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[thene]

d:eletion: THE REAL WORLD (ADA)
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I get a lot of messages like Ada's. Mostly by email, but Ada is of a class of people who believe in conducting all important matters on real paper. His handwriting was arrestingly elegant but what really made me consider him above most of such search-and-destroy jobs was the fact that it was for his sister.

He laid the details with heart-tugging clarity - no judgement, no pleas to my emotions. His elder sisters had never been close. They had little in common that they could bond over, and - with little observation from their parents or anyone else, and I pictured, perhaps unfairly, bored foreign nannies and nobby boarding schools - they became rivals and sometimes enemies, aggressively different in most ways, competitively similar in others. Agathy had been cold and cruel, Migua manipulative and irrational. They had calm phases, and the last year had been one of them. Agathy had become less hostile first, Ada said - she had a boyfriend she planned to marry, and Migua in her butterfly world had seemed to decide to let it be, even to invite Agathy into her social life for the first time ever. That social life included recreational dreamsharing.

Migua, in a nightmare of mental breakdown that (I can only read life as I know it) reminded me of why I've never used drugs, had encountered her sister in what she thought was an artificial nightmare, and had shot her.

Agathy died - a verdict of misadventure had been, Ada did not say as much, purchased, with no further repercussions against she who had held the gun.

It was the kind of horrible dream-reality error that's symptomatic of why dreaming is dangerous. If the family was any less wealthy, I expect I'd've seen it in a poster ad already; as it was, no one said anything, no one did anything, and Migua was just left to descend. She hurt herself, refused to sleep, refused to wake up. She seemed not just guilty but bereft, as if she couldn't cope without the sister she'd never loved in the first place. Their parents didn't discuss it. Too much shame.

Rumours of my existence led Ada to the quite rational conclusion that, given how few good times she and Agathy had had, it would be better for Migua to forget she ever had a sister than to continue on as she was.

I ignored the provided phone number and wrote back, asking him to come to Avenue Road for a cup of tea and some talk about how I could help him. He turned up with no further appointment. I took a ream of notes as we spoke, and he didn't question it, and nor did he seem to notice the recording device hidden among the flowerpots on the front windowsill.

I needed to see Migua from the inside. I needed to forge this poor boy.



Ada Walpole was far from the first person to ask me to perform deletion on someone other than themselves.

Non-consensual dreamsharing for malicious purposes was made a crime seventeen years ago, and as soon as anyone comes up with a new use for dreamsharing, someone discovers a pressing reason to break that law. It's surprisingly rare that it's the same person; ingenuity tends to be wide-eyed and vain when it comes to its good purposes.

I admit to vanity, I have a very good lawyer and I could hedge all day about the meaning of malice. Canary's brother once told me, as if he were amazed by this, that I don't have any; and he's right - all I've ever valued is peace within and without, an end to pain, and the healing that can come from letting the past slip away to where it belongs. Not even money matters, and some nights I think I hear my younger self railing at me, from a great distance, about that.

(I never played at being a rich young widower - I gave most of what he left me to a homeless charity, and kept only the house on Avenue Road and as much money as I thought I'd need to live decently for a short while if for some reason I didn't kill myself. A few years later I realised I was surviving off the other things he'd given to me; knowledge, social contacts, a reputation within the tiny world of high crime, that vague feeling in my spine that the things I can do are being done for reasons other than myself. Being told that I sound like him sometimes, for just a moment. I could feel content with that legacy right up until I met Ascott.)

I've never automatically ruled out a deletion job because the subject hasn't invited us in, but, provided I've got room to be, I'm choosy about them. It's partly practical - unwilling subjects are harder to work on, and while theoretically they can't tell what I've done to them (it's not like planting an idea; you can't see what isn't there) one always risks later retribution. Mostly, I worry about the motives of the person who's paying me to do it. Ada's were genuine and without blemish. There was a lot about it that should have stank - money and bullets and maybe maybe-not infidelity, and things I couldn't contemplate without a flash of anger - but I felt like infiltrating Migua would be a kindness to everyone involved.

I can't often say that about deleting people's memories uninvited. The first person - people - who asked me to perform deletion on a third party were from MI5 and they didn't allow me to refuse; finding myself trapped in that grey area, I did what I've always done and decided to make myself at home. A lot of other callers have found me there over the years; spies from a rainbow of nations, NGOs, gang flunkies, well-meaning terror cells, private individuals, kids like Ada.



Ada suggested that he introduce his sister to me as if I were a - Harley Street kinds of overpaid - bereavement counsellor. I didn't laugh, or tell him how many I'd burned through how fast when I was Migua's age. In the real world, sometimes things break that can't be fixed. Even if I could rub out all the cracks, I wouldn't do it.

So I added unlicensed psychotherapy to the list of things I've not been prosecuted for yet and began setting the stage, inside and out. I bought a shiny plaque for the door and rearranged my study. Ascott was unimpressed when I asked her to feign the role of a medical secretary - I asked her to think of something better and she said she shouldn't have to. We didn't speak for the rest of the day. Canary went through my notes; she saw Migua and her tendencies and started turning them into the foundations of a dream; formal rather than natural, a maze with complex rhythm-rules. Ascott and I learned Canary's world as she built it, just like always. The two bird-women went to case out Migua's north London home, and her haunts in town - I wasn't invited.



A jug of something that tastes like water on the table, two empty glasses. Flowers cut fresh from the garden - I chose them for the colours, deliberately not fussy about their alleged meanings. I don't grow chrysanthemums anyway. A box of tissues. Let her drink first, and more than me, and it would be fine.

If all went well, the hardest part would be the bit where I have to talk to her before she passes out. I was still scrawling an opening script, memorising it as I wrote, when Ada called to say his sister was on her way.



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