The Smoke

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This desert, stretching in every direction visible to the observer, is not smooth. Its topology is in fact absurdly disordered. Yet the observing eye, unable to parse its complexity, flattens everything. Simply to comprehend it, the eye must reduce its thousand thousand defiles and dried riverbeds, stands of silver gidgee trees and banks of Mitchell grass, to a flat monotony.

This desert is made of stones and sand and indeterminate things which, alive or not, have found little use for the living state. Anyway they are so coated with dust that they are already halfway mineral.

The sun has risen too far to reveal, by way of shadows, Woomera’s natural topography: how the ground rises to the north; the geological remnants of an ancient coastline to the west; to the south-east, the rubbed-out, filled-in sketch of an archaic meteor strike. The blast pits, on the other hand, are as clear as an artist’s first marks with charcoal upon an orange paper. The lips of three, four, half a dozen arcs of pitch-black shadow are distinguishable by plain sight, with a suggestion of further, similar pits stretching as far as the horizon.

The pits are all the same size, curvature and depth. The nearest of them may stand for all: a great scorched hole in the fractured ground, suggesting not so much a massive blast as a caving-in and blackening, as if, in this diseased zone, the rocks themselves have shrivelled.

Between the pits run lines of finer, whiter stuff that might be roads, though they are in fact just the crushed marks left by heavy vehicles rolling from one pit to another. Not roads, then; only desire lines. (Desire lines: a strange expression to apply in a place like this.)

The wall is made of glass. The observer – your own brother – looks down through the wall and sees, reflected there, the white rubber boots encasing his feet, the white tiled floor on which he stands, the grey-green grout between the tiles. Focusing past this Pepper’s Ghost, he sees, in an oblique and foreshortened fashion, the lip of the pit in which this structure stands. High as this eyrie seems – twenty storeys at least – the whole structure must be even bigger, to rise so high from so deep and sharp-sided a bowl cut in the sickened earth.

Around the pit he spies little vehicles, and little men, wielding white hoses that from this vantage point resemble nothing so much as strands of spaghetti, trailing across the ground and down into the pit. Your brother leans his head against the glass wall, straining for the angle. He glimpses a ring of small, windowless towers – units threaded like beads around a great metal girdle which curves out of sight to left and right.

These are the shock absorbers. The angle of observation is too steep, the pit too dark, for your brother to see more, but he knows that below them there is a shallow domed plate weighing a thousand tons, built of steel and coated on its underside with a rubberised concrete. And above that, in a hermetically sealed zone, there is a pipe, and down this pipe the bombs are meant to fall: bombs that are held in magazines arranged within the ring of massive shock absorbers.

The bombs, each weighing half a ton, will drop at a variable rate, sometimes once a second, sometimes much less frequently, their speed matched to – indeed, dictated by – the resonant frequency of the shock absorbers. Once they have fallen a precise distance through the small bomb-shaped hole in the centre of the curved plate, the hole will clam shut and the bomb will detonate with the force of five kilotons of TNT – an atomic blast about half as powerful as that which devastated the city of Berlin in 1916, ending, at the cost of some 40,000 lives, the bloody farrago of the world’s Great War.

The bombs boast virtually no propellant; a smear of tungsten paint. Material just enough to spread a hydrostatic wave across the surface of the plate. The heat generated by each explosion is immense – ten times the temperature of the visible surface of the sun – but very short-lived, so that the inner surface of the plate is hardly ablated. It will survive this treatment for years.

The pressure exerted by the blast pushes the plate. The shock absorbers dissipate the kick, spreading the acceleration along the length of the tower. By the time the shocks reach that part of the structure where your brother is now standing, he and his fellows will hardly feel them.

In this manner, the whole ungainly structure will rise from the ground and through the air and, at an altitude of around 300 miles, be serviceably clear of Earth’s gravity well. From this comfortably high orbit, the stars beckon. The Moon. Mars. Even Jupiter is not beyond this ship’s projected range.

Whether your brother will see Jupiter, and explore its rings with an unaided eye, remains a secret. Before Jupiter, before Mars even, there is a necessary duty he and his fellows must perform, a mission only the captain knows about – and your brother is not the captain. He is a midshipman (first class, mind) and his name is Jim. Jim steps away from the window. (There is plenty of room to manoeuvre – the economics of this kind of propulsion favour big craft over small, and this vessel is as big as a frigate.) He reads his name, backwards, reflected in the blast-proof, heat-proof, cold-proof, pressurised and tinted glass of the wall. James Lanyon. Over his name, a Union Jack. Over that, stitched to the breast of his white leather flight jacket in gold thread, the name of his vessel.

HMS Victory.

1

Troy has fallen. The belly of the wooden horse has splintered open in the town square, vomiting forth Greek elites. The gates are torn open and the city, gaping, lost, runs with blood. Priam, King of Troy, is dead, slaughtered on his throne; his lieutenant Aeneas saw it happen. Now all the heartsick warrior can do is try to save his family. His wife Creusa. Ascanius, his son. His father Anchises.

Anchises, that Venus-lover, that lame old goat – you’re put in mind of Billy Marsden the fitter chasing after the barmaid of the Three Oaks, out Halifax way three winters past, and laugh.

Two men you do not know look up from their game of cards and stare at you. Their eyes, carrying no hostile intent, are nonetheless like crossed staves barring your path. No overtures. No gambits. Stranger, keep to yourself. Four years in London have made you a foreigner here, who grew up in streets not three miles from this spot.

Helplessly irritated, you feather the onion-skin pages of your mother’s Aeneid, turn and read on.

Aeneas’s other half, Creusa, she’s no slouch. She’s set, little Ascanius upon her hip, sandwiches packed, water bottled, tickets in her purse, scarf tight around her chin, Let’s go! Bus leaves in ten! Ancient Anchises feels all his years and wants to stay put, Here I was born! Here I will die! Not a shred of Billy Marsden now, and much more like your own drear dad.

It is a relief to you – if only for a moment – that by tomorrow you will be free of Yorkshire and back in London for a while. For a moment (only a moment) you wish you were already embarked on the long, rickety journey back to the capital. There is very little left for you to do. In this home that has forgotten you, all you can do is wait. Weather the afternoon. Weather another Friday night fish-and-chip supper with your dad, self-stoppered Bob Lanyon (who, according to persistent rumour, nonetheless slapped Billy silly once, for grabbing at your mother). Weather another sleepless sleep in that garret bedroom you know as well as the cavity of your own mouth. The room’s absurd: it is too small to accommodate a grown man, and the truckle bed is even more ridiculous, your feet hang over the end of it at night. At one and the same moment, however, that room feels too big for you to bear. When you were little, you used to share it with your brother Jim. But you are on your own now, and Jim is off to outer space, by Woomera.

You drink off your pint and set the jar down a good distance from you. The tabletop, black with varnish, is getting wet from your beer, and you do not want to damage the book.

Ascanius’s head bursts into harmless flame. Aeneas, resourceful, grabs a water jug from under the sink and chucks its contents at his son’s head. Creusa meantime chides the dripping boy, How many times must I tell you with the matches? Clueless, the lot of them; deep in defeat’s addlement, they don’t even realise that these harmless flames around their infant’s head are a sign from the heavens.

So the Gods, feeling generous, provide the family with yet another hint that all may be well, if only they’d get a bloody move on. Aeneas sees it first, scudding the heavens outside their door. It is an asteroid: a chunk of rock, about half a mile on its longest axis, white hot and shedding gobs of flaming stuff into the superheated air. It streaks over the dying city. This signal is unmistakable.

Time to go, says Aeneas, and loads his chumbling father on his back.

You leave the pub to catch the last of the daylight. October: the air is restless, the clouds intermittent and dirty against a sun that still thinks it’s summer. There’s rain on the other side of the valley, and a band of low blue cloud sweeping along like a curtain, so you take a short cut and turn off the road down a paved gutter, still wet from the morning and treacherous with dropped leaves, to a path above allotments. This is a route you found as a boy, cheating on a school run. It leads to the wooded cut where the remains of old engines founder among the roots of trees that only pretend to be ancient, and stone basins send fingers of rusty water rushing hither and thither, from terrace to terrace, to power the ghosts of freshly rotted wheels.

The local coal diggings were exhausted a generation ago, so the town regrouped on the valley floor to feed off coke that’s hauled up daily by railway from the strip-mines of Nottingham and Derbyshire. These days the town is busier than ever. New works, great mechanical mouths agape, belch smoke through stacks built tall as cathedral spires, taller, all to protect the lungs of the town, but it doesn’t make any difference. Smoke dribbles out of the chimneys, dribbles down and around them, especially on a day like this, and gathers in the streets and smuts the washing.

The old brick donkey path weaves behind a moss-green outcrop. As you follow it, you catch a brief glimpse of the town, steeped in its lake of smog like blue milk. The town is arranged as a series of terraces spreading like ripples from the big brute facts of spaceship factories. The town drowns in waves of smoke while up here, where the town’s story began – the first fires lit, the first iron smelted, sweet waters of the peat bogs blasted into screaming steam, and the region’s future literally forged – here the air is as sweet and rotten and brambly as any untouched hollow out by Byland or Rievaulx.

A cart rail hidden under dead leaves proves as slippery as black ice, and down you go. You pick yourself up, mouldy, cursing, and pat your coat pocket to check that your mother’s book is secure. Your hand meets your hip. You cast around. The Aeneid lies open in a muck of twigs. You pincer it up with forefinger and thumb and blow dead leaf fragments from its blue cloth covers and its frayed and faded spine. Not much damage done. You shake the thing, not hard, to free a leaf that’s stuck to an open page. A slip of paper falls from the back of the book. You put the book in your pocket and pick up the paper. It is folded once and you open it.

The paper is headed ‘Gurwitsch Subscription Hospital’ with an address in Queen Square in Holborn, London. It is the hospital your mother attended when she first took the rays. The letterhead is fancifully antique, but below, the details of an upcoming appointment – B-P ‘therapy’ and a date nine months old – have been dashed off by an ink-starved dot-matrix printer.

The ‘BP’ in BP therapy stands for biophotonics. The biophotonic ray is a cytological phenomenon discovered by the embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch. For that reason, it’s often called the ‘Gurwitsch ray’ or G-ray.

Gurwitsch, a Munich graduate and a Russian Jew, was born towards the end of 1874, the year of the Yellowstone Eruption. So far as biographers can ascertain, young Gurwitsch was the only member of his family to survive the global ten-year winter which followed North America’s fiery end. And thanks to the quick and generous actions of the family’s lawyer, he thrived.

Contemporary memoirs describe a bright boy, obsessed with colour. This was no uncommon obsession back then. Yellowstone’s profound effect on the atmosphere of Northern Europe, especially at dawn and dusk, fuelled a short-lived generation of consumptive and hungry artists. Gurwitsch’s first ambition was to join their starving ranks, and this, unusually, met no opposition from his patron. But he was no good, and after two busy yet barren years, Gurwitsch returned from the soup kitchens of Paris, his paintings and diaries consigned (ritually, and with a certain amount of drinking) to his friends’ fireplaces. He later quipped that his art had served the essential function of warming hands more talented than his own.

In starving Saint Petersburg, where a ban on domestic cats had brought forth rats the size of dogs, in rooms heavy with the smoke from burning furniture and even floorboards, the young Gurwitsch set about his second career. He became, of all things, an embryologist, fascinated by the mysteries of development.

Why do things grow the way they do? Why is growth such an orderly business? Especially: how does every part of the expanding foetus know at what rate to grow? At every stage of life, the foetus is exquisitely symmetrical, its internal organs developed in a manner perfectly suited to support its periphery. How is this possible? What constrains and encourages this roiling ball of fast-dividing cells to fashion itself into so intricate a form?

There were at the time two broad answers to this question. Gurwitsch’s lecturers were wont to throw up their hands and talk about the existence of pre-existing ‘templates’. But Gurwitsch, a young liberal, radicalised in Paris and hiding seditious German pamphlets behind his stove, preferred the more radical alternative. This hypothesised that the cells of the foetus actually communicate.

Gurwitsch’s militant materialism and powerful, disciplined imagination marked him out as a radical. He was arrested, served out a short period of exile, and maintained a secret correspondence with political and scientific figures in Vienna, London and Berlin. There was a revolution going on in the life sciences quite as profound as the revolution brewing among the trades unions of Paris and London, and Gurwitsch’s letters offer a fascinating, if bewildering, glimpse into years during which scientific and political questions were virtually indistinguishable.

The trouble was, Gurwitsch couldn’t get the painterly monkey off his back. He had all the makings of a liberal martyr, a Duma minister, a scientific entrepreneur like Koltsov or Vavilov, but, one by one, all the key public moments passed him by. His time became entirely absorbed by the conundrums of colour. Pigments and spectra. Constructed colour. Colour mixes. Colour wheels. Goethe’s anti-Newtonian maunderings. John Clerk Maxwell’s mistakes. The nonsense of the primaries. The tapestries of Le Blon. Canvases of Signac and Seurat. He wasn’t, by a long chalk, the only Russian intellectual to succumb to the temptations of ‘internal exile’, using personal study as a shelter from the political chaos outside. Read any short story by Turgenev. Attend any play by Chekhov. And so his tale might have ended: another one of Russia’s lost generation of Francophile pantaloons.

It was in the Collège de France, working down the corridor from Pierre and Marie Curie, that Gurwitsch achieved the breakthrough that would, for better and for worse, immortalise his name: the Gurwitsch ray.

A colour all his own!

What he had in fact found was a weak ultraviolet pulse, passing from cell to cell. Living tissues emit light. This was a significant finding, but not unexpected. What was unexpected – indeed, revolutionary – was Gurwitsch’s leap of faith: that it was this self-generated light, this ‘biophotonic ray’, that was orchestrating development. Why do birds give birth to birds, and dogs to dogs, and cats to cats? Because, said Gurwitsch, every species emits its own special ray.

Easy to say; harder to prove. Anyway, Gurwitsch’s discovery had to join the queue. There were altogether too many newfangled rays abroad. Every ambitious physicist in middle Europe was touting a ray of some kind. X-rays, N-rays. It took time to sort the wheat from all this hopeful chaff.

But in the end—!

At an international conference held at the Ukrainian animal breeding station at Askania-Nova, on the eve of the war that would consume a generation and irradiate a continent, Alexander Gurwitsch was ready to declare, not only that the biophotonic ray was real, but that he had already taken the first steps to control it. Biophotonics, he declared, would give the next generation the ability ‘to sculpt organic forms at will’ – no small promise to make to men and women scarred, as Gurwitsch was scarred, by memories of the ten-year Yellowstone Winter.

‘In the near future, man will expose foetal material to a finely tuned and targeted ultraviolet ray, synthesising such forms as are entirely unknown in nature,’ he declared. ‘Biological synthesis is becoming as much a reality as chemical.’

This was Gurwitsch’s promise – nothing less than ‘the planned and rational utilisation of the living resources of the terrestrial globe’.

No one standing and applauding him that day had the slightest idea how badly this was going to go. The speciation of mankind. The Great War and its battlefields. The all-too-many undead.

So the whole sorry history of the twentieth century unpacks itself, leaving the appointment slip, wilted, crumpled in your hand.

When you think about it (and you do think about it, all the way down the wooded valley and in under the filthy milk-waves, past factories of cold smoke and the shop-floor smell of suds and hot metal, through the town’s smutted streets to your father’s front door), who’s to say, with medical science being what it is these days, that cancer will not turn out to be the product of some virulent biophotonic ray?

Of course, there’s no earthly way you can talk to your father about this.

You enter the house without knocking. Bob is having his weekly wash in a tin bath by the fire. Bob: a man made of sticks, reduced by age to the gawkiness of a teenager. Strong, but somehow… whittled. You go through to the kitchen, giving him his privacy. You fill a kettle and boil it on the hob, and while the tea mashes you fish around in the bread tin, fetch out a stale nub and try to turn it to good account; damned thing near snaps a tooth. Through the half-closed door you ask your father how his day has gone. He replies, ‘A thousand turned.’ His voice, full of pieceworker’s pride, now admits a new and discordant note: the defensive vocal tremor of an ageing man pitted against the young.

And they are so young! Many of them cannot remember a time before the spaceships. When Bob started there, his factory was making frames for ladies’ bicycles.

‘We need bread, Dad.’

‘Chippie’ll have some.’

You hear him clamber from the bath. The quick thwacking of a thin towel over tight, hard limbs. His footsteps on the stairs, surprisingly fleet as the weekend approaches. This has been Bob’s life: cares tumble off him on a Friday night only to pile redoubled upon his thick and aching head come Sunday morning. A few hours’ fishing in the beck above the old wheels will put his mood right by Sunday afternoon and ready for the week ahead: a week of numbing, repetitive labour in the factory. Fishing, though, is a summer occupation. The rest of the time, or kept indoors by the weather, he can only mope.

You bring out his tea and your own and set the mugs on the mantelpiece. Two tall cones of condensation form on the mirror behind, apparitions rising to occupy the room that lies beyond the glass. When your dad comes down he’s wearing his suit, a grey shirt with a collar and shoes bought in Leeds less than a year ago. Around his wrist is the watch Jim left him for safe-keeping two Christmases past: the one from the flight school in Peenemünde, with the logo from Frau im Mond surfing starlight on its engraved underside.

‘Christ, Dad.’

His face falls a little. You have embarrassed him, and well may you want to kick yourself. Now you are going to have to talk him, stage by painful stage, back into whatever holiday mood overtook him, that he has put on his best clothes for an evening of fish and chips by the canal. He dressed hardly finer the day he and your mum first waved you off to London, a scholarship under your arm and a promise of digs at your aunt’s house in Islington. What is there for Bob to celebrate now?

It is not impossible that he’s simply glad to see the back of you for a few days. These have been trying months, the pair of you without companions. Abandoned Lanyon and his singleton son have been hanging out their washing in the yard on a Wednesday night when any housewife, sensitive to the changing currents of the town, could have told them the Wednesday air runs foul from the shipyards.

Fish is brought on ice from Whitby twice a week to Hebden Bridge, and from there it is carried across the valleys of the Calder, from Mankinholes to Hipperholme, by cart and lorry and bike, even to the very ends of Jerusalem (or at any rate to Jerusalem Avenue, where it intersects with Dry Cart Lane). Were you able to map this distribution of wet fish on a screen such as the wizards of the Bund employ, you might say, in something approaching wonderment, that this is a great transmigration of sorts: how the corpses of fish move through the upper air, and up, and up, even to the giddy heights of Mount Tabor, three miles north-west of Halifax. There, on that busy, deceiving (and for you, incomprehensible) handheld device, would be evidence of the land’s invasion by the sea.

‘With chips.’

‘Right you are, Mr Lanyon.’

‘Twice.’

Bob’s futile noblesse oblige has him ordering, in nice detail, the only dish the shop can possibly serve, since fresh pies won’t be delivered before the morning and they’re out of pickled eggs. Bob has a weak man’s habit of standing on his dignity. ‘We’ll sit here by the window.’

‘Right you are.’

Bob wants you to tell him what things you plan to bring back from London: how much in hand luggage and how much by the van. Hard to imagine that you’ll need a van at all, unless you were to ship your drawing table home. ‘Which,’ you explain, ‘what with petrol and the hire, would make it the most expensive drawing table in the whole of Yorkshire.’

‘But if you need it, lad—’

Now here’s a question. Do you need your drawing table? Do you need any of the appurtenances of your vocation? Life in London, with all its little disappointments and petty humiliations, came damned close to convincing you otherwise. There you were, pitting your poor, bare, unforked drawings, your set squares and putty rubber, against the generative gambollings of the Bund’s machine-brains. How could you fail to fail?

To Yorkshire, however, no Gurwitsched superbrain will ever come. No Bund-made architectural projection will ever flicker in hologram over the waxed tabletops of local council rooms in Halifax, because even if they did – the speciation of the human race being what it is – no one in Halifax, however handsomely educated, would be able to understand it. Your skills, however crude, however outdated, are still valid here. Here the pencil and the slide rule, rule.

How long, once you set your mind to it, will it take you to turn your skills to account here? How long to learn to wall a furnace, or calculate canteen space for a factory? Not long. Never mind for a moment the accelerated lives of others: in this part of the world, your talents still count. And you have to do something. Anything. You can’t always be freeloading off your dad. Puffing your way up the valley to the pub and back. Poring through your mum’s old Everyman Pocket editions. It won’t be long before your savings run out.

‘Wherever I find work will have a drawing table for me.’

Your father is disappointed. ‘But your books. Your clothes. That chest of drawers—’

You try not to show a smile. Bob once visited the flat you and Fel shared near Cripplegate. He might have been visiting a fairy’s castle. The place astounded him: its size, its light. It was only a flat on the Barbican Estate. A self-igniting hob. An electric piano. Tablets. A phone without a cord. Nobody he knew owned such things as he saw there. Furniture from Fel’s family. A chest of drawers, meticulously painted in the Moldovan folk style.

‘That was Fel’s, Dad. Not mine. Anyway, it’ll be long gone. She’ll have cleared out her things by now. I’ll get to the flat and probably find just a couple of suitcases’ worth of textbooks.’

Bob wants there to be more for you to ferry back. He wants you to fill his house. He wants to come downstairs of a morning and find his living room cluttered with someone else’s clothes, someone else’s furniture, the tools of someone else’s trade. He wants his home filled with the signs of life.

You sense your father’s hunger so suddenly, and with such lurching clarity, that you’re finding it hard to swallow down your fish, and there is a moment, not long, but real enough, in which, unable to breathe, you reach for your teacup only to discover that there may be not enough tea there to clear the batter clagging your throat.

Now that you know how lonely your father is, you also know that you absolutely must not carry on living with him.

‘You want another tea?’

‘No. Ta.’

The way your feet dangle absurdly over the edge of your little truckle bed is surely evidence that moving back in with your dad was only ever a stopgap: a chance to breathe free air again, out of the Smoke. It is time you found your own place. Earning enough to afford it is another reason to pick up your trade. No more paper bridges, no more fancy permeable-walled pavilions on the Bartlett forecourt. It is time for some serious application. Workers’ housing for the spaceship yards and bomb manufactories of Huddersfield (an upwind location would be best, in light of recent reports from the Ministry of Health). Planning meetings to be scheduled with the users of Greenhead Park. Written objections anticipated from the parents of children attending the adjacent grammar school. You read the papers, you talk to people, you even know which firms to approach. You know what the work will be like. You believe it will be worthwhile. The prospect might even excite you, were it not that London has poisoned your love of building things.

Hasn’t it?

Since January you have been breathing Yorkshire air, air you grew up in, air that made you. All year you have been walking these valleys, eating this fish, drinking this beer, rubbing blood and feeling back into your night-frozen feet of a morning. This has been your solid, ordinary life.

Now, again: the Bund. It floods back. It fills you like a tide.

London, and all you have seen there, as street by street, investment by investment, handshake by soft handshake, the Bund’s enclave in London has spread. Not that anyone talks about ‘enclaves’ any longer, far less ‘ghettos’. The Bund has grown synonymous with its constructions – its great shining towers of plastic stuff, all glass curtain walls and weather-responsive bricks – and ‘Bund’ has come to stand for both. Today the Bund stretches from Fenchurch Street to Spitalfields, while on the other side of the river it has turned South London, in the space of a few years, into Medicine City: an incomprehensible medical theme park, a macabre sort of Blackpool for Georgy Chernoy’s undead. (Or pick your term, as the papers do. The nigh-on-dead – the Telegraph. The better-off-dead – The Times. The might-as-well-be-dead – the Sunday Express.) All this building done at a cost so high that most nation-states would break before they had accomplished nearly so much – and done with hardly more effort than it took to push a button on one of those confounded, impossible, incomprehensible keyboards of theirs.

‘Come on, lad,’ says Bob, clapping you on the shoulder, ‘let’s get a jar.’ He’s already up and shrugging on his coat.

Flowing yourself into bed, five pints the worse, you pull back the curtains in your room. This is the plan: that even through a fug of Friday ale, the morning light will wake you in time to catch the milk train to London.

Five hours later and light wakes you all right: not sunlight, but light from the furnaces. Even at this early hour, the town’s chimneys are belching sparks.

The air in your room is so cold that for a while you lie in bed, pinned under the blankets, watching your breath rising like smoke from a stubble-field. It pinks in the light of a distant steelworks.

Now you stand, hunching in the cold, before the window. The street lamps are out and the road surface, hidden from the furnace-pink predawn, is a river running silently and forcefully under your window, down the hill, towards the beck, and the mill wheels, and the weirs. This is the current taking you away today, back to confront those things that lost you your love and ruined your nerve. This is the river you have no name for, bearing you back into the Smoke.

On the surface the matter could not be simpler, and setting it out, in terms both clear and pleasant, took no more than four lines of standard type on a sheet of legal-sized paper headed ‘Hotblack Desiato’. The letter arrived through the door a couple of weeks ago from the estate agent that manages the flat in the Barbican you’d shared with Fel.

The flat has been lying idle and the lease is finally up. Any remaining personal property must be removed. You had six weeks from the date of the letter so there is still a month to go. There is a number to call in case of problems, and the letter ends, for no especial reason, ‘Warmest regards’.

A gloomy metaphysical river you cannot name is dragging you helplessly off into the difficult past, but here’s a comfort: at least your papers are in order.

You put on travelling clothes. Your best shirt is crisp, and in the minimal, industrial light of belching chimneys, the cotton does not show the stains you know are there: indelible smuts the fabric acquired within days of your coming back home. (Do you remember the look Bob gave you when you asked him if there was a dry cleaner’s nearby? The strangled mess he made of the word ‘Halifax’?)

It pleases you to be fastening the cuffs on a shirt so new-looking, so apparently white. But are you not saddened, too, to find time rewinding so easily? You must look very much the same as when you stepped down off the train in the New Year: a returning, not-so-very-prodigal son. You thread your tie. Close your throat against the room’s cold. Think of your father’s face as you glimpsed it from the train that day in January: a face framed in the spray-can snow still adorning the station café window. On it was a loneliness you could not then begin to measure, but instantly reckoned with your own.

Bob is downstairs in the parlour now, raking out the fire. The almost-musical scrape of that tiny shovel in the grate. Robert Lanyon, third-generation lathe-man. He has proved too firmly rooted to ever leave this valley, as the rest of you have left, one after another.

Stella – your mother’s sister, ten years younger and a looker – was the first to leave Yorkshire, leading the family’s diaspora. No one was surprised to see her go, least of all the teachers at that miserable school you went to, slumping along in her footsteps. Your headmistress had been a probationary English teacher when Stella was at school, and imagined people admired the way she and her staff held to their original, dismal view of Sue (as she was back then), stiffly ignoring her subsequent successes on stage, in film and, most recently, in the Bund. It is an attitude that has only made the institution appear more petty.

The next emigrant? Uncle Michael, Bob’s older and reputedly much smarter brother. Michael upped sticks to Canada. Fleeing the bombs, he said. The rocketship yards and reactors. The radiological toll. The ‘greens’: government-issued radiogardase pills. ‘The whole country is committing slow suicide,’ he wrote, in the only letter he ever sent home: you found it years ago in the back of your dad’s clothes drawer. Whatever the reasons for his emigration (along with the stick of plutonium, there came the carrot of a sizeable tax break), the upshot is a whole slew of barely-heard-of relations are earning quick fortunes and hard knocks in the shale fields of Alberta.

Jim was next, your brother: straight from school into the army. You have no idea where his fascination with the Space Force began. At home, the nearest he ever got to rockets was the percussion caps he persuaded you to steal from a nearby quarry. The pair of you spent a whole summer blasting them, trying to reroute the course of the brook below Heptonstall. You were never caught; the police were baffled. Since joining the Force Jim has written to the family with decreasing frequency, his stories becoming ever more bland, their details more and more thoroughly redacted. Last month he recommended your dad buy government bonds. That had to have been dictated by somebody else.

Finally Betty, your mother. Three years go she moved in with Aunt Stella to attend outpatient chemotherapy appointments and, in so doing, took her first, fatal sips of Georgy Chernoy’s magic medicine.

Sue/Stella. Michael. Jim. Betty. All of them have been blown down the valley, one way or another, onto the rails and away. Bob alone remains.

Your jacket pockets are full of unnecessary things. You sort them out in the half-light. A penknife and a tube of mints. A scrip for ‘greens’ and a packet of them, half-gone but still more than enough to see you back to the city.

You pause for a second, the cold prickling you under your clothes. Below you, in the sitting room, you can hear your father cracking kindling.

You go to the mantelpiece and pick up the two objects you always take with you when you travel. Jim grins from out of his cheap brass-effect frame. On his army dress uniform are pinned the black, white and desaturated blue colours of the Space Force. (They didn’t have separate uniforms when he joined, only colours; the service is very new.)

Into one pocket goes the photograph. Into the other goes the dolly. It’s a chickie-made thing: a figurine of woven straw, faceless and shapeless; a frayed bundle of knotted stalks. You found it one day while walking the peat moors high above the town. It was lying, not even in the grass, but somehow on top of the grass, not hidden, not settled, but almost as if it were balancing on the tips of the grass blades, as an Indian sadhu might distribute the weight of his body harmlessly across a bed of nails. You were skirting a small, anomalous island of earth maybe a foot above the surrounding ground. Old peat workings, you assumed. Only later did you let your imagination run riot. That table of earth: might it have been an ancient altar?

Making up grandiose stories about your find became a kind of habit with you; a game you played with yourself. The stories enjoyed a bizarre resurgence when you went to architecture school. Chatting up young women in student bars on the banks of the Thames, you found it tempting, though wildly dishonest, to ascribe to this foundational moment the beginnings of your fascination with the built environment. (‘And there it was, this tip of a buried ziggurat, the whole plan of the place laid itself out before me, I found myself able to read the earth,’ and so on and so forth. Some well-inclined women will fall for this kind of thing.)

In truth, you did experience a kind of revelation that day. Though you knew there were chickies living in the hills above your town (why not there? There are chickies everywhere), the dolly in your trembling hand was solid evidence of their presence.

You showed it to Jim and he grunted and you said, ‘Is this a chickie thing?’ His shrug said, Whose else would it be? You wished his response had not been so casual, so unsurprised.

Clutching the abandoned dolly, not understanding it, or what there was about it that needed your understanding (was it a toy? A votive figure? A mislaid household god?), you felt suddenly at odds with everything, divorced from the whole accepting world. You hadn’t even seen a chickie in the flesh by that point. Only pictures.

Pockets full for no reason – Jim an awkward, sharp-cornered slab in one, the dolly a solid lump in the other – you work your way around that absurd child’s bed you still sleep in. As you leave the room, the loose board creaks as usual beneath the thin oatmeal rug.

You clatter down uncarpeted stairs to the parlour. It is darker down here. At street level the windows, lace-curtained, are shielded from the furnace light of the valley, and Bob is a shadow among shadows, a heavier-than-life blocking of the darkness. Bowls scrape and spoons rattle as he lays the table for breakfast. The blocks of him turn and swivel: ‘Morning,’ the word less of a greeting than a statement of raw fact.

Back at him: ‘Morning.’ You feel your way into a chair. The blocks of your father move to the chimney breast, and in the light of the few flames there, shrink and slenderise and gather into human form. ‘Ready, then?’ He brings the tin jug from the hearth and, his hand gloved in a thin towel, pours the coffee. You sip at it; as always, it is watery and tannic. Bob goes back and forth, bringing each part of your breakfast out of the galley kitchen one item at a time: bacon, butter, bread, a tiresome ritual, something to do with love, and though it renders you a child – a little pasha perched upon his wooden throne, waiting to be fed – you know better than to spoil the moment by helping.

The salt and fat filling your mouth are a more effective alarm than any bell, any cold. Fully awake at last, you gaze around the room. Its sparse but heavy furniture – bureau, rocking chair and sideboard – float more than stand in the dark room, as if only habit and old expectation maintain them in this cramped space. Photographs in heavy frames on the walls contain dim but well-remembered scenes: holidays, school photographs, newspaper portraits of Jim. Jim is a celebrity now, the toast of the valley, first Yorkshireman in space, for all that (a local joke, this) he has only had to follow in the van of his valley’s own steel.

Once back from this trip, you will be moving out, finding a room, and Bob will be on his own again. Surely he knows this? It surely will not come as a surprise to him?

No point saying anything yet, since you have no particular idea where you will go. (Not far, if you can help it. There are rooms to let near the station, you could rent something there, though the noise bears thinking about, and the filth kicked up by the wagons, the soot.)

What will life be like, with you there (wherever ‘there’ turns out to be) and Bob here? You imagine meeting him in the station café, in the blue hour before his shift begins. You imagine buying him breakfast. You would like to do that, after years of him bringing your breakfast to you, one item at a time. (A foible of his. A joke, even. Something he picked up at the cinema. How food is served in grand houses. How the other half live.) Though if you’re going to buy him breakfast every day you had better get on looking for that job. A practice in Halifax might pay you something while you learn how to supervise the construction of kilns and presses and production lines. It will be a change from what you are used to. The profundities drilled into you at the Bartlett will not cut it here.

Bob is already clearing the plates. You stand to help him but he waves you back into your chair. He is smiling; you catch the shape of his mouth as he turns briefly through the light of the hearth. Not much of a smile: a rictus made of embarrassment and a desire not to speak. It took a while for you to understand this expression, which has become habitual.

It is to do with Jim, and the awkward transferred celebrity Bob has had to bear: father of a famous son. Bob’s smile acknowledges the good fortune that everyone imagines must be his lot: his fellows on the shop floor, the neighbours around him at the bar, the scarved wives nodding at him in the street. How proud he must be, with a son gone off to conquer outer space! Strange, given the enormity of that project – a quarter-mile-high spaceship raised on the shock wave of atomic explosions – how no one realises how afraid Bob must be.

You cross to the fire, reach under the bench and pull out your boots. A needless and heavy affectation, these, as you knew full well when you bought them, shortly after returning to the Riding. Steel toe and heel: honestly, it’s not as though you’re lugging rebar about all day long. These heavy boots will mark you out in London. Is this the idea? That they should be your armour? Your constant, dragging reminder that life is changed, changed back, rewound? As you draw these thick laces tight, you find yourself wondering – bitterly, suddenly – if this is to be the pattern of your life: a series of tactical withdrawals.

Bob comes and sits beside you and draws his own boots out from under the bench.

‘You don’t—’ you begin.

He leans against you, gently, and maybe he is trying to communicate something to you. On the other hand, he could simply be toppling over while trying to get his boots on. Either way it doesn’t matter, don’t say anything, let him come with you to the station if he wants.

In silence, the pair of you pull on your coats. You lift the wire-mesh fireguard into place across the hearth; Bob unfastens the front door. Cold floods the room as surely as the vacuum of outer space floods an airlock, and the fire in the grate is all light and no heat, bidding you both a chemical farewell.

The porch step gives directly onto a narrow pavement.

The street, unlit, flows around you both, tugging you to the right, and down its little gradient to the great black flow of the main street, also unlit. You navigate by long practice, lifting heavy feet over the stones. The clopping of your boots suggests the passage of pit ponies.

Ahead, over rooftops and glimpsed between yard walls, pink towers of steam and dun smoke spill into the air. These inexpert washes colour the half-darkness, forcing in the idea of a new day.

The pavement is broader here, so that you and your dad may walk side by side. Bob links his arm with yours. It is an intimate and ordinary courtesy that the men of London long ago lost. (In Keighley, men hold hands.) Ahead of you, in a smutted sky without stars, one light hangs like a planet. For a moment, you think it might be Mars. Then a second, smaller light appears, a red light, blinking at the very edge of the white. Then, to the left, a steadier green light. You stare, mesmerised, as the white light’s red and green companions clarify themselves. They separate from their white parent and the central light grows oblate so that the planet is transformed, in an instant of perception, from a world into an artificial thing. The red and green lights move in a tilting orbit around the white light as the aircraft banks towards a distant airfield: first of the day and herald of the morning.

‘One from the Bund,’ says Bob, without bitterness.

You admire that. You wish your own heart did not pucker at the sight of that impossible, incomprehensible aeroplane. But it does. The stuff of the Bund feeds a resentment you have to acknowledge, if only to tell yourself, over and over, how shameful that resentment is. Does the horse resent its rider? Does the dog resent its master?

Sometimes. Perhaps. It has been known. And the speciations brought about by Gurwitsch’s ray are recent: little more than a generation old. The wounds are still sore and bloody where the human family has pulled itself apart into cognitive haves and have-nots.

You know what aeroplanes are. Obviously. As does your father, who has gone in his working life from chamfering the holes in the frames of ladies’ bicycles to checking the tolerances on pressure rings bound for rocketship propulsion systems in Woomera.

But these are crude mechanisms, set against the creations of the Bund. In a few short decades, the Bund’s minds have somehow fused engineering, architecture and design into an alchemical son et lumière that, at the touch of a secret button, transforms entire cities overnight. The Bund’s aeroplanes are not even planes any more. They have no wings. Or the whole plane is a wing. And even if that makes a kind of aeronautical sense, how is it possible that this same vehicle can plunge vertically, like a ball, then spread like a flower, disgorging its human cargo, not remotely discommoded, onto any square of even ground?

The aeroplanes you know are the aeroplanes your dad knows: rivet-and-sheet-metal concoctions, prayers to the Bernoulli principle, ungainly as storks. Dependent on runways. Dependent on air speed. Dependent on fuel. They are machines like the army airvan that carried Jim into the clouds over Croydon Airport, two Christmases ago. And how you all cheered that day (the last time you saw him; he’s not been back since), first Yorkshireman in space, kangarooing his way to Woomera by Tripoli, Cairo, Calcutta, Singapore!

This thing ahead of you, above you, wheeling around you, this red-green-and-white fairy galleon of aerogel and costly china, might have sprung from a different world. And if a world is only what we understand and handle and possess – then another world is precisely from where this thing has sprung.

‘One from the Bund.’

Like James’s shrug, the day you found your corn dolly on the moors, your father’s words leave you hanging at an uncomfortable angle to the world, as though everyone else knows some simple, small, obvious thing that only you have to puzzle over.

It ought to be your father seething with untutored resentment. It should be him shaking his gnarled and oily fist at the sky – ‘This sky no longer mine!’ – while you, with all your knowledge, all your education, all your experience (once the lover of a Bundist’s child), say nothing, for what is to be said? Perhaps a shrug, perhaps a smile.

Instead you scowl at the cobbles, feeling like an idiot – and this is bad, because from the Bund’s point of view, that is exactly what you are. Do you remember that card game you used to play with Fel? ‘Set’, it was called. Its cards were printed with different designs, each assembled from four pictorial components: one of three colours, one of three shapes, one of three fills, one of three numbers, maybe there were other components, you can’t remember, and you had to make tricks of three cards, all cards the same or all cards different in every component category, and just trying to rehearse the rules to yourself is itself a mental stair-climb, a breathless stagger-run to the very bounds of your cognitive capacity, but she never had that problem, did she? She could explain the rules to your friends in seconds. And she beat them, that goes without saying. She always won.

You cannot hear the Bundist aeroplane. There is the thumping syncopation of the mills to consider: not loud, but deep, arterial, the molten blood of the town stirring into slow life. Also the fact that Bundist planes make absolutely no sound.

At the bottom of the slope the buildings of the town rise around you, and darkness and silence make a final sally. Arm-in-arm, you pass shopfronts. A memorial of the Great War. The street gives onto a square, grey in the slow, thick light that comes before the dawn, and you let go of each other to cross hobble-footed over cobbles to an alley between warehouses.

Night-time folds itself away while you’re in the alley, and you come out among brick warehouses and wide, bruise-blue cobbled lanes as if into a foreign town that bears an uncanny but only surface similarity to home. The furnaces that appeared to be sitting directly ahead of you now belch far to your right, as though they had contrived to evade you.

The railway station is a series of low-slung brick buildings erected in the midst of a complex network of tracks, most of which are used to shunt heavy goods and fuel between the town’s furnaces and factories. Few passenger trains actually stop here. With practised caution, the two of you step over the rails. Stairs made of sleeper wood take you up onto the island platform and its shuttered tea house. You stand together under its portico and shelter from the day’s grey nothing.

Beyond the rails, a motor truck rolls past, its headlights on, and then another, and a handful of men pick their way across the ribboned steel to join you; they are here for the same train. Cheap smutted suits and hats; they look drowned in their clothes.

A light appears, far up the line, and you hear a squeal of wheels on curving rail.

‘Be well,’ says Bob.

You shake hands as the train takes form, bearing down upon you. The locomotive has the clean, swept-back lines and deep-green livery of the national service. It is as big as a steamship. The rolling stock it draws is tawdry by comparison. Matchwood.

Bob opens a door for you and you lumber into the carriage in your heavy boots, encumbered as a spaceman. Bob swings the door shut behind you. You pull down the window to talk to him: ‘Next week.’

‘No rush.’ There is a studied casualness to these words, as though to say, London has a claim on you no less than my own.

A great horn sounds pointlessly. The train does not move. Behind Bob, on the wall of the tea house, hangs a government poster: Hattie Jacques urges you to eat your ‘greens’.

You take a seat. Your father raises his hand and wanders off. The rail service is a law unto itself this early in the morning; heaven knows how long you will be sat here. You stand and push the window up, pull the coat around your throat, sit back in your seat and try to doze. Your feet in their heavy boots feel as though they have taken root in the ground, drawing you down into slumber, but there is something in your trouser pocket, the lining of your pocket has twisted around and made an uncomfortable ball at your groin, so that you have to stand and fish it out, whatever this is that has caught in the lining.

It is the dolly. It is even more misshapen now: a knotted handful of straw waste that once resembled a man.

The doll was in excellent nick when you first found it. It can’t have been lying on the ground for long.

There was a bulge for a head, legs shaped with clever little knots to suggest knee and ankle joints, and arms bound to the torso – part of the torso in fact, but extra knots created the illusion of arms pressed to the sides of the figure, lending it a faintly military cast: a straw soldier standing to attention. The corn stalks were dry and crisp and tied firmly in place, smooth when you ran your thumb along the grain, ridged and resistant when you ran your thumb crossways.

‘Hey!’ James’s voice came from a surprising distance away – he had just that moment noticed your absence.

‘Where are you?’

You looked up and could not see him. Hunkered down like this, examining the figure, the tall grass of the moors surrounded you.

‘Here.’ You waved, hoping that would suffice.

‘Where?’

You stood up.

Jim was more worried than you realised. He ran back to you. ‘For crying out loud, I thought you’d fallen down a hole.’

Yes, there are holes. Old mine-workings. Some of them are ancient: pre-Steam Age. And there are odd dips and ridges where the peat-diggers have been. There is no way at all to tell how old the peat-workings are. People have found flints near some of them, arrowheads, scrapers. And near others, Mars wrappers, the foil off Tunnock’s teacakes, prophylactics, wet filters from spent cigarettes.

You held the dolly out to him. But when he reached for it, you withdrew your hand. You did not want to let go of the dolly. Anyway, he was not particularly interested. You asked him: ‘Is it a chickie thing?’

Jim shrugged a yes to your question and walked away.

These moors, so barren, so deserted, just so much waste ground to play in: for the first time they became a populated place, and you wondered if you were, after all, welcome there. Across the tawny land before you, mile after mile of it, a thousand pairs of unseen eyes blinked at you.

You followed Jim, unsettled, wanting to be beside him, yet at the same time keeping your distance, a studied ten, twenty steps behind, clutching the dolly, jealous of it, guarding it. Jim paid it and you no mind. Every once in a while he would pause, head raised, the waxed paper kite rolled up in his fist, scenting the air. But it was hopeless. Even here the breezes lasted no more than a minute. They were idle things: God leaning out over his cloud and stirring the air like a girl trailing her fingers through the waters of a boating lake. You hugged the dolly to yourself and a warm-bread smell came from the hot straw. As you walked you felt, between your legs, a dampness, a swelling you didn’t know what to do with, and you had to adjust yourself. You felt clumsy and delicious at the same moment, and you knew you shouldn’t clutch yourself there, that you would only make it worse.

Jim walked. You hobbled behind. You entered a stand of thin trees, and the ground grew damp and green, the moors falling behind. There were rocks to catch the foot and sheep paths to follow, and Jim glanced back at you more often, as you came off the heights, to see that you were following. The path dropped down a narrow stone staircase and Jim was waiting for you at the bottom and he said, ‘Throw that thing away.’

You stared at him.

‘People will see,’ he said. You could tell from his eyes, and the contempt there, that he didn’t mean the dolly. He meant the other thing: what the dolly brought on. You scowled, hunching forward a little, inexpertly trying to hide the swell tenting your pants. You went ahead of him so he could not see. You held the dolly carefully in one hand, by your side, where you could not smell it, its bread smell, its milk smell; you wondered if it had been left there for you.

You entered woods, a clear path zigzagging down the side of the valley, and came at last to a road. You had overshot. You turned in the direction of town. By the time you got back to the house, Bob was already home and Betty had the fish he had caught gutted and floured. You ran upstairs, hid the dolly under your pillow, washed, came down again, and ate. Everything was normal. Everything was as it had been.

You shared a room with Jim. That night you waited and waited, hands cupped around your privates, waiting for him to fall asleep. The smell of the dolly was rising through the pillow. A warm-milk smell. A baking smell. You thought of a girl trailing her fingers through the waters of a lake. A little girl. No taller than a chickie. The thing in your hand gave a kick.

You did not trust Jim to be asleep. You shifted in bed, turning to face the wall, moving the pillow so the scent flooded you. You stroked yourself. You thought of its mouth. Its sharp teeth. You had only seen pictures. The complex entrances between its legs. Its enormous phallus. You did not know what to imagine, and you did not know what to do with what you imagined. Your own modest cock was hard in your hand and you were seized with fear: what if it wouldn’t go down? You wanted to look at it, to reassure yourself. You wondered if doing this turned you into a chickie. It felt as if it might. You tried to remember the pictures you had seen and the feeling in your groin overtook you and something hot spilled into the palm of your hand. This had never happened before; you wondered what was wrong with you.

You lay still. Jim was silent. It was not a silence you trusted. Only when he started to snore did you ease yourself from the bed. You didn’t know what was in your hand. You thought it might be blood. You were afraid of getting blood on the sheets so you cupped it in your hand and cupped your groin with the other hand and hobbled to the door. The floorboard squeaked. You closed your eyes. Jim did not stir. You wondered how you were going to get the door open without smearing blood on the doorknob. You wiped your hand dry over your belly, opened the door and tiptoed onto the landing. You went downstairs and fetched your coat and went through the kitchen to the back door and into the yard. In the privy there was a nub of candle and a box of matches. You lit the candle and held it near yourself. There was nothing to see. Whatever it was that had come out of you, it was not blood. The fear went away, leaving you hollow inside. There was water in the jug. You soaped and towelled yourself. You tried to pee but couldn’t. You went back to bed.

In the morning, you lay under the blankets until Jim had dressed and left the room. You fished out the dolly from under your pillow. It was clean and tightly woven, but in the course of the night its smell had changed. There was a sharp note like cat pee running through it, and something damp-smelling: moss and musty washing.

You took it into the kitchen and poured cold water into the sink and shook the dolly about in the water to clean it. It came apart immediately. There were things living inside it. Insects. They fled up your hands. They crawled about in the water. You slapped and splashed, balled the mess of straw in your hands and took it through the back door into the yard. You screwed up the dolly and dropped it into the bin.

For twenty minutes the train sits without moving. Then, with a great gush of steam, the mechanism gathers itself and with a painful, squealing slowness, the locomotive tugs at its matchwood burden, nursing you over so many meshing rails, into the narrowing mouth of the valley and out again on a broad embankment, east and bending slowly south, past sodden pastures and the silver smears that recent floods have made of rivers, past so many flocks of indeterminate black birds, and mill towns, and the backs of terraces.

The dolly in your hands is a new thing. Now: how can that be?

It must be a replacement.

From where, though? They none of them last more than a few months.

Let’s say you bought this one in London from a shop east of Charing Cross Road.

You have no memory of this.

And then (I’m good at this) you do.

2

You come up out of the Underground into Aldersgate Street, at the junction with Long Lane. There are banks and clothing shops. Office workers on lunchtime errands jostle you towards the road. The traffic on the dual carriageway is heavy and unaccommodating.

Everything here is motion, business and the constant shuffle of people, information and goods. It is hard to imagine that anyone could live around here. Were you to lift your eyes, you would see, rising above the faceless brick wall impending over the opposite pavement, the accommodation towers of the Barbican Estate. But the pavement is too busy, the road too dangerous, so people do not look up. The street keeps their attention. Up this close, the Barbican becomes a kind of secret, a region made invisible by strategy, known but disregarded. Your private kingdom.

When the lights change, you cross the road and follow Beech Street to where it becomes an underpass, and up a white-painted concrete spiral stair to raised brick-paved walkways. Though the estate follows a rough grid plan, routes between its multiple levels, its towers and terraces and gardens, are confusing for the visitor, so routes to the main towers and the arts centre have been marked out on the ground with durable coloured tape. You follow a yellow line to a view over the ponds. The flat you shared with Fel is directly above you, hidden by a concrete canopy. You are summoning the energy to turn and enter the tower through a door controlled by a keypad. Inside there are stairs and a single elevator. You lived on the eleventh floor and often took the stairs, a late convert to exercise, working off the weight your unathletic college years had piled on. Today you have been awake too long, you have been sitting on the train too long, you are tired and unhappy and you just want to be done; you call for the lift.

The elevator is clean and cold. A notice behind clear plastic mounted on a mirrored wall reminds tenants of the rules governing sublets. Beside it are an advertisement for a dance performance and advance warning of the annual residents’ AGM. The elevator is painfully slow.

On the eleventh floor there are two flats. Outside your neighbour’s door there’s still that thin red welcome mat which was always tripping you up when you passed it on your way to the stairwell. The door sports a non-regulation brass-effect knocker that belongs on a house. Not that you expected changes. You haven’t been away long. Anyway, most of the residents are old; they’re settled here for the duration.

The door to your flat is secured with an Ingersoll and two mortise locks. You did not bother with the mortises when you lived here, so it takes a second to remember which way around the keys go. Inside there is a burglar alarm, disarmed by typing 1-2-3-4 on a keypad near the door. The hall smells exactly the way it used to smell. You had expected to walk into an empty shell. But no: this still feels like home.

The lounge is an airy room, though the ceiling is low, with generous windows all down the longest side. Nothing appears to have been removed since you were last here. The shelves are stacked with books, and there is Fel’s piano against the wall beside the kitchen door; you’re surprised she hasn’t taken that. She must have a better instrument now. A real one. A grand. What kind of life does she live now? Money will not be an issue inside the Bund. What friends does she have? No one you know has heard from her since the pair of you split up, nearly a year ago. This is one of those times when losing a lover has been like losing a world.

Weary of your ruminations, you go to sprawl on the couch, but first you have to empty your pockets. The dolly. The frame. What on earth made you bring these things along? The dolly goes back in your pocket. It’s a wonder that the glass wafer in Jim’s photo frame hasn’t snapped. You set it up on the table beside the sofa and sit there idly tapping it. You move the photo frame around the table, pointing it to face the hall, the kitchen, the long window. As though you are showing him your home. As though the photo were a screen, and your brother really were looking out of it. Tap tap tap.

He never did visit the flat. The timing was never right, and then he was gone to Woomera. You wonder how he is. You wonder how long it will be before he can write his own letters again. It occurs to you that this whole block must be roughly the size and weight of the army’s new spaceship.

You never played the piano much while you were here, though you know enough to pick out chords and follow a melody, accompanying drinkers in the pubs you and your father frequent back home.

Fel was the pianist. Compared to hers, your efforts sounded ugly and lumpen. She said she liked listening to you, but you would not be encouraged.

The piano is electric and you are surprised to find it plugged in and the power still on. The stand holds a book of cocktail-bar arrangements. Frederic Curzon, Ronald Binge: if you substitute octaves for chords in the left hand you can just about follow the line.

The work boots you’re wearing are no use on the pedals and will scratch them, so you take them off. It’s good, shedding these great heavy boots, but at the same time you’re left feeling naked. You are making yourself at home in a place that no longer belongs to you.

There’s a three-against-two syncopation in this piece you’ve lost the knack of. A run of minor sevenths, tangling under your fingers, is so pretty you try it again and again but you don’t make much progress. Run after run, the music falls away, becomes an athletic thing, a banging about. You wish you had practised more while you were here, but at the time the piano had been of a piece with the card games you and Fel used to play together, and the dinners you used to try and cook together for your friends. Ordinary shared activities, they could not help but remind you how far you lagged behind her in understanding, accomplishment, even the plain brute capacity for living. Fel didn’t just think faster than you. She felt faster. She felt more. Until in the end you acted more like her pet than her lover. Until, in the end, you realised that was exactly what you were.

Too loud. Enough. You close the lid over the keys.

Has Fel even moved out? It doesn’t look as though she has. Heavy items like the piano: with money no longer an object, you can understand her leaving such things behind. But her sheet music is still here, and her books. All the countless ordinary little things that add up to a person. Did she even pack a bag?

You need the toilet. In the bathroom, you find that she has left her perfumes gathering dust. This is doubly strange: it’s not a collection anyone would want to just abandon. Blood, moss, wet rope, tobacco, cat urine, ash. In her whole collection there is not one floral note. The business of scent was one of those many subjects Fel had absorbed and mastered, enthused about, obsessed over, and to stand close to her in her weaponised state was to fall down a rabbit-hole of queer associations.

Your hands are shaking. Are you afraid to try these scents? They will bring you to the edge of places and times you know you will never be able to revisit. The nostalgia they wield is a threat. Let them go!

But like an agoraphobic drawn to the edge of a high place, you take down a bottle and open the cap. You spray your wrist, shake the alcohol into the air, and once your skin is dry, lean into the scent.

It is for all the world like being strangled in a damp cellar.

According to the estate agent’s letter, there are just a few weeks to go until new tenants move in to this flat. You can clear your stuff in hours, but what about the rest of it? Is she really going to abandon Chopin, Debussy, York Bowen, all these well-thumbed scores scribbled over with her own fingering? You imagine her coming here to pack, scraping through the door with a rucksack full of bags. (This is, remember, how you moved in here, carrying gear on the Underground from the shared house in Tooting.)

More likely, Fel’s belongings will be packed carefully away into boxes and crates by men hired by her father. They could turn up at any time.

In the kitchen, you dig out a blister-pack of greens and thumb two tablets onto the granite-effect counter. You run yourself a glass of water. And think about it: the power is on, the water is on… Try the hob – yes, the gas is on, too: seriously, did you forget to turn the gas off when you left?

You open the kitchen cupboards and there are some tins and dried goods but all the perishables and opened packets have been cleared out. The kitchen bin by the pantry door is empty, and there isn’t a liner in it. The fridge door is closed. A mistake: it’s been emptied and turned off and the door should have been left open; there are lines of black mould and a bad smell inside; it’ll need disinfecting.

So here’s a possibility. (You neck your greens – a silly name for little pills of radiogardase, common name ‘Prussian Blue’.) What if she’s coming back? What if she’s moving back in?

The painted chest of drawers is still in the bedroom: an heirloom from Moldova, and Fel’s favourite object. ‘It used to stand in my nursery. When my grandmother was a baby, they put her down for the night in the bottom drawer.’ The frame and the edges of the drawers are a yellowish green, the drawer panels off-white decorated with carnations. Fel’s underwear is here. Her tights. Her hairdryer.

She’s entitled to come back, obviously. To carry on living here, if that’s what she wants. Thanks to her father’s generosity with the rent, this was always more her flat than yours. You work through the drawers, pulling out your things, the few clothes you left here. Are they even worth taking back with you? If you’re not going to take them with you, you ought to throw them away. Imagine leaving them for her. Imagine her coming back in here, sorting through these drawers and finding your belongings, your socks, your T-shirts. Imagine her throwing you away.

This is no good, you’re going to drive yourself mad, you have to stop thinking, you have to find something that will stop you having to think. The power is on, the gas, the water; you go into the bathroom and run the shower over the bath. You undress, and halfway through you remember the fictional removal men you dreamt up, muscling in with their crates and their boxes. Half-naked, you cross the hall to the door and deadlock the Ingersoll.

The water is running hot when you get back. You adjust it a little, keeping the heat as high as you can bear, and step in under the flow. For a while you stand there, willing on catatonia. The shower does not numb you, but it does refresh you until, to hell with it, you might as well wash and be done. Maybe there is coffee somewhere in the cupboards; you could make yourself a cup.

You squeeze soap from a bottle: expensive stuff you remember Fel got from a parfumerie on Wigmore Street. Rosemary leaf, cedar-wood bark, juniper berry. On the side of the bottle there’s this absurd, humourless sales screed, to convince you the purchase was worth it. Why on earth should reading this again bring on tears? Maybe it’s the smell. The associations. Something, at any rate, is drawing out tears you have never been able to shed before.

Ridiculous. You turn off the shower, pull the curtain aside and step out of the bathtub. You dry off. Finding some toilet paper, you blow your nose. Then, out of habit – because you could as easily have flushed the tissue away – you pedal open the bin which stands under the sink.

This bin has a liner and it’s full – so full, the tissue you’ve dropped in there has rolled onto the floor. So you bend down and pick it up and poke it into the bin, and lying on top of the screwed-up tissues, a used-up toothpaste tube, flossing sticks and cotton wool, there is a pregnancy-testing wand.

You pick it out of the bin. The little screen is blank, though it’s doubtful whether this means anything one way or another; there’s no telling how long the wand has been lying here. You stare at it, waiting for you know not what to overwhelm you. But loss is not like that. Loss is not some pain you can steal yourself against.

You sit up against the side of the bath, slowly, numbly rehearsing the way the world is now. It is different from what you thought it was, and at first only the words make sense, so that you have to repeat them, over and over, to bring this new world into being.

She got her child, or is trying for one.

She got the life she wanted, which you would not give her.

She’s with someone else now.

She’s with someone else now.

That’s the hardest part to come clear, the part that needs the most rehearsal, not because you resent this newcomer, but because you genuinely do not know how to imagine this. Someone else. Who? You think of your old friends, people you shared a house with in Tooting. You’ve spoken to them, it’s none of them, it’s someone entirely new, probably a Bundist like Fel, someone with whom you have absolutely nothing in common.

You feel like your heart’s just been ripped out of your chest and you wish that felt as dramatic as it sounds. You wish you could bleed. You wish you could be sick. But no. Without a heart, you feel absolutely fine, the way a doll must feel, absolutely fine, all of the time.

And because you want to feel something, anything, you allow yourself, for a split-second, to think of the life you could have had – and, Christ, you pull back immediately, of course you do, there’s the cut, there’s the wound, not going there, not going there again.

Fel must still be staying here. This is still her flat. She could come through the door at any moment – only your gut tells you she won’t. If this were her usual home, there would be a liner in the kitchen bin and the refrigerator would be stocked and there would be open packets in the cupboards.

No: she has held on to this place for occasional visits. Her pad in the city. This is where she stays when she wants to be alone.

3

The Kaiser Wilhelm Society meant well. The idea was to save lives. To treat wounded soldiers from the air. In the winter of 1916–1917, during an extraordinary and extended hiatus in the conflict, Zeppelin-mounted floodlights raked the dead and dying of the Somme with healing Gurwitsch rays.

A bubbling in the winter mud. ‘A fantastical mulch,’ Punch burbled; The Strand was likewise mightily intrigued. On both sides of this ever more evidently insane conflict, a great hope arose: that the freshly killed might be squeezed and pummelled back into order by Gurwitsch rays. If it worked, then (argued some) war itself would become meaningless. On the contrary (argued others), war would become infinitely more heartless and mechanical. It didn’t matter whether your heart was filled with dread or with longing; everyone, in those few quiet weeks, believed they had glimpsed the world of the future.

But the future was of a sort no one could have imagined, and the spring of 1917 brought forth strange fruit. Where the name ‘chickie’ came from, no one now remembers, and it’s a strangely innocuous name to have stuck given the bloody nature of their arrival, rising, diminutive and needle-toothed, from the mudblood of the Somme.

They feasted upon the dead, dragged gangrenous limbs into their hives, prospered and, after their fashion, bred, while all around them, the heavily armed constituencies of Europe succumbed to existential horror. Nothing budged the chickies. Not flamethrowers. Not gas. Attempts at pogrom further complicated an already impossibly complicated conflict, and attacks against this bizarre new threat very quickly deteriorated into campaigns against the usual: Gypsies, students, Czechs perished by the hundreds of thousands. Jews came in for special persecution, as it got into people’s heads that Gurwitsch’s biophotonic technology was the weapon of choice of a cosmopolitan Jewish conspiracy.

Young leftist Jews had for many years been torn between two competing political camps: the Zionists, who sought a political homeland in Palestine; and the Bundists who, rejecting the old ‘obscurantism’ and embracing Marx, sought integration in a new, humanist future. The pogroms of 1917 polarised that struggle. The Bundists, seizing Gurwitsch as their secular saint (who would be strung from a lamp post in Prague in 1920), fled to Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

It should have been the end of them. Reduced to a pitiful few hundred radicals, they were flying right into the jaws of yet another Russian famine, even as every other intellectual was trying to get the hell out. Lenin, grateful and canny, offered them Birobidzhan in Siberia as their homeland and, singing hymns to the New Soviet Man, they leapt aboard the carriages of the Trans-Siberian. No one expected to hear from them again.

Within a year, Birobidzhan had become the engine of Bolshevik atheism: industrious, innovative, positively American in its embrace of new technology. Still no one foresaw its rise: how the Bund should, in the course of thirty bloody years, overtake and surpass its Bolshevik paymasters. But how could it have turned out otherwise? The Bund had the Gurwitsch ray, and with the ray they transformed everything, just as Gurwitsch had predicted. Gurwitsched wheat averted the ’21 famine, saving Saint Petersburg. Gurwitsched horses twenty-five hands high pulled rocks out of the path of the White Sea Canal, connecting the Arctic to the Baltic. All Europe fed on Gurwitsched pigs, Gurwitsched apples, Gurwitsched lemons. Until at last their mastery was such, the Bundists dared to try again, and in a much more careful, targeted fashion, what had been tried in 1917. They turned the rays upon themselves.

The Barbican: two towers, and seven storeys of maisonettes upon a rectangular podium, grouped around lakes and green squares. Its architects were your teachers: German war refugees with strong ideas about simplicity and utility. Men who, with their past ripped from them, embraced the future. They were men whose self-idea was constructed entirely of new materials. They were old when you met them, stood in lecture halls and applauded them, and they are long gone now. They surfed the wave of the future, and it swallowed them up. The flat you shared with Fel looks inwards, over the lakes, the greens, the lines of trees, and it is easy, standing at the living-room window, to imagine that nothing has changed. Ironic, that a building conceived with an eye focused so fiercely on the future should already be feeding your nostalgia.

Meanwhile the Bund races ahead, overtopping everything, swamping everything. This wave your teachers surfed has grown so big, all you can do now is run from it. Head for the hills, the mills, the moors! There is not much dry land left above the Bundists’ liquid way of building. Walls that shift to accommodate the occupant. Roads that move. Aircraft that unfurl from the sky.

The Bund’s in every country now, with enclaves in all big cities. The obvious metaphor for this process – a tumour, metastasising – fails because of its unkindness. The Bund’s enclaves offer the Old World much, and almost all were welcomed. Good regulation helps, as London proves. Founded in the city’s financial heart, London’s Bund may overtop the Barbican all it likes, but it is here, on this line, that its deluge ceases and its wave is frozen. It has been agreed and signed into statute that the Bund’s glass and LED glitter will come no further west. And after all, the Bundists are men and women, not without feeling, not without judgement. Even if it were in their jurisdiction, the Barbican Estate would probably survive as, within the purlieus of the Bund, traces of London’s Roman wall survive, and local wells and rivers under stone, Bazalgette’s pump house, and the foot-tunnel under the Thames at Greenwich. The Bundists are kinder to the past than your precious émigrés ever were. Remember those pictures: how thoroughly they erased the ruins of Cripplegate to bring the Barbican into being?

In your first year (such was the city’s desire to keep up with the Bund) the Bartlett assigned you some ruined land of your own. It lay within a stone’s throw of this estate. It was yours to survey, yours to refashion on paper and in balsa, and in your second year, assuming your vision was not hopelessly inept, you got to see it built. You read and reread your commission, unable to believe your luck. The Corporation of the City of London was giving you a whole block of the city to play in: a huge, weedy lot, bombed out in the Great War and neglected since, running south from Roscoe Street as far as Fortune Street, and bounded east and west by Whitecross Street and Golden Lane. You imagined yourself another Geoffry Powell, another Christoph Bon. You imagined great Brutalist towers rising. You didn’t have nearly the amount of money needed for such grandiloquence (nor, indeed, the freedom; your tutor was constantly breathing down your neck). Undeterred, you traced the borders of your playpen on maps both old and new, in council offices and in libraries, struggling to encompass your fortune. Fortune, Whitecross, Roscoe, Golden Lane…

You picked through the stones so gingerly. What were you expecting to find in that choked and rubble-strewn quarter? Another corn dolly? Superstition kept you hesitating at the outskirts of the bomb field for a long time. Street by overgrown street, garden by garden, cellar by flooded cellar you crept forth, timidly occupying your very own zone of council-approved redevelopment. Theodolite over your shoulder. Cheap camera. Notebook. Sandwiches in a tin box.

Over the course of spring term, you came to know every ruin, broken arch and orphaned doorway. Every exposed interior. The papered walls of everted reception rooms. The absurdity of sanitaryware under a blue sky. You found a fox nesting inside a toppled wardrobe, a spindle of buddleia taking root inside a shoe.

You worked hard, long into the night, and gradually that square of streets – Fortune, Whitecross, Roscoe, Golden Lane – became your private kingdom. And why not? This was the zone assigned to you. This was yours to transform. Yours to improve. The clearance operation was scheduled for the summer break. Before then, you had to bring your friends here. You wanted them to appreciate the scale of the work ahead, and see the shabby Before to your carefully drafted After.

You brought Jill here, with whom you acted once or twice in college plays. She was very stiff, her fingers always playing at her throat, and you imagined she was a bomb just waiting to go off. Which, as it turned out, she was, though not in the way you had hoped. You spent an entire spring day trying to seduce her. Mind this drop, that spar, an unprotected hole! She wasn’t dressed for it. A yellow frock. Strappy sandals. You took these as good omens. Listen, you said, hear the water, running just beneath our feet! Here, there’s shade and a seat, someone’s abandoned sofa, not too damp, behind this abandoned car. Here – shush – look at the pretty little foxes!

Until, in the ruins of a bomb-hollowed church where you led her by the hand (you had got that far) down an aisle filled with coloured light filtering from a great west window still unaccountably intact and there, butterflied in green and red and blue, she let go of your hand and knelt, fingers clawing at her neck for the little gold cross you had imagined was no more than an ornament. Then tears, and the hysteria that (you learned) invariably accompanies a religious visitation. ‘The light! Such light!’

So that tore it.

Who else did you bring here? More college friends. Stan and Robyn. In their third year of music studies they had decided to get married and had moved into rooms absurdly far from the campus.

Towards the end of your first year your scholarship monies had all run dry, and you were making ends meet playing lounge piano in a dive north of Soho. One Saturday night, Stan and Robyn turned up there. They paid you hardly any mind, they were too busy screaming at each other, throwing wine at each other, throwing plates. It was the sort of place that appreciated character. You were more likely to get hustled out than they were: your plodding arpeggiations were the definition of dismal.

They showed up the following Saturday, and the Saturday after that, and the one after that. They told you they were co-writing a musical review. It was all about the art of the English murder and the impossible airlessness of the garden suburbs. You didn’t take them at all seriously, until their faces were in the papers. Your Aunt Stella bankrolled the show’s move to the West End, where it won instant acclaim.

As a favour to Stella, you led Stan and Robyn through your soon-to-be-flattened wilderness – Fortune, Whitecross, Roscoe, Golden Lane. The earthmovers were already trundling into position as you sat the pair on piles of broken masonry and took moody publicity shots of them with a very complicated large-format camera. Stan was wearing a lounge suit and Robyn was in a cocktail dress and they were constantly brushing the plaster off each other, picking off burrs and thorns and seeds and stray grasses. ‘We’ve got to return these clothes.’ They couldn’t take their hands off each other.

Six months later and with the baby beginning to show, they parked up on a bridle path in the Lee Valley and piped exhaust fumes into the cabin of their car. The papers, in a frenzy, rang you up for more photographs. ‘Anything unpublished will do.’ You dug out the portfolio. You gazed at them. They looked so very happy. So very unworldly. You burned everything, even the negatives.

Stanislaw Lesniak – another ‘Stan’ – was no celebrity, but of all your visitors, he was the one who most publicly identified with the place. Early one summer vacation, so as to fill a gap in his little magazine Responses (‘Poetry, Politics, Gardening’), he took a tour of Cripplegate (‘The foxes here are riddled with rabies: what has the council to say?’), casting you as that region’s native guide (‘Surly, incommunicative, venal, but a match for the wildlife’). Stanislaw was in love with you, and you must have felt you owed him something because you spent four whole days leading him up and over banks of broken masonry, through thickets of bramble and self-seeded foxglove. It was a stop-start affair as he was constantly having to peer at, pick and identify the surrounding plant life, cross-referencing diligently between three heavy field guides. ‘It must be fat hen after all. I’ve never seen a specimen so tall.’ Buddleiae were just buddleiae to you until he taught you to distinguish between Lochinch and summer lilac. ‘I have also come across wall lettuce and hedge mustard here, among the usual smooth sow thistle, nipplewort and coltsfoot, all with yellow flowers.’ You appear in his exhaustive account of his Cripplegate explorations often, and always through the lens of incredulity. ‘The rubble banks to the west of the site are “a sea of bluebells” in March, Lanyon tells me: a convenient claim to make in July.’

Responses withered but Stanislaw Lesniak’s account of unrepaired Cripplegate has never been out of print. The Penguin edition has woodcuts for each chapter head. You still hear him on the BBC sometimes, explicating difficult ideas to do with soil radiobiology.

Felicine Chernoy.

Last and not least.

When you led Fel through Cripplegate, she drank in everything you showed her so passively, it was impossible to know whether she was having a good time or not. She was not equipped, mentally, for an unaccommodated world. She had no idea what to do with it. If you led her to a vantage point, she would follow. If you sat her down in the shade behind a wrecked car, she would sit. She said almost nothing. She more or less ignored the picnic you had brought. You had no idea, back then, how little she ate. She was a vacuum into which you had been pouring all your hopes for weeks. She was, at that time, still a simple object of desire, absurdly too beautiful for you.

In the night that followed your explorations of Cripplegate, you took her back to the house in Tooting where you rented a room. She let you make love to her again.

In the middle of the night, the faulty central heating clanged you awake and you found her sitting up beside you in the bed, sketching with a biro on lined paper. She had tweaked the curtain aside to illuminate her page by street light. You sat up and turned the light on. She had your likeness down in all its gawky preposterousness. Her portraits never tipped into caricature; they were crueller than that. The plants at your feet were identifiable. Mercury, lamb’s ear, black bryony. You told her the names of the plants she had drawn. She blinked at you, half-smiling, and you began to understand what the vacuum inside her signified. She was built to absorb everything. Nothing escaped her notice. Nothing was beneath her regard. Not even you.

Somewhere there must still be the drawings Fel made of the construction site when, in the autumn term of your second year, your paper buildings were given planning permission and began to rise upon the plane of levelled rubbish separating Fortune Street and Roscoe Street. She caught details with her pen onsite, and when you were alone together you explained the things she had drawn. That the sill-plate bolted to the crawl-space wall is made of pressure-treated lumber. That the lintel carries the load from the roof to the trimmer studs, so the door does not burst open under the weight of the roof. Your careful explanations were completely pointless. You surely realised this. A tribesman patiently explaining to an anthropologist how to work a flint into a scraper.

Bringing Fel to the building site strained your relations with the foreman, who already had little interest in anything you had to say. He knew what houses were. Again and again you had to drag him back to the plans. Answering the builders’ objections became an exhausting and nightmarish version of the fairground game in which hammering the head of a mole into its hole causes three other moles to pop out. You had to fight for every off-width stair, every pricey curtain wall, every non-standard sheet of glass. What you did not know at the time was that construction of this sort was already redundant. In fact, your houses were the last the foreman would ever oversee, or his workers build. The Bund’s constructions stop east of City Road, but its construction crews are available for hire by any cash-strapped city council. The homes you and your construction crew so painfully conjured into being, turning pencil strokes to timber and nights of careful calculations into so many tons of mixed cement: for the Bund, these are merely printing jobs.

Your work survives, though much of it has suffered after being passed rapidly from owner to owner and from use to use. On Banner Street someone has tacked faux-Elizabethan timbering over your brick frontages. Flats that impend over the pavement on cantilevered beams have been propped up with massive and unnecessary concrete pillars. Carpet shops and convenience stores fill the small, uniform retail units you had meant for artists’ studios, rehearsal spaces and left-wing bookshops. Where Banner Street meets Golden Lane, the Foresters pub remains true to your vision: a rectilinear shell of yellow brick, hardly different in its proportions from the houses surrounding it. The architectural suggestion here – that the pub might have been made later, by knocking through two ordinary residences – was, if you recall, deliberate: one of many knowing nods to the idea of a manufactured past. It is an embarrassingly bad building but this is where you find yourself: a criminal returning to the scene of his crime.

The inside of the pub is carpeted throughout with worn red industrial stuff. The balustrades around the little raised dining areas are made of wood, as are the chairs, though they are slathered over with such a layer of thick and shiny varnish that they may as well be made of plastic. Plastic drip-trays line the long bar. Tall electric pumps offer a narrow selection of beers. A Heineken will do. You carry it over to a round table set out for eating. Not that you plan to eat, but there’s a television blaring away in the taproom.

The channel it is tuned to is fixating, not for the first or even the fifth time, on the construction of HMS Victory, a British spaceship, powered by atom bombs, that is your world’s best hope for reaching the Moon, and Mars, and other stars. Ever since the end of the war, politicians have been promising to use atoms for peace, and the Victory is the flagship of that effort.

Unfortunately, it has also come to stand for all the frustrations, delays and broken promises of the Atoms for Peace movement. It is taking far too long to build.

The TV is regurgitating information films and animations and interviews that everyone has seen several times over. It is all old material. So far as you can tell, there is no actual news.

Cynics say this state of affairs is likely to last indefinitely: a ship always about to launch, a new era of discovery always just around the corner. This dark joke rankles with you, since it casts your brother and his fellow crew members into perpetual purdah: always ready, hands on the hatch doors; always, and for ever, just a klaxon’s blast away from boarding.

Since its inception, the project has hung in a queer no-man’s-land, part military project, part national festivity. Politically, keeping the entire project dangling makes a queer kind of sense. Never mind the real possibility of failure (after all, no one has ever tried this before), success will be expensive, in an instant turning investment into expenditure.

Even sat with your back to it, the flickering screen is hard to ignore: dramatic current affairs-style music, all bombast and synthesised brass in a 5/4 rhythm, shakes the little set so that the casing buzzes. The only distraction to hand is a crammed tin dish of ketchups and sauces and individual servings of sugar and low-calorie sweetener. Why on earth didn’t you bring a book?

The door opens, admitting the sound of traffic, a man in a pork pie hat, and a chickie on a lead. The man leads the chickie up to the bar. The chickie may as well be a dog he has led in, for all that anyone here seems bothered by it. It squats at its master’s feet. With small, stubby, nailless fingers, it scratches at its neck where the collar has raised a mild red line. The collar is black leather, about an inch wide, and studded with small, rounded stainless steel studs. The chickie yawns, lips peeling back to reveal purplish gums and long, stained teeth. Its incisors are filed to points.

The chickie is big for its kind, though it is wearing a puffy powder-blue nylon one-piece that adds much to its apparent bulk. Its feet are laced up in strappy black high-heeled sandals. Its toes are long and delicate and end in thick nails, lacquered a glossy black.

The man in the hat is someone you recognise, though it takes you a minute to place him. He has on a black leather blazer, dull and greasy with use, baggy jeans and tasselled tan loafers. It is the foreman of the construction crew that built your houses. The man who knew what houses were and, worse, knew that he knew. The man you ignored when he told you that you couldn’t bring your girlfriend onto a building site.

You can’t remember his name. He has lost weight since you last saw him and much of it from his face, which is lined and cadaverous with an ashy forty-a-day cast. You watch as he deftly crushes the filter of his cigarette prior to popping it in his mouth. This is a man with a taste for tarry goodness. He used to be defined by his drinking, his pot belly neat and protuberant and virtually liver-shaped, a cartoon of cirrhosis. Now he has become a man defined by his smoking. The hat is new. At least, you have only ever seen him before in the fluorescent yellow hard-hat of his profession.

You wonder (because for some reason this does not seem to be in your power to decide) whether you are going to stand up and go over to the bar and say hello to him, though you know full well he will not remember you, and even if he does he will make a business of not remembering, because architecture students with their fancy ideas, their timber decks and neutral facades, are a dime a dozen to him.

The TV sparks and gutters out and from the taproom comes the soft, hollow sound of tables being dragged across thin carpet. You turn and watch through the rails of your snug. There are a dozen or so men pulling tables together to make an impromptu stage. The barman – a young man with acne and plastered-down hair – disappears out the back and a moment later the stage is bathed in a blood-red glow from small spotlights mounted on the ceiling’s fake rafters.

Someone sets a glass down heavily on your table. You turn, take in the glass – it is dry, there is money inside – and the fist and the arm and the pork pie hat and the foreman’s eyes. You remember his eyes very well: how they packed and focused and delivered everything he knew not to say. Wilkes. His name was – is – Wilkes.

‘Fiver.’

Had it been anyone else you would have simply stood up and left. Instead: ‘Thank you, Mr Wilkes.’ And in goes money you can ill afford to waste like this. Wilkes, indifferent to his name, moves off. You wonder where his charge has gone.

The barman is back. He is walking around the lounge, bar towel in hand, wiping tables now that they have been vacated. It occurs to you that what is happening here cannot be legal, and this realisation, coupled with the charge emitted from Wilkes’s eyes, lifts you to your feet and propels you along a line of least resistance into the taproom.

There are people following you in, nudging you closer to the makeshift stage, and it’s a puzzle to know where they’ve come from, the pub wasn’t this busy before. The stage, made of slippery, highly varnished tables pushed together, a rickety platform full of gaps and raised edges, blears red under the spotlights. You know what is coming and it amazes you they think they can get away with this. The council is not kind to these kinds of infractions, the pub could lose its licence. To cover your nervousness, you try swallowing the rest of your pint. (No? No. It absolutely refuses to go down. Its gassiness has defeated you.)

The man in the pork pie hat is no longer around. He doesn’t even introduce his act: a thin cheer greets me as I mince through the crowd. With a muscled grunt, I push myself up on my knuckles and swing into a sitting position on top of the tables. I have been here before. Not in this particular pub, as it happens, but on stages like these, in front of crowds like these. I’m surprised there are so many men here; it’s normally a mixed crowd.

There’s some applause, a couple of wolf whistles. I reply with an expression I know will get you all going: something midway between a yawn and a threat, exposing my sharpened teeth. You all think this is a natural thing for me: feral. You have no idea of the hours I have spent in front of the mirror. You cannot imagine the tedium of all those facial exercises. But that is where the art is, thankless as this sounds. It takes work, making this look easy. I stretch my bowed and rickety legs and part them a little, scraping the table varnish with the pointed heels of my sandals, then get to my feet (such tiny feet! I am proud of them, I take a lot of care of them, can you tell?) and parade slowly over the tables, testing them, marking my space. I bring my hands to my throat, feeling for the zip, and because my eyes are as black as a bear’s, with no whites visible, everyone here thinks I am looking at them as I pull the zip down.

Is no one going to put on any music? I have played some dives before but this takes the biscuit. Not that I need music. I am more than capable of setting my own rhythm. I know what I’m doing. Let us be clear who is in charge here, shall we?

Shucking this bloody blue nylon coverall is a relief. You may cheer to see what’s underneath but your pleasure is nothing compared to my own. What was Wilkes thinking, dressing me up in that sweatsuit? I run my nailless fingers through the spangled glitter of my skirt (yes, it hurt; yes, it was Wilkes’s idea; yes, with pliers; into each life a little rain will sometimes fall) and once I shed my bolero shirt I find that half my carefully applied paint job is coming off on my fingers. I can feel it, it’s just slopping off me, I’m drenched. I run my hands around my belly and my breasts, finger-painting myself. Always, if you can, turn a mishap into a number. I remember I once slipped arse-first between two tables in a place hardly better than this and you should have heard the laughter, oh, they thought I was done for. But I came up through that crack like the devil himself and all his little demons. Spitting. Snarling. Dripping. Tonguing. They laughed on the other side of their faces that day. They climaxed with terror. The landlord literally so, the gropy bugger. Which is why Wilkes decided that night to see to my claws.

I need a moment for my skin to breathe and for the glitter spray to tack and harden: a slow, sashaying process around and around my little ‘stage’ gets the audience clapping in time. I’m gathering up the threaded stuff of my skirt as I go, revealing the junctions between buttock and thigh, between buttock and buttock. And stop. And – bend. These heels are at the absolute outer envelope of what I can manage. Bend. Bend, damn it. The bed last night, if you can call it a bed, the foam pallet Wilkes tossed down for me in the back of his garage, has stiffened me like a board. Bend. Good grief, it’s a long way down…

The money shot. Are you looking? You are looking. Sex means very different things to me, which is why I can make it so powerfully personal for you. This is anything but nature expressing itself, let me assure you: how I reach behind, and spread. What on earth you find of paradise in those complex and inutile folds and swelling, hairy lumps beats me, but I’m not complaining. I like being looked at. Can’t you tell? I like being seen and studied. I like being recognised. For me…

Ah, but what’s the point? You don’t even know I can think, and I’m certainly not going to blow the gaffe now. Not here. Not yet.

Still bent, I part the threaded stuff covering my breasts and cup and squeeze and pull. Milk drips from my fingers. And I am off again, tripping to my internal rhythm, orbiting the stage. My tongue is swelling, the way it does, and without my meaning it, it rolls out of my mouth. Every slip becomes a gesture, every fault an element: I lick the curve of my clavicle and the smooth knob of my shoulder, writhe my slim, long neck against the restriction of my studded collar and – there.

What you have come to see. Or, at any rate, are going to get. This big, bifurcated member of mine rises of its own will through the silver grasses of my skirt. Honestly, just look at the bloody great thing; it’s hard sometimes to say which of us is in charge. Clear mucosal oil gathers in its bowl-shaped tip, and from it rises a scent as powerful and penetrating as any incense, a human ambergris to set your blood on fire, so gather round, boys, girls, gather round and breathe it in, now that I have you under my spell.

It says something about your state of mind that Wilkes’s absence from the scene distracts you from my presence. Frankly, I am somewhat hurt. But I have to hand it to you: you’re quick on the uptake. You’re wondering what it is that lets Wilkes sit there quietly at the bar, supping his gaseous bitter, when the air is turned all golden with my milk-and-fresh-bread smell.

Wilkes glances at you. He says: ‘You’ll av to zerve yourzelf.’

There. The secret is revealed.

‘Barman’z gone to wodge.’

You shrug, aping the other man’s indifference.

‘What’z de madder wid you, den?’

‘What?’

‘You don’t lige de show?’

You have no answer to that. You neither like nor dislike my show. You understand that it is a thing beyond liking and not liking. Still, you want to say something.

Wilkes’s face is as belligerent as his question, and you struggle to right yourself under the power of his pale blue gaze. You fancy that our close association – talent and agent, slave and master – has lent him some of his living property’s power, though none of its charm.

‘I know you,’ you tell him. ‘We worked together. On these houses. You had charge of the site.’

Wilkes looks at you without even trying to recognise you. He shrugs. ‘Worked all over,’ he says.

‘But here. These houses—’

‘Shid houses.’

‘Are they?’

‘Bund do better dan dese in an afdernoon.’

Wilkes breaks off his stare, snaps upright as though heaved on a wire and begins paddling the pockets of his trousers. He tilts his head back, his mouth stretching in a rictus that reveals the browned nubs of never-shed milk teeth. His sneeze, coming after so theatrical a delay, is explosive, escaping his rapidly cupped hands. Spit flecks your cheek; you take a step backwards.

‘Shid.’

You have no handkerchief to offer him.

‘Fug.’ Wilkes wipes his nose with a bare hand. ‘Shid.’

The break in transmission encourages you to try again. Why you should want to attempt communication with this oaf beats me. But try you must.

‘How do you—?’

Then his eyes are upon you again, and you stop.

‘Whad?’

‘The chickie. How do you—?’

Absently, Wilkes runs his hand down the front of his shirt. ‘Rezizt?’ The man snorts phlegm and, swallowing a bark of laughter, taps the side of his nose. ‘Oh, I gan rezizt. No broblem. I don av none of dis, mate. None of your zense of zmell.’

The show is over. Chickies bring you on, goes the old joke, but they cannot bring you off. Now my striptease is done, we have a room here full of men and women with no idea – none – what to do with themselves. All this spangle and glitter is but the delivery system for a state of mind you lot cannot resist and can never find a name for, suckers that you are. And since no one wants to meet each other’s eye, it makes logical sense that the entire audience repair en masse to the bar, clamouring and shouting, waving damp banknotes in the air. It is thirsty work, being worked on the way I work on you.

Glasses clash and tinkle, in and out of the bottle-washing machine. Beer gushes. Slops puddle the bar. The barman reappears, disappears, reappears. Now there are two of him. Seriously: they are as alike as twins. Someone nearby lights a cigarette. You fish in your pocket for change. There’s only enough for a half. What time is it?

‘Bollogs.’ Wilkes leans away from the bar. He wobbles a moment, a boat casting off, and by the pitch of his gaze you can only assume he is looking for me, for while I am many things, I am not what you would call tall, even in these ridiculous heels. ‘Mate,’ he says to you, ‘wodge my pint.’

One glance at the cloudy muck Wilkes has made of his drink is one glance too many. Anyone making off with that yeasty backwash gets what they deserve.

Half a pint of IPA in hand, you squeeze through to a narrow space to the right of the bar, and at a small table you sit, only to find yourself tourniqueted by that damned twist in your trousers again. You stand up and turn out your pockets, and what should turn up but that corn dolly of yours? Odd: you could have sworn you left it behind at the flat. It’s somewhat the worse for its escapade. One arm is mushed beyond saving and there are loose stands of straw around its neck: a makeshift ruff.

You shove the dolly back in your pocket and sit down abruptly. You feel embarrassed, though there’s no very good reason why. Such trinkets are common enough. Dollies. Arrowheads. Little baskets (‘Fairy baskets’, they call them). Felt shoes. Crude clay figurines of animals, no bigger than your thumb.

Every village in England has a store peddling the leavings of its local chickies. They sit happily enough in the window display, nestled among the other tat those places sell. Stuffed mice dressed up in doll’s clothes. Hand-drawn maps of local walks suitable for the halt and the lame. Pamphlets anatomising the local church. There were a couple of shops of that sort in Hebden Bridge, do you remember? One was a post office, the other a riot of incense, posters, semi-precious stones, pendulums, tarot cards, runes, wands.

Do you remember the summer Jim came home on furlough and brought along mates of his, rough army lads from Sheffield and Penistone? How excited you were! How much you wanted to be a part of their games! You were just about old enough to drink by then, and Jim let you tag along after them up to Heptonstall for a boozy lunch of curries and crumbles, and then to the pub for more pints. They were friendly lads after their fashion. They teased you for your glasses and your weak frame. You were too excited to let anything they said hurt you.

Do you remember afterwards, what you got up to together on the moors?

Do you remember stumbling upon my hive, and what you did with it?

If you had bothered to clear it out instead of burning it, you could have sold my things to that shop. It sold all manner of rubbish, that place, like Mayan Music Balls which came with a note that read, ‘Because they are handmade, no two balls ring alike.’ Most didn’t ring at all.

What would you have found to sell, had you bothered to dig me out? A brooch made of hammered tin. Some horn buttons. A few long-stemmed pipes. A clay oil lamp. You could have earned a few bob from that lot.

But no. Jim and his mates were far too drunk by then. Liquored up, they were, and they even had you lugging a crafty keg after them onto the moors. Big army louts, your brother’s mates. Clumsy and vicious, and you no better, leaping up at them, wagging your tail: Jimmy’s kid brother, eager to be joining in with the older boys.

Pathetic.

It was your match, Stu. Remember that.

Do you remember the dance you did? Of course you do. Ululating and farting, how you hopped and skipped around the blaze. Such brave young braves. Shirts shed and feathers in your hair. (And I got the last laugh there, didn’t I? What did you think I saved feathers for? How could it not occur to you, to any of you, that I might want something soft with which to wipe my arse?)

You didn’t hear my mewling, and this I guess is just as well, because it saves us having to explore the vexed business of what you would have done, or not done, or egged each other on to do, if you had realised what was choking to death under your feet. A dozen eyes not opened. Half a dozen mouths not weaned. Does anything so young feel pain? Oh, trust me.

A peculiar ululation, distant but very loud, cuts through the pub and silences its banter. The noise is impossible to place: it sounds hardly human. Something horrible must have happened, but beyond that the cry gives nothing away.

In a silence so total it is almost comical, you stand and walk to the door. For some reason you are the only one in motion. No one else thinks to follow you and investigate the sound. This, apparently, is your moment, though you would feel more the man of the hour were you able to walk in a straight line. Your early start this morning (did today really start in the West Riding?), a few mouthfuls of lager and those ridiculous work boots of yours have robbed your legs of their power; you might be tottering from a sickbed.

The door isn’t nearly as heavy as its thick varnish and bottle-glass panels suggest: when you pull it towards you, you practically hit yourself with it. The roadside air, though far from fresh, washes over you like water. You don’t have to go far to identify the source of the commotion. Bent over the pavement, his hat gone, his thin hair disarrayed, Wilkes dribbles blood into the gutter.

You catch him by the shoulders and ease him away from the road where the traffic is barrelling by. He has his hands over his face. You take hold of his arms to steady him and his hands come away. His nose is half-off, his left cheek horseshoed by neat triangular punctures. His chickie must have attacked him. He sinks to the pavement, his feet stuck out wide, like a toddler lost in a mall, and pats spastically at his jacket. He finds his cigarettes. The lighter’s in the packet but his fingers are bloody, the flint wheel will not catch. You bend down to help him. He kicks at you like a child.

You ask him: ‘Do you want me to call someone?’ Where is his chickie? Where has it gone? How long will it last, scampering back and forth across these busy roads?

Wilkes is still struggling with the lighter. You force it away from him and snatch the cigarette packet from his lap and stay out the way of his drumming feet while you light him a fag. He won’t even take it when you offer it to him. Some punters from the pub have joined you now. You throw the lit cigarette in the gutter, hand the pack and the lighter to the barman – one of the barmen, seriously, they must be twins – and, heading south, you take City Road back to the Barbican, trying very hard not to let the misery in.

Shit. He pronounced your houses shit.

You look about you. Yes, shit by any measure, though they might still be thought well of in the West Riding. You wish very much that you were home already, back in the valley, back in your father’s house, feet dangling off the end of your little truckle bed and freezing in the cold air. And, come to think of it, why not return tonight?

There is a sleeper service. If you’re not sticking around in town you could afford the ticket for that. Is there anything in the flat so very precious that you really need to fetch it? For a second, you pause, and the foot-traffic of City Road barges about you: secretaries and clerks are tottering sore-eyed from a day’s work in the Bund; shop assistants stride along in determined pursuit of happy hours.

Thinking to leave it all behind, you look around for a bus stop. Then you remember James’s picture in its frame. That’s a problem. You can’t leave that behind, can you? And once you are walking again, a dozen other vital articles spring to mind, things you simply cannot do without, though you’ve managed perfectly well without them for months.

You take a meandering route back to the flat, hoping to clear your head a little after this haywire afternoon. City Road is the line along which original London abuts the Bund. It is the civil boundary beyond which Bundist land purchases cease. The contrast between the two halves of the city – the unaccommodated West and the Bundist East – is stark. It is as though the city has been divided by war, rather than by the conscientious and passionate avoidance of it.

The border between old and new is clear, but it is not brutal. Finsbury Circus, which happens to lie on the Bundist side of the road, is hardly changed. Quality will out, and nothing has been allowed to interfere with the lines of Edwin Lutyens’ Britannic House. There is still a ring of limes around the park, though otherwise the planting is much improved, and the Bund have introduced lemurs to play about its stand of preternaturally matured baobab. Office workers sprawl exhausted on blue lawns, watching as the lemurs chase each other through the branches. Sometimes a lemur comes to ground, steals someone’s phone, settles on a high branch to study its blank screen, disappointed, then drops it in fright the moment it rings.

You sidle through the crowd waiting to enter Moorgate Tube Station. These are unaccommodated workers who have spent the day working in the Bund. Serving coffee. Sweeping offices. Operating phones and reception desks. They are quiet and slow to move, each nursing the mild headache induced by hours spent on the Bundist side. Many unaccommodated men and women work in the Bund. The pay is good, though the jobs are menial. The Bundists’ treatment of their unaccommodated guest workers is always civil, and when you slip up, or seize up, or panic (it’s inevitable, sooner or later), passers-by are kind, though some of them sigh a little. Where is it you are trying to get to? What is it you are trying to do? Here, let me open this for you. Come over here. Have a sit down. Can I get you some water? Is there anyone I can call?

You turn right along London Wall. Where the Barbican estate overtops the road, making a tunnel, you turn right again on Wood Street, past maisonettes above green-painted garages, and left, into the estate by Saint Giles.

A scrabbling sound to your left startles you. You see a concrete spiral stair near a sign for ‘Gilbert Bridge’. Over the top of the curved pebble-dash wall, you catch a glimpse of something grey. A pork pie hat. Whoever is wearing it is no taller than a child, but (trust me on this) it moves much more quickly.

Slowly, cautiously, you take the stairs up to podium level. There is no one about, just a view across the ponds, and the maisonettes on the far side of the rectangle are half-hidden behind the foliage spilling from planters and window boxes.

Behind you, you hear a door click shut. You turn. Nothing moves. A few yards away there’s the entrance to a stairwell. You go over to the door. It’s locked, and access is gained by typing a code into a stainless-steel keypad. The code has not changed since you lived here. You pull the door open, take the stairs back down to street level, and in the crawl space under the last flight of stairs you find me crouching, clutching Wilkes’s pork pie hat in my nailless hands.

I stare back at you with blind-black eyes, giving nothing away.

You’re waiting for me to move, but you’ll never win that game. I can outstare suns. Slowly, carefully, you pull the corn dolly from your trouser pocket and hunker down, so that you are on a level with me.

I have shed my skirt of silver grass and my spangled bolero shirt, but there is still that black leather collar round my neck. You would help me take it off, but you are afraid to approach. The mess I made of Wilkes’s face is not something you’re going to find easy to forget.

You speak to me as to a dog of unsure temperament: ‘How did you get in here?’

Because you told me the code for the door. Dummy. I lick my teeth at you.

‘Hmm?’

Impasse.

‘Here.’ You hold the dolly out to me. ‘You like this?’

I lean forward a little, sniffing. I’ll play along.

‘You like it?’

I lean back into the shadows and nictitating membranes flash sideways over my black eyes. I paw the hat closer to myself, hiding my groin.

‘Was he a bad man? Was the man bad to you?’

I take the hat from my groin, straighten it out and place it at a jaunty angle on my head.

So that is that. What are you going to do? You mull the options. The council exterminator is just a call away.

Carefully, so as not to startle me (as if!), you stand. You go to the door, palm the green exit button to unlock it and push it open. ‘Out you go, little one.’

I hunker further into my corner.

‘Come on, now.’

I draw the whole business out for an age – I need you to think that I’m frightened – but as I sidle past, I can’t resist tugging the corner of my new hat in salute. Courtesy ought to beget courtesy. You laugh.

Back up the stairs, then, to the podium – and what now? A drink in the Barbican Centre beckons but you can’t afford it. There’s still plenty of time to grab some essentials and head for the sleeper train, but can you face more travel after today?

Wearily, you cast about, getting your bearings. Orientating yourself is surprisingly hard; you don’t normally approach the flat from this direction. You finally settle on a route that leads you around Speed Garden. It’s not direct, but it’s dusk now and you want to catch the last of the light. The corn dolly is still in your hand, or what’s left of it; you look for a bin, but when you get back to the flat the dolly is still in your hand.

Standing at the door, fishing for your keys, it occurs to you that maybe you should knock first. What if Fel’s removal men have arrived? What if Fel is here?

Oh, to hell with the whole situation! Savagely, you wrestle the key into the lock.

There’s no one inside.

Unlacing your boots takes the usual age, then you head into the bedroom. You can barely keep your eyes open. You figure that if you steal a nap, you’ll wake up just in time to buy something to eat at a convenience store. But if you sleep on, does it matter? This day has gone on too long already.

You’ll at least leave the blinds open. You take off your trousers and dump them in a heap in front of the wardrobe. The duvet is folded, without a cover, at the foot of the bed. You pull it up over yourself as you lie down. You close your eyes.

Wilkes’s ruined face looms at you behind your eyelids. The shock of finding him bleeding on the pavement, never mind your potentially risky confrontation with the chickie just now, has left you trembling. You turn over, away from the window, willing on oblivion.

When you came off the moors behind Jim and his friends, you could still smell the smoke. It was in your clothes and stuck to your skin. You ran sooted hands through your hair and wished you could get away with shaving your head, the way Jim shaved his. You wanted, above all things, to be like your brother. It’s why you lit the match in the first place. It’s why you torched my nest.

You sit up in the half-light, confused.

A warm-milk smell is rising in the room.

You turn the pillow over to its cool side and something falls off the end of the bed onto the floor. You look over the edge. It is the corn dolly. You should get up and throw it away once and for all, but the kitchen bin has no liner, remember; anyway, you are far too tired.

You close your eyes, letting the smell rise and set around you. A fresh smell. Flour and milk and heat and sugar. You imagine afternoons with Fel. Cooking with her, listening to music with her, listening to her play. You imagine her warmth against yours in the night. As you drift off, you are dimly aware of your tears, and your hand, as if of its own volition, moves to cradle your erection.

You wanted to be like Jim in every way. You wanted to be a soldier like him. You wanted to leave home with him when his furlough ended. You didn’t want to be left in the valley with your maundering dad, your fading mum.

At the point where the path made its first, marked descent off the moors, Jim and his friends broke into a whooping run. They had forgotten about you. You paused a second, glancing back. The smoke rising from your fire was white at last. You figured that it had gone out, that it was just smouldering. Satisfied, you turned on the path and scampered after your brother and his friends.

Jim’s brothers-in-arms were gone the next day and Jim himself returned to his regiment at the weekend. Left on your own, you told yourself you would explore the moors, dig for treasure, practise the physical exercises James’s friends had taught you – their lunges and presses and thrusts – and intersperse these activities with long, punishing runs. That way, you would be in training. That way, even as you remained where you were, you would be beginning your escape. But, what with one thing and another, you did not set foot on the moors again that summer.

Jim came home for Christmas. On Boxing Day Betty, feeling as well as she would ever feel again, suggested a walk up the valley to the pub at Heptonstall. You begged her not to tire herself. You grew insistent. Bob, shying away from confrontation as usual, weighed in on your side, so that your mum never did climb the valley, but sat listening to the radio all day long, fidgeting and disappointed.

Jim came home again, but only briefly, the following summer. He asked you if you wanted to take a walk with him over the moors and you said no. Jim asked you why not, and you had no answer. He asked you what the matter was. You looked at him, quite blank: wrong? There was nothing wrong. You just didn’t want to.

‘I’ll buy you a pint in Heptonstall,’ he said.

‘You can buy me a pint here,’ you said.

‘If we’re staying here, then you’re buying.’

‘All right,’ you said.

Over your second pint, you asked him: ‘When do you think Mum will come home?’

Shortly after Christmas she had decamped to her sister’s in Islington, north London. There were treatments there she could not get locally. You had begun to wonder whether she was, after all, dying.

Jim finished his beer. ‘Honestly? I don’t think she’s coming home. I think she prefers it in the Smoke. Can you blame her?’

Naturally you blamed her. She was your mother and she had deserted you. Whatever was wrong with her, however serious it was, she had no business using it as an excuse to avoid you.

Another Christmas. Betty was still away at Stella’s.

‘Dad, when is Mum coming home?’

Bob told you to dubbin your boots. Tomorrow you and he and Jim and Billy Marsden and his new girlfriend were going for a Boxing Day tramp about the moors.

Somehow you contrived to stay at home.

Come Easter, your dad found your walking boots under the stairs and they were in a terrible state, all dry and cracking; you hadn’t been up on the moors for over a year. Did your boots even fit you any more? They did not. And so it went on. Until at last you matriculated and it was time for you to leave for London: an exhibition scholar, bound for the Bartlett School of Architecture!

‘Can’t keep him out of his books,’ Bob used to say to strangers, his voice always more puzzled than proud. ‘Can hardly get him out of the house, this one.’

It was true. Since burning my nest, you had found yourself unwilling to return to the moors. It was as if, beyond a certain altitude, all the oxygen left your lungs. You spent your days indoors, inventing playgrounds of your own with pencil and ruler and protractor. You grew monomaniacal. You grew proficient. The people you thought of as friends at school began to laugh at you, began to shun you, but you did not care. You built and built. And such a fortress you raised around yourself! Palaces of tracing paper. Moat-loads of Indian ink.

You weren’t much to look at when you left for London. Pasty, fat, stooped, white as a sheet. You looked self-buried. But what a fuss everyone made! Betty came back for a week or two to help get you ready. At night you had to lie there listening to her and Bob arguing.

To you she said, ‘We’ll be living in the same city soon!’

You managed a thin smile. Her friendliness was coming far too late. You’d needed her here, at home. You’d needed her to be your mum. Now that you were leaving, you did not need her any more. She was just one more part of the past you wanted to put behind you.

It took weeks to get you ready: days spent in and out of shops and the barber’s and rail stations and council offices in Halifax, in Bradford, and once as far as Leeds, all to outfit you for London. From up on the moors, on top of the barrow where once I had worked away with flint and wooden shovel, preparing and burying my dead, I could see you all rushing around, gathering and dispersing across the valley: what a carry-on!

You looked like so many ants plundering a heap of grain. Here they come, a dark column of Lanyons: cousins, aunts, family hangers-on, hauling their spoils along a narrow track through the grass! Some heave with their shoulders against a large seed. Some push. Others tighten the ranks and punish delay. A whole river of expectation flows down the Calder, pouring you east and south, through the irradiated country’s strip-mined middle into London: Do us proud, son!

It was all you could do to stop your mum from marching all the housewives of the terrace to the station to wave you off. As usual, the train sat there for ages, but no one moved, no one left. They wouldn’t leave you alone.

‘Get some fresh air, lad, if you can.’ Your father’s sound advice.

At last you were away. Beneath you, the wheels squealed and rattled over a set of points. You closed your eyes, relieved, took a breath, then stood up and leaned out of the window to wave goodbye.

Do you remember it?

Your mother, your father, the people of your street are tiny swatches of cloth, twitching and shivering in the morning cold. High above the station the valley wall impends, and above that, rising into the clouds, clear as soft pencil on tracing paper, runs a line of thick black smoke.