The Smoke

4

Felicine’s father, the celebrated surgeon Georgy Chernoy, had no more time for chickies than any other Bundist. At a public dinner, one warm night in May, he made his views plain. Memories of the dinner have stayed with me, partly because this was the first time I met him in the flesh; mostly because this was the night I met his daughter.

The dinner was held in a corner of Windsor Castle. It was one of those uneasy cultural gatherings meant to preserve backchannels between London as it had been, and the Bund which was effectively colonising its eastern part.

I was still in the first year of my studies at the Bartlett and absurdly underqualified for this gathering. But I was not alone: scattered among the dignitaries – and, come dinner, sat one to a table, as a sort of mascot – London’s young ‘creatives’ (choreographers, actors, comic book designers, musicians) found themselves being told how they might, by their civic engagement, ‘foster dialogue’ between the two ever-separating halves of the city. We were also here (according to my invitation, embossed on heavy card) to celebrate our ‘promise’, which in my case consisted of a paper plan for a park-like green bridge across the Brentford arm of the Grand Union Canal. I looked forward to an evening spent representing Architecture. When I explained my evening’s mission to him, Stan Lesniak suggested I arrive dressed as a wall.

I caught the train from Waterloo to Windsor at dusk, read a while, then glanced up and stared in mild disbelief as the floodlit castle came into view, perfectly symmetrical, perched above the lamp-lit town on its conical and lonely hill. This imposing yet straightforward structure conformed so exactly to my picture-book idea of what a castle should be, I wondered if every childhood castle might not be traced, through influences both trained and untrained, conscious and unconscious, back to this one foundation.

The climb to the castle, past shuttered shops and cheery pubs, was taxing. I am not fond of physical exercise. A soldier examined my invitation and let me through the wicket gate.

Electric lights bedded in the lawn marked a discreet but clear path across the inner court of the castle. I doglegged around a cloister, passed through a gift shop (which took some of the shine off the adventure) and came to the back of a short queue. A man older than my father offered to take my coat. Entering a timbered, book-lined room, I was handed a glass of British méthode champenoise and an earnest woman in flat shoes eagerly introduced me to representatives of Dance, Literature and the Plastic Arts. We had absolutely nothing in common, and – aside from money, or rather the lack of it – absolutely nothing to talk about.

The Bund as a culture is not famous for its cultivation of dialogue. In place of a nuanced give-and-take, its members tend to substitute power or, in a softer setting, volume. Georgy Chernoy’s voice, neither deep nor shrill, nonetheless cut through lesser conversations as though tuned to a wavelength unused by anyone else. ‘It is,’ he announced, ‘simply a matter of limits.’

An opinion, expressed with patrician self-confidence, has a seductiveness of its own, unconnected with its content.

‘These limits are real. They are not imaginary, and they are not theoretical.’

Wrapping my fingers inexpertly around my glass, warming it, I worked my way through the growing knot of listeners while, away from the throng, men and women in kitchen whites entered through disguised doors in the bookcases to gather abandoned glassware and arrange the supper tables.

‘At what point – this is what we have to ask ourselves – at what point do we assign a painful pejorative like “pollution” to a living thing? Oh no—’

(Impossible, at this distance, to tell whether Georgy Chernoy was responding to a genuine interjection or to a rhetorical one of his own devising.)

‘—I do not dispute for a second that chickies are living things, with as much “right” (as you might say) to life as any other ordinarily evolved thing: a horse or a house plant or a human being. Though the Bundist interpretation of some terms here have wider philosophical implications than the definitions we find operating elsewhere. Terms like “rights”. And “life”.’

‘He talks as if he just stepped off the boat.’

Surprised, I turned to my right. The young woman standing next to me came barely up to my shoulder. She had expensively cropped blue-black hair and so many bright studs in her ear, it had at a glance the appearance of a single jewel. I had assumed her words were meant for me, but she was not looking at me. She did not seem aware of my presence at all. Words burst from her, softly but with an extraordinary intensity, as though she were drawing little knives and hurling them in Chernoy’s direction. ‘He was born in Beckton, for crying out loud.’

‘Yet when it comes to the beings you call “chickies”—’

‘Oh, for crying out loud.’

‘—we find ourselves struggling for an appropriate vocabulary. Their human provenance – the way they bubbled up from the blasted earth of the War’s greatest and most terrible battlefield – inflicted upon all parties in that wasteful conflict a trauma that has yet to be fully appreciated, let alone understood, and not at all healed. I would go so far as to say that historians of the future will dub our present age as the Great Shock. If one considers – as we almost never do – that these creatures emerged from the death-throes of doomed soldiers, what does one feel, what can one feel, but a great numb pressure, such was the enormity of the German mistake? Meaning to bring the dead back to life, they brought something new into the world. And in an attempt to contain that mistake, they then tried to put the new thing to use. The industrial utility of the chickie is beyond dispute: our economy thrives and our culture is fed and watered on an infrastructure built by these easily regulated sub-men. But this easy regimentation veiled from us the other half of their nature, what I might call the Dionysian half of their nature, which ultimately brought an end to the German industrial project and led to our current, uneasy stand-off.’

This was Chernoy’s circumlocutory way of referencing the way the Ruhr Valley’s entire industrial workforce, who by 1937 had been labouring alongside chickies day in, day out for years, were finally overcome by an insatiable lust, downed tools and spent the entire summer and most of the autumn of that year frolicking with these so-called ‘sub-men’ in an orgy that all but broke the nation’s economy. Similar, sometimes grotesquely violent ‘outbreaks’ across Europe brought an end to all grand experiments at the industrial regulation of the chickie population. Left alone at last, the chickies simply melted away. And as Chernoy charmingly put it, ‘Who can say how many of these oh-so-easily-organised work animals conduct affairs of which we know nothing, in places hidden from us: the crannies of our derelict spaces, our edgelands, our abandoned outhouses?

‘Their numbers matter, you see. And on this very island, in this great nation, a great unplanned experiment is under way. Let me say it. Someone has to say it: as a species, regarded as a species, chickies impute a so-far-unmeasured pressure upon this island’s ecosystems. It is not a matter of what they might intend. Such concepts are wholly irrelevant. It is, simply, a question of what the chickies are.’

I leaned towards the girl beside me and said, under my breath: ‘He doesn’t know what “impute” means.’

She shot me a flat glance and looked away. Her rejection was total, as though I had poked my head around a door into a room in which I was not welcome.

On the other side of me, a hand shot out and gripped my own. I turned, and was confronted by magnificent breasts and a freckled décolletage adorned with a single silver medallion on which an aeroplane rose above a stand of palms.

I raised my eyes. ‘Stella.’

‘Naughty boy. Why haven’t you said hello?’ This in a much louder, gayer voice than the girl had employed; it put even Chernoy off his tracks.

‘So that, erm, we might consider them – the chickies, I mean. I mean, how should we regard them? As we attempt, for instance, to control the spread in our southern waterways of American signal crayfish—?’

‘Good God,’ a man in a dinner jacket exclaimed, sliding his hand around Georgy Chernoy’s shoulders, ‘in my local restaurant we eat them.’

Georgy Chernoy blinked at the interruption, before smoothly joining in the general laughter. ‘Well, that isn’t quite—’

‘Happily,’ the man in the dinner jacket went on, assuming control of the party – I think he was a junior minister, something to do with the Arts, or Sport – ‘we have no culinary plans for the chickie race this evening. I have just been informed that our somewhat more conventional menu is ready for serving. Friends, would you take your seats?’

Aunt Stella, her hand tight around my own, led me along the room to where about a dozen round tables had been laid for dinner. ‘Come with me.’

Bootless to point out that there was already a seating plan. Stella placed me firmly in the seat to her left and brushed off the small confusions this generated with a charm she had learned years before on the stage, steering repertory performances in which she alone had properly learned her lines.

‘So come along,’ she cried, settling herself beside me. ‘How on earth are you?’

‘Well.’ I was in love with her; so were most people, irrespective of gender. As is often the case with actors whose power resides in declaiming their lines as though they were poetry (a dying and undervalued art), she was magnificently sexual. Putting everything into every line tends to leave everything on show afterwards. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I’m here to represent Architecture. I feel a complete fraud.’

‘I think it’s rather sweet,’ Stella said, picking up and examining the tableware with a critical eye. ‘The government hasn’t a clue about what any of us do and thinks we all subsist on air and sunlight. Come a crisis, though, they gather us up and rally us over the top like the good little foot soldiers we secretly long to be. Oh, to belong to society! Imagine! The vanguard of soft power. Good God.’ She peered more closely at her fork. ‘“John Lewis”. Really?’

Her clipped delivery was hard to parse. Painfully, I ascended the ladder of her logic. ‘Crisis?’

‘What?’

‘You said there was a crisis. That we were here because of a crisis.’

‘Oh. That. The spaceships, I mean. The whole Woomera effort.’

‘That is a crisis?’

‘Not for us, dear. For us it’s a red-letter day. But for the Bund…’ Her eyes widened. ‘For the Bund, well…’

‘Well what?’

‘If the Victory reaches the Moon and the Bund are already there…’

I shook my head. ‘The Victory is not even built yet,’ I told her. ‘And even the Bund aren’t on the Moon yet.’

‘Their machines are.’

‘Exactly. Their machines.’

Stella pulled one of her little-girl-lost faces. ‘Well, I don’t pretend to understand the details,’ she said.

‘And you?’ I asked her, backtracking. I wasn’t equipped for a political conversation, and not in the mood to be bested in it.

‘Me?’

‘What are you doing here? You’re hardly “a young person of promise”.’

‘Well, thank you for that.’

‘More a woman of glamour and accomplishment.’

‘You stepped around that hole very neatly, dear.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But if I hear you utter the word “mature” I will stick this fork in your eye.’

‘So?’

‘So, what?’

‘So what brings you here? Presumably there’s a production on the way I should have heard about?’

Stella laughed and patted my hand. ‘Dear Stuart, don’t you ever read the papers?’

‘Not really, no,’ I said. I didn’t want to say that I had taught myself to read a better sort of newspaper these days than the ones in which she regularly featured.

‘Well, if you had, you silly boy, you would know I am your hostess this evening.’

I frowned.

‘In a manner of speaking.’ She gave me a big false grin. ‘In that I’m Georgy’s fuck.’

Over the years, Stella’s promiscuity had likely earned her more column inches than her acting. How plain Sue Cosgrave had escaped the confining expectations of Yorkshire’s West Riding in the first place was the stuff of a dozen gushing articles in a dozen different magazines, to the point where she had reduced the entire saga (Pye Nest Methodist Church, the Halifax Victoria, Leeds Rep, Birmingham Rep, Liverpool, Bristol, the Manchester Tivoli) to one of her pithier one-liners: ‘I owe my career to three things: a gift for mimicry, a vice-like memory and an inability to conceive.’

She saw nothing salacious in the way she had arranged and rearranged her domestic circumstances over the years, and as for the men she had supposedly exploited, well, she never approached the role of muse with anything other than perfect seriousness. This had made her one of theatre’s more notorious femmes and, until the recent decline of the West End, one of its more powerful players. Only the youngest commentators ever took her to task: earnest, unattractive young people from provincial stage schools, sharpening their wits on Stella in between, say, a casual catering job and a devised theatre production in the basement of an Islington pub. Newcomers imagine theatre runs on talent. Stella learned early on that it runs on morale.

‘I can’t imagine there are many theatres in the Bund.’

‘Stuart, don’t be an anti-Semite.’

‘Are there?’

‘There’s television, you silly boy.’ She let me mull over that as the waiters brought the soup course. Then: ‘Georgy’s very interested in a concept I have for a show about unidentified flying objects. They get a lot of them in Wales.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘They come from a dying planet. They are genetically spent. Their germline is exhausted.’

‘The Welsh?’

‘The aliens. I’m calling it “DARE”. They have come for our organs.’

‘Really?’

‘In the first episode, DARE’s flight commander downs an alien craft over Theydon Bois, only to discover that its occupant’s heart belonged to his abducted sister.’

‘Dare—’

‘D. A. R. E. Only I don’t know yet what it stands for. What do you think?’

‘How old is Chernoy?’ (When Stella was in this garrulous a mood, one’s only line of defence was attack.)

Stella affected weariness: ‘How would I know? How old are any of them? Good Christ, pea and ham.’ She picked up a spoon and stirred it experimentally through her soup. She gave a squeal as bullet-headed tadpoles of pancetta flocked and nibbled at her spoon.

This playful demonstration of Chernoy’s mastery of biophotonics elicited some scattered laughter but no one knew whether to eat the soup or not. The effect wore off soon enough, the cubes losing their motility as they cooked in the hot broth. The stuff, once I got up the nerve to try it, was far too salty.

‘If we can find match-funding from Germany then DARE goes into production early next year.’

‘So this is real.’

Stella pursed her lips at me. ‘Of course it’s real.’

‘I’m sorry, as a pitch it just sounded a bit… unformed.’

‘We’re talking about the Bund, Stuart. Things happen quickly there.’

Stella had always maintained that once she reached the age of fifty-five she would retire, fit out some attic rooms and gather together a small salon (‘It’s how all the real business in this town is done’). But, as I learned later when I caught up with the gossip columns, Georgy Chernoy’s antics outside Wyndham’s Theatre – nightly deliveries of flowers and chocolates; light but swingeingly expensive suppers; incomprehensibly pretentious cocktails in the bars of so-exclusive-as-to-be-invisible hotels; taxis to friends’ country houses – all this had turned her from her purpose. She was still acting, too – in television.

She had found a man at last. Not a boy, uncertain of sex and in need of a guide and a mother, God knows there’d been plenty of them in the last few years, but a man of accomplishment, ready to fuck her, riotously (she wanted the yellow press to know that, for some reason) and well. I wondered what Chernoy thought of that.

It amused her to cast herself as Chernoy’s plaything. She had always enjoyed pulling the puritan tiger by the tail, but ‘Georgy’s fuck’ – was there not an element of the abject here? ‘A fuck and nothing more’?

The waiting staff entered once again through hidden doors to gather up empty plates. The rest of the meal was conventional, even stolid. The Bundists were served slabs of pinkish stuff on a bed of spiralised radish. The rest of us got slices of overdone venison on under-seasoned mash and crunchy vegetables.

Once the tables were cleared, Georgy Chernoy stood up to speak at a lectern in the corner of the room. The Bund’s rather childish sense of humour and habitual bids for attention (the soup was a classic example) had this effect: that its spokespersons were earnest to a fault, dry as bones and solemn as owls.

‘We take this truth to be self-evident,’ Chernoy began, ‘that death is a mistake.’

It was ground he had covered many times, in the press and on the radio, and it was not a subject with which I felt comfortable. To take my mind off his words, I looked about the room. The girl with the jewelled ear wove past our table on her way to the toilets. This was my first chance to see her properly and her spareness surprised me. Her slim black skirt shifted tight over her thighs as she moved. High heels explained her mesmerising walk but meant that she was even shorter than I had imagined. She had a hungry look: a female Cassius, Stella would have said. Hungry and determined. I thought of foxes. I thought of crows. I watched her leave the room: her hair was shaved short at the back, a chaotic dyed-black shag everywhere else; it must have cost a fortune. Shiny things sparkled under her hair as she pulled open the door. I assumed her to be one of the angrier ‘creatives’ brought to decorate a gathering whose average age must have topped sixty.

When she was gone, I studied the room, out of sorts without really understanding why.

It was easy to tell the Bundists from the rest of us. They tended to be either very short or very tall. They did not share any particular facial characteristic. They put the lie to the notion that beauty lies in conformity. The strangest-looking of them, be they elves or ogres, displayed a health, happiness and animation that contrasted painfully with our sallow, sagging, relatively immobile faces. I wondered what they did, that they thought it worth being here, and how involved they were in government. I wondered how many backroom conversations our civil servants might conduct with them this evening, over sherry, perhaps, or spirits, or at any rate over wine markedly better than any served during our meal, in private rooms away from the dining hall. But these were idle thoughts and for all I knew the entire evening might be adding up to no more than a series of empty, well-meant platitudes.

‘To Alexander Gavrilovitch Gurwitsch, then,’ Chernoy declaimed, raising a big glass of purplish stuff. (I expect it was Vimto, though neither I nor anyone I had ever asked knew what accident of history had caused the Bund to fall so madly in love with that stuff.) ‘Brother of a concert pianist, he mastered Beethoven; pupil of Kupffer and Boehm, he conceptualised the developing shark brain; and with Vladimir Vernadsky, in that little hut in Kazan, why, it is not too big a claim to make that he dreamt up the Bomb! This modern Aristotle, for whom “the whole” was never a static entity, but rather an invariant dynamic law pertaining to the entire process of development! And as Gurwitsch moved step-by-step in that direction, trying never to lose contact with real biological data, may we uncouple his Kraftfeld from the body itself, never losing our wonder or our rigour, so we might realise the potential plasticity of all living matter, and weave for ourselves new natures, for the men and women who are to come in his name, on this and other worlds!’

By which time most of his listeners, exhausted, had set down their glasses and had to snatch them up again for the toast. We drank, not too sure of what we were drinking to, and some of us numbly suspecting that whatever it was, it was but another small, friendly, well-meant step towards our own dissolution. The Bundists around us, strictly teetotal, drained their Vimtos and grinned their bright-white grins. A second dignitary – tired, stoop-shouldered, obviously not a Bundist – stood to speak.

I took advantage of the lull to slip out of the room.

The nearest bathroom was a public toilet. Its steel trough and elbow-operated taps were incongruous fittings among the elderly brickwork and pitch-black wood.

I dried my hands on a paper towel, left the bathroom, and then, when I came to the gift shop, I continued walking until the corridor turned and deposited me outside on a gravel path. I crossed over to a stone balustrade and studied the garden below – or as much of it as could be seen in light shining from the windows of the castle.

The garden was arranged to a formal plan: a sheet of paper folded, cut about with nail scissors and spread out flat again. The planting was sparse and precise. I smelled roses.

I heard her footsteps on the gravel path before I saw her, approaching from out of the darkness. Her shoes were dangling from one hand and she was walking slowly, barefoot, over the stones. The weakness of the light, and the slowness of her walk, suggested some marine space, and it startled me when she looked up, right at me, and stopped: a first contact between separate worlds. I raised my hand in uncertain greeting. She turned to the left, along a narrow path between low bushes of lavender. As she brushed by them, their scent rose into the air. Just at the edge of vision, where the darkness prepared to swallow her again, she glanced back at me.

Small dog-like stone lions guarded a flight of steps that ran flush to the wall. I followed them down into the garden. Once out of the glare of the castle, my eyes adjusted quickly. The night was not so very dark after all. There was a full moon. The air along the lavender-lined path was heavy and astringent. It was a smell that, much later, I would recall every time I used Fel’s soap: lavender and thyme, with something metallic in the mix.

She was waiting for me. ‘You’re supposed to be listening to my dad.’

I took this in. Chernoy was her father? Then she was a Bundist. ‘I thought you were a painter or something.’

‘Why can I not be?’

I thought about this. ‘Not with those nails.’

She lifted her hand and looked at them: impossible to tell in this light whether her nails were black or red. ‘Perhaps I brush up well.’

I walked on, hoping she would follow. The path widened and she came to walk beside me. I slowed down, conscious of her bare feet on the stones. ‘Unless you don’t use paint,’ I said. ‘Being what you are.’

‘What would I use? Being what I am.’

‘Light. Plasma. Solidified air.’

‘You’re funny. What else?’

‘Dad’s rays, maybe. I reckon you spend your days sculpting living forms for new natures, on this and other worlds.’

‘Did he really say that?’

‘Yup.’

In the garden’s centre there was an oval bed of carefully topiaried evergreen shrubs. She said, ‘This is a garden for people who don’t like nature, isn’t it?’

‘I think that’s the point.’ With a sweeping gesture, I took in the town below the castle, the railway, the foggy effulgence that was London. ‘Be glad there are such things as gardeners. Out there it’s chaos, haven’t you heard? The wasteland.’

‘And there was I thinking you were a romantic.’

‘Really?’

‘I meant in the intellectual sense.’ She turned to the castle. Her face, lit by distant windows, was as grey and fragile as paper. ‘So. You’re not a nature lover.’

I thought about the West Riding, my narrow upbringing there, how my father’s love had straitjacketed me, and how glad I was to get out. And at the same time, how much I missed weekends fishing with him in the fast-flowing brooks above the town, and how bitterly I regretted my brother James’s disappearance into the toils of military security. We used to go walking about the moors until…

I might have touched a dental cavity with my tongue, the shock was so sudden, the pain so sharp. I covered my confusion as best I could. Hands in pockets, surly shrug: ‘Nature has its moments.’

‘Dad’ll sort it out.’

‘I’m sure he will.’

‘There will be order. Fel.’ She extended her hand. Her nails on the back of my hand were cool and sharp, like the edges of teaspoons.

‘Stuart.’

She smiled. There was something on her front tooth. It glittered. ‘And I don’t paint.’

‘I don’t paint, either. We have that in common.’

‘Let’s leave it at that.’

‘We’ll prolong the mystery.’

‘Only you buttonholed La Cosgrave and sat with her all evening, so I assume you’re one of her harem.’

‘I’m her nephew.’

She looked at me. ‘Really?’

‘This makes you and me practically related. From how she tells it.’

‘God, don’t, she’s worse than he is.’

She appeared easy with the idea that her father was sleeping with an actress. I wondered what had happened to her mother. ‘How do you get on with Stella?’

‘Not very well at first. Now she’s roped me into this television project of hers.’

‘DARE? She told me about that.’

‘Every week I arrive at a small film studio in Shepperton, West London, in a gold car with batwing doors.’

‘Star treatment, then.’

‘That’s the title sequence, silly. Personal assistants with big hair saunter past me in hotpants.’

‘Several flash you a leer.’

‘Careful.’

‘Trust me to know my aunt. What’s the film studio about?’

‘It’s a cover: behind the glitz and tinsel of Shepperton lie the central headquarters of a surreptitious supra-governmental organisation dedicated to the defence of the planet.’

‘The Desk of Abominable Rectal Examination.’

‘Or something. Don’t interrupt.’

Beyond the formal garden was a grove of trees, and a narrow path between ferns and steps down to a pool, and a waterfall splashing, and an artificial cave behind the waterfall, and in the darkness I kissed her, and her hands moved across my back, and she opened her mouth to me, and she tasted of berries and all the concentrated juices of the summer. (Only later did I remember: Vimto.) The thing on her tooth was meant to be there. It was a jewel, set in the enamel, reflecting light that, given where we were, hidden from the castle and its windows, could only have come from the Moon.

5

Since any Bundist, staring at a screen (and when did they ever do anything else?) could follow any number of live video feeds transmitted by machines already anchored on the Moon, already digging, mixing and building, it was and remains a puzzle why any of them found Stella’s television show worth their investment. DARE: the glacially paced saga of men and women on a fictional moonbase plagued by a perpetual clothing shortage.

And this, Punch tittered, came as no surprise since the rockets necessary to supply the moonbase were themselves fictional.

DARE’s world was one powered by gigantic chemical rockets of the sort that had, one after another throughout my childhood (eager ear pressed to the radio), come to spectacular grief in the deserts of Woomera. No doubt the art of sending payloads into orbit by rocket would be mastered eventually. But in the Bund – that peculiar ethnic combine in frozen, far-distant Birobidzhan, Lenin’s Siberian homeland for the Jews – a new technology had been born.

The Bund used balloons to lift small payloads into the stratosphere, then gently accelerated them into orbit using the same proprietary mechanism that allowed the Bund’s aircraft to land vertically on any square of level ground.

The payloads their technology could handle were light indeed – just a few pounds, far lighter than any living human being. Steadily, however, their technology had amassed in orbit, constructing itself out of parts, so that Bundist machines were even now scuttling over the surface of the Moon.

Woomera hoped to leapfrog the Bund’s lunar ambitions with their planet-hopping HMS Victory. And if, God willing, the Victory flew, then the present would diverge even more sharply from Stella’s imagined future of aeroplane-sized space shuttles and orbital docking platforms.

At least Stella had the sense not to put a date to this redundant future of hers. She gave me a draft of her pilot script to read over the summer holidays. When I handed it back to her with proofreader’s scribbles, I teased her about her concept. She countered, ‘Who says there can’t be more than one future?’ This with the touching melancholy of a girl who has asked for a puppy and a kitten.

Though I knew my aunt and her reputation well enough to distrust her performed naivety, I did think at first that DARE was most likely a mere vanity project. I couldn’t imagine the show ever getting made. I couldn’t imagine who would want to watch it. But if it gave Stella, in the autumn of her career, the sense that she was breaking new ground, learning a new skill, exploring a new medium, or however you want to put it, then where was the harm?

Georgy Chernoy, I had assumed, was bankrolling his lover’s project, though his name never appeared on the project’s paperwork, not even as one of the show’s more-than-a-dozen executive producers. I do know he arranged the permits necessary for Stella to film south of the Thames, in the purlieus of Medicine City. One bright August morning, when I should have been working through my second-year reading list, I went, armed with a camera, to help Stella to scout locations for her series.

It was my first visit to Medicine City, and for all the press that had greeted the project, both gushing and hostile, I was quite unprepared for what I found there. It felt as though the tram trundling us from London Bridge Station to Peckham Rye were slipping us through theatre flats into an entirely different reality. A weak enough commentary, since this was more or less exactly the impression the City’s designers had been aiming at.

I had been living and studying in London for slightly less than a year; in that time Medicine City had spread at visible speed across the compulsorily purchased streets of its south-east quarter, turning schools into clinics, cinemas into surgeries, whole avenues into ‘memory lanes’, re-creating Londons past and gone – and this with technology the Bartlett staff themselves could hardly fathom, let alone teach to us.

Who were the unknown architects of that extraordinary and controversial transformation of the south-east, from the Thames at Deptford, through Peckham, to the very mouth of Forest Hill and the valley William Blake had dubbed his ‘Vale of Vision’? How many of them were there? Where did they live and work? Had Medicine City’s construction relied upon ordinary, unaccommodated talents, thousands of them would have been needed to realise the project.

But it was no secret that the entire look and feel of Medicine City – ‘An Oasis of Reminiscence and Regrowth’ – had been envisioned by machine, down to the smallest details: the tasteful lighting embedded at the edge of every pramway; the walnut detailing of Medicine City’s step-free streetcars.

My sense of rushing disorientation began the moment our tram, starting from outside London Bridge Station, turned the sharp and squealing corner onto Tooley Street and a view of the first and most well-reported of Medicine City’s architectural novelties. Around the cool white walls and dappled niches of a second Saint Paul’s Cathedral – smaller than Wren’s original and opened out, a kind of exploded maquette – strolled the medicalised infants generated by the Chernoy Process.

Some infants wandered unaccompanied, but most held the hands of nursie. For those not yet able to walk, an elevated pramway swooped around the structure.

The point of the cathedral was simple: it existed to jog, in these ersatz infant minds, memories of the actual cathedral, which lay hardly a mile away on the opposite bank of the Thames. Much of Medicine City was directed to this purpose: it was a theme park dedicated to the awakening of memory. And if it seemed gimcrack, absurd, even insane – well, no one involved in the project, not even Georgy Chernoy himself, was likely to disagree with you there. It wasn’t as though they had planned it this way.

No one had guessed, at the start of the project, how difficult it would be for Chernoy’s Processed infants to remember their past.

And once the problem was recognised, no one had any idea just how baroque the solutions to this problem would become.

Memory, after all, was the most labile of mental gifts, the one most susceptible to suggestion – no? It would be enough, surely, to show these forgetful infants certain pictures; or play them certain pieces of music; or feed them, in extremis, mouthfuls of madeleine dipped in tea – no?

No, no, and no. The medicalised infants generated by the Chernoy Process turned out to be maddeningly resistant to reminiscence. Nothing short of full immersion in the past seemed capable of waking them to it.

So then the problem had become: how to immerse an infant in a vanished world? Various lacklustre systems of ‘virtual reality’ were developed: ugly concatenations of pressure suit, visor, gloves. Nothing worked. It proved cheaper, in the end, to re-create entire environments, at least in little. To resort, that is, to the artisanship of theatre makers, fairground engineers and theme-park designers.

Saint Paul’s was not only Medicine City’s most famous ‘attraction’; it was also, from Chernoy’s point of view, its most successful prompt to memory. It turns out that all of us hold Saint Paul’s in mind in much the same way. Most everyone, whatever their background and personal circumstances, remembers the same cathedral.

London’s less celebrated landmarks, however, were more of a struggle, requiring redundancy and repetition to be effective. Our route led through endlessly reiterated miniature versions of the same places. I lost count of the number of Oxford Streets we rattled by: tatty barrow and hawker Oxford Streets, shuttered and hostile Oxford Streets, Oxford Streets lit here by flames (a memory of the Great War), there (a happier, more recent memory) with Christmas fairy lights; all small, none built above waist height, a vast, cluttered multiversal Oxford Street containing all imaginable prompts to memory.

Vernacular memories were the hardest to bring to mind through this bizarre architecture. And this was an abiding worry for Medicine City: vernacular memories are, after all, what define a personality. Yes, everyone remembers visiting Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but few personalities are profoundly shaped by the experience. What shapes a person is the colour of the bedroom curtains; the pattern of the linoleum in the kitchen; the sound of muffled arguments in the hall. What shapes a person is the daily grind.

Bedrooms, bathrooms, office cubicles: these did not require endless versioning so much as an extensive, dull, generic running-through of elements. There was only one office building in Medicine City, but it stretched all the way from New Cross Gate, up and over Telegraph Hill to the leafy crescents of Brockley. It had been built outsize to most effectively prompt, in the infantile minds of Chernoy’s patients, memories of the times they had spent in such places. The cramped conditions. The irritation, the boredom, the drudgery. Here furniture substituted for buildings: desks five, six yards high, and office chairs as tall as street lights. Anglepoise lamps loomed over the street like great white eyes, while calendars as big as billboards scrawled over in marker-black (‘provisional deadline’, ‘sales strategy’, ‘accelerator hub’) provided curtain walls, dividing the district up into discrete memory-packets: post room, sales, marketing, human resources, even a trading floor.

This last was the most abstract area of all, a series of giant blocky, geometrically simple maquettes sporting the bright striped blazers (rendered in wire-reinforced tarpaulin) of the most venerable London firms. A bell tolled as we rattled by; more likely, the recording of a bell.

Hauled through a cutting at Telegraph Hill, at last Stella and I found ourselves amid a sanely proportioned architecture: a practical, habitable architecture built for use. We boarded an elevated travellator at Brockley which promised to take us to One Tree Hill and the southern edge of Peckham, but which for the longest time led us a circuitous dance through the thickly arboured avenues of Ladywell.

‘All the gentlemen from the City set their mistresses up around here,’ said Stella, pointing out handsome red-brick villas through gaps in the rhododendron. I glimpsed gabled frontages and doors and upper windowpanes heavy with stained glass.

These houses had since swapped their knick-knacks, closets and cocktail cabinets, their Everyman Libraries and Schirmer’s Classics, for padded pneumatic chairs and lockable cabinets, for wall calendars and anatomical charts, for drills and mirrors, and had opened their doors to dentists, chiropodists, opticians, reflexologists and all the other ancillary crafts and services that hung off Medicine City’s great enterprise. We saw infants in perambulators and buggies. We saw newborn infants bundled up in the arms of young nurses. We saw infants staggering out of driveways clutching their freshly drilled jaws, and peering out of the windows of private cars, owl-like in new spectacles.

We strode as the elevated walkway pulled us along, the air fresh on our faces. We passed a girl on crutches, and sidled around twins in a pushchair, and were nearly bowled over as three boys barged past us, playing tag. On the travellator running beside us in the opposite direction, I saw one medicalised boy trying to fly a paper kite, though these walkways moved at nothing like the necessary speed.

Stella turned to me and grinned. She had her youthful colour back, as if the air itself must be tonic. ‘What do you think?’

I had no thoughts, just a few futile and incoherent premonitions. I felt as though I had been reduced to the size of a mouse and left to fend for myself inside the toybox of a spoiled and distracted child.

Now came Honor Oak, and the hill from which Boadicea, Queen of the Britons, is said to have led her last and fatal charge against the legions of Gaius Paulinus. A cable car carried us over that, and down through modest residential streets which by pure coincidence had already been named, a good century before Medicine City was ever conceived, for the Crimean War and for the work of Florence Nightingale. We walked the length of Scutari Road and came at last to the Rye.

A breeze had picked up and across the fields children were flying kites. Dogs ran about among them, barking. Families picnicked on squares of blanket. A railed-in section of the park afforded a little shade. The flower beds were planted with red-leaved ground cover, grasses, ornamental thistles and other sculptural plants.

There was a bowling green, a café selling Italian ice creams, a playground.

‘We’ve come a long way,’ Stella said to me as we set down our coffees at a table outside the café, opposite the lake. Children ran back and forth, squealing. I couldn’t tell if they were real children this time or more of Chernoy’s medicalised infants. I nodded agreement, too tired to ask what Stella meant. She might have been referring to our journey today, or even to our involvement in the ostensibly glamorous business of television production. Perhaps she meant the life-journeys we had each taken, out of the West Riding and into the Smoke, into careers no one back home would have foreseen for us, and which among some locals were no doubt, and at this very moment, raising sneers of reverse-snobbery.

Theatre. Architecture school. Should the HMS Victory ever leave the ground, Jim would be following the most remarkable trajectory of us all. It was his adventure, if anyone’s, that would earn our family its footnote in the history books. Were we particularly gifted, particularly blessed? The way we had scattered felt more like an accident than anything else. How had a family with roots in iron and coal and labour haemorrhaged so suddenly, in the space of less than a generation, and scattered its energies on so many grand-sounding but empty projects? Plays that people no longer came to see. Bridges and buildings that machines could make better. A giant spacecraft that had yet to fly.

Fel arrived at the café laden down with laundry bags. I went to get her a drink and when I came back the table, my chair and a great deal of the decking round about were strewn with swatches and squares of material.

Fel was helping Stella design the costumes for DARE.

She cleared my chair, dumping her fabric samples unceremoniously back into the bag. The piece she and Stella were agonising over had an open, interlocking weave; it looked as if it had been made by a spider. ‘I can make this out of wire,’ Fel explained. ‘I can distort it to fit any shape, like armour. It doesn’t have to be fabric at all. It could be a sort of exoskeleton.’

‘Well.’ Stella stretched the fabric over the table. ‘It’s you that has to wear it.’

‘If we choose the colours carefully you won’t be able to tell the difference between the fabric version and the rigid one. We could pretend they were the same suit. A responsive fabric. A kind of safety garment.’

Stella liked that. ‘What else?’

Fel had been running off samples at a nearby medical fabrication lab. With a computerised loom she had created materials that looked half-mechanical, as though there were tubes running just under the weave: compression suits, Stella explained glancingly to me, for use in the vacuum of space. What interested her most, though, were the flimsy, shiny stuffs that would ultimately appear on the show as fashion wear. ‘Can you make these up?’

‘I’ve had a go,’ said Fel, doubtfully, pulling out a tabard and a microskirt made of white vinyl, each piece stamped with a bright red DARE decal. ‘I thought this might work for the crew of the submarine.’

Stella was far too busy with the fabrics to notice the glances Fel and I were exchanging. We had been seeing each other for more than three months, and I still had no clear idea who Fel was, beyond that she came from the Bund and seemed to own her own time.

I did not know what she did, and had yet to realise that among the Bund the question ‘What do you do?’ made little sense. I knew what her mouth tasted like. I knew the jewel in her tooth was a birthday present she had given herself. I knew she lived away from the Bund, pursuing an independent life in a place of her own, a studio flat near London Bridge Station with a bed that pulled out from the wall and an upright piano and a bathroom stacked with funky, off-piste perfumes, all moss and wet rope and cat piss and cigarette ash. I knew she didn’t so much sleep in a bed as in a nest of pillows and duvets and clothes and bathrobes and anything else that lay to hand, and that her blood ran so hot that she barely covered herself at night, but lay snoring on top of the heap she had made, like a young dragon. I knew she had a teddy bear called Boethius and that when she was alone, cuddling Boethius brought her consolation. I knew that she had read Boethius’s Consolations, and it was rare that I met anyone who had read what I had not. It was an effort for me not to talk about books with Fel, but I tried to hold back because I knew that the more we talked, the easier we would be with each other, and the easier we became with each other, the more we ran the risk that we would defuse whatever was driving our mouths together whenever we were alone.

I didn’t want Stella to know about us. I didn’t want it in her head that she had somehow brought us together. That my aunt was sleeping with Fel’s father was more of a family connection than Fel and I knew what to do with, and we already had a tacit understanding to treat Stella simply as a wealthy, eccentric lady of a certain age; someone for whom we did amusing favours.

This was the game we were playing with each other, the fiction we were trying to maintain.

I glanced up and saw Stella looking at me. Stella knew. Any fool would have guessed that I was smitten. Fel was naturally discreet; ‘wily’ might be a better word. But me? I may as well have worn a sign around my neck. I coloured up.

Stella was far too intelligent to say anything, though.

Fel packed up her samples and her notebook. She was staying on at the café – her father was due to meet her there for tea.

‘Give him my love,’ Stella said. ‘Tell him if I’m not home before him, I won’t be far behind.’

I wondered what Fel really thought of her father’s blousy new girlfriend. I wondered if her father had taken many partners. It was strange, thinking of him about to turn up here. He was still lodged in my mind as a celebrity. The man who had defeated death.

‘Now, Stuart, shall we go and make some use of that camera of yours?’

Stella and I said goodbye to Fel and walked north to the restored lido – one of the few structures remaining from the old Peckham. From here we worked our way back to London Bridge by taxi, on foot, and by taxi again: a three-hour zigzag in pursuit of locations, vistas, angles, and in all that time my eye hardly left the viewfinder of my camera. Stella was a tyrant when she wanted to be, and tireless, and – I had to admit it – inspiring. We did good work that day.

In the course of it, we discovered that the whole of Peckham had been transformed, all the way north to its hazy junction (razed by Zeppelin bombardments in the Great War) with Bermondsey, where the old Peek Freans and Hartley’s Jam factories had given way to pharmas, hacker labs and synbio start-ups.

And while the warm air gathering in the bowl of New Cross had hardly changed from the fug Stella said she remembered from her boarding house days – still laden with Chindian and Cypriot kebabs, mutton in sticky rice, eels, pies and liquor – the streets west of there and around the Queen’s Road had, we discovered, acquired a quite different olfactory signature, stringent and sickly citrus, reflecting the food habits of Medicine City. Wheatgrass and spirulina. Goji crackers. Smoothied spinach. Crispy kale with chia seeds. Stewed kelp.

Three months had not been time enough for our sex-delirium to dissipate and reveal just what Fel and I had let ourselves in for.

I was not, she told me, her first unaccommodated boyfriend. I was, however, the very first not to look into her eyes and say something catastrophically ill-judged like, ‘Are you even real?’

Fel, true to her corvid appearance, proved a first-class mimic. Once, over her first ever (and, for her, highly transgressive) half of pub cider, she performed these lines of reductive male incomprehension to the company with a precision that had my male friends wincing in self-recognition and the girls throwing up a little into their mouths.

I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the pub but it was a block away from the High Street in Tooting in south London, and I would often be there with my friends, catching a routine or a band.

Two of my housemates had a stand-up act. They dressed as pirates. We went to see them every month, whenever the comedy circuit brought them back near the house. Their routine was never the same twice, and it never improved.

When Fel and I met, I was sharing that house in Tooting with seven others. None of us had any money or knew how to cook an egg. There were so many of us, and so much traffic on the stairs, that the ground-floor ceiling plaster was coming down. The door to the downstairs bathroom had no lock, but the bottom edge had swollen so you could jam it shut for privacy. Two smallish strides carried you from the door of my room to the bed, assuming the floor was clear, which it never was. You could open the window and climb out onto the roof of the kitchen extension. Fel and I perched out there some nights drinking cheap white wine from Balham Tesco, chilled almost to freezing to make it palatable. We drank it out of mugs because all the glasses in the flat had been broken. Sometimes the others would join us on the roof, bringing beer.

The Tooting crowd liked Fel, but they weren’t sure what to make of her. A stray fox. A feral cat. They knew, and sometimes said aloud, that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Stan Lesniak once went so far as to draw me aside and give me a stern talking-to. ‘You know she’s slumming it with you, don’t you?’

I wasn’t angry. I knew Stan was jealous, and drunk, and unhappy. I was even prepared to accept that he was right. I knew I was overly submissive around Fel.

But how else was I to behave? She was a Bundist, and I was not. Her mind ran on high-octane fuel. Next to her, I was a wood-burning thing.

Though she excelled me in the speed of her thought, in her wit, in her knowledge, that is not to say that her mind had no shape. It was particular, as specialised in its way as any piece of technology. It had edges. Even limits. She hated abstraction. I learned quickly not to offer her my hidden depths. She absolutely would not engage with my important agonies about life. She wanted things from me. People. Facts. Objects. She was a collector. This was her purpose in life, and all the purpose she needed.

She liked me to explain things to her exactly. She wanted details. When I sat at my drawing table, studying the Cripplegate plans, or simply working on something that to her must have appeared quite ordinary – a staircase, perhaps, or a curtain wall – she would pull up a chair and kneel on it, elbows on the table, watching with a seriousness that was utterly, charmingly childlike.

I told my housemates that Fel designed costumes for television, because it was true, and because whatever else she did remained a mystery to me. Or not a mystery, exactly, but difficult to explain. What did she do all day?

Fel had money. I didn’t. I remember saying early on that this situation was bound to grow old very quickly: that I would not be able to keep up with her. I did, in the end, manage to convince her that taking me out to dinners I could not possibly afford, though good for my stomach, was bad for my spirit. But still she treated me to concerts, to song cycles at Wigmore Hall, to opera at the English National and the Royal.

She knew every piece. She knew every performer. Every soloist. She listened to music. Really listened, sometimes with the score in her lap. There didn’t seem to be any part of the cultural life of the city that she didn’t know like the back of her hand, and I couldn’t work out how she had acquired so much knowledge or how she sustained such a lively engagement with everything. She put me in mind of an ambitious foreigner, acquiring the trappings of a culture not her own. Which was, of course, exactly what she was. And like an ambitious foreigner, the culture she had acquired by diligent study was easy to parody. It was undeniably off-beam, and often yawningly over-serious. At the same time, it was richer than anything a native like me would ever gather out of the air.

She took me to lectures at the Whitechapel and the Barbican and the Tate. She wasn’t a student. She wasn’t an artist. She wasn’t a musician. She wasn’t working on a novel. She didn’t fit any art-school pigeonhole. Still she knew more about art, music, books and architecture than anyone I’d ever met, Stanislaw Lesniak included, and this is why, in time, Stan came to hate her so. She sucked everything in but she was more than a buff, more than an anorak in a pretty wrapper (this was her description of herself, one night among friends).

All she did was live, and so she lived, intensely and well. Her mind was like a steel trap. She forgot nothing. I had no idea what she saw in me. What I saw in her was someone who was used to considerably more than I could ever give her, and whose talents – even if, in the end, they simply boiled down to smart acquisition – ought to have earned her a sight more than a supporting role in Stella’s DARE.

‘What do you reckon?’

Thigh-high boots and brassiere. Open-weave tabard. Platform heels. A long dress made of translucent plastic, split to the thigh. Playsuit. Plastic camisole.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I said.

‘This is just for the submarine. You should see my Moon gear.’

‘Please.’

Purple fright wig. Silvered eyeshades. Microskirt and thong. ‘Stella kept me behind an extra hour today for screen tests. I think she might have been hitting on me.’

‘Please take that image out of my head.’

‘Oh.’ Fel folded her arms. ‘You’re no fun.’

Stella wanted Fel to play the captain of DARE’s global fleet of stealth hunter-killer submarines. In DARE’s ever-expanding show bible, this was defined as an executive position involving active service, frequent dry-land contact with the upper echelons of the DARE bureau, and regular face-to-face contact with defence crews on the Moon. That way Fel could wear virtually everything Stella designed.

When DARE won match-funding and received the green light from the broadcaster, life became easier. I told people Fel was an actress.

My female flatmates were subdued around Fel, the boys puzzled, though sympathetic. Some – Stan Lesniak in particular – were quietly concerned that I might be bad for her. They fed her herbal teas and shot me looks as though sceptical of my motives. As well they might have been: she got drunk very easily and more than once Stan leaned out of his cupboard of a room to find me manhandling Fel up the stairs.

At night we tore into each other the way a starved cat tears at a bird.

Fel gave herself a hard time, always. She never took her brilliance for granted. She was conscientious. She never took her body for granted, either, moving with an oiled slickness that suggested the expert operation of a complex mechanical system. When she reached orgasm, she laughed, and while her happiness was evident, at the same time her climaxes were not a release for her, nor any hackneyed falling back into self. She was energetic afterwards, elated, as though together we had enabled her body to accomplish a new thing.

It was a part of Fel’s heritage that she was insatiably curious about all kinds of processed food and unfamiliar tastes. Dog treats. Mealworms. Cans of winter melon tea and pressed fish roe. Though she agonised over it, interrogated it, poked it and pilloried it often, she ate virtually everything. Bacon. Black pudding. Growing up on the Bund’s peculiar, delicate and by and large processed diet, she was fascinated by the rawness and bloodiness of my own meals. Once I cooked her some steak, and she grinned and chewed and slobbered and enthused right up to the point where she was violently sick just a couple of feet short of our toilet.

She thought in ways that were studied and contrarian. She treated other people’s opinions the way a fox treats an unsecured bin. She gave herself no quarter; she said, ‘The way I’ve been taught, I tear everything down to white light.’ Until she said that, it had never occurred to me that, young as she was, she might actually have finished her education, and been given mastery over all the tools she would ever need.

Towards Christmas in my second year, Fel decided it was ridiculous, me having to commute from Tooting to the Cripplegate site every day. ‘There’s too much going on. You’ve too much to worry about. It’s going to drive you crazy,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me.’

The next evening she turned up at the Tooting house dangling a set of keys in my face. She said, ‘Daddy says we should move in together.’

‘Well.’ I thought about it. At least, I made a good show of thinking about it. ‘Daddy knows best, I suppose.’

‘Is this Georgy’s?’ I asked, moving as if in a dream from one large, airy, day-bright room of the Barbican flat to the next.

‘One of them,’ Fel replied. ‘It’s not a place I know.’

‘Why is he doing this for us?’

She came and stood by me and we gazed out through the patio door at the water and the strong, brutal lines of the buildings. Sunlight against brick and cement render. ‘He’s going to have to accept what I want,’ she said. ‘And I want you.’

Kissing me, putting her arms around me, sliding her tongue into my mouth, she stopped me from formulating the obvious question: whether her father had asked her for anything in return.

My Tooting housemates helped us pack and made us promise to come back and visit, but we never did. I was sorry to lose that easy, effortlessly decent community in Tooting. Looking back, I can see that I was at my happiest there, and at my best.

But love will have its day. I imagined I was surfing with Fel through new territories. (‘Surfing.’ This is what she called the business of acquiring information.) Books. Music. She played me Wagner, Mozart, Schumann. We read poetry aloud to each other in bed. Cavafy. Keats. Eventually it would come to me that I was not ‘surfing’ anything; that I was simply wallowing along in her wake. In the meantime I was drunk on her difference. The weird flexibility of her limbs. Her scrawny strength.

‘We frontload our health,’ she told me once, in bed. I sucked on her tit as she spoke for the Bund. ‘Many of us go blind before we die.’

Fel had time for Stella’s TV show. I didn’t. The spring term of my second year ended with important exams. In the end, in a desperate bid to balance favours for Stella with my course requirements, I persuaded my tutors to grant me a placement at her studio, so that I could design the interiors she needed and have that count towards my qualification. Submarine. Moonbase. Moon interceptor. Tank-like ‘mobiles’. The subterranean offices of DARE’s Shepperton HQ. I sold it to the Bartlett as an opportunity to design for the new fabrication machines spilling out of Medicine City. I showed them Fel’s open-weave exoskeleton-cum-jumpsuit, in both its fabric and wire versions, and I explained I wanted to accomplish equivalent innovations in the built environment. I used expressions like ‘built environment’. They gave me six weeks and expected me to write them a 30,000-word dissertation about the experience.

Because Georgy Chernoy’s personal worth was astronomical, it was easy to forget that Stella was a commercial success in her own right. She owned a house in Islington and a holiday cottage in Shropshire, to which she used to repair whenever she had a script to work on. When she heard about my dissertation deadline, Stella gave me the key and told me to top up the oil tank, keep the dehumidifier running in the master bedroom, and otherwise do with the place as I liked.

As if holing herself away in an old crofter’s cottage at the edge of a village just shy of four hundred souls was not isolation enough, Stella had had a hut built at the top of her garden. The garden ran all the way up the hill behind the house. Though the property deeds presumably marked a border, in truth it was possible to walk all the way up through the garden, past two handkerchief-sized lawns, past gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes, and a terrace barely big enough for a set of rusting garden furniture, up more steps to the hut, and beyond, into trees, and out again to a view all the way to Wales, and there imagine that the entire Clun Valley was one’s own.

I took an extended Easter break there. On my first night, I woke up at about 4 a.m. to an unfamiliar chill and could not get back to sleep. I went downstairs, made coffee in one of Stella’s several coffee makers, fetched the key from beside the back door and carried my drawing equipment up to the hut along bark trails and flagstone paths treacherous with moss and lichen and dew. The hut was small, watertight, and the bottled gas heater warmed it up in minutes. There was a chair and a tilting table large enough for me to draw on. It became a routine. I started work before dawn, finished around eleven and spent the rest of the day either walking in the surrounding countryside or tending the garden.

It took me about a week to shake off the persistent feeling that I was working on DARE out of weakness – an inability to say no to my aunt when she needed a cheap favour. By the end of the second week I was obsessed. I spent evenings on the phone to Stella and to Fel, arguing for more budget, better materials, more ambitious sets. I drew ceaselessly, inspired by the scripts I had read the night before. These arrived almost daily. The series, originally planned at six episodes, was now budgeted to run for twenty. Our available funds were increased, but I still had to design sets that were more convincing, more sturdy and more easily mended for less money per unit of screen time.

Strong colours and extensive lighting notes replaced expensive materials. The moonbase grew airier, lighter and less cluttered, the submarine even more of a human sardine can. Only a skeleton staff remained to operate DARE’s subterranean HQ.

Though she brought in friends to help with the dialogue, Stella wrote the additional storylines herself. Under the pressure of extra work, the scripts, though crude, were acquiring a distinctive flavour – an urgency and coherence the original episodes had lacked. Whether by accident or design, Stella’s notion – that the world has room for more than one future – began to be realised. The show’s inconsistencies, its departures from reality, no longer bothered me. I began to inhabit the world of the show. In my mind, it ceased to be a drama about underdressed people in space. It ceased to be a show that deliberately, wilfully ignored the Bund, the chickies, or the half-dozen other human variants that rub more or less uncomfortably against each other upon this crowded and irradiated Earth.

DARE became for me another world entirely: imperilled, certainly, but in many ways happier than our own. It was a world without civil war, without nationalism, without tribes. It was a world that had never been exposed to Gurwitsch’s ray, a world in which the ray had not yet been discovered or, better yet, did not exist. It was a world whose dominant species was still one and entire: a single, healthy, well-bred human family.

A scream startled me out of my reverie. It came from the bottom of the garden. I leapt up, looked out, but it was still an hour before dawn and all I could see was my own face, reflected in the glass of the door. I ran outside. ‘Hullo?’

There was no reply. I hurried as fast as I dared down the garden. I’d taken my shoes off outside the hut and the dew soaked through my socks as I ran.

I found Fel catching her breath by the back door.

‘Fel? What are you doing here? Are you all right?’

She pointed at the path. ‘What is it?’

We were in pitch darkness. I stepped forward to trigger the outside light and there, in the centre of the path, frozen stiff as a garden ornament, was the toad that lived in the rockery wall. I bent down and made to take hold of it. It jumped between my feet. I chivvied it away.

I took Fel in my arms and kissed her. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I thought I’d surprise you.’

‘Darling. Come see the hut.’

She pulled back against my hand. ‘Not up there.’

‘Come on.’

‘I’m scared,’ she said, pouting, only half in jest.

I laughed, put my arm around her and led her into the cottage. ‘I’ll make you a coffee. How come you’re so early?’

We spent the next four days together. I would wake at four and work in the hut until daybreak. We would breakfast in the garden around nine, and then I would go back and work into the early afternoon, when we would visit some town or other, some castle or stately home, that Fel had spotted in the guide she had bought. I tried to take her walking with me but the countryside bothered her. Things kept moving about in her peripheral vision: sheep, cows, crows, tree branches bending in the wind. She was always tripping over roots, stones, her own laces. She was not equipped for the natural world and lacked the lore necessary to survive it. If a cow’s in your way, wave at it and keep walking. Stand still for a wasp, and check the rim of an open can before raising it to your lips. ‘It stung me! It stung!’ I kissed away her tears but Fel was not to be comforted. ‘Let’s go back. Urgh! There’s another one!’

‘That’s a bee.’

‘I don’t like the outside. The outside is mean.’

The paper guide she had bought in Ludlow was exhaustive, but Fel missed the Bund’s information glut. The day we went to Stokesay Castle, she asked me: ‘How do we know if it’s going to be busy?’

‘It’s Saturday. It’s a castle. It’s going to be busy.’

‘But what if it’s too busy?’

‘Then we’ll queue or we’ll go somewhere else. Come on, Fel.’

She carried her absurd do-everything, know-everything phone around wherever we went, though a lack of signal rendered it virtually useless. The phone had a camera in it so her carrying it around made some sense. She worried about losing it, though. ‘Nothing’s backing up,’ she explained.

‘It’s your phone. It’s in your hand. Why would you lose it?’

‘I just don’t want to lose our pictures.’

‘You’re not going to lose them.’

‘Don’t be angry.’

‘I’m not angry.’

When we got home, she made me sit with her and look through her camera roll, for all the world as though the day recorded there had not already happened.

‘Nice. Good one. Yes.’ I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

When it was time to return to London, Fel dialled a number on the house phone, listened, dialled some extra numbers and put down the receiver: ‘All done.’

In the evening, a car drew up outside the door. It was large, white, brand new and unlike anything I had seen before. There was no driver. We put the luggage in the boot and climbed in. The interior smelled of leather polish and new plastic. This is how Fel had managed to arrive so early, the morning she came to the cottage: she had booked one of these vehicles for herself and slept the whole way. She snuggled against me as our vehicle wound steadily through narrow country lanes to the M54. I clutched at her, petrified. The motorway was worse. I was convinced we were going to crash. How can a car have no driver? I cricked my neck craning to see out of windows dialled dark against the street-lamp glare.

When we got back to the Barbican, I was so tired I had to go straight to bed. The mattress felt as if it was moving in waves under me.

6

‘No one need be too surprised by the pace at which we build,’ Georgy Chernoy had said, over dinner in Windsor Castle. ‘The rules by which we operate are no different from the rules that have pertained to progress, fecundity and expansion on this planet since life began. They are no different, if I might for a second speak as a Bundist–’ (a strange thing to say, since to my knowledge he never did anything else) ‘–no different from those which led our unaccommodated forebears to their own achievements.’

Even Stella, who had sat shiny-eyed through his whole performance – wrapped up in his vision, or at any rate spellbound by his delivery – admitted to me later that Georgy Chernoy’s noblesse oblige at this point had made half the room suck its teeth.

Oblivious, Chernoy had continued: ‘I say “rules”, but there is only one rule, and everything follows from it. Not a rule, even, but a simple mathematical truth. I mean the exponential function.’

If the Bund has deviated from the general course of human progress, it is through their knack of comprehending, embracing and exploiting the consequences of the exponential function.

‘And how strange that humankind, the tool-builder, the city-maker, the census-taker, should be always tripping over such simple mathematics!’

Here Stella’s report broke off in typical style: ‘Oh, I’ve no head for numbers!’

I had just got back from Shropshire and Stella was treating me to one of those expensive hotel teas she so enjoyed. It was May, the first anniversary of my meeting Fel, which meant it was also a year to the day since the dinner at Windsor Castle. This was how we got talking about Georgy Chernoy and how I came to hear, slightly garbled and second hand, a speech Fel and I had missed. ‘Something about how things double every few years. You must know all this from your college work.’

I poured milk from a silver jug into Stella’s cup. ‘I just spent a whole month in Shropshire drawing curves. That doesn’t mean I understand them.’

‘Curves! Yes! He talked a lot about curves. About how the Bund thinks in curves. It all sounded rather pretentious, if you ask me.’

Had Georgy Chernoy sought a living example of general mathematical myopia, he could not have found a better subject than Stella. I remember thinking darkly: perhaps this is exactly what he has done – picked her as a sort of glamorous mascot of human limitations. A human pet he can watch as she paces stereotypically back and forth, back and forth, against the plate glass of her own incomprehension.

Chernoy’s point – and it was a valid one, however galling – was that some vital truths about the world, though well known and widely broadcast, absolutely refuse to stick in the unaccommodated mind. They are well understood, and yet they invariably fail to inform action.

Multiply the natural logarithm of two by a hundred and you get seventy, or as near to seventy as makes no odds. Divide that number by growth expressed as, say, so many per cent per year, and you get the number of years it takes for a steadily growing thing to double in size. A tree growing at five per cent a year will double in size every fourteen years.

From that, everything follows. Since the first protozoa assembled themselves, species have been expanding to fill the niches available to them; have reached carrying capacity; exceeded it; and died. ‘The greatest human achievement was its magical ability to cheat the limits of carrying capacity by altering its environment. The Bund’s more recent achievement is to accept, and act upon the knowledge, that this human magic also has its limits.’

I think this is what, above all, puzzles non-Bundists and fuels our occasional hatreds: our sense that the Bund is hypocritically preaching restraint on the one hand while throwing off all shackles to expansion with the other. For heaven’s sake, it has begun to mine the Moon! The Bund, to the contrary, would have it that its own dizzying, so-fast-as-to-be-unfollowable growth is possible because it understands the limits to growth better than anyone else. ‘If bugs in a jar reproduce once every minute, and by midnight the jar is full, at what time is the jar half-full?’

This Stella had remembered. Familiar enough as I was with the riddle, it still took me an incredulous moment, a split-second of scepticism, before I confirmed the answer in all its enormity: ‘At one minute to midnight the jar is still only half-full.’

‘You see?’ Stella clapped her hands, delighted.

One minute to midnight, and the future looks bright, the possibilities endless, or almost endless. A whole half-jar remains unexploited!

A minute later, everything starves. Everything dies. Everything ends. This was the Bund’s point of pride: that it understood the exponential function in its bones; was trained up to it; was born to it. It thought in curves and, in so doing, knew how to evade environmental limits long before impacting with them.

‘Do have another little cake.’

‘I’m done.’

‘Not at these prices, you’re not,’ Stella snapped. ‘At these prices we’re licking the bloody plates.’

I picked one with a strawberry on top as the healthiest-looking option. Underneath the fruit was a crème pâtissière so thick I needed an extra cup of tea to wash it down.

Stella took the opportunity to check her phone. Georgy had got it for her to help her organise the shooting schedule for DARE. The first live-action filming was just a fortnight away, and a second-unit crew made up of final-year film students was already at work making stock footage of the models I had built for the show: submarine, mobiles, interceptors, satellites, assorted Earth- and Moon-based launch platforms; also some simple pyrotechnic work.

She pecked hazily at the screen, saw me looking, sighed and dropped the phone on the table.

‘I’m never going to get the hang of this thing.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ I said, but only out of form’s sake. I knew how impossible it was. Just the night before, Fel had cuddled up beside me in bed and tried showing me how she planned our evenings on the tablet she was always hauling around with her. Images sprang from the screen in 3D and she started knitting patterns together as though plucking a harp. All I could do was laugh.

‘What? It only takes practice,’ she said. Perhaps she was trying to be kind. We both knew it wasn’t true.

Stella had tried moving her scripts onto glass; the logic of text manipulation had held reasonably fast in the transition between media and she spoke enthusiastically about the speed at which she was able to turn cast scripts into shooting schedules. Suddenly the (Bundist) lighting cameraman and the cinematographer were accessing her work even while she was tapping away at it, her whole screen blizzarding in green and purple. She’d had to abandon the work to them. She was enough of a professional to know that film-making is a collaborative business and that her film crew knew a lot more about the mechanics of a shooting schedule than she did. You could see that it hurt, though: how work she had assumed would take a week came back to her, without her input, late in the evening of the same day.

Episode seventeen upped the ante by launching a story arc to carry the first series to its cliffhanger conclusion. (Stella had it in mind that a second series of DARE, if green-lit, would eschew standalone episodes altogether. She would run the show, developing its narrative ‘spine’, while professional writers drawn from theatre would collaborate on individual episodes.)

In episode seventeen, the aliens launch a concerted attack on the moonbase – DARE’s first line of defence. At first, the attack appears tactical, but by episode nineteen it is clear that the UFOs are arriving for the long haul. Despite swingeing losses, they begin to construct a nigh-on impregnable bridgehead on the Moon’s far side, using material time-shifted one second into the future. Cut off from their lines of communication, the crew of DARE’s moonbase lack vital intelligence on the nature of the aliens’ ‘chronoconcrete’. Unaware that their attacks are simply strengthening the enemy’s hand by providing them with a vital extra source of ‘chronic energy’, they succumb, one by one, to mysterious, invisible ground-assaults.

With extra episodes to devise, Stella was using me as her sounding board. Our teas were more frequent, which pleased my sweet tooth, but they were closer to script meetings than family catch-ups. As Stella’s ideas for DARE developed, it grew clear, at least to me, that I was not the best reader she could have chosen. It was all too obvious where her latest ideas were coming from. She seemed to me to be working out her feelings about looking after my mother – none too subtly, neither.

By episode twenty, DARE’s secret Shepperton HQ has developed an effective portable countermeasure involving resonant crystals, and the aliens are flushed from their bridgehead.

Submarine-launched interceptors land successfully within the perimeter of the now abandoned alien station, and ground crews set out to explore the structure.

In the final reel of the final episode, they find the moonbase’s ‘dead’ crew.

They are not dead, but they are not really alive, either. Helpless, strapped to gurneys, dripping blood and worse, many have had their organs harvested and their vital functions are being maintained by sophisticated machines.

‘In the second series, brilliant surgeons will pack these life-support systems into the victims’ still-living bodies, and these cybernetically enhanced personnel will form a new, elite line of defence for the DARE organisation,’ Stella explained. ‘They’re not just stronger, not just faster; their ordeal has bestowed on them a deep insight into the minds of the invaders.’ She could see I wanted to interrupt and, to stop me, she turned her attention to the teapot, adding hot water, stirring, pouring, talking all the while: ‘But with this knowledge comes a certain sympathy for the aliens – these last desperate representatives of a dying world. As the second series builds to a crisis, you won’t be entirely sure whose side these familiar characters are actually on.’

‘I think,’ I began (I knew I had to tread carefully), ‘I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. You want the first series to end with a shot of the show’s most engaging characters eviscerated on surgical beds?’

‘It doesn’t have to be graphic.’

‘It doesn’t?’

I didn’t want to be angry with her, but it was all I could do not to shake her. Betty was only just out of her latest bout of ‘life-saving’ surgery. I assumed this was where Stella had got the idea. By now my mother had hardly any internal organs left.

It is a measure of the love Betty and Stella felt for each other that, almost until the last, it survived the radically different choices they had made in life. As a young woman, Stella had chosen a life in which she could decide things for herself. Betty, marrying young, and marrying Bob, chose to have her life dictated by a husband. She never thought to resent her sister’s success, and I suspect this is partly because she did not recognise it as success. In my memory, Mum, while fond of Stella, always spoke rather disparagingly about what she was ‘getting up to’. The real fullness of life, in Betty’s opinion, was to be obtained through home and family. And given that these, in our case, consisted of a tin bath in the parlour and Bob rolling in drunk every Friday and Saturday night, you could only admire her faith.

I had just started my second year at the Bartlett, and was watching my first houses rise in Cripplegate, when Betty moved to Islington to stay with Stella. I didn’t visit often, and they did not encourage me. Chemotherapy left Betty weak, prone to viral infections of one sort or another. There was no prohibition on my visiting, but an odd reticence kept me away. If I phoned Stella at home in Islington, it was always to talk to my mother or, if she was resting, to ask after her. But when Stella and I met in person, it was never at the house, and the subject of Betty never arose.

Had I known my mum was going to spend the rest of her life in London, I would never have let such an unnatural state of affairs persist. But I always assumed that Betty would return to the West Riding after her treatment.

I wonder, at what point did Betty’s affection for Bob entirely die? He never, to my knowledge, behaved badly towards her, not even in his blackest moods, not even in his deepest drunk. She never had to hide behind lace curtains of a Monday morning, as I recall some bruised and battered neighbours doing.

Betty never went home. She spent her last years in a room not her own, in a city she didn’t know, being ministered to by a sister she loved dearly but with whom she had nothing in common. I realise now, and far too late, that she was disorientated. That she did not know what she was doing. That she did not know what she was agreeing to.

How long did Betty hide the symptoms of her cancer? She must have been aware of her illness even before I left for college. I remember when I was still at home, and distracted by the business of moving to London, she was constantly visiting the toilet. But this sort of thing seems significant only in retrospect. Once or twice I found pink piss in the toilet bowl. But even this is no smoking gun. With bladder cancer the bleeding stops and starts. It can disappear for weeks. Even months.

Whichever way you cut it, Betty’s silence killed her. Once in Islington, the pain in her lower back became so bad that Stella had to manhandle Betty to the surgery. It was the first time in her professional career that Stella had ever missed a matinee. Much later, she told me how startled she was at how light her sister had become: ‘Like a bundle of sticks.’

Had this medical emergency unfolded in the West Riding, I don’t doubt the doctor would have sent Betty away with painkillers and some nonsense about sleeping on a harder mattress.

In London it was a different story. Stella’s GP gave Betty an immediate referral.

The cystoscopy revealed suspicious lesions, too far gone to be removed surgically. Betty returned to Stella’s with a sore arm from a BCG injection and a letter for the GP to continue the course, but it was only ever a holding measure. Within the month she was back in hospital, an inpatient this time, awaiting an operation to remove her bladder.

It was the autumn of my second year, while I was having to commute daily from Tooting to Cripplegate. I suspect now that Mum’s operation was the main reason Fel and I moved in together when we did. Fel was worried about me.

‘There’s too much going on. You’ve too much to worry about. It’s going to drive you crazy.’

At the time, I was bowled over at the thought that Fel liked me enough to live with me. It never occurred to me, until later, how much she wanted to care for me.

I went to see Betty before the surgery. Her bed was a pile of forms, handbooks, diagrams. She was trying to understand what life would look like after the operation. She was confused, humiliated.

Further operations followed to create a new bladder for her, using a loop of intestine. She grew even thinner from that procedure, as was only to be expected. Released from hospital, she stayed with Stella, learning to self-catheterise, learning to live with incontinence.

She never went home. She never went back to my dad. She reminded me of those women of the Middle Ages who, disappointed in their political manoeuvrings, retire to a religious establishment.

And though it feels strange to me to be casting Aunt Stella, of all people, as a nurse, her performance was, as always, immaculate.

Why Stella did what she did then is still a mystery to me. And I can’t quite get it out of my head that she waited till I had spent a month in Shrophire, designing her precious TV show, before she dropped her bombshell on me.

‘It’s not the end of death,’ she tried to explain.

It had seemed strange to me at the time, that she had wanted to meet me so soon after our last teatime, when we had shared jokes about that strange meal in Windsor castle. It turned out that both occasions were of a piece: Stella was preparing me for what she had done.

Our sandwiches lay neglected on the silver tray and the tea grew cold in its pot. Had she really thought to lure me into an easy understanding? Was she so complacent? The hotel’s faux-Louis XV chair frame dug hard across the backs of my legs as I crouched forward, wanting to run, wanting to fight, wanting this not to be happening. Stella, for her part, must have guessed what my response would be: her shoulders were hunched, her whole manner defensive. ‘What it does,’ she explained, ‘is it obviates one’s personal extinction. Obviates. Is that a word?’

I had no idea what to say to her. What could you say to this? Georgy Chernoy’s patented Process was unprecedented. It was revolutionary. It was, frankly, bizarre. ‘For God’s sake, Stella. What were you thinking?’

‘She will not leave us. That’s what I’m trying to say. That what your mother is – and you have to think of her as a performance, Stuart, that’s the point, we’re not things, we’re performances, you see? We rehearse ourselves. Well, that rehearsal will continue.’

‘Does Dad know?’

Stella would not look at me.

‘You know he can stop this. Don’t you? He’s her husband. He has that right.’

She forced herself to meet my gaze. ‘We cannot let her die, Stuart. Can we? Think of the possibilities!’

When I got back to the Barbican, I was too upset to go up to the flat. I headed to the Foresters instead and used the payphone by the gents to call Bob’s pub, the Arms. I asked the barman to give my dad a shout and after a few minutes Bob called me from the usual payphone. ‘What is it?’ he said, assuming the worst. He had been preparing for this call for a while.

‘It’s Stella.’

That foxed him. ‘Stella?’

The pips sounded. ‘I’ll call you,’ I said.

I rang him back – we had called each other like this often enough that I knew the number – and I explained what Stella had done. I told him what she had planned for Betty. I couldn’t tell if the silence that followed indicated anger or confusion or grief or what. ‘Has Stella talked to you about this?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘She’s not spoken to me.’ This in a tone that would have told me, had I been paying attention, that it was quite pointless putting any responsibility for action onto him. Bob’s fear of confrontation was pathological. ‘I think this is Mum’s choice, don’t you?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think this is Mum’s choice. I think Stella’s railroading her.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘I don’t want a conversation about Stella. I want to talk to you about Mum. Will you come and see her, at least? Speak to her?’

Robert hummed and bumbled.

‘You can take a couple of days. The factory will give you a couple of days.’

‘But where will I stay?’

‘You can stay with Fel and me,’ I said, out of my mind with frustration.

Which left me having to explain to Fel why my father was visiting: because Stella had persuaded my mother to sign up for the Chernoy Process. The emotional complications of all this would surely drown us, so I decided to make a last-ditch effort and visit Medicine City myself, to see if I could dissuade Betty from undergoing the Process.

‘Why am I meeting Mum outside? I can’t see how that’s going to be comfortable for her.’

Fel, sprawling across our bed in the Barbican, gestured at her tablet. She twisted and fiddled with the air above the screen: ghosts rose from the glass and spun. But even Fel was bested by Medicine City’s overmediated user portal. ‘I’m not sure “inside” and “outside” mean very much in Medicine City any more.’

I bit my tongue. The baroque complications the Bund larded over everything had long since ceased to captivate me. ‘I just need to know where I’m going.’

In reply, Fel dug about under our pillows and pulled out the glass wafer that was her new phone. ‘Take this.’

‘You know I don’t have a clue how to operate that.’

She tapped it. A miniature colour-coded urban landscape appeared. ‘Ladywell. Follow the blue dot.’ She waved the phone at me to take. ‘It won’t do anything else, I’ve locked it to the app.’

I had no idea what she meant by that. I did know she was trying to be helpful. I knew, too, that without her help I would never have been able to make an appointment in the first place. This, after all, was how the Bund was locking the rest of us out of its accelerated territory: by the sheer weight of its offering. Options, menus, mirrors, proxies – what did these words even mean? What concepts lay behind them? No door was ever barred in the Bund, but no door was ever the right door, either. The Bund was a party at which, unless you knew everyone already, you were never able to strike up a conversation.

‘Thanks,’ I said, pocketing the phone.

She got up and kissed me. I ran my hands over her head. It felt as though I were stroking a cat. Filming had begun on DARE and Fel was sporting a haircut appropriate to submarine commanders: close-cropped, and shaved over the ears. She kissed me again. ‘I hope it goes all right.’

‘“All right”?’

I didn’t mean to be awkward with her. She was only trying to be kind.

She let me go. She was out of patience with me, and trying not to show it. ‘I don’t know what you want. Not really.’

I took a breath. I had no desire to take my confusion out on her.

The least I owed her was an effort to be honest.

‘Your father’s treatments.’

‘Yes.’ She let go of me and climbed back under the sheet.

‘What do you think?’

‘What do I think?’ She paused a second, letting me register the inadequacy of my own question. ‘I think they work.’

‘Yes.’

‘In fact, I know they do.’

I sat beside her on the bed.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘you’re asking me the wrong question.’

I took a breath. ‘I can’t ask you how you feel about it,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair of me. I don’t know what I feel about it myself.’

‘I am the wrong person to ask,’ Fel agreed. ‘I’m too close to it. I grew up with Daddy’s work. It seems normal to me. Inevitable, in a way it doesn’t to anyone else. Not yet. Not even in the Bund. I don’t think it does you and me any favours that your mother’s been invited to go through with this. I know that’s selfish of me.’

I took her hand. ‘I feel the same. I know I shouldn’t but… There’s something else.’

‘Yes?’

‘My father’s coming to town to see her. He’s going to need somewhere to stay.’

It took Fel a moment to realise what I was getting at. ‘I’ll book him a room,’ she said.

‘He wouldn’t feel comfortable with that.’

She lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘Right.’

‘It won’t be for long.’

I lay beside her on the bed. Her hand found mine. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s fine. I didn’t mean to be a bitch.’

‘It’s not that.’

She turned to look at me.

I said: ‘If Bob asked you about the treatments, what would you tell him?’

Fel thought about it. ‘I’d tell him the truth. That Daddy’s a genius. That the Process he’s invented is the future. That death has lost its sting. Beyond that, what other people believe is irrelevant. Don’t you think?’

That Georgy Chernoy’s triumph over death would usher in a new world was evident. But I could not imagine Bob wanting to take up residence in that world. It would surely repulse him. All his life, Bob had lived for the weekend. A long rest by a sunny brook and fish enough to catch. What was Death to him but an everlasting weekend, an eternal release from the labour of living? I could not imagine anyone less likely to consider the Chernoy Process a victory. Seen through Bob’s eyes, in fact, it could only be thought a betrayal.

‘Go.’ Fel kicked me under the sheet. ‘You’ll be late.’

To get there quickly I caught the Tube but it was already four by the time I arrived at London Bridge. This station being a Bundist development, I was not surprised to find the layout changed since my last visit and extra exits added for streets I’d never heard of. The gloss and finish of the place did surprise me, though they offered but the barest hint of the bizarre transformations I would encounter above ground.

The conceit of the designers was that London Bridge owed its existence to bones. And I had read enough at college to know that this was, in a strict historical sense, perfectly true: Southwark has risen from the marshes of the ancient Thames on the bones of its settlers and their animals, accreting layer by layer like a coral.

The same is true of many long-settled places.

Because the Tube line had been dug deep here, the remade station had been fashioned as a slice through history. The walls were lacquered earth, and in the earth were the leavings of past ages of London. Potshards and wooden clogs. A trove of coins. Chicken bones in the ashes of a fire. As I ascended the escalators to street level, so I moved through time, through timbered frames and broken arches, pools of shattered stained glass, swatches of stained brocade. Then ironworks. Pipes and pumps. The homogenous tilth in which the station’s faux-relics had been ‘buried’ (set in lacquer, polished, cunningly lit) vanished entirely, squeezed out by a tangle of ducts, drains and brickwork vessels – the innards of a world coming to mechanical life.

The story these corridors were telling was not subtle. It was coarse, triumphalist and irresistibly exhilarating. As I neared concourse level, iron ceded to plastics and glass and ceramic, and the whole fabric of the building seemed in motion, responding as an anemone might to my passing. The entire subterranean structure was a narrative of human progress, writ according to the Bund’s rigorously materialist creation myth, in which the poor, bare forked folk of the Earth had assembled, out of dirt and heat, generation by generation and oh-so-painfully, a living thing out of dead stuff – a city that first had breathed, then gushed, then felt and cried, and now, at last and with the coming of the Bund, had begun to speak.

I had a moment’s panic while I fished for my ticket, then remembered that Fel’s phone itself would let me through.

I held it up to the plastic barrier, which slid open, letting me onto Tooley Street and a project that, since my last visit, had taken a strange and baffling new direction.

The tram stop was where I expected it to be, and the tram, though wheelless, propelled on a cushion of magnetised air, was in all other respects as I remembered it. The street, however, had quite vanished, broken into pieces and rearranged as if within a giant’s kaleidoscope.

There was no longer any second Saint Paul’s, but fractured pieces of that structure hung about the street as though projected on the air. Look again, and you would see that these shattered baulks were solid enough, artfully suspended by wires thin as silk from distant sky-grey gantries. Some of the rubble was shrunken to the size of a bin or a bench, while other fragments had been blown out of proportion, so that the statue of Queen Anne, for example, which, like its original, had stood at the foot of the cathedral steps, now spanned the entire thoroughfare, with a tunnel for traffic drilled through her skirts. The whole effort here seemed directed against the comprehending eye, destabilising and dethroning it, making every angle as legitimate as every other, as though the whole view were a canvas by Picasso, that avant-garde Parisian artist whose career had been cut so cruelly short by the wartime gassing of that city.

Out from under Queen Anne’s skirts, the vistas rolling by grew stranger still. There were no recognisable streets any more, but only the most fractured arrangements of materials through which we swooped in perfect silence on a raised concrete track, like privileged tourists of the future scouting some terrible and ancient wreck.

As I had understood it on my last visit, these playful zones – colossal filing cabinets like blind high-rises and chairs the size of bridges – had served a psychological function. Such outsize fragments of the real were meant, I had thought, to help the labile and disorientated infants of the Process keep the world in mind. They were props, in other words, for people whose grip on reality would otherwise have been fatally loosened by the Process.

It was clear, however, that this year some new strategy was being tried. Outside, there were no objects, but only the parts of objects; no reality, but only the ingredients of one. My brow furrowed and my head ached as we rolled by acre after acre of incomprehensible stuff: the levers from adjustable office chairs, carpet squares, coat hangers, phone sockets, bicycle handlebars, cotton wool, the lids of take-out coffee cups, fluorescent tubes, paint, staples, sandwich packaging, a pile of faceless wooden men, red and blue, unstrung from table-football games, all of it gargantuan, monumental, none of it readable. It was as though the everyday world had been torn apart and discarded, leaving only the components, as meaningless and minatory as the letters of a sentence were you to jumble them and cram them, spaceless, upon a board.

What breakthrough had Chernoy’s researchers made to necessitate this shattering transformation of their playground? Were they trying to actually ape and echo the psychic disintegration of their patients? To what end? What would be the point of that unless it was to prepare their clientele for an altogether different sort of reality? The weightless, hypermediated, so-complex-as-to-be-chaotic reality of the Bund?

When Betty’s Process was complete, she would wake into a new world, that was clear – and not a world I could ever be part of.

Beyond the cutting, the tram slowed and settled, purring, onto its concrete bed. In my hand, Fel’s phone blinked ‘Brockley’, and I disembarked.

Parties of Processed infants were walking under the lime trees of Ladywell, catching the last of the daylight. The air was fresh, and I was certain that it was only my imagination that filled the streets with the faint ghost of an echo of a dentist’s drill, the fleeting suggestion of mouthwash, the yeasty smell of fresh Band-Aids.

On my first visit, with Stella, it was obvious at a glance how this area had been given over to various ancillary medical services. Aside from anything else, there were signs all over the road, severe speed restrictions, crossings at every junction, lights in the kerbs and ramps up to every door. All that I had seen last August, just eight months earlier, had been removed. Had the Chernoy Process somehow done away with the need for dentists, GPs, sports therapists and all its other hangers-on? Or was Medicine City simply learning the art of disguise? I passed along an avenue of cherry trees. It was easy to imagine that the area was restored to what it had been before the Great War: a leafy and fashionable suburb of the City.

The infants of the Process moved awkwardly along the pavement in bands of between half a dozen and a dozen. They moved too sedately for children, though now and again I saw, pelting in another direction, groups of runners.

They bashed along the pavement together, equally silent, equally serious, as though fleeing for their lives.

Too slow. Too fast. I tried to imagine what Chernoy’s Processed infants were going through as they struggled to come to terms with their strange new bodies. Half-remembered. Half-familiar. Too small. Too strong by half.

Everyone was civil, letting me by on the narrow pavement, but the way people here travelled in groups unnerved me. I wondered what their common purpose was. Half a dozen overtook me at a run. Instinctively, I brought Fel’s phone close to my chest, protecting it. Were all these infants following an exercise regime, I wondered, or something more atavistic? The boast of the Chernoy Process was that the mind lived on in a new body – but what if the body had its own agenda? The body of a child, flexing, expanding into the space afforded it, testing every limit: such a body would have its own ideas. What must it be like, to take a ride in that body? To be tied to it? Committed to it?

I came to a street that must once have been a main traffic artery; now it appeared to have been given over entirely to promenaders and runners. I climbed wrought-iron stairs to a rolling walkway raised above the road. I travelled east.

I tapped Fel’s phone. I was meeting my mother in an indeterminate zone, a white space on the phone’s projected map, near buildings, near a park. Now I understood Fel’s confusion. It was impossible from the map to tell whether I was meeting Betty outdoors or inside. There were no other details beyond a time of meeting.

Someone barrelled into me from behind and I fell, dropping the phone.

I saw a bright trainer, a stylised skull stitched to the heel, and a hand snatching up the phone. I got to my feet. The young man leapt from the handrail of my walkway into the trough of the one moving parallel to mine, in the opposite direction. The combined speed of the walkways caused him to spin and tumble when he landed. He was already far behind me when he got to his feet. He was unhurt. He stood, arms folded, staring me down as he vanished in the fading light.

My heart hammered in my chest. Panic fizzed through me. But it was over and done and there was nothing I could do about it: I had been mugged. I don’t know whether it was the absurdity of the incident or what, but I felt strangely insulated from the assault. I was shaken, and stayed shaken a long while. At the same time, I found the incident impossible to take seriously. Here, in a place technologised to the point of incomprehension, someone wanted to steal a phone? Was this area haunted by unaccommodated criminals? Or was my assailant one of Chernoy’s patients, testing the limits of their regained youth? Exuberant. Out of control…

I should have run after him. I should have leapt from walkway to walkway and pursued him. But I had never been athletic, and I lacked the reflexes that make quick action possible.

So it occurred to me far too late that without the phone I wouldn’t be able to find my mother. And even as I thought this, the road, which had risen to cross water, met with a walkway, and the boards under my feet meshed and slowed.

I took metal stairs down to the waterside. There was a small river here: a well-domesticated suburban tributary of the Thames.

Along its banks were trees in full leaf, and leading away from the river, a peculiar, maze-like public park made of narrow gravel paths between hillocks no more than a few feet high. These must have been artificial. Between the hillocks, raised on wooden posts wrapped around with coloured scarves, were tents, marquees and gazebos of every size and shape. The tents were brightly coloured, lit by lamps that gave off a warm, organic glow. These lamps were hung from the tent posts, or placed upon the ground behind screens of ornate punctured tin. In each shelter lay a couch. Some tents held two couches, I suppose for partners who – not to be parted by death – had chosen to undergo the Chernoy Process together. And on each couch sprawled a living human form.

Some were naked. Others lay smothered in a thicket of metal branches which, growing up around their couch, threshed about, dipping in and out of that prone and defenceless flesh as if spooning it up.

My eyes fought to adjust, my mind to comprehend what I was seeing. The back-and-forth of metal blades as fine and sharp as grasses in the wind should have made those tents tableaux of violent atrocity. But as I walked, glimpsing each figure – here a man, there a woman, here two women, there a family gathered around a relative gone so to fat and out of true that it was not possible to guess the person’s sex – it came to me how happy everyone was here. How unconcerned. Around me rose a great contented murmur of calm and private conversation, which my ear, in passing, muddled to a giant, restful hive-hum.

The reclining figures, naked on their couches, watched my progress without embarrassment or self-consciousness of any kind.

Those whose bodies were hidden under thickets of threshing blades were hardly less passive. Their half-closed eyelids and small smiles suggested that they were drawing from the experience, and in full view of everyone, some small, innocent pleasure.

Here and there a figure, unattended at present, lay virtually hidden behind that sharp, weaving stuff. But I saw no blood, the blades dipped but did not appear to penetrate, and I began to wonder if that dangerous metal foliage was, after all, anything more than a sort of massaging mechanism.

I saw children – real children, not Chernoy’s Processed infants – by several of the couches, holding the hands of prone men and women who must, I supposed by their age, be their grandparents. Some were staring up in wonder at the faces of these ancient beings. Others, bored at last, were playing tag around the tents while their parents – who after all were only grown-up children themselves – kept vigil around the beds of their parents.

So many sensations and ideas pressed upon me all at once. It was only as I walked, snatching furtive glimpses, that I was able at last to parse what I was seeing. I was in a great tented gathering of the dying, where the naked dead-to-be held hands with the yet-living. The prone, plump, pinkish bodies on their couches never moved. Each tent was a tableau, warmly lit and calm. A series of nativities. The metaphor was an apt one, I saw now, for once the initial shock was past, I was able to register what was surely the point of the whole Process: every naked figure on its couch, young or old, man or woman, had a belly swollen with new life. Everyone lying here, regardless of their age or sex, was pregnant, and in dying they would, I supposed, give birth to themselves.

Standing lost in all that fertile dying, I knew then that I could not do what I had come to do. How could I presume to dissuade my mother from this new chance? What right had I to tell her she should die in the old world, she who had taken the decision to live in the new? Why had it even occurred to me to do this? Because I was afraid for her? Or because I was afraid of her, and what she would become?

The great warm human buzzing around me became a scent in the air, neither spring nor autumn, neither new life nor rot, but something else, something unprecedented, new to the Earth, which could not ever be the same again. I breathed it in and found myself, quite unaccountably, in tears.

I wondered how I would ever find my mother; and if I missed her, if I would see her before she was a child again.

Bob paid his only visit to Fel and me. He arrived late one Friday evening in June, right in the middle of my end-of-year exams, wandered goggle-eyed around our new apartment, and in the morning insisted that he go on his own to Ladywell to talk to Betty. And when he panicked, lost beyond all saving somewhere out in Woolwich (as had been inevitable), he rang, not me, but Stella, from a kindly stranger’s phone (‘I have a gentleman here says he’s lost, he says you’re his sister-in-law.’)

Stella put as brave a complexion on the afternoon as she could. But it was clear enough, once she had rescued Bob and led him to that place where Betty was at rest, dying and being reborn at once, that Bob would prove inadequate to the occasion.

I imagine him there, on the threshold of that tented fairy space, frightened and affronted. What on earth would he have found to say to his wife, in such surroundings, and after so long an estrangement?

Well, it turns out he did not enter. He never got that far. He stood on the travellator platform, talking to his wife on Stella’s picturephone. They cannot have been more than a couple of hundred yards apart.

It took me most of the summer to shake off my anger towards Stella. Eventually she managed to persuade me to break bread with her. Or at very least, fork cake, in the lobby of her usual hotel. She had decided to meet the controversy head-on, and insisted on playing me the recording of Bob’s conversation with Betty.

‘Stella,’ I protested, ‘it’s private. What were you thinking, recording this?’

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, as oblivious as her boyfriend to old notions of personal privacy. ‘The phone records everything.’

I persuaded her to show me only snatches of Betty’s side of the conversation with her husband. Betty’s face, withered more by suffering than age, loomed large in the frame of Stella’s phone.

‘The thing about cancer,’ Betty said, ‘is that it hurts. So you learn to fold the pain up inside you. You crumple it up, so that, even as it gets stronger, it’s all the time getting tighter, denser, smaller, like a stone. And then you throw the stone away. You see? You throw it into the sea. And though the waves will return it, again and again, you throw it back into the water, again and again.

And so it goes, back and forth, back and forth, thrown and returned, thrown and returned, day after day, and you hope that at last the waves will erode the stone. You hope, one day, there will be no stone. Though there always is.

‘But Stuart, this is the point. When you take pain like that, every day, and squeeze it tight, squeeze it into a stone, and throw that stone away, eventually you realise: you can do that with anything. Any part of yourself. And that’s why this has been easy for me. Do you see? I’ve been doing this for years. Stuart. Feel my belly.’

‘That’s enough,’ I said.

Stella leaned forward, over the table, the phone firmly in her grasp. ‘Watch.’

Betty had turned the camera upon her body. Waving steel grasses tipped across her supine form, hiding her gravid belly. Out of focus, writhing and spiralling, they stirred her flesh as though it were a soup.

I sat there, helpless.

‘Touch my belly. Feel how hard it is. Like a stone. Are you going to catch it, Stu? Are you going to catch this stone? Are you going to look after me?’

The picture went out.

I got to my feet. ‘You had no business showing me that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That’s between Mum and Dad. You had no business recording it.’

‘Stuart.’

I buttoned my coat.

‘Did you not hear? She was talking to you. That was all meant for you.’

I shook my head. ‘She was talking to Dad. She’s confused.’

‘Please, Stuart.’

I threw a twenty pound note on the table, a calculated slight since Stella always paid – pointless, too, since the hotel no longer accepted paper money – and I left.

Bob’s own interpretation of Betty’s state of mind had been refreshingly straightforward. ‘She wasn’t interested in anything I had to say. Mind you, she never was.’

Following his aborted trip to Ladywell, Stella saw him back to our flat. He spent the evening with me and Fel, saying very little, and the next day he returned to Hebden by the noon train. His visit, which I had expected to be both awkward and intrusive, proved in the end too short for us. Fel felt she must have done or said something wrong. ‘I don’t think he liked me very much,’ she said as we pulled sheets and bed covers from the couch where he had slept, and I said nothing, because in all honesty she was probably right. It must surely have occurred to Bob that the Bund, which had won dominion over so much already, had now won dominion over his wife. And if that was the case, then who was Fel but the agent through which the Bund would win dominion over his son?

I lived in two worlds, and until that point I had always imagined I would be able to hold them apart: my unaccommodated life, and that part of my life that nudged up against the Bund. I had managed until now. I had remembered not to rub my father’s nose in my higher education. I had always toned things down when he was around.

I wanted him to be proud of me, but I knew not to make too much noise about all of the important things I had learned, nor opine too vigorously about political matters of which Bob, living where he did, and doing what he did, could not possibly know anything.

But the stretch between life in the West Riding and life in London was as nothing to the chasm the Chernoy Process was opening up between the unaccommodated and the Bund, and for the first time, I felt myself tear. I loved Fel, and I loved my father, but as time went on and the world continued to change, playing out with a cold logic the speciations triggered by Gurwitsch’s ray, I could see that I might be forced to choose between them.

7

We none of us visited Betty very often during her pregnancy. And this was no tragedy, since day by day there was less of her to visit. By the autumn, when we were carrying umbrellas to Ladywell and splashing along gravel paths from tent to tent, it was impossible, when we got to her gazebo, for us to glimpse the oh-so-precious core one likes to imagine lies at the root of a human self. Betty’s body alone remained. That and a wrapper of words and associations unbound by anything you could call consciousness.

Betty’s tent was sagging by then, its crimson canvas faded in streaks to a fleshy pink. Mildew grew in the corners and its seams bled in the rain. There was mud trodden into the rugs around the couch, and things living under the weave, and the tin lamps scattered round about, which had lit Betty’s confinement from beneath like a Victorian nativity scene, had tarnished and dented, and many had ceased to function. By then, Betty was spared the sight of this dilapidation. The stand of blade-like grasses had receded back into the earth, but now her head was smothered by hordes of silver bees. It was a sight familiar enough by then to make my last visit, at the end of November, easier than perhaps it ought to have been. Not very charged with emotion at all, in fact – it was as though I had already lost her. When I squeezed her hand for the last time, her fingers found mine and yet I knew, deep in my heart, that this was merely an autonomic response, and that she was consumed. I stared at her swollen belly. Its late fecundity was still disturbing to me: a youngish belly parasitising on an old woman. An unnecessarily bitter way of looking at the Chernoy Process, but given Betty’s medical history, how could I think of it differently?

Oblivious to my grim metaphor-making, Betty hurtled towards her triumphant rebirth. At Stella’s request, the clinic sent us regular video reports. Through them we sensed her belly swelling day by day, and heard the bees swarming in and out of her mouth and nose in pursuit of strange honey, reading her mind even as they burned away her brain.

The clinic controlled every nuance of this process, including the moment of death. For Betty’s demise, they picked Christmas Day: the very day the family were meant to cheer Jim off to Woomera.

Stella’s house in Islington stood on the corner of Inglebert Street and Myddelton Square. It had an impressive front door, but the easiest way in was by the garden. I pressed the bell and after a long shivery moment the side door – set in a high, lilac-topped brick wall – unlatched itself without buzzing. I let Fel through first. Though much of the planting had died back, the garden still felt overgrown. I gathered Fel to me and kissed her in the shadow of the long-neglected apple tree. Laughing softly, she pushed me away and I nearly toppled over a planter moulded in the shape of a classically proportioned human head. I took her hand and led her, more by feel than by sight, along a narrow brick path to the top of a spiral of slippery iron stairs.

Light from the basement dining room lit our way. The kitchen door was ajar. From it spilled a current of warm air, heavy with asafoetida and cumin. Stella, who had never cooked for Fel before and who claimed never to have done more than spiralise a few vegetables for Georgy (‘We always eat out’) was attempting a feast compatible with the Bund’s strictures on diet. There was no trace of Christmas in her cooking, no decorations in the windows, no sign of cake anywhere. I put a brave face on things but it had somehow slipped my mind that Christmas was not universal. I was as disappointed as a child, though grimly determined not to let it show.

‘Come in, come in,’ Stella harried. ‘Don’t let the warmth out. No, don’t shut the door, leave a gap, we won’t be able to breathe.’

‘How are you doing, Stella?’

‘Have you come straight from Cripplegate?’

‘Pretty much,’ Fel said.

‘Drinks. Would you like a drink?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ve got juices, Rose’s Lime, Vimto.’

Fel laughed.

Stella’s smile was uncertain. ‘You all drink Vimto, don’t you? At least, Georgy does.’ She shot a look at me.

‘It’s fine, Stella. They do all drink Vimto. It’s practically a religion.’

‘Do you have a beer?’

Stella blinked at Fel. ‘Of course.’

‘Fel drinks alcohol.’

‘Oh.’

‘And Vimto,’ said Fel. ‘But a beer would be lovely.’

‘Stuart, can you go and get Fel a beer from the fridge next door?’

I slipped off my shoes and stowed them under the bench just inside the back door. I crossed the dining room to the heavy, lime-green fridge-freezer. The room was nothing like I remembered. Stella had it fitted out with subfloor heating under marble, and a set of wilfully eccentric pieces from Portobello Road Market had taken the place of the old cupboards. This evening, in preparation for the gathering, the room was all lit up with tea-lights and candles. It looked like Stella was trying too hard. I returned to the tiny galley kitchen with Fel’s bottle of Pils. ‘Is there an opener?’

Fel, recognising the brand, took the bottle, screwed off the cap and stuck her tongue out at me.

‘Now, Felicine, do go and sit down. Stuart, give me a hand.’ Stella thrust a handful of coriander at me. Some of it dropped on the floor. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling a chopping board down and over the sink: the fit was precarious but there was no other surface to use. She had already taken the dining table out of action with place settings and glasses for Vimto and wine. ‘Can you manage there?’ She fished about in an open drawer and fetched out a mezzaluna. ‘As fine as you can.’

‘A knife would be better. I need one hand to steady the board.’

She found me a knife too small for the job; I sawed away at the stuff in my fist, pressing down to keep the board in place.

‘Oh dear,’ said Stella, gazing at the mess her cooking had made of the kitchen. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘It all smells fantastic.’

‘Everything smells fantastic when it starts to burn.’

‘There. Is that fine enough? Good. Now, what else is there to do?’ Having got through that labour with my fingers still intact, I was game for anything.

Because the Bund only ever ate meat of its own devising – vegetal meat, efficient, sterile and relatively homogenous – Stella had elected to stick to vegetarian food. She was not a bad cook, but she was out of practice and the recipes she had chosen – I read them over her shoulder out of books with titles like The Incredible Spice Wunderkammer and Adventures on the Cardamom Route – had far too many stages to them.

‘Just grind all that into a paste and fry it,’ I told her, pointing to a particularly knotted passage in Under the Tamarind Tree. ‘Make life simpler for yourself.’

‘But it’ll burn!’

‘It won’t burn, it’ll be full of liquid from the onion. Just toss it about in some oil until the water evaporates.’

She looked up at me with wide eyes. ‘You think so?’

‘Go and talk to Fel,’ I said. ‘She’s on her own in there. I can fix this.’

She kissed me on the cheek.

It was easy enough to handle. Stella had forgotten the rice. It was still soaking in far too much cold water. I drained half of it off, added cardamom and butter and salt, and was just sealing the pan with a sheet of foil when the back door opened and Bob and Jim came in.

‘I found him,’ Jim bellowed, putting his arms around me. ‘I found Dad, bet you can’t guess where.’

‘How’d you get in?’

‘Some pillock left the garden door open.’

I wanted Jim to be still and let me look at him: I had seen him twice in the past two years, both vanishingly brief encounters on his way through London, and none of us had received so much as a letter from him since he’d been selected for the army’s Space Force. He had just finished a month in purdah at a submarine base in the Firth of Forth, doing whatever passed for basic training in that bizarre and brand-new organisation. Tomorrow was Christmas Day and he was off by air for Woomera and the rocket construction effort there. After that, there was no telling when we would see him again. If all went well, the next time we saw him he would be on television: first Yorkshireman in space.

If Jim’s ebullience hadn’t already given him away, his breath certainly would have. ‘Good drink?’ I asked him.

‘Should have come with us, bro.’

I wrestled Jim off, one hand still steadying the rice pan. ‘Christ, you’ll have me tipping this over.’

Jim laughed and ruffled my hair.

‘How’re you doing, Stu?’ Bob’s face was flushed, maybe from the sudden heat of the kitchen, more likely from however many hours he had spent drinking with Jim.

‘Go through. Take your shoes off. There’s beers in the fridge.’

Stella appeared at the living-room door and hugged the new arrivals. Once the rice pan was sealed, I set it on a low heat, checked my watch and followed the others into the dining room.

Stella’s new dining table was very small: a find from her scavenging expeditions in search of props for DARE. She told us it hailed from the mortuary of a defunct hospital. The zinc wrapping was tarnished here and there, and you could not help but try to guess which had been the table’s head end and which the other.

Fel sat at the end of the table, Jim near her and Stella next to him. ‘Food in fifteen minutes,’ I announced, taking a seat opposite Jim. Dad sat beside me. This left the chair at the head of the table vacant for Georgy.

‘I don’t know where he can have got to,’ said Stella, finding things to fret about. ‘He said he’d be here to help.’

Fel must have asked Jim something about his work because the next thing I knew he was moving all the glasses about the table in an effort to explain the hydrodynamics of small nuclear devices.

Bob was aghast. ‘Should you be telling us any of this, lad?’

Jim laughed. ‘It’s no secret, Dad. The ship’s half-built.

You half-built it!’

Bob smiled a guarded little smile. ‘Only shift work, son.’

‘Anyway,’ said Jim, ‘I dare say if you lot had wanted, you’d have blasted off years ago and this Earth’d be riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese.’

I looked from Jim to Fel, unsure what was going on.

Jim saw me and shrugged. ‘The Bund, I mean.’

Fel smiled him a cold smile. ‘Blowing things up is not our style.’

Jim laughed and raised his beer. ‘Trusting us to do the heavy lifting, eh?’

‘We don’t trust you to do anything,’ Fel said, holding my brother’s gaze.

No one knew how to react – no one, that is, but Jim, who met my eye and whistled his appreciation. ‘Got a live one here.’

‘Bob?’ Stella placed her fingertips on the table: a subtle call-to-order. ‘How was Betty?’

Bob met Stella’s smile with a rare smile of his own but he said nothing.

Jim filled the silence so quickly, there might not have been any silence at all. ‘I thought she looked jolly fine. Stuart?’

‘I saw her last month,’ I said. ‘She seemed – well, she seemed healthy, didn’t she, Fel?

‘God, she must have been glad you were there, Felicine!’ Jim exclaimed, thumping the table. He pronounced her name to rhyme with ‘twine’. ‘The daughter she never had.’

What that was supposed to mean, I had no idea, but Fel took it in good part: ‘How much have you drunk?’ she asked him, laughing.

‘We sank a couple, didn’t we, Dad? Christmas cheer and all that. You two should have come along.’

It occurred to me then why Jim was coming at everything from such an odd angle, exhilarated and aggressive. He was nervous. And realising this, I realised why. He was covering for Bob. Bob had once again failed to visit Betty. It must have been obvious to Fel as well: she felt for my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.

‘When I come back,’ Jim said, ‘I expect Mum’ll be… well, I hope—’ He hesitated, finding himself suddenly on dangerous ground, and something else occurred to me: how strange all this must seem to him! He had spent most of the last year, prior to basic training with the Space Force, on a peacekeeping tour of Sri Lanka. Of all of us, he had the least understanding of what Betty was going through, and the least notion why anyone could have thought it was a good idea.

‘Well, of course,’ Stella exclaimed. She laughed. ‘Everything’ll be different in a year.’

As though her assurances were a cue, Georgy Chernoy entered the living room.

‘George! Where have you been?’ (Only Stella ever anglicised Georgy Chernoy’s name. I suppose it was a sort of endearment. I wondered what he thought of it.)

Georgy strode up to Stella’s chair and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I could not get away.’ He took in the table, his daughter, me. ‘You must be Robert,’ he said to my father. ‘And James.’

Jim stood up, none too steadily, to shake his hand.

‘Congratulations.’ Georgy pumped his hand. ‘When do you fly out?’

‘But I only just got here,’ Jim shot back, and over laughter, ‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘And the big launch?’

Jim grinned. ‘I’d be the last to know that.’

‘Jim’s been telling us how their ship’s drive works,’ Fel said.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Did you know that the bomb-delivery mechanism is based on a Vimto dispensing machine?’

‘Yes. I did.’ This flatly, and without humour. I wondered why Georgy was trying to shut his daughter down. To Jim: ‘Well, I wish you luck with it.’

Try as he might – and I was not convinced that he was trying especially hard – Georgy Chernoy could not let go the noblesse oblige of his people, for whom such pyrotechnic adventures were, according to their conceit, quite superfluous.

‘There’s something splendidly muscular about this effort, isn’t there? Yes?’ He fished around the table for signs of assent and, ignoring their absence: ‘Here we are – in the Bund, I mean – setting off firecrackers from high-altitude balloons, spreading sails to catch the sunlight, spitting ions out the back of flameless rockets, sending up fist-sized microsatellites on pencil-thin laser beams. And here you are, shipping ruddy great pipes halfway around the Earth and threatening to nuke an entire desert so as to get a frigate into orbit.’

‘The point of space,’ said Jim, ‘is being there. Don’t you agree? No, you don’t,’ he continued, not letting Georgy respond. ‘You’d rather send up machines. Each to his own, but I want to see the Earth spread below me with my own eyes.’

Georgy cocked his head: a predator sizing up prey. ‘What a pity you only have one pair.’

Stella shot me a look. She didn’t like the combative turn the conversation was taking. But what was I supposed to do? Get the two sides of this dinner to meekly agree on their mutual incomprehension? I said: ‘I suppose, having given birth to the dead in Catford, it’s a relatively small step to give birth to them on the Moon.’

Georgy’s smile tightened.

‘That is the idea, isn’t it?’

‘It’s certainly a possibility,’ he conceded.

‘Already you’re populating other planets!’

He did not look at me. ‘Quite why everyone is so fascinated by the population curves of the Jewish race, I’ll never know. It has always been like this. As if we’re a sort of human isotope. Don’t let them reach critical mass!’

His angry defensiveness astounded me. Why now, here, among friends, was Georgy referring to his community by the old, unhappy name? The whole point of the Bund had been to repudiate its tribal past. Of all the bizarre figures forged in the inferno of the Great War, the Bundist – thoroughly modern, rigidly materialist, crushing the rabbi under his proletarian heel – had surely been the most compelling, the most exhilarating.

‘If it was critical mass we were afraid of,’ I said, ‘I think we’d look at London and declare that battle lost for good and all.’

By Georgy’s expression, I could see that he still thought I was attacking him. Fel had let go of my hand. Perhaps she thought so, too. I did not care. My blood was up. I knew what he thought I was. All I could do was answer fire with fire. ‘When you’ve finished snatching racial failure from the jaws of political victory,’ I said, ‘you might just possibly see that I was paying you a compliment. Whatever the Space Force accomplishes – men in space, men on the Moon, men on Mars – it’s obvious to me that you will still be first to settle these places. That is, I assume, what your machines are for? To build for your arrival?’

‘First to settle?’ This from Bob, for whom none of my oh-so-important opinions had made any sense at all. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I think Jim and his mates might surprise you there, Mr Chernoy.’

Chernoy did not miss a beat. ‘How very proud you must be of your son,’ he said, reaching across the table.

Bob, blinking, rose as if hypnotised to shake Georgy’s hand.

I glanced at my watch. ‘Stella?’

Stella and I served the food while Jim, in the lull occasioned by my absence – what on earth had I been thinking? – held forth about his training. Bob, at least a little tight and with a second bottle of beer on the go, listened intently. Georgy had relaxed at last, though as usual his open, warm smile gave absolutely nothing away. I couldn’t catch Fel’s eye to see what she thought of my altercation with her father. It hadn’t been my finest hour, but of one thing I was sure: he had started it.

‘I don’t know how we’re going to fill the days of our voyage, exactly,’ Jim admitted. ‘There won’t be much to master about the ship itself: it’s the size of a frigate, as you say, and a damn-sight easier to sail.’

‘And where will you go?’ Georgy asked. ‘All being well.’

More rearrangements of the glassware: ‘So you see, even Jupiter is not outside our range.’

Georgy looked impressed. ‘And do you have special suits prepared for Mars?’

Jim blinked, blindsided by a question so specific and so very much off the point. ‘I’d be the last to know about details like that,’ he said again.

‘Only I’ve heard it said that it’s going to be easier to run on the Martian surface than it is to walk,’ Georgy said. ‘So I suppose the designers are going to have to think about that.’

You could see Jim taking confidence from the question. You could see him thinking: Here we are, two men together, thrashing out the technical detail. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘Your power-to-weight ratio is different in lower gravity – more like a child’s. The smaller you are, the stronger you are relative to your size. And that’s why little kids are always running about from place to place. It’s easier for them to run than walk.’

I remembered the strange combination of awkward slowness and pell-mell speed exhibited by Chernoy’s Processed infants: old souls in bodies adapted to a more accommodating physics.

Before I could put any of that into words, however, Georgy once again launched himself into wild territory. ‘A lot of little kids running about on the Red Planet!’ he cried.

Everybody looked at him.

He blinked at us. ‘Well, isn’t that what it’ll be like? It’s charming. The thought of James here skipping about Schiaparelli like a toddler.’

Silence.

‘Oh, come on, why go all the way to Mars if you’re not going to have a bit of fun?’

It occurred to me that it was we who were being thin-skinned now. Grown men playing tag in the red dirt? The vision was charming! Especially so in the eyes of a man who had fused the infantile and the aged into one constantly renewing – and therefore immortal – form.

‘Fel,’ said Georgy, serious suddenly. ‘What is that you’re drinking?’

Fel reflexively wrapped her hand around her bottle. ‘It’s beer,’ she told him. I had never really taken any notice of her interest in alcohol, which anyway never exceeded the odd half of cider down the pub. Hearing the tremor in her voice now made me realise that breaking with the Bund’s teetotal tradition was a big deal.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Well.’ Even Georgy’s control slipped occasionally: he shot a glance at me. A corrupter of women as well as an anti-Semite.

‘Has everyone got enough?’ Stella asked. ‘Oh, God. The beans.’ She ran back to the kitchen.

‘They’re on the side,’ I called, and when she didn’t respond, went into the kitchen after her. Stella was peeling the foil off the pan. ‘Oh, look, they’re burned!’

‘They’re not burned.’

‘The garlic’s all brown.’

‘Not very brown. It’s supposed to be toasted, it’s fine.’

‘You can’t do that with garlic.’

‘Yes you can. With this, you can. Stella, look at me. What do you think I cook for Fel? I cook this kind of food all the time. It’s perfect.’

Stella mouthed a thank you and carried the dish out to the dining room. I fetched a spoon.

The beans were perfectly fine. Trust Bob, though, to be meticulously cutting off each tip and edging it with his knife to the side of his plate. Had Stella noticed? No: her gaze was glued to Georgy Chernoy who, having got everyone’s attention with his potentially belittling remark about playtime on Mars, was holding forth on his favourite subject: the reconciliation of what, in a more formal setting, he would probably have dubbed ‘the human family’.

‘It’s absurd!’ he exclaimed, and Jim chimed in, banging the zinc with his beer bottle. (Stella winced.)

‘We’re not afraid of you!’ Jim asserted, slurring slightly.

‘Well, of course you aren’t!’ Georgy laughingly agreed. ‘Where could the conflict possibly lie? The moment you’re in space is surely the moment you realise how absurd all this scaremongering is. Do you know, I read an op-ed in one of your papers the other day that raised the spectre of us dropping Moon-rocks on London? That’s the word they used: “dropping”! As if the Moon were above the Earth! It’s positively medieval. Ptolemaic, even.’

‘Anyway,’ said Jim, overcome with fellow feeling, ‘you live here. You people are half of this city. You’d have a few words to say if anyone dropped rocks on you!’

Chernoy beamed at him. ‘No one’s dropping anything. No one’s throwing anything.’

Bob, joining in, raised his bottle. ‘And to hell with the red-tops!’

‘The tabloids. The papers,’ Stella explained, seeing Georgy’s confusion.

At that, Georgy raised his own bottle. The bottle surprised me, the label even more: now he, too, was drinking Pils. ‘Well, yes, to hell with them,’ he exclaimed, and drank.

Fel was working hard to ignore her father and so had managed to strike up a conversation with mine. Bob had that poleaxed look I had noticed men got when they talked to Fel for the first time – as though he was being truly understood for the first time. ‘Pumps, in the main,’ he was telling her. ‘The pipework for pumps. They made me a checker.’

‘It’s a big deal,’ I told her, chipping in.

Bob shot me an angry glance. ‘It’s shift work, as always.’

‘On spaceships.’

‘The parts for spaceships.’ Poor Bob: he was trapped. Whatever he said about it, his work carried the smack of glamour.

Georgy drew the back of his hand across his lips, stood up and crossed to the fridge. He wanted people to notice him. Above all, he wanted Fel to notice him. He pulled out two bottles of Pils from the door, unscrewed them both as he returned to the table and handed one to Bob. Fel was still managing to ignore him, but Stella wasn’t. I sensed that this was new: that she had not seen Georgy drink till now.

‘An engineer is an engineer,’ Georgy announced, and raised his bottle to Bob to chink.

Bob stared at him.

‘Whatever the engine,’ Georgy added, and took a deep draught of his fresh beer.

Bob frowned. It was all very well him putting his own work down, but what was Georgy about? I could practically see the clockwork turning in him: should he be offended or not? How I hated that about him: that old pendulum inside him forever swinging between pride and fear.

‘God, Daddy,’ said Fel, ‘don’t tell us you’re an engineer now.’

Georgy sucked at his bottle. ‘Well, what would you call it?’

‘Medicine isn’t an engineering problem.’

‘Everything is an engineering problem.’

‘Really.’

‘You’ll discover this in time.’

‘Here we go.’

The pair of them, father and daughter, each nursing their bottles of forbidden alcohol, had been building up to a row ever since Georgy came through the door.

‘What?’ Georgy smiled a combative smile. ‘You think all that art and music you’re so fond of aren’t engineering problems? Talk to any painter! Any composer!’

‘You don’t know any composers.’

‘What, you think you’re the first to step outside the Bund? Stuart, tell her: is there anything you studied at that school of yours that wasn’t an engineering problem?’

‘Well.’ I was painfully aware what his likely opinion of me was. ‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’ Georgy laughed, incredulous. ‘In that case, remind me to bring a hard hat and good insurance next time I visit any structure of yours.’

It was such a clumsy attack, I couldn’t help myself: ‘An open mind will do.’

Georgy was delighted, or made a good show of seeming so. ‘Oh, bravo!’ He raised his bottle in a toast. While he drank, he kept his eyes on Fel. He was showing her how little her trivial dietary rebellion mattered. It would take more than a bottle or two of beer to count as secession. Measure for measure, Daddy could match his brat of a girl. Only it was apparent that he could not match her: his eyes had already acquired a dangerous glassiness.

I expected Stella to head the conversation into calmer waters, but she sat there in absolute silence. In the end, it was Jim who poured oil on troubled waters by offering a little homespun philosophy of his own.

‘Now hang on, Doctor Chernoy. I mean to say, there wouldn’t be much point in good engineering, would there, in making something well, or doing anything well, if others didn’t stand back once in a while and say it was well done? Would there? And isn’t that what art is?’

Georgy clapped, rather slowly. ‘There you are! “Lonely on a peak in Darien”!’ He winked grotesquely, at me or at Fel or maybe at both of us, it was hard to tell. ‘Poetry.’

‘Silent.’ Fel’s voice was taut with anger. ‘“Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Though what Keats has to do with anything beats me.’ She reached for the pitcher of Vimto Stella had prepared. It was still full, the ice almost melted.

‘I’ll have a sup of that,’ Jim announced, ever the diplomat, and thrust out his water glass. Fel poured for him. ‘And–’ he drank it off ‘–and I’ll be off home. No, no, I’d better,’ he insisted, gathering himself. Sobriety, or a decent impression of it, had become like a jacket he shrugged on at will. ‘Reveille’s at five a.m.’ He got out of his seat and in one swift, elegant move that made Stella squeal, he gathered her into his arms and brought her out of her chair in a hug tight enough to wind her. ‘Auntie!’

‘Give over! Oaf!’

‘Thank you so much for tonight.’ He planted kisses on both her cheeks. ‘Such a terrific send-off.’

‘Great fool,’ Stella cried, flushing with pleasure.

It was clear enough, whatever we said, that Jim was determined to leave, so one by one we got out of our chairs and hugged him.

‘Till tomorrow.’ Stella sighed, kissing him. ‘Get some good sleep.’

Jim hugged me, kissed Fel on the cheek and came around the table and into Bob’s arms. Neither man smiled as they held each other, and the party fell silent a moment, solemn suddenly at this parting of father and son.

‘Here,’ Jim said, pressing something into Bob’s hand. The moment went by so fleetingly, I didn’t take it in. It was only much later, when I returned to Yorkshire, that Bob showed me what he had been given: a wristwatch from the rocketry school in Peenemünde, the logo from the film Frau im Mond surfing starlight on its engraved underside.

Georgy had the sense to hold himself back in this moment of leave-taking; or perhaps, rising from his seat, he had suddenly felt the effects of the evening’s alcohol. Jim and Georgy shook hands, more formally than before, their smiling eyes locking. For all Georgy’s earlier nonsense about reconciliation, the evening had, if anything, drawn the lines between our races even more clearly. Georgy said: ‘We’ll see you when you get there.’

He meant the Moon. Jim’s grin at the challenge was without mirth. ‘Your machines will. Have them prepare our supper for us.’

‘Don’t be late,’ said Georgy, still holding his hand.

Bob and I saw Jim to the door. When we came back in, we found Fel and Georgy staring daggers at each other across the table while Stella gathered up the empty plates. Georgy wheeled around in his seat. ‘Robert!’

Fel, a desperate expression on her face, looked from her father to me and back again.

‘Robert, tell Fel what it is you actually do.’

Stella passed me bearing plates into the kitchen. For all her doubt and her little-girl-lost routine, the meal had been a success. We had demolished every dish; there was barely anything but sauce in the serving bowls. Only Bob’s plate remained full. He took his seat and began picking at his dinner again, his face drawn. ‘Well—’ he began.

Chernoy interrupted him. ‘Robert measures the widths of holes, Fel. Day in, day out. Imagine that.’

I felt Stella come back into the room beside me, felt more than heard the breath she drew.

‘Dad,’ I said quickly, before she could say anything, ‘stop messing about. Come and help me clear up.’

Georgy shot me a look that might have been admiring. I ignored him; I just needed to get Bob out of the room. Let the Chernoys fight among themselves if they wanted to.

In the kitchen, Bob emptied his plate into the bin and handed it to me. He’d eaten hardly anything.

‘Too spicy?’

He shrugged.

‘Come and help me wash up.’

I washed, Bob dried. What did you do all day? I wondered. Traipsed around the city. Supped tea in cafeterias. Rolled up at the pub at last. What? You told Jim but you won’t tell me. ‘You should have gone to see Mum,’ I said.

Bob glanced at me, and quickly away. ‘I did.’

‘Right.’

‘You calling me a liar, lad?’

‘Yep.’

Stella came bustling in. ‘What are you two still doing in here? Come out! Leave that. There’s dessert.’ The party was coming to pieces in her hands. I felt sorry for her, but really, what else could she have possibly expected? Had she imagined that all the bits of unresolved family business she had hurled together willy-nilly this evening would unlock each other, as neatly as a stage comedy? But of course she had. This, after all, was the world she lived in: the scripted world of the stage, where complications only got tangled up in Act Two in order to unwind in Act Three.

Only there wasn’t going to be any Act Three. Not tonight: not with Georgy drunk and raiding the fridge for another beer, and Stella, suddenly losing her cool, pulling hard on his arm to stop him. The fridge door flew open and a carton of milk toppled out of the door and landed at my feet. I snatched it up but it had burst and it leaked all over my hands and down the front of my trousers as I juggled it into the kitchen.

By the time I came back, Georgy was shifting, none too elegantly, into a penitent gear. It was already arranged that Bob would stay over, so Georgy was going to have to mend fences somehow. He said to Bob: ‘I honest-to-goodness didn’t mean anything bad by it.’

Bob was the taller of the two men, but his baffled, hypnotised expression revealed that Georgy, even as an unaccustomed drunk, knew how to handle men like Bob: simple working men for whom even their own sense of self-worth acted as a brake on their self-assertion.

Fel ordered an autonomous cab for us. We rode most of the way home in silence, until at last she said: ‘Your mother dies tomorrow.’

I looked out through the window. It was a dry, clear night. Christmas Eve. I was surprised the streets were so empty. ‘Yes.’

‘No one said anything about it.’

‘No. Well, Jim and Bob went to see Mum earlier today. In the end, there is nothing to say, is there?’

‘Isn’t there?’

‘For crying out loud, what do you want me to say?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That I’m losing her again? You need me to spell this out?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘That I’ve never particularly liked her?’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Love and like are different things. Deal with it. God knows I’ve had to.’

She put her arm around me. I tried to calm down. I did. Only I didn’t want to be put on the spot. I couldn’t bear the way Bob had sloped off again, and I couldn’t convince myself that I was any better. And the way the evening had ended: that still rankled. ‘Your father’s an arsehole,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She offered nothing else. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t turn it into a joke. She didn’t want to be angry with me. She waited for me to calm down.

I took her hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

She squeezed my fingers. ‘What will you do tomorrow?’

‘Do?’

‘Are you going to Croydon to see Jim off?’

‘Of course.’

She took my hand and massaged it, as though trying to read something there. ‘And your mum?’

‘I’ve been to see her,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing left.’

‘There’s the birth.’

‘I’m not interested in that.’

We were approaching Moorgate when she said, ‘I’ll go there tomorrow. I’ll go to Ladywell. Someone should be there.’

I shrugged. ‘If that’s what you want to do. I guess you understand it better than I do.’

We got to the flat and undressed and huddled together under the duvet. I’d had enough. I couldn’t bear the thought of talking any more. But as usually happens whenever I try to force sleep upon myself, it didn’t last. In the middle of the night I woke up, brain ticking and buzzing as though it were already morning, only I was convinced there was a stranger in the room.

I stretched out for Fel but found only bedlinen. I sat up abruptly, sure that by doing so I would shake off what could only be a dream. A glitch of the sleeping mind.

But the presence persisted. It was real enough, though invisible, and felt tied to Fel’s absence. I stared numbly at the empty half of our bed. Fel was not in the bedroom. I blinked, orientating myself.

The door was ajar. Light fanned in from the living room. I got up. The laminate flooring was cold and sticky against my feet. The French window was open, letting in distant traffic sounds, the city never quite sleeping. Fel was on the balcony. She glanced at me and smiled and the diamond set in her tooth and all the stones in her ear glittered in the moonlight.

She turned back and looked up at the sky. I followed her gaze. A half-moon was rising above the blocks of the estate. Where the Moon’s dark half should have blocked out the stars, there were lights. Just a few, very faint. Four or five of them. Six. Maybe seven. My eyes, adjusting, caught the hint of more, though I had to look to one side of the Moon to detect them. They were faint enough that they disappeared when looked at directly.

They hung in no particular pattern, and shone with the same modest brightness as the surrounding stars so that it appeared, after a few seconds, as though they were indeed stars, and the dark half of the Moon was entirely missing. A few seconds later, the illusion righted itself, and reason took hold again, and I was looking at the unlit half of the Moon. And there were lights. Lights on the Moon.

The Moon was inhabited. I’d read the papers. I knew the inhabitants were only machines. Diggers, cranes and drills. But still. Fires were burning. I had not seen this before. Not with the naked eye. I must have said something. It was quite a sight.

Here, however, memory breaks down. It fails me, and I can’t be sure which of us next spoke.

‘Fires are burning.’

Nonsense.

I took Fel by the hand. ‘Come to bed.’

8

Champions of the Process called Georgy Chernoy’s medicalised infants the ‘reborn’. Critics dubbed them the ‘undead’. To me they were just strange children. Their bodies, though growing at an accelerated rate, never quite managed to catch up with their impatient, adultish minds. I was never able to take them entirely seriously, not even when one of them was my own mother. Fel persuaded me to visit my new mum around the time she was three months old, and had started to use sign language. Fel was infatuated. Whenever the weather allowed she had been wheeling Betty around the memory parks of Medicine City, and the therapy was having the desired effect. ‘Betty knows who she is now,’ Fel assured me. ‘She’s been asking after you.’ As though this would encourage me. But Fel’s enthusiasm was winning, and my own curiosity was growing. What finally tipped the scales was Betty leaving the nursery. Stella took her back to her house in Islington to look after her, now that she no longer needed specialist care.

‘It’s just a matter of patience,’ Fel explained to me. ‘Your mum’s memories are all there. It’s just a question of encouraging her to work through her old life. She needs to call everything to mind. You should go and see her. You should talk to her. You should make the connection.’

I didn’t know about that. But I had lost too much of my mother already – to cancer, and to Stella – to ignore altogether this strange new chapter in her life. Though I was sceptical about who or what I would find rattling the gaily painted bars of Stella’s newly installed stairgate, I felt I had better stake an early interest.

I arrived to find Betty in Stella’s basement dining room, strapped in a high chair, splashing sickly, sweet-smelling rusk porridge all over the zinc dining table. Now Betty was out of Ladywell’s care, Stella had to rely on local shops for her supplies. Betty’s stiff plastic bib had a locomotive on it. Her sippy cup was embossed with cartoon giraffes.

‘Here she is,’ Stella said, tone cheery, eyes wide as she faced me and nervous as hell. I wondered if her mood was triggered by my arrival. It was just as likely that Betty herself was keeping her on a constant knife’s edge.

Her feeding, for a start, was painful to watch. An ordinary baby, knowing no better and anyway lacking coordination, will throw porridge around as a kind of wild experiment. The infant before me, however, already knew perfectly well what a spoon was, what a table was, what up and down were and what porridge was for. She just lacked the coordination to handle them. There was no joy in her movements at all – just incapacity. She looked to me to be exactly what she was: a shrunken adult struggling with a motor dysfunction. She glared up at me, her chin thrust belligerently forward and dripping with milky, greyish stuff. She dropped her wide-grip plastic spoon. It fell half into her bowl and toppled out onto the table. She weaved her stubby little arms in front of her face.

Stella translated: ‘She wants to know what took you so long.’

Fel was in the kitchen, wringing out a rag. She returned to wipe up the worst of the spills and detach Betty’s bib. Betty sat still throughout the clean-up. No actual baby would ever have done that. I tried hard not to show my discomfort, but I found it very difficult to watch. I felt I was confronted with something pretending to be a baby. Which, I suppose, was not far from the truth. The imposture was more than unsettling. It was disgusting. My whole body sang with tension. It occurred to me that it would be the most natural thing in the world for me to stove this thing’s head in with a pan. The shock was so intense, I mumbled an excuse, rushed into the kitchen and leaned over the sink. There was a glass on the drainer and I fumbled it under the tap and filled it. The drink helped. Thank God that’s over, I thought. My heart steadied. I came back in to find Fel wiping Betty’s face with a damp tissue, and it was all I could do not to rush in and save her, pulling her out of range of that dangerous, gummy mouth and those tiny, stubby, grasping hands.

They weaved about.

Stella, translating again, said: ‘She wants to know about your work.’

So I sat there sipping milky coffee, trying to control the trembling of my hands, trying to explain to my newborn mother how the kinds of technology that (among other things) made her possible were eating my career before my eyes. ‘They print buildings now, Mum. Draw and print. The machines do everything.’

Whatever sign-system Betty was using, it had to be tiring, and she was constantly trying to form words in the back of her throat, her immature tongue weaving around inside her gaping mouth like something trapped. I tried to ask her about herself, about what she was going through and how she felt. She waved these questions away impatiently. Replying to them with arm gestures would have been both difficult and exhausting – even assuming that Stella was up to translating them.

Fel steered away from us as we talked; over Betty’s head I could see her busying herself in the kitchen, sorting out piles of baby clothes. Georgy Chernoy was not at home. I wondered what he made of these novel domestic arrangements: about being confronted, at the end of every busy day, with a living, breathing, defecating example of his creation.

In the taxi back to the Barbican, Fel said, ‘What do you think about kids?’

‘She’s not a kid,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know what she is. Well, I do. I get it. She’s something new. Still, I don’t know how you do it. They grow up fast, don’t they? Faster than normal. That’s what I’ve read. I can’t imagine Dad coping with this. Not until she’s older, anyway. Not until she can speak, at very least. How long will we have to wait? A couple of months? She’s developing so fast.’

I looked across at Fel. She was looking out of the window, away from me. Her arms were folded.

‘What’s the matter?’

She took a sudden interest in something outside, though there was nothing to see.

Eventually, she said: ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

In the game of Set there are no turns. The dealer shuffles a special deck and lays twelve cards face up in a rectangle. Players identify and remove sets of three cards from anywhere in the array. Each card contains one, two or three symbols, which are lozenges, squiggles or diamonds, and these are either red, green or purple, and solid, open or striped. There are 81 cards in the box, and there is a 1:33 chance of there being no set present in an array of twelve cards.

‘Set!’ Stan Lesniak exclaimed.

‘No.’ Fel pointed to two of his cards. ‘These two are diamonds. That one is a lozenge.’

He still didn’t understand.

‘You can’t have two characteristics the same,’ Fel explained, ‘unless all three are the same.’

Stan blew a raspberry. ‘This is boring,’ he complained. ‘Have you at least got some better wine?’

Stan, star of my academic year, editor of Responses, was following my brother to Woomera, albeit in the employ of the Commonwealth Office. For years the army had been detonating atom bombs in tarmac-lined hemispherical basins dug all over the desert. It was the quickest way they knew of producing the valuable, short-lived nuclear fuel called tritium. Now local campaigners were blaming the production cycle for an increase in stillbirths, birth defects and childhood leukaemias. Stan had been hired to establish whether these claims had any scientific credibility.

‘You would have thought, when they heard the loud bangs, people would simply have had the sense to move away,’ he complained. He sipped at what I’d just poured him and winced.

‘Stan’s a sensitive soul,’ I said for Fel’s benefit, trying to keep the evening light.

But Stan was caught in an embarrassing position and, being Stan, wanted to take his embarrassment out on us. Somehow he had heard about Betty – I don’t know how – and he must have assumed Fel and I were looking after her. He was irritated to find that Betty was not with us when he visited; worse, that neither Fel nor I wanted to share parenting stories with him. He insisted on staying in the flat though, even though we had a restaurant table booked, and then he acted all put out that our home life was boring. Well, whose isn’t? ‘What do you do all day here, anyway?’

It was a good question, though not one I had any intention of discussing with him.

What did we do all day here?

Listlessly, and without much conviction, I revised for my finals, which were now only a month away. I had been a conscientious student. I knew I would pass. I knew, with equal conviction, that I would not excel. For all my brave words in Art’s defence around Stella’s dining table, I was not very creative. I had learned how to use rulers and protractors. I had learned how to project a three-dimensional structure onto a piece of graph paper. I had learned how to turn sketches into lists of materials and plans of work. I had, over three years, acquired competence in the very skills that were even now being automated by the Bund.

Whenever the futility lay too heavily upon me, I got out my designs for the second series of DARE. The sad fact was, Stella, my first client, was likely to be my only client for some while, and if I wanted to stay in London, then the only way forward for me was to do the kind of work she had offered to find for me: concept artwork in television and film. DARE’s balsa-wood moonbase and extruded polyethylene submarine were amusing enough, and I had undeniably enjoyed designing and assembling them. Series two was already well into development, and I was having a lot of difficulty trying to dream up suitably otherworldly shapes for the aliens’ lunar beachhead, an important recurring locale. Stella had so far deemed everything I had sketched ‘too tellurian’.

‘Too what?’

‘Too Earthlike, dear.’ She poured out more tea. ‘Too grounded, somehow. I don’t know. I mean, what do we really know about these aliens?’ She gazed off into the Barbican Centre café’s bright orange middle distance.

Now that my work for DARE involved maquette-making as well as sketching, Stella was renting space for me in the Barbican itself, in workshops that were meant to serve the theatre in the art centre’s basement.

Being handed the keys to these well-appointed workshops sped my work along. It meant I could walk to work in minutes. It also meant Stella had an excuse to call in at our flat with Betty. Fel, hearing the bell, rushed to the door. It was a novelty for her, to have friends surprise her in the day. Such casual arrangements must, I suppose, have been absent from her own carefully invigilated childhood. And she adored Betty. She scoured charity shops for cast-off toys and games. They were the only second-hand items Fel ever let through our door, and she filled the flat with them. Wooden train sets. Dollies. Toy xylophones. There was always something new at our flat for Betty to play with.

It was strange watching Betty and Fel playing together on the living-room rug, and impossible to say who was humouring whom. Fel talked a good game, always couching her charity-store purchases of toys and games in terms of Betty’s locomotor development, her hand-eye coordination and so on. When they got together, Fel played with Betty the way I imagine she would have played with any toddler. My mother’s uncanniness did not seem to disturb her at all. It made me wonder if Fel had ever played with young children before. Could she simply not see that there was a difference here? A weirdness?

Betty did not so much play with Fel as play along. The Process had her growing so fast you could practically hear her creak, and her mental development was more advanced every time I saw her. By the time my finals were over she had begun speaking: a curious, very unchildlike honking from the back of her throat, all hard ‘g’s and aspirants, as though she were suffering from a bad cold. But she never spoke to Fel except through the sign language that had served her in her first month. It was as if she didn’t want to break the illusion of babyhood. As if, around Fel, she wanted to stay a child.

Betty liked having Fel make a fuss of her. Day after day of Stella correctly and assiduously treating her like an adult undoubtedly made Fel’s attentions, by contrast, into a sort of holiday.

More than that, though: I think Betty genuinely liked Fel. Among the many exasperated glances Betty shot her when she thought Fel wasn’t looking, there were other, much softer, much more melancholy expressions. Once, I came in from a morning at the workshop and found Fel and Betty sitting on the floor, some sort of bead game spread out between them, with their foreheads pressed together. Neither spoke or let my appearance disturb them.

Then Fel was up on her feet asking me how the lunar beachhead was coming along, and Betty, in a striped jumper with buttons at the neck and red rompers and one shoe, was looking up at Fel with an expression, on that unformed toddler’s face of hers, of what I can only call love.

As that summer ended, so the distinction between the two parts of London – the East and West, the Bundist and the unaccommodated – grew ever more visible.

The Bund’s soft annexation of South East London was an injury to the whole so huge and so sudden – the quick hacking-off of a limb – that the unaccommodated city, still dizzy, incredulous and drunk on the endorphin high of injected capital, was only now waking to the pain of its mutilation.

At the end of a working day, I would stretch out by walking east, into the Bund. With a new phone to help me (‘Here,’ Fel said, handing it to me, ‘it’s simple. There’s only one button,’ – as if that wasn’t half the problem), I decided I would conquer my dislike of exercise and wove a route – never the same twice – to the river, and watched commuters piling home, ever more exhausted, ever more pale and wraithlike, onto ferry boats at Canary Wharf and Millwall Outer Dock. I would ride back with them as far as the Tower. It struck me that my fellow commuters – guest workers, visiting the Bund by day from the unaccommodated half of the city – were beginning to resemble ever more closely the dead-eyed drones drawn by the more hostile newspaper cartoonists. Half-men. Robots. Indentured labour. Working conditions in the Bund remained excellent; in fact, if anything they were improving, with more allowances made for unaccommodated ‘guests’. But something had changed. Watching them stumble off the jetty at the Tower and Charing Cross, you would be forgiven for thinking they had just been hauled, blinking, from the airless depths of a mine. It was hard not to read buyer’s remorse into the blank looks they gave the Thames’s southern banks. Not that there was anything for them to see there. Those zones of the city were by now entirely transmuted, all fairy glitter and constructivist gesture. Structures – you could not call them buildings; for a start, they had no doors – rose and fell there in real-time. There was no solid building anywhere. The very substance of the place had been turned from architecture into something very like metabolism.

In the newspapers, columnists all of a sudden found themselves reminded of the South London of their youth. School nature walks on One Tree Hill. A favourite aunt in Peckham. A visit to the Horniman Museum. The taste of jam fresh from the factory in Deptford. The smell of leather clinging to the maze of little streets in Rotherhithe. Where, the opinion-writers asked rhetorically, had all this past got to? Was it possible that it was gone for ever, transmuted into a dramatic yet finite flow of capital investment? Had the city’s appetite for new construction become so overpowering that it had induced us all to gobble up our past?

It became the fashion, even among those snobs who had never set foot south of the river, to claim some connection with those lost lands. Gift shops sold old postcards of the area, antique advertisements from businesses long dead, road maps that no longer squared, in any particular, with the area they once covered. Between cushions printed with photographic renderings of wide, empty, untarmacked high roads in Brockley and Sydenham sat scale models of the Crystal Palace, the TV transmitter, the full-size plaster dinosaurs grazing in the nearby park. A flyer arriving in our postbox invited us to subscribe to a heritage project: the accurate, brick-by-brick reconstruction, in a derelict corner of Hackney, of Brockley’s demolished Rivoli Ballroom.

Such cheap nostalgia would most likely have faded and been forgotten, were we not constantly reminded of our territorial loss by changes within the Bund itself. Compared to the baffling erasures to the south, the changes wrought in the city’s old financial centre were, on paper, relatively modest. And something had needed doing. Over the few short years of its habitation, the Bund had grubbed up London’s old, war-damaged financial district and amalgamated the pieces into towers like the building-block constructions of a hyperactive child: here a brick-clad wall; there a glass curtain; over there a virtually windowless obelisk. The district’s ancient street plan had not been obliterated so much as upended. Vertical thoroughfares wove through its towering and peculiar constructions, along suspended glass tunnels, over footbridges and platforms, up escalators and moving walkways, so that navigation – already notoriously difficult for the unaccommodated visitor – had begun to tax even the people of the Bund. Some general solution was needed: a way to tie together all these pavements and public spaces.

The solution was light. Lots of light. Moonlight in particular: that cool, blue suffusion. So the Bund built artificial moons: huge fizzing lights mounted on scaffolds that reached so high they topped its tallest buildings. The Bund’s whole bizarre mass lay like an accident beneath these six unblinking eyes. Residents basked in this rational light, navigating with ease, at last, the night-time maze of their city, and celebrating, through a contented silence, their conquest of the night.

The rest of us hated these six ghastly eyes gushing electric ice, freezing the Bund in a silence that – compared to the bustle in our unaccommodated half of the city – could only suggest the silence that hangs between the detonation of a bomb and the screams of its first victim.

The Bund erected ingenious baffles so that light from the Bund would not spoil the night-time of our half of the city. Still, come nightfall, the Bund’s high towers shone in their reflected light: a bug-zapping effulgence that, according to those old enough to remember the War, brought to mind the terrible first seconds of an atomic explosion. It felt to us as if the Bund was bathing nightly in some terrible, malign radiation. Though, after all, they were only glorified street lights, and only there to help people find their way in the dark.

The uncanny and pitiless glare shed by the Bund’s urban ‘moons’ was a source of exasperated humour for a while – the stuff of acid editorials and pithy stand-up routines. The truth is, though, it unnerved us – and by ‘us’ I mean the unaccommodated majority to the west. Compared to the unbending horror of those rays, the West End’s own piecemeal illuminations – the mass effect of a thousand thousand street lamps and headlights and shop signs and God knows what – felt positively homespun.

And so it came to us that, unlike those strange, friendly folk to the east, we loved the night, and darkness was our friend. Night-time made up part of who we were. Without the night, why would it ever occur to us to gather together? Were there no night, why would lovers ever turn to each other in the dark? We didn’t want to conquer night. We wanted to make light of our own – ordinary, human-scale light – and gather around it, creating little bubbles of humanity in the dark. What were our street lamps and headlights but lanterns? What were our lamps but candles? The night was for stories, for song, for sleep. Summer was hardly over and the gift shops were filled with candles, oil burners, old-fashioned spirit lamps and huge, dim lightbulbs with ornate filaments, not lights so much as ideas of lights; gestures towards illumination. We did not want the day to last for ever, and we wondered at those who did: the ever-industrious Bund, who appeared not to need the night any more. The sleepless Bund who, we reckoned, must have lost the use of some quintessentially human part of themselves.

And thinking this, we began to rage, as surely as a chimpanzee in a zoo, confronting some simple, animatronic version of themselves, will panic and scream and tear the toy to pieces.

Who were the Bund, who did not need the night? Who were they, to buy up half our home and wipe its memory off the face of the Earth?

Capping the matter nicely came the Bund’s long-promised workings on the Moon itself. Once these became visible, I think we all very slightly lost our minds. Who were the Bund, that they were remodelling our Moon? The red-tops, casting around for some means to express their existential outrage, grew literal. And the pictures splashed across their front pages were real enough. Whatever your politics, it was undeniable: the Man who once resided in our Moon had been entirely erased.

On the Day of Atonement – which was also the day I learned I had earned an upper second from the Bartlett – someone splashed graffiti over Stella’s garden wall. The next day, Fel and I stood across the street, watching two men in blue council overalls scrub away at the mess: a boy with a shaved head and a much older man who paused every few minutes to wind a fringe of thinning hair around his scalp, only so the breeze could unwind it again.

‘We’d better go in.’

Fel took my hand and led me across the street.

‘I didn’t expect anything that bad.’ I was quite shaken.

Fel said nothing, and I wondered if I was being naive.

Stella and Georgy were in the dining room with little Betty. Sprawled across a rug in the corner, she was painstakingly constructing a tower of brightly coloured wooden blocks. She had outgrown the game already, and she moved the blocks about dextrously in her chubby little hands more in the spirit of exercise than play. I wondered if she knew what had been happening, and if so, whether she had recouped enough of her old self to understand its significance. Her air of exaggerated seriousness aside, she looked to me like any child occupying itself while the grown-ups argue.

Stella was saying to Georgy, ‘If the BBC wants to interview you, you surely have an obligation to go.’ Stella had a producer’s belief in the moral as well as the material benefits of publicity.

Their familiarity with and love of the microphone had been one of the few bits of common ground Stella and Georgy shared. Today had wreaked a change: ‘I am sick and tired of explaining things,’ Georgy snapped – then, raising his hand, he revised his opinion. ‘No. I’m sick and tired of explaining new things. I’m sick and tired of being the voice of the fucking future. And the fact is, no one around here is interested in the future. They’re interested in old things. Aren’t they? The same old things. For two thousand years the same old things.’

So much for a drink of something and ‘congratulations on your degree’.

‘George, please—’

‘Go and read what’s on the fucking wall, woman!’

‘I’ve read what’s on the wall.’

‘And?’

‘It says “Yid”.’ Stella retorted. ‘It says “Yid scum”. I can read. I do know what you’re getting at. I’m not stupid.’

‘Actually,’ Fel said, ‘it says “Kill yid scum”. If there are points here for accuracy.’

Georgy, who up to this point had hardly marked our arrival, flew at his daughter: ‘You think this is a joke? This amuses you?’

‘I think,’ Fel replied, deadpan, ‘that you could do with calming down.’

Stella leapt in: ‘It’s the BBC. It’s a chance to explain—’

‘Do you think the oafs who daubed our wall listen to the fucking PM Programme?’

‘I just think it’s good for people to know what’s going on.’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘we all know what’s going on. Don’t we? Isn’t it obvious?’

Georgy watched me carefully.

I met his eye: ‘You’re smarter than us, less sentimental than us, more ambitious – whatever words you want to use. We used to write off our differences as cultural. As upbringing. Everyone’s different, we said. Just as everyone’s the same. What a wonderful, rich, diverse world we live in, and on and on. But you are different. Fel’s different.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fel.

‘Fel, listen. The difference between the Bund and the rest of us is getting bigger by the day. Once we began using the ray, some speciations were obvious from the start. Who thinks chickies are human? Who ever thought they were human? Was there ever a time? A few weeks after the irradiation of the Somme, maybe, but by their second generation? No chance. With you and us it’s different. The divergences haven’t been so great between us, or haven’t shown up so fast. So we cling to the idea that we’re supposed to be the same somehow, “underneath”. That’s why you’re getting called those names. The names are offensive, sure, but that’s not all they are. They’re also – you made the point yourself – they’re also old. They’re a way – clumsy, disgraceful, yes – but a way of clinging on to the idea of there being one humanity.’

‘Is your point,’ Georgy asked, acidly, ‘that these hooligans are trying to be affectionate?’

I felt a tug at my hand.

I looked down to find Betty looking up at me. ‘I want to go pee,’ she said.

I was confused. ‘Can’t you—?’

She tugged at her groin. ‘These bloody poppers are impossible.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I led her out of the room.

She ignored the bathroom and led me to the front door. ‘I can’t open this,’ she said.

‘You want to go outside?’

‘I want to get you outside.’

‘What have I done?’

‘Given vent to your advanced education. Open the bloody door.’

I turned the lock and followed her out. On the top step, she took my hand and turned me around. ‘Look.’

A six-pointed star had been daubed over the door in red paint. Since the door was painted red anyway, this didn’t look nearly as bad as it might have done.

‘They weren’t the brightest,’ said Betty. ‘I think they wanted it to look like blood.’ Her voice was thready and raw. Even the Process couldn’t tune immature vocal cords to adult use.

I had to ask: ‘What do you think brought this on?’

‘You mean, “What did we do wrong?”’

‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

Betty shrugged: another oddly adult gesture. ‘Maybe someone spotted me. Maybe someone realised what I am and didn’t much like what they saw.’

I said nothing. What Betty was suggesting was certainly possible. Were feelings running so high against the world’s still pitifully few undead?

‘How’s James?’

Only Betty ever called Jim by his full name. It was one more proof that my mother really was residing in that crisp, fresh, infantile frame, and the realisation, as usual, dropped the temperature of my blood by a couple of degrees. I recalled how I’d felt when first confronted with her: the recidivist urge I’d had to get rid of this monstrous thing. This impostor. This ‘child’. If her son had felt that way, how could anyone be surprised if strangers, liquored up and fed fright stories by the cheap papers, felt the same way? Naive or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the anti-Semitism that agitated Georgy so was no more than a desperate and inept scrabbling for vocabulary, and that these hatreds were a new beast masquerading in old clothes.

‘We don’t hear from Jim much,’ I said.

Betty skipped down the steps, stopped at the gate, and skipped up them again. If this was her way of allaying the suspicions of passers-by – just a little girl playing on some steps, nothing to see here – then it was ill-judged. Physically she looked only about two years old.

‘No letters?’

‘Sometimes. I’m pretty sure they’re being dictated.’

Betty paused on the steps. ‘I wonder if James knows he’s picked a side.’

‘A side.’

‘In the war.’

‘Oh. The war. That.’ I said, with sledgehammer irony.

‘Oh, Stuart.’ Betty sighed and flopped onto the top step, exhausted by her game. ‘Do try and take your head out of your arse.’

I laughed, as who would not, barracked by a child? But Betty’s attention had been caught by three youths who had come to linger at the corner opposite the house. One leaned against park railings, watching us. The other two seemed to be paying us no mind. One was fighting to light his cigarette in the breeze. The other, with his back to us, had a baseball cap pulled low over his face.

I leaned towards Betty: ‘Is that them, do you think?’

Betty stood up, arms folded. ‘Let’s go in.’

We found Stella alone in the kitchen.

‘Where’s Fel?’

‘Upstairs with Georgy. No, don’t go up.’ Stella rattled the dishwasher shut. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’

‘Can I give you a hand?’

‘It’s all done. God!’ Stella picked a dish towel up off the floor and threw it onto the counter. ‘I am so sick of clearing up.’

Given their resources, it had not occurred to me that Stella might be feeling the weight of a domestic burden. But little Betty’s arrival must have ushered in a dramatic change of pace for her. And from the times I had met him, I was confident Georgy was not a man to look after himself. He had that preppy, over-mothered quality. Not one to keep the laundry in check, was my guess. Not adept in the stacking of dishwashers.

Fel came into the room. She had been crying. She held my eye long enough that I knew not to ask any questions. Betty went over and took her hand, and though Fel smiled and gave her hand a returning squeeze, nothing came of it: no talk, no game.

‘Is it time we were going?’ I asked.

Fel nodded.

‘Stella, call us any time. Is Mum going to be all right?’

‘We’ll be fine.’

‘Any time.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’

Fel and I bent down and took turns to kiss the top of Betty’s head. We left through the front door. Evening was drawing in. The boys lingering near the house had wandered off; there was no one on the street.

I said, ‘Let’s walk along the canal a bit. We can get a bus from the Roman Road.’

Fel followed where I led, without enthusiasm. We met the canal at the southern end of the tunnel, where it emerges from its underground passage of Islington. We picked our way down leaf-slimed steps to the towpath. It was a bright night. Most of them were, since the Bund had begun to light the Moon. We glimpsed it through damp, bare branches: a new moon, illumined by the lamps newly lit on its surface. Like this, it hardly seemed a solid thing at all: more a scaffold of lit strings stretched across a small, circular void.

‘Mum thinks there’s going to be a war.’

‘Is that what she says?’

‘She reckons the Victory’s a warship. I don’t know where she gets this shit.’

‘My dad. Upstairs he was telling me much the same thing.’

‘Really?’ I was disconcerted. I had assumed Betty had been listening to the local phone-in shows. Maybe they both had. ‘Georgy buys into this idea?’

‘Daddy just had death threats daubed over his garden wall.’

I had no reply to that. ‘What did he say to you?’

Fel did not reply.

The roads running parallel to the canal descended slowly till the only thing separating the towpath from the road and its council housing, the bricks curdling under bright orange sodium lamps, was a low chain-link fence. Houses like these, I thought, were likely to be my only mark upon the world, and then not for long. The economies of the Bund were ungainsayable, and the whole city would be a Bund construction in time. Rage towards this future, though ugly and to be deplored, was not an unnatural response. ‘We should get out of here,’ I said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I mean we should get out of London altogether.’

‘Are you so frightened?’

‘It’s not a question of being frightened,’ I said, ‘it’s a question of being expected to take sides in a conflict that as far as I can see is entirely fatuous.’

We walked in silence. Beyond the estate were retail parks, more housing and, as we neared the Roman Road, the iron fences and towering plane trees of Victoria Park.

Fel said, ‘My mother rejected the Bund. Did I ever tell you this?’

‘You’ve never told me anything about your mother.’

‘She was Moldovan. Her family were boatmen before the War. Farmers before that. Peasants. Not thinkers. The last people you would ever expect to make a stand over an idea. When she left the Bund, she tried to take me with her to Palestine. I was too little to remember. I’m told that when we reached the Mandate, the authorities tore me off her and put me on the first boat home. I do think I remember Daddy waiting at the dock as we sailed into Tilbury. My mother died a year later during a typhus outbreak in Jerusalem. I have no idea why she suddenly decided to cling to the old faith, and it’s hopeless asking Daddy, all he ever does is quote from his own speeches. The debt we owe future generations. The promise of technology. Maybe my mother embraced Jehovah as the only voice strong enough in her head to contend with Daddy’s.’

The moral to all this did not need spelling out: the sides choose you.

‘We could go to Shropshire,’ I said. ‘Stella doesn’t use her house there. It needs someone to look after it.’

‘What would be the point of that?’

‘We could do what your mum tried to do. We could try to lead a normal life. You keep saying that’s what you want. Would you like a normal life with me?’

The look she shot me revealed how much she hoped for, and how uncertain she was that I would commit.

‘Nothing’s off the table,’ I said, careless and (strange how the feeling had crept up on me) desperate. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

If that had been true, I would have been prepared to utter the word ‘baby’ out loud. But some calculating part of me still clung on.

‘Let’s have a normal life,’ I said.

The smell was overpowering. A yeasty, cheesy, sour stench.

Fel stared into the dark of the hall. ‘What is that?’

I felt for the light.

Stella’s Shropshire cottage was infested with chickies. We could hear them scuttling about behind the furniture. Upstairs they thumped and bumped their way into hiding. They were as big as children but had the timid instincts of mice.

The carpets downstairs were smothered in scraps of paper. Every book in the place had been torn to pieces and chewed up for nest materials. The flock had been pulled out of the living-room sofa through rents in its covers. There was a foul-smelling stain in the corner of the living-room ceiling, so it was easy to guess where in the house the chickies went to relieve themselves.

Fel gazed about her at the ruin: ‘How is this even possible?’

‘The neighbours must be away.’

‘Jesus.’ She fished out her glass slab of a phone. Naturally there was no signal. ‘Where’s the land phone again?’

‘Over there. Who are you going to call?’

‘The firemen, of course.’

The fire brigade would bring exterminators. ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said.

Fel dialled. I came over and, gently, took the receiver out of her hand. ‘It’s not that bad. Let me deal with it.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Let me assess the damage. If we call the fire service, Stella’s insurance premiums will go up.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘We can go to Ludlow and find a hotel. Give me tonight to assess the damage and if necessary we can call the fire brigade in the morning.’

Fel spotted the stain on the ceiling. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Let’s find you a nice hotel.’

By the time I got back to the house, it was after eleven. The rooms were silent. Perhaps the chickies had already evacuated. I doubted it. I went into the kitchen. The radio on the windowsill was tuned to a music channel. I scanned for a talk show and turned the volume as high as it would go. Human voices were a more reliable deterrent. Use music and you were as likely to get chickies dancing as running away.

The player in the living room had no radio but I found a cassette of Third Kingdom, a popular if rather overwrought radio drama that imagined the state of continental Europe had Germany’s most notorious post-war chancellor not choked on that grape.

I went upstairs, letting the din on the ground floor do its work. Upstairs was far worse. There was a nest in the main bedroom, extending from the end of the bed and covering the window. It was made in the main of plastic waste which they must have dragged from fields above the cottage: fertiliser and feed bags, tarpaulin, bubble wrap. It was held together by stuff that had been chewed up and urinated upon to form a smelly cement. God knows what else had gone into it. Fabric. Paper. Bits of carpet. I fetched a broom out of the upstairs closet. I poked it into the nest. There was no sound. I wiggled the broom handle and heard the delicate interior crumble. The nest appeared to be empty.

I went through the hall, clapping and shouting. Nothing I did felt particularly effective, but I had to try something. Ever since the episode on the moors, I had found the idea of doing violence towards the chickies unconscionable. This sounds like a reasonable attitude, but I am afraid it wasn’t. Saving chickies where I could was not a moral imperative with me, or anything in which I could take pride. It was more on the order of a superstition. A childish taboo. Tomorrow, Fel would insist I saw sense and called the fire brigade, and then it would be too late for them.

The study door was shut and obstructed from the inside. I pushed it open enough to edge through into the room. A blanket had been pulled from the daybed under the window and used to block the door. The smell in here was extraordinary. Warm milk and fresh-baked bread. Though far too powerful to be pleasant, it shared nothing with the sour, blocked-drain smell downstairs.

Most everything had been pulled off the shelves and out of the cupboards and spread over the floor: clothing, paper, also the balsa sheets and knives and clothes pegs and tubes of glue I had been using to fashion set designs for DARE. I scuffed through the mess to reach the work table. Bizarre to find my notebook there. The phone and lamp had been pulled off and dangled by their wires over the table edge. But the book sat squared to the edge of the table as though set there for me to read. I picked up the chair and put it back on its feet. I sat and opened the notebook.

It was as I had left it. What else had I expected? I flicked through the pages, one at a time, past my last, abandoned doodle – a sketch of the aliens’ lunar beachhead – and through to the end of the book. The pages were blank. As they surely had to be. And yet I was disappointed, as though denied some revelation. I stood up and, from force of habit, rolled the chair in under the table.

The chair legs hit something soft: something which shifted in response to the impact. I pulled the chair out and knelt down. Under the table I found an old coat of navy-blue felt. There had once been hi-vis patches sewn on its back and elbows, and there were still tattered lines of the bright stuff fastened to the felt; the rest had been torn or eaten away. The coat slumped and shifted. I reached under the desk and pulled it out by the collar. Little hands closed over mine. I jerked back. From over the top of the coat a face appeared. The chickie was very young: practically newborn. It was still blind. Dark jellies moved behind its yet-to-open, tissue-blue eyelids. It opened its mouth in a yawn. I stared down its pale, pearly throat. It raised its head, extending its neck, begging for food. I stood up and felt in my trouser pockets for something to give it. My fingers closed around a ball of something. I pulled it out. How long the corn dolly had been languishing in my pocket, I could not remember. Anyway, it had come entirely to pieces: now it was just a handful of grass tangled up with short lengths of red ribbon. The infant chickie reached out for the thing. I dropped the mess in its hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. At least, I remember saying something absurd.

Outside the room, somewhere in the house itself, perhaps, the chickie’s parent would be scavenging for food. I didn’t want to get caught between them so I left the room, closing the door behind me.

The scent of the room seemed to follow me into the hallway. I felt overloaded and unclean and, in spite of myself, aroused. I looked into the bathroom. The toilet was blocked and in the corner between the toilet bowl and the window was a pile of scat. I went back downstairs and through to the kitchen. I found the key to the back door and let myself out. The porch light snapped on automatically: absurd that this light should still be working when the house as a whole was so evidently broken. Like windscreen wipers clicking back and forth on a wrecked car. I climbed damp, leaf-strewn stone steps to the first lawn. Beyond it lay blackberry and gooseberry bushes; grown out of trim, they suggested the beginnings of a fairy tale: a thicket of thorns.

Above them, up wooden stairs that were succumbing to rot, there was a shed and a greenhouse and between the two, coiled there among weeds, a hose attached to a standpipe. I looked around. I don’t know who I expected to be there, spying on me. The smell from the study had followed me even here. It didn’t make sense. I sniffed my fingers. The odour had come from the dolly. It was spreading up my wrist, my arm. I undressed. I had an erection. I turned the hose full on and doused myself. I forced my head under the biting cold water. My penis throbbed. I turned the jet on it. It bobbed under the downpour like a salmon trying to leap a fish ladder. The baked-bread smell rose through my head and milk spilled in a strong stream from my erection. The water carried it away into the earth.

I wrenched the tap shut, gathered my clothes to my chest and ran on tiptoes, shivering, up a bark-lined path, up more stairs, past a table and iron chairs, to Stella’s writing hut. The key was where I had left it, by the door under a large stone ammonite. The hut was as I had left it. I closed the door behind me, dug about in the desk drawer for matches and got the gas heater working. There was a blanket folded up on the rocking chair at the back of the room. I shook it out, scrambled into the chair and wrapped the blanket around me. I fell asleep almost immediately.

The heater woke me hours later, puttering away on fumes from the empty bottle. The room was so hot, I had to peel the blanket off my sweating skin. The hut had a glass door and I stood in the cool air seeping around its edges, watching a smeared winter sun top the edge of the hills.

Later that day, in a tea house in Clun, near the old castle, I tried to explain to Fel the decision I had come to as the sun had risen to dissolve the mist filling the valley. ‘London’s bad enough with your dad paying our rent, but this place is no different; we’d still be taking handouts from Stella. What we’d have here isn’t an ordinary life at all.’

‘What do you want to do?’

I thought about it. I thought about Fel in my bed in the shared house in Tooting. How impossibly cramped it was. How uncomfortable. How lacking in privacy. I thought about her bed, how it fell squealing out of its niche in her little studio flat in London Bridge. How house-proud she was. How clean everything was, how antiseptic. The curve of her back as she played the piano. I thought how strange and sad it was, that no stream may be stepped in twice.

‘I want an ordinary life with you. I do. Only this isn’t it.’

‘I understand,’ she said.

‘The house is a wreck.’

‘We can’t live here.’

‘No.’

‘No.’

I didn’t know what else to say.

‘We’d better call Stella,’ she said.

Fel returned to London the next day. I stayed on for several weeks to organise the refurbishment of Stella’s house. I got a private contractor in to do the extermination. By then the chickies were long gone. ‘You should have called us the moment you noticed them.’ The white-suited exterminator tutted, shaking his head at the dim-wittedness of his clientele. ‘It doesn’t do to disturb them. Once they’ve formed an attachment to a place, they’ll only keep coming back.’

I hired a firm of industrial cleaners to drive out from Telford. They arrived in a van with a rose painted in incongruous soft-lit detail on its side.

As soon as they saw the upstairs bathroom, they tried to renegotiate the price. ‘Who on earth did you have in here? Students?’

I asked Stella for any photographs she had of the cottage, and to leave me to re-create the place as best I could.

‘You don’t have to go to all that bother.’

‘I want to,’ I said. ‘It’s become a kind of project.’

It was obvious I was trying to avoid coming back home. Stella didn’t say anything, and neither did Fel. Somehow the pair of them had intuited that I needed my space.

‘Don’t forget to watch tonight,’ Stella reminded me.

The first season of DARE had begun airing on a pay-per-view channel. When I told Stella her television was broken (it wasn’t), she arranged the delivery of a set twice as large and a box to suck the relevant channel off a distant satellite. I was out of excuses, so I sat down to watch.

Stella’s style was all gloss and chrome and nylon and the shock of the new – or as close as her minuscule budget could get her. Every shot went on far too long as she squeezed every drop she could from my oh-so-brilliantly detailed mise en scène.

Episode three was called ‘Time and Tide’. It involved a plan to drain and transport the Earth’s oceans to the aliens’ homeworld using a temporal pump. Time, moving faster inside the pump, meant that water was leaving the Earth at a fantastic rate through a pipe of economical dimensions. This neat conceit not only made the device hard to find, giving the episode its narrative thread, it also kept the climactic shoot-out and destruction of the device within Stella’s modest budget.

Or that, anyway, had been the logic behind the script I had proofread for her. In execution, though, things slip about in odd directions. Stella must have been offered a deal on cheap location shooting, because the episode, which was supposed to have been a claustrophobic affair set almost entirely within the chipboard confines of DARE’s stealth submarine, had been opened out to include a romantic interlude in somebody’s back garden and moody establishing shots of the beach at Dungeness (standing in here for an exposed seabed). Towards the end of the episode, even the submarine came apart into a series of surprising real-world cutaways, including one extended sequence in which Fel, playing the submarine commander, crawls inside the ship’s weapons system to effect a vital repair. In the script, Fel’s risky adventure was conducted off-camera, via regular, increasingly desperate reports over the ship’s Tannoy system. Stella had somehow found the resources to visualise the whole thing. No wonder she had wanted me to watch the episode.

It surprised me that she had chosen to shoot in such cramped locations: there seemed very little here that Stella could not have got me to re-create in plasterboard and hot-knifed packing foam. Concrete walls and pipework; a floor with a drain. Signage whose significance escaped me but which, being in an easily legible and serifed font, no doubt belonged to the location itself rather than to Stella’s set-dressing.

At one point, Fel entered a cell-like, windowless space and took her mark behind a drain set in the floor. Her costume was a silver one-piece, sturdier than the foil-thin suits that were the usual daywear of her crew. She wore no wig: her head was close-cropped, shaved over the ears. (I remember that cut; the feel of it under my hand.) From the drain in the floor, water welled. It rose in a column, fluted and swirled by the pattern of the grating, and spread over the floor. It hit the back wall of the cell and broke, foaming: salt water. The flow strengthened and the cell began to fill. Soon the flow welling from the grate was no more than a dome of disturbance on the surface of the rising water. Inch by inch, the water rose around Fel’s body.

It was over her chest now, and in a weird breaking of the fourth wall, Fel looked directly into the camera lens. Not into the distance, as the shot seemed to demand. Right at me. The water got to her neck. The camera was mounted to match her eyeline. The water was nearly at the level of the lens. Wavelets plashed against a glass screen protecting the lens. Was the camera in a glass box, or were they shooting through a window?

The water rose over Fel’s face and the camera at the same moment, losing what was surely the most dramatic moment of the shot, the moment Fel’s face, her nose and mouth, became submerged. The image was a mess of distortions, foam, shadows, gloom. Not until the water level had risen above the lens did the scene stabilise.

Fel remained in shot, holding on to the pipework. The film lamps, adequate enough to illumine the dry cell, struggled to penetrate the seawater, so that Fel’s impassive expression, her apparent relaxation, her utter indifference to the water, may have simply been an artefact of poor lighting. Was she even in the water? Perhaps there was a glass wall between her and the water, just as there was a glass wall between the water and the camera. But how could that be? Surely the water had pooled around her feet? Surely I had just seen that – seen the water rise, not just in front of her, but around her? Yes. I had seen that. The impossibility of it – that she should be submerged and show nothing, and minutes later still show nothing (why on earth were they holding the shot?), impressed me. I wondered how it was done.

I was still wondering at Stella’s special effect, still impressed by its realism, as I pawed the bathroom door open and retched all my pent-up horror violently into the toilet bowl.

I wiped my mouth with toilet paper. I swilled and spat. I went back into the living room and phoned Stella. I wanted to know how she had pulled the trick off. I wanted some reassurance. I didn’t get any reply. I phoned Fel. She picked up straight away.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi. What’s wrong?’

I laughed weakly. ‘It’s that obvious?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve just been watching DARE.’

‘It’s not that bad.’

‘I’ve just been watching you—’

‘What?’

‘Drown. I’ve just been watching you drown.’

When I finally got her to understand what I was talking about, she laughed at me. ‘I held my breath, Stu. What the hell did you think?’

I couldn’t tell her. With the vividness of nightmare, the airlock sequence had realised my suspicion that Fel was advancing beyond the human. That she was changing from the woman I knew into something else. That she was leaving me.

‘I was just going to phone you,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s some bad news.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘Mum.’

‘What? No, Betty’s fine, don’t worry. Only Daddy and Stella. Well, they’ve decided to split up.’

‘Good God. Why?’

There was a pause.

‘Things aren’t getting any easier here,’ Fel said.

There were Christmas lights strung across the main streets of Islington. For some, the party had already got itself started:a balloon was stuck in a tree near Stella’s house, and spent firework casings lay trodden underfoot by the park gate.

With Georgy gone I had assumed Stella might dress her house for Christmas this time. There was no garland on Stella’s door and no tree in her window, though it was hard to be sure because her windows were barred on the inside by white steel concertina railings. The bell was gone from beside the garden door so I went around to the front. Stella let me in. Though it was after noon, she was still in her dressing gown. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ she explained. ‘Some boys were throwing firecrackers at my window.’

Betty was in the dining room in the basement, playing Operation. Her dexterity was almost adult. She nodded me hello but otherwise ignored me. The Process had put us at a remove hardly greater than that established already by her long absence. Would we have grown any closer had it not been for her cancers? I doubted it.

Reminded, I asked Stella: ‘Have you got any greens? I’m out.’

Stella fetched a freezer bag from the kitchen, full of unopened tubes: ‘Here. I don’t take them any more.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I’ve been rayed.’ And when I didn’t understand: ‘Georgy rayed me. At the Gurwitsch. I’m resistant now, or so he says. It’s a new treatment he’s been developing.’

‘That’s—’ I fumbled a green into my mouth, crunched it, swallowed it down. ‘That’s amazing.’

Stella shrugged, as if developing an inoculation against radiation poisoning were just another of her ex-boyfriend’s eccentricities. Which, perhaps, from her perspective, was just what it was.

Remembering to drop the affectionate anglicisation of his name must have taken effort. It was something she wanted me to notice.

I duly noticed it: ‘What’s happening between you and George?’

Sighing, Betty hopped down from her chair and left the room. She had been here throughout, a witness to their break-up. I could not begin to imagine how awkward that had been.

Stella sat down at the dining table and lifted Betty’s Operation game, buzzing angrily, onto the floor. She drew a tissue from her pocket and absently worked at one of the old, indelible stains in the zinc. ‘I suppose you were right, after all,’ she said. ‘I suppose the differences between us and the Bund are becoming unbridgeable.’

‘But he took you to the Gurwitsch. He’s been treating you. Why didn’t he just—’

‘What?’

‘You know. Why didn’t he make you—’

‘“One of them”?’ She shook her head. ‘He offered. He suggested it many times. But why would I want that?’

I had nothing I could say to her. For a long while now I had wanted nothing else. Of course I wanted to be ‘one of them’. A Bundist. Bright – genuinely bright, not just over-educated. Odd. Different. A match for Fel, since as I was, I was – what? A companion? A pet?

I think Stella sensed my turmoil; anyway, she squashed it flat. ‘The Bund hands out the treatments it wants to hand out, to people it wants to hand them out to. It’s a cult. It’s always been a cult.’

‘It’s certainly a business,’ I conceded.

‘It’s a cult. I honestly think I prefer those nutters causing trouble in Palestine. At least they don’t pretend to be doing everyone else favours. How is the house?’

‘The house?’

‘My house.’

She meant the house in Shropshire. ‘Oh. Good. It’s good. I hope. I mean, I hope you like it.’

‘I’ll probably just put it on the market.’ Stella sighed. She saw my disappointment: ‘Well, I did tell you not to go to all that effort, didn’t I?’

‘Yes. You did. You might still have warned me.’

‘I didn’t know I’d need the money then.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Everything is fine. The network wants a third season of DARE, so I need to free up some capital to tide me over next year.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, uncertainly.

‘Don’t tell Fel. The ink’s not dry and I still have to think about casting.’

I couldn’t imagine Fel losing sleep over whether or not she would get yet another chance to strut around one of my cardboard sets in a purple fright wig.

‘Does Georgy know?’

Stella woke up to what she was doing with the tissue, the pointlessness of her scrubbing, balled the tissue up in her fist and tucked it into the pocket of her dressing gown. She frowned at the stain in the zinc. ‘I’m going to have to get rid of this table. These marks don’t bear thinking about.’

I looked at it. It was a dreadful thing. ‘Where did it come from? Could you take it back?’

‘From the Gurwitsch,’ Stella said. ‘They don’t want it, they threw it out. I found it in a skip.’

It was some ungodly hour of the morning on Boxing Day. Fel was sitting up in bed with her bedside light on. She was unclothed, a sheet over her knees and a book balanced open in the shallow nook of her thighs. I had just woken out of a deep sleep. I sat up, drinking in her spare and pale body, and she held up the book to shield herself. Playing along, I bent forward and read the faded spine. She laughed at my surprise: Virgil’s Aeneid. And, closing the book, she said: ‘The old stories are the best.’

I kissed her. She touched my face. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said.

I don’t know how much later it was but when I woke again, I found the bed empty. The sheets were cold. The room was in darkness. I turned on the light. I felt certain that there was someone in the room with me. Someone behind me. Someone hiding out in the corner of my eye. I got out of bed and went to the window. The Moon was rising behind the flats of the Barbican. It was a very different Moon from the one I had seen with Fel just a couple of weeks earlier. It was a new Moon, bright with artificial light. The light was spread unevenly over the Moon’s surface, gathering in streams, knots and pools which, to the informed observer, might well have echoed the geographic features of the Moon itself. At a glance, however, the far stronger impression was one of regularity: off-kilter lines of longitude and latitude gridded the Moon’s sphere.

I thought of bacteria and bell jars. I thought of clocks and curves. I thought of the exponential function. The HMS Victory would have to hurry if it was to land the first living people on the Moon. Even then, their efforts would only be token. The evidence was shining there above our heads: whole Bundist cities were rising from the regolith, empty and bright and inviting. Some people found it strange that the Bund, for all their activity on the Moon, had built no rockets worth the name, no spaceships, no Space Force. But it was not the way of the Bund to waste time on a journey. To them, the destination was everything. I had been to Ladywell. I could guess well enough the means by which the Bund would one day settle the Moon – if indeed it had not already begun. I wondered which of those lights up there were hospitals.

I heard Fel in the living room, turning over playing cards. I slipped on a dressing gown and went to join her. She was sitting on the floor, laying down cards, gathering them up. She was playing Set.

If no set can be found in the twelve-card array laid out at the start of a game of Set, three more cards are added. The odds against there being no set now increases from 33:1 to 2500:1. 1080 distinct sets can be assembled from the deck. Though there is no such thing as a ‘good’ card, or a ‘good’ pair of cards (each of the 81 cards participates in exactly 40 sets, and each pair of cards participates in exactly one set), some players have hypothesised that the ratio of no-sets goes up as sets are removed from the array.

Fel paid no attention to me. She was focusing on the cards. She played too fast for my eye to follow. In the space of two minutes she had ordered the whole deck, leaving three discards. She gathered them up, shuffled and began again.

I said, ‘Why did you ever play me at this?’

She saw me and put down the cards.

‘You always won. But you made it look hard.’

She shook her head.

‘Yes you did.’ I came and sat opposite her. ‘You made it look as though it was a game worth us playing.’

She gazed at the cards. ‘I liked playing this with you.’

‘Why?’

‘It was fun. Playing you.’

‘Humouring me.’

She shook her head. ‘If that’s what you think.’

‘What else am I to think?’

It was a stupid question. A mean question. She was right not to answer it. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

I said, ‘What else did we do together that was like this? By which I mean: totally fucking pointless?’

‘Not pointless.’

I wish I hadn’t raised my voice. I wish I’d had at least that much sense. ‘Well, what would you call it?’

She stared at me, the way you search a wall for a door that isn’t there. ‘Love,’ she said.

That shut me up.

She said: ‘That’s what we do together. That’s the point of it. That’s why it’s worth doing.’

It wasn’t that I disbelieved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. But we had started to talk of ourselves in the past tense and it was too late trying to change. ‘I know you’ve been slumming it with me.’

‘Oh, for crying out loud.’

‘Well, you have!’

‘According your friend Stan bloody Lesniak I have.’

I hadn’t expected that. ‘What?’

‘Your friend Lesniak. He’s shared his important thoughts about our relationship in his fucking student rag. I thought you’d seen.’

‘I don’t read Responses – I didn’t even know it was still running.’

‘He’s had a fine old go at us. In fiction, but it’s pretty bloody obvious who he’s talking about.’

That took the wind out of my sails. It made my blood run cold to think that Stan had so easily identified the breaking point in our relationship; worse, that he was actually finding something entertaining in it all. Was our being together so obviously unworkable? Was Stan the only one of our friends to be raising his eyebrows at the thought of us? I doubted it.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what’s it got to do with him?’ I wanted all of a sudden to paper over the cracks, to heal what was broken, to withdraw every complaint.

She gathered the cards up from the floor, split the deck in two and put it back in its box.

‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘His readership can’t number more than a couple of dozen.’

‘All our friends read him. All your friends, that is.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘When was the last time we went out with friends?’

‘We can do that.’

‘Not now we can’t.’

I gave her a minute to calm down. ‘What does he say? Exactly?’

‘Read it yourself. Only I threw it away.’

I tried not to smile. ‘Good,’ I said. Then: ‘Do you want to come back to bed?’

She shook her head.

I took her hand and led her to the sofa. We sat together, intimate but not touching. We had not sat like that before. It felt very grown up.

We both knew what this was. Knowing it, we managed to be kind to each other.

She said: ‘I know people, they get a lot out of having a kid. They get a different kind of relationship out of it. Satisfaction. A lot of fun. Being stuck in their little monster’s perpetual present – it makes them young again, in a way. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘But you don’t feel it.’

‘No.’

‘You like the life we have. The music, the books. You can work. We go out together in the evenings. It’s good for you. It’s what you want.’

‘Yes.’

It was the worst possible moment I could have chosen to be honest. Sometimes the words have to come before the feelings. You may not mean them, but that doesn’t make them untrue. They are a kind of promise to yourself. A challenge to yourself. And I failed that challenge. Even at the time, sitting there beside her as her tears came, and me there feeling so very sad, so very noble that I had managed to be honest, I knew that I had failed. ‘In time—’

‘What time?’ She got up off the sofa. She pointed out of the window. She screamed at me: ‘There is no fucking time!’

I looked where she was pointing, but there was nothing to see. Only the Moon.

She said: ‘I’d better go.’

Returning in the new year to the West Riding, to the valley, the furnaces and all those narrow streets, I decided to move back in with my dad for a while. Though Betty had left him years before, Bob was feeling especially lonely now that she had passed away. And despite Stella’s best efforts, her unwelcome letters and even less welcome day visits, he refused to let her reconcile him to the idea that there was another Betty waiting to see him, and talk to him, and reminisce with him over past happiness. Death was death to Bob: a boon companion he refused to abandon.

I told myself that I would not stay long. That moving in with my dad would be an opportunity for me to regroup, while giving Fel some much-needed space before she and I took up – in a more circumspect fashion – the next chapter in what was obviously going to be a lifelong friendship. We had made some brave noises about staying in touch and remaining friends.

Naturally, we never saw each other again.