drag him onto a ledge, and he spluttered back into life, vomiting oily water.

  One of the uni students peered down over the edge of the pier at me. We didn’t say anything, just stared at each other, our eyes full of fear. And then a car pulled up and the group lifted their friend to his feet – he was conscious now, thank God – and helped him into it, before speeding off into the night.

  I looked up at Lecter, hearing his dismissal of Clio again. Dresses like a whore, what does she expect?

  ‘I suggest you keep away from Clio – and me,’ I said, flexing my fingers as I walked back into the party.

  I’m not a violent man.

  27

  May 1998

  I wanted to keep on walking, out through Louis’ party and into the night, after my encounter with Lecter. My exchange with Clio was bad enough, but I hung pathetically on to her parting words, hoping that I might see her around. It was Lecter who frightened me, the primal anger his words had stirred, feelings that I thought were long dead and buried. I’d moved on, turned my life around and never wanted to go back there. Tonight, in Louis’ garden, was the first time since those Newlyn days that I’d felt such emotions and they scared me.

  I gave up trying to chat with Clio – whenever I caught her eye she looked away – and forced myself to be sociable, fuelled by too much Beck’s. Louis introduced me to some of his less weird friends upstairs on the landing. He seemed to have stopped filming me, which was a relief, but he kept producing white hard-boiled eggs, peeling and eating them, scattering their shells like litter. ‘Symbols of the soul,’ he said, slipping another smooth egg into his mouth. ‘Watch the film.’ He also told me to help myself from a drawer in the second-floor bathroom to whatever drugs took my fancy before they ran out – ‘just ask me for the key’ – but I stuck to the beer.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said later, an arm around my shoulders. It must have been after midnight. I knew where we were going and this time I was too drunk to resist. Once I start on the beer, I can’t seem to stop. A legacy of my nights in the Swordy. ‘Adam’d drink the piss of a smuggler’s donkey,’ as one of my fishing mates used to say. Now, somewhere in the back of my head, a voice shouted at me to walk away, but I ignored it. The film of Aldous on rotten.com had nothing to do with Louis. I didn’t care about it any more. Far more important was the chance to parade through one of Louis’ famed parties with the host. It was a signal to his friends that I was now one of them, a member of his inner circle. That I had arrived. Made my mark on the Cambridge arts scene. Played Doctor Faustus and here I was, guest of honour. A first-gen medical student from Cornwall. I could see a thread running from my dad’s abstract paintings through to my late-night reading of Hemingway in my attic room to being a star of this arts party. It all seemed to make sense in my drunken mind. It was meant to be. And my transformation would lead me into the arms of Clio.

  People stepped aside as we went up to the second-floor bathroom. Louis locked the door behind us. Pulling out another key, he slid open a wide drawer beneath the sideboard and talked me through the smorgasbord of posh highs on offer: hard-stamped gold-bar Ecstasy pills, Mexican mushrooms, Californian medical weed, Valium and individual pouches of the finest Colombian cocaine. A world away from what we used to get wasted on in Newlyn, where it was mostly weed, and salty weed at that – ‘sea hash’ that had been thrown overboard by smugglers and was then caught in trawlers’ nets. But I wasn’t about to start dabbling in hard drugs at Louis’ invitation. I’ve seen too many stressed-out fishermen get hooked on heroin, blowing their minds and hard-earned cash on a quick fix before heading out to sea again. If it wasn’t heroin, it was ketamine.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, swallowing. ‘I’m fine, really.’ An image of a naked Aldous came and went. Some of my fellow medics are into cocaine, having studied its effect on the brain and convinced themselves that, by understanding the underlying chemical processes, they’re in some way immune to its dangers. Immortal.

  ‘Shall I leave you to it?’ Louis asked. ‘Give you some time on your own?’

  ‘It’s OK, honestly,’ I repeated, but he could see me staring at the drugs.

  ‘Clio’s in a mood, isn’t she?’ he said, sounding almost impressed by the strength of her sulkiness.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I replied. I didn’t find it easy talking to Louis about Clio at the best of times, let alone when I was drunk.

  ‘It’s usually me who sulks,’ he says.

  ‘So you said. Or Gabe.’ I was curious about his brother’s depression, especially since attending a psychology lecture last week. At present, there are still no biological markers for major depressive disorder.

  Louis gave me a strange look, as if I’d been too familiar. ‘Actually, I hoped Gabe would come tonight, that you might meet him. He used to love a good party.’

  ‘He’s not here?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not so well.’

  I couldn’t reveal that I knew it was depression, didn’t want to land Clio in trouble for breaching any confidences. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Me too,’ Louis said.

  I stayed silent, gave him the chance to elaborate, but he chose not to.

  ‘Clio’s upset because I haven’t given her this,’ he continued, waving the key in the air like a prize.

  ‘OK,’ I said, confused, wondering where our conversation was going.

  ‘She loves her Es. Take it from me, anything can happen when she drops one. But she won’t risk them off the street. Had a bad trip once, dodgy pill. Mine are all tested.’

  His lips curled into a smile, but I still couldn’t stop looking at his orange eyes. And then I watched, transfixed, as he reached for one of the bags of coke, cut two lines with a credit card on the side of the sink, and pulled out a £50 note. A pinky. Was it the same one that Aldous had used? It seemed so unlikely. I glanced around. No cameras in sight. Louis leant forward, snorted one of the lines, and passed the note to me.

  For a moment, the nerdy medical student in me was tempted, intrigued by the way cocaine binds to the dopamine transporter and blocks the removal of dopamine from the synapse, causing a build-up that triggers euphoria. Or was I deluding myself and just wanted to be a part of Louis’ world?

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks all the same.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, sliding the second line of coke back into the bag. ‘I’ll leave these up here.’ He took the jar of Es out of the drawer and placed it on top of the mirrored Indian cupboard above the sink, out of sight. ‘Just in case you change your mind.’

  I watched him lock the drawer and followed him out of the bathroom onto the landing, where he introduced me to a blonde woman in a flimsy dress made entirely from red rose petals – Angela Hayes, American Beauty. Angela was kind enough to say some nice things about my performance as Doctor Faustus. So kind, in fact, that I was beginning to forget about Clio, when someone screamed from down below. A piercing cry that could be heard above the pounding techno. I knew at once that it was Clio. I spun round, so fast that I felt dizzy. God I was pissed.

  I peered over the banister of the open landing. Lecter had his hands held up in mock protest as Clio berated him on the floor below. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could guess. He’d been whispering sweet offensive nothings into her ear again. And he was swaying like a stick in a storm, barely able to stand on his feet. I glanced over at Louis, who raised his eyebrows at me but didn’t move. As far as I could tell, he and Clio had managed to avoid each other for the whole night. And then he produced his camcorder and started to film.

  I don’t know whether it was the alcohol in my veins or a misguided belief that I was being filmed and was therefore an invincible movie star. Either way, I rushed down one flight of stairs and found myself in Lecter’s masked face before either of us knew it, pumped up by a trigger-wash of adrenaline.

  ‘Is he bothering you again?’ I asked Clio, short of breath.

  ‘My doctor in shining armour,’ she said, hiccupping. ‘Or should that be a white coat?’ Jesus, she was even more out of it now, completely gone.

  ‘Not you again,’ Lecter said, barely able to stand himself. His eyes flitted from side to side.

  ‘What are we going to do with you?’ I asked, already weighing up my options. Lecter was light-framed and short, frail as a jockey.

  ‘What are we going to do with you?’ he replied, jabbing his finger at me. ‘Eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?’

  He raised his glass and poured the last of his red wine through the hole in his mask, dribbling some down his chin.

  ‘Shut him in the bathroom if he’s being a pain,’ someone said behind me. ‘The key’s in the door.’

  I turned to see Louis walk past. He had stopped filming and was on his way down to the ground floor. I spun back, just as Lecter lunged at Clio, trying to lick her through his mask.

  ‘Get this creep off me, Adam!’ Clio shrieked, pushing him away.

  Instinctively, I grabbed Lecter from behind and locked my arm around his neck. If it wasn’t for the alcohol, it would have been a simple task to haul him up one flight of stairs to the bathroom, as I was so much taller than him. As it was, he kicked at the steps with his heels like a demented Cossack dancer, catching me in the mouth with a flailing arm as I dragged him up to the second floor. People cheered and made way for me as I pulled him through the bathroom doorway.

  ‘Grab me some mandy,’ Clio called out from below.

  I shoved Lecter up against the bathroom wall. With my other hand, I managed to close the door and lock it. My lip was bleeding and I wiped away the blood on the back of my sleeve.

  ‘Listen very carefully,’ I said, my eyes close to his. ‘Stay away from Clio, do you hear? Stay away.’

  He looked back at me – I noticed his pupils were dilated – and then he spat in my face through his mask. I was back in Newlyn again, brawling on the North Pier. I needed to control myself.

  ‘Haven’t you shagged her yet?’ he asked, his voice slurred. ‘Is that your problem? Must be the only bloke in Cambridge who hasn’t.’

  He’d crossed a line. I swivelled him around, away from the wall, and manhandled him across the bathroom as if he were a prisoner. I didn’t know what my endgame was, but I had a vision of him collapsing into the bath in the corner. And then I pictured the student in Newlyn as he fell backwards, the shock on his face. I stopped.

  Lecter turned to look at me and started to collapse. I caught him just before his head smacked onto the floor, propped him up against the wall and took off his mask. He was unconscious but breathing. Had I hit him? Caused him to pass out? Already my own actions were a blur. Time had lost all shape. He was drunk, nothing more. So was I.

  I sat down next to him and decided it was the right moment to go home, pleased that I’d checked myself, prevented Lecter from injuring himself. A fresh breeze blew in from the big open sash window, maybe from the south-west, it was hard to tell, filling the gauze curtain like a spinnaker. It was a welcome reminder of a normal world outside that weird party bubble. And then I remembered what Clio had asked me to do. Struggling to my feet, I walked over to the basin and found the jam jar on top of the Indian cupboard. Two pills glistened inside like beady jewels. I looked at the door again and poured them both into my hand.

  ‘Chuck one over,’ Lecter said.

  His voice made me jump. He was sitting more upright now. I was surprised that he was even conscious.