The Smoke

-

The hatch closes on Jim Lanyon’s hand. He whips clear, catching his finger for a split-second between the hatch door and the sill. A dull compression pulses through the nail into the bone.

The tunnel lurches around him and his arm sweeps on a reflex, seeking something to cling to.

His hand finds something soft and lumpy and unmistakably alive. A face. His hand digs in, forefinger and bruised middle finger getting purchase around the arch of an eye even as he cries out in terror: he thought he was alone here.

The face joins in with Jim’s screaming and swivels free of his grasp. His fingers trace thick, dense hair, a woman’s hair, and his autonomous self, that diurnal part of him oblivious to events and circumstances, and which responds only to the routines and the givens of life, pulses out its interest.

The world lurches, throwing Jim and the face and a tangle of limbs and ducting into a new and radically different arrangement. It is as though they were the jumbled elements inside a kaleidoscope and someone is twisting the eyepiece, setting them to a new configuration.

The sound as it twists – this grinding, screaming corridor made kaleidoscope – fills Jim’s head with metal, and he presses his hands against his ears and screams along to the buckling tube like a child on a fairground ride, screaming to take control, to rise to the fear, to perform it, anything so as not to be consumed by it, sensation piling up on sensation as the corridor buckles and twists, every failure a jagged edge, a spark, a scream, a puff of vapour.

He remembers the last time he was afraid like this, and screamed like this. He was a boy, strapped into a fairground ride with his dad. He and his dad had screamed together, surfing together the wave of their imminent destruction, and here, too, there is a second scream accompanying his own and the lights come on again. How long have the lights been out? Jim does not know. He had his eyes tight shut, the better to scream, but his eyes are open now and he sees the face, bare inches from his own, hurtling into him, into his face, filling his vision with shadow, a dark and heavy presence filling his field of view. Then the collision, forehead to forehead in classic silent-comedy symmetry to a soundtrack of mutual screaming, and the corridor thrusts itself straight again, a limb kicking itself back into shape, and the lights go out again.

They breathe together, suck air together, paired in the darkness, and in the eerie blast of cold that stops both their mouths, they are joined in the terror of decompression. But the chill dissipates and, released for a second, their rhythms come apart, each pants to their own beat. Jim is first to speak, if you can call it speaking, a wet swallowing that approximates his name.

The face beside him is a wet, hot presence at his left ear, and upside down – what quality of sound tells him the mouth is upside down he cannot say, but in the pitch dark he is certain that the face, just one inch from his ear, is now inverted. It jabbers something, Venison or Tennyson or some other name he does not recognise. Not on his shift, not on his deck, not in his department. A stranger, even here, thinks Jim, and wants to cry. A dark unknown, suspended in a greater dark.

Hands pat and palpate him, fumbling for purchase, and he feels her breath on his cheek, its hot, wet pulse as intimate and shocking as a tongue, and then it is gone as his hands and her hands find each other in the dark and her hand finds his bruised hand and he gasps with pain and pulls his hand away and the corridor rips along its length as sure and straight as if along a seam and flattens itself, showing them themselves against the stars, as in a vast and cinematic mirror. He loses purchase. She reaches for him, reaches up for him, to hold him fast, but she cannot reach him as he wheels above her, a new star, spreadeagled, Union Jack patch bright and primary against the welling Earthlight. The woman – Tenterden? Verizon? What’s in a name? – turns to face that massive and appalling planet whose light and mass and heat they have so recently escaped. Jim, floating above her, waves desperately, while she clings to a stanchion in the unwound tunnel, her flesh gently swelling as though she were blooming in the light of Earth, and her outgoing breath is a puff of ice crystals that Jim, in his own anoxic, depressurised and surely dying state takes to be seeds or spores spilling from her puffball mouth. He fancies that she is shouting his name. But he knows he is only bootstrapping cold comfort for himself in these, his last seconds, and as the Earth rises over the metal ribbon in which they were wrapped, it comes to him that death is taking its own sweet time, and seems indeed to have forgotten him.

For the longest time he hangs there, spreadeagled British star, contemplating, as he pulls away, the wreck of all personal and national hopes, and why can he not die?

Jim sees with a sinking heart that the ship has buckled, failing at the place, the joint, that even a child would have pointed to and said, The weak spot’s here. The giant shock absorbers have shivered and flung their sockets, sending engine and crew tumbling into different, equally unstable orbits.

This undying man, this British astronaut called James Lanyon, does not understand his life, or why it should continue now that the face he clung to is gone. The face, the hair, her hands on him, her breath upon his cheek. This man turned dying star looks for the woman whose name he cannot figure and sees the corridor in which they were caught, spread wide and flattened like the tube from a roll of toilet paper. He sees her, tethered to a pipe by a yellow harness. She had been safe, he sees. She had been trying to save him. She had not careened into him. He had careened into her. She was the still point in that space: his anchor. And here she is, her breath a thousand spores scattering in barren space, her flesh blue and swollen, oedema puppying her, making a doll of her, a thing of fabric more than flesh, and he remembers her breath on his cheek. He feels tears, and how is it that his tears float liquid in his eyes, turning the wreckage before him into so many threads of light? How can his tears be wet, when her eyeballs are ice?

And thinking this, he lets his gaze drift away, which has been focused on the painfully fine grain of the stranger’s body. His field of attention widens, threads clearing as he blinks, to take in more, and yet more, as he is led away (by whom? by what?), his field of view expanding with distance as he travels, faster and yet faster, from the scene of the disaster. He sees it whole now: the frigate-sized living quarters on whose behalf the Victory’s great elastic heart once, and so very briefly, beat out a nuclear pulse. Where is that valiant engine now, its pneumatic legs spread and pulsing, appendages of an atomic space-jellyfish?

The ship’s drive was a spinning disc of concrete, and through its centre, once every four seconds, nuclear devices were fed by a machine that, but for its size, would be familiar to any vending-machine engineer. When the ship buckled the living quarters, fighting free, limped off crippled, bent askew and barely space-worthy: certainly no match for the rigours of reentry. In the tense hour following the accident, the crew held a silent vigil, all ears to the Tannoys on every deck and stair. Now all was being stored away again, as the doomed spacefarers set about softly tidying their tomb. With motive power gone, all was afloat. In silence, the crew moved listlessly, securing all the things they had already unstrapped, so cocksure, once the atomic engines had begun to pulse and the floors had begun, in jerks at first, and then with greater smoothness, to deliver the promised one-gravity.

With the drive gone, they knew they were doomed. Impossible to convince a crew so highly trained that a stable orbit was achievable now. Having flung itself from its broken but still-pumping drive, the accommodation module stood no chance of survival. They had only to look out of the frigate’s many generously proportioned portholes, where the view was impossible to parse: a whirligig of stars and clouds as the ship tumbled around the Earth in an ever-tightening spiral.

The accommodation module had thrusters meant to orientate it finely for docking with and undocking from its engine. Half these thrusters had been destroyed in the brutal act of separation, but the ones ranged forward remained and still held a little fuel. By line of sight, by trial and by error, the helmsman brought the ship about and steady on its axis. The awful Earth turned beneath and about them. The stars, doused by Earthlight, went out one by one. The crew waited for nightside, and a chance to hide in their minds from the planetary mass that would in a very little while embrace and consume them. But nightside did not come, and the Earth swung about them like a big, bright, smothering parent as if illuminated by its own light.

Of the sun, by some eccentricity of their turn and trajectory, there was no sign.

What further disaster has befallen the frigate, James cannot begin to guess, embroiled as he is in the event of it. He can only witness: a somehow undying eye.

Shocked out of the capacity for further shock, Jim watches with a feeling at once profound and nameless – a great annihilating wave of sensation – as the ship unfolds itself, an aluminium origami reversing itself into sheets of base metal. The flattened and unwoven plates of the ship turn on a mutual axis, plates striking plates without a sound, so that all are sent spinning on syncopated rhythms, turning to the light and knifing into the dark. A complex visual score, lacking all edge of violence, unfolds before his somehow still-working eyes. James grows drowsy. He closes his eyes.

And opens them, shaking, breath heaving, as the enormity of his state comes upon him. Where is everyone? How is it that he is pulling away from all this? What explains his steady withdrawal?

Refocusing, hunting for clues, he witnesses further mysteries. The wreck has begun to foam. White froth emerges from every intact hole in the dismantled craft. Once the foam has dribbled off, each hole yawns, a distorted, screaming mouth, folds open, turns inside out and unwinds into a kind of flower: its petals are metal surfaces, and a bouquet of tangled wires and mangled ducts serves for sexual parts. All these materials are sorted as he watches, bundled and batched; the flowers are picked and pulled apart – she loves me, she loves me not – and it comes to him that the Victory is being dismantled and sorted by agents which, at this distance, are too small for him to see.

The froth, meanwhile, floating free of the ship, has formed lines, and these lines, like trails of spittle, like spawn, lead away from the ship; they are being pulled away from the ship, and it comes to him, in his strange, somnolent, undying calm, that this soft white stuff, these little beads strung on strings like fish eggs in a deep black stream, these bright things, these bubbles, are the crew.

He cries out, and hears his cry, and hearing it, the madness of it, the act of hearing in a vacuum that must by now have killed him, makes him scream the more, and since screaming is not enough, his hands begin to paddle, he scrabbles for purchase in the dark, and his left hand, the hurt hand, the bruised hand, catches against a film, an unseeable skin, and sticks there. Pain wells under his bruised and loosened fingernail and makes his hand a ball of hurt, and his gaze, drawn to that hurt, fixes on his hand, stuck there in a clear glue. A plate of his ship, turning to catch the light, appears as a sheet of light beyond his hand, and where his hand is stuck, there in the dark, the sheet twists, warps as through a lens, and it comes to him that he is in a bubble, breathing, screaming, that he is embraced within an egg, and sensing this, his bruised hand closes around the tissue it touched, and crumples it, and everything before him stretches and bends, the ship turns into streams of light, and above him the Earth itself vanishes in an ovoid blur.

Reaching with his other hand, his right hand, he grabs a fistful of that tegument and pulls himself forward, and the gluey stuff surrounding him folds itself upon his face and, screaming, he sees the material fog against his breath.

He is inside an egg. His tongue touches tasteless plastic stuff and he bites, desperate to be free, desperate to be dead, and something tears somewhere. He hears the air whine out and his ears pop and he begins to spin, tipping back into the violence of the world, a star no longer, but a lonely and unburdened man, riding a broken, bucking bubble in the dark.

The whining stops. The spinning world slows and steadies. The wreckage reappears, terrible in its tidiness: a palletised assortment of aluminium plates and drums of wire.

Jim breathes, and hears his breath. The bubble has mended itself. He reaches out again with both hands, steadier now, mystified by this bubble, and his hands meet gluey walls. He presses the walls wider: the egg gives a little, and the view before him wobbles. He lets go, and the world, or what there is of it – raw materials in space, turning in the light of Earth – recovers its shape.

He paddles around his little cocoon. He faces the sun, whose blaring light should blind and burn him, only to find that this quarter of his world is browned out. The material of his egg is responding to the sun’s glare, protecting him.

He inverts himself, looking for an edge to his strange and sustaining prison. A door. A valve.

He sees another egg, and another man inside it. And below that another. And another. He stares, counting the stream of bubbles rising from the deep, each one holding a man or a woman. The man in the bubble nearest him has already seen him. He gesticulates wildly, mouth open against the wall of his egg. James, absurdly, waves.

The stream of bubbles weaves about, new bubbles coming visible then drifting into shadow. Beyond his own string, other strings grow nearer, all gathering together in a braid. We’re saved, he thinks, we’re being saved, and the thought, which should comfort him, only fills him with a deeper fear. Saved how? And by whom?

A skull’s knowing rictus presses against the plastic just below Jim’s nose, and as he cries out and bucks away, a second skull, armed like the first with hands clown-spread beneath its neck, seizes hold of his bubble, nudges the other, and makes eyes at its companion. And such eyes! James has never seen such eyes before: eyes like stumpy telescopes on the zooms of pocket cameras.

The skulls, appearing out of nowhere, adhere to the wall of his egg with long, spatulate fingers, human, yet threaded with black lines as though tattooed with a map of the vessels running beneath the skin. The skulls are not human, but they must have begun that way. Products of the Gurwitsch ray, is Jim’s hysterical guess. An extreme fulfilment of Gurwitsch’s promise to ‘sculpt organic forms at will’. Their eyes shoot in and out and their necks, geared in ways that are not human, wobble their skulls about in strange and simple patterns, and it comes to Jim that the skulls are having a great time. That they are happy with their lot. That they are singing.

Jim backs away. The space outside his bubble is full of skulls suddenly, crowded with skulls, some adult, some belonging to children, some foetal and hardly formed at all, and as they swarm about his bubble, latching on with their big clown hands like so many putti, it comes to him that he has had enough of this, that this is not a rescue, and he has had enough, more than enough. Pressing his face into the plastic wall, he hears their shanty, fudged and softened, through the gluey skin – ‘Weigh, hey and up she rises’ – and with a snarl of hate he lunges and bites and tears a great mouthful of egg wall free and spits it out and feels the air rush out and the cold rush in and his ears explode and he cannot hear his laughter.

The skulls, bug-eyed and concerned, sew up the rent with dextrous fingers and invisible thread.

He bites again. They poke him with their fingers. He fights them off. They shuffle in. The egg is shreds. He tears and tears. The cold is everywhere and his blood fizzes like champagne. But still from somewhere comes the air to let him fill his lungs, and the skulls sing lullabies to him and paddle his flesh with big clown hands and absolutely will not let him die.

9

I spent two more days in London, ‘clearing the flat’. I bought a rucksack and packed it with books and a few photographs. I left my drawing table behind, and ornaments I had bought for the flat at one time or another. Except for a denim jacket, I piled all my clothes into bin liners and carried them around to a nearby charity store. On the train, I treated myself to a sleeping compartment, and I was well rested by the time I reached the West Riding, at midday, not a week after I had left.

I wrote the whole adventure off as a mistake. I had let nostalgia creep up on me and I had got what I deserved. Fel was in the Smoke somewhere, very close, close enough to use the flat we had shared. She had a new life, a new lover, and she was at very least trying for a baby. She was living the life she had wanted and which I had not felt I could give her. I wondered if her boyfriend was unaccommodated, or a Bundist, like her. I had not stayed around to find out. I hadn’t called Georgy, or even Stella – and by not calling her, I even passed up the chance to see my mother. I had run away from a place and time that had no room for me now. Perhaps “run away” is too strong. My quick departure did not feel like cowardice.

I stopped wondering. (Who is she seeing? What is she doing? Is she happy? Does she think about me?) I packed it all away. Some decisions cannot be revisited, even in the imagination. I was – I had to be – done.

The world had other ideas, naturally.

Bob welcomed me home with few words, and I could see he was sorry that I was not, after all, bringing back every stick and rag of my past life to fill his house. I told him about Fel, not because I thought it would help, but because I had no one else I could talk to. Bob’s taciturnity normally drove me mad, but on this occasion it was a blessing. He did not tell me that all had turned out for the best. In my neurotic state, I thought I could see him thinking it. I should have found another woman, I suppose: some warm stranger with whom I could share, in complete confidence, my version of events. But I couldn’t face it.

In November, a month after my homecoming, television signals penetrated the Calder Valley. The reception was surprisingly good for this foggy weather-trap. Nobody had a TV, not at first, and the first set we had access to was the one recently mounted over the counter of the fish-and-chip shop. It was a canny commercial move, but even a general curiosity could not explain the crowd Bob and I confronted one chilly Friday. There were men and women milling outside on the pavement, taking turns, with their usual rough courtesy, to get inside and at the screen. I figured there was a rugby match on. I plucked Bob’s sleeve. ‘Let’s try that new place by the canal.’ I was oddly incurious, probably because I had found myself piecework with a local solicitor and was pulling regular hours again, sticking to regular mealtimes; I was famished. ‘Come on.’

Why Bob, who was no lover of crowds, hung on, I cannot guess. He must have been visited by some fleeting sixth sense. He led me, his arm linked through mine, towards the door. The moment people saw us, they made room for us. Elbows nudged, shoulders were tapped. They made a path for us, all the way up to a spot under the blaring TV. It all happened so effortlessly, so smoothly, as in a nightmare. Standing there, surrounded by dozens of silent men, I wondered what had given us pride of place. Though it wasn’t hard to guess: family of the first Yorkshireman to go into space.

The TV was not tuned to either of the familiar stations. I recognised it instantly: a Bund news channel. Why on earth were we receiving this? Come to think of it, how were we receiving this?

The Bund’s peculiar style of news delivery – shaped to satisfy its people’s vaunted appetite for information delivered logarithmically, always on a rising curve of complexity, difficulty, urgency – would have lent bombast and millenarian gloom to reportage from a village fete. The main story – the one the channel kept coming back to – was simply incomprehensible. The picture, slewing and cutting every which-way, was even more confused than its soundtrack. There was a lot of repeated information, looping video and the same words uttered over and over. While these complex grammatical and visual syncopations were beyond me, I could not help but notice that very little news was being conveyed. Whatever this was – a close-up shot of a sheet of paper being screwed into a ball by invisible hands – the Bund’s news anchors had yet to get a handle on it.

The balled paper blinked out, replaced by a channel ident whose swooping curves and rolling hills of Bayesian distribution unwrapped to reveal a studio – half-real, half-animated – in which two presenters were sitting opposite each other without a table between them, swinging idly in their padded chairs, and with a clipboard on each lap. The man leaned earnestly forwards as the woman, her too-tight skirt riding another inch above her knees, consulted her pad and recited an itemised list, turning this way and that on her chair as she read. The whole scene reminded me strongly of the white-coater pornography they screened at Bob’s factory at Christmas, were it not that the backs of the presenters’ heads were glass. Their brains, not so spongiform as usual, and animated – presumably by the same joke ingredient that had animated Windsor Castle’s soup course – swam around on their cortical tethers, bashing the sides of their meningeal tanks like two angry fish.

A location shot: again we were confronted with what appeared to be a piece of crumpled paper. As I watched, it curled; ink burst from a tear, then bloomed into weird, globular flame. A blank, uncrumpled sheet filled the next shot. Then, crash-focusing, the camera revealed that the sheet was not blank at all. Indeed, it had ceased to be paper, become instead a solid surface: a door. The door opened and something knocked the camera aside. As the camera wheeled, it captured a pair of legs, knees bending frantically, frog-like, the legs caught at the ankles by a pair of thick white padded trousers. Then, kicking the trousers free, the legs shot out of view. The camera, untethered, rose with an undersea slowness after the legs and found them briefly, framed in the big round door. Not quite in focus, they gesticulated once, twice, then rose in a V against a wall of stars.

The studio reasserted itself and the news anchor’s head wobbled slightly as she channelled the latest information, her brain buffeting the sides of her skull in a frantic bid at escape.

A sick vacuum opened in the pit of my stomach.

The camera wheeled.

The camera was weightless.

This was footage from outer space.

Paper became metal as creases rent and pulled away to reveal: duct-work, silvered padding and great handfuls of wire.

Stars hung in an empty sky. A cloudy mass, faintly edged with green, descended from the top of the screen: it was Earth seen from orbit. Flashing past – literally flashing, rhythmically reflecting the light of an unseen sun – came the wheeling parts of something: a flight of disassembled components flying together in close formation.

A Union Jack rippled by.

I realised at last that this was the Victory. Or rather, this was what was left of her. And that Jim, my brother, first Yorkshireman in space, had to be dead.

Betty, when I finally got her on the phone, wailed like a child, which, in an important sense, she still was. The grief of motherhood and the physiology of childhood are a heady mix.

‘She’s had to go and be sick.’

‘Stella?’

‘I’m so sorry, Stu.’

‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t suppose… There’s no way—? Christ, Stella.’

‘Be kind to Bob.’

‘Of course.’

‘Hang on.’ Stella left the phone. The pips sounded: I pushed in more coins. In a minute Stella was back, the tension high in her throat: ‘Is Bob there?’

‘He’s in the pub. I can go and get him, it’s just around the corner.’

‘Betty says she wants to talk to him.’

I tried desperately to think of something to say.

‘Stu.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

I hung up, gathered my refunded pennies and went back to the pub. Bob was sitting in the lounge bar at a tucked-away table with Billy Marsden, his wife and daughter.

‘Dad.’ I beckoned him up. I didn’t want Billy and the others to hear our conversation because I had no idea what Bob would say. For all I knew, it would be something terrible. ‘It’s Betty,’ I said. I couldn’t not tell him. I couldn’t just send him out to the call box thinking he was going to speak to Stella.

Bob simply nodded. He headed for the door. Had he understood? He had never once spoken to his wife since her rebirth. I made to go after him, but stopped myself in time. I sat in his seat and the Marsden girl reached under the table and squeezed my knee.

Twenty minutes later, Bob was still not back, so I made my excuses and went around to the call box. It was empty. I walked home and heard Bob moving around upstairs.

‘Dad?’

‘Here,’ he called, hearty enough. I climbed the stairs and looked in at his room: this room he had shared with Betty for years; the room in which Jim and I, I can only assume, had been conceived.

Bob was packing. ‘I’m borrowing your case.’

‘Dad.’

‘Betty wants me with her. She wants me in Islington.’

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be glad for him. I wanted to be glad for them both: Mum and Dad together again at last. But it was too much to process all at once. Had Bob forgotten what Betty was now? Had he forgotten what shape she was in? ‘I’m catching the sleeper,’ he said.

‘The sleeper will have left. Dad, wait till morning.’

‘I can get the last train to Leeds.’

‘And then what?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

He was afraid to wait, I realised: afraid of second thoughts, afraid of his own fear. Inspired to action, he was having to commit to it, like a man on a high diving board. (The incongruity of that image was enough to make me smile.)

‘Can I help, Dad?’

‘Make me a tea.’

He asked me not to see him off. He shook my hand. He did not look like an old man who had just lost his eldest son. He looked like an old man on a date. I wished him luck. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to say.

Anyway, he never got as far as London, or anything like. Once again, his fear of the new bested him. The afternoon of the next day, Stella tracked me down by phone to the solicitor’s office. She asked me when Bob would arrive. I told her I had no idea. Afterwards I was told off about receiving personal calls in the office. The next morning, early, a policeman banged on the front door, waking me. He told me I had to go and pick Bob up from Leeds. He was reasonably sober by then.

In the days that followed, Bob vanished into the knot of his workmates. They were bringing him home, paralytically drunk, each night. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing for him, or whether he wanted it or not, but I knew better than to interfere. The factory was a community that, for better or worse, took pride in looking after its own.

On top of destroying the HMS Victory, the Bund had casually stolen our airwaves, the better to show us the futility of all our hopes of leaving the planet under our own steam. The first of these outrages was unconscionable; the other, infantile. Our response, as a government and a people, was immediate. King William was evacuated to Newfoundland. Bills were passed without debate through Parliament in a frantic attempt to contain Bundist communities in London, Birmingham and Glasgow within their civic bounds. Chernoy’s Process was challenged in the courts and class actions were organised. There were demonstrations. In London and in Bradford, riots. Leeds airport was overrun and a Bundist plane was set on fire.

Bob and I shared one more Christmas together, then I got my own room, and it was as well for him that I did. The locals saw my father as a man bereaved, but they very quickly developed a different opinion about me.

The room I rented was in a house by the railway: a garret space not very different from my old bedroom, but larger, with an impressive oak double bed with a frame too high for the room. On waking, I would look out through the window at the railway and feel caught in a dream of flying.

I was paying for my room out of piecework and favours, but in March a job came up that I could take a genuine interest in, working for the council in Bradford.

On the morning of my final interview, a rock flew in through my bedroom window. Straight through the gap between the top pane and the frame – it couldn’t have been more than five inches wide – it landed on my bed.

I picked it up. A bit of clinker from the railway.

I went to the window and looked out. I couldn’t see anyone.

It was a miracle the window wasn’t broken. That had surely been the idea. If there was any trouble, the landlady was bound to ask me to leave. I didn’t know where else I could go around here that was affordable and still near my father.

An hour later, stepping cautiously over the rails to the platform for an early train to Halifax, I turned up the collar of my only good suit, afraid of who might be taking aim at me. My feet wobbled on the stones: no shortage of ammunition around here.

What, I wondered, was my offence? That I had dated a Bundist? No one here knew about Fel. Was I being punished for Betty’s choices? Even assuming word of her undertaking the Chernoy Process had got around, I’m still not convinced people here would have fully understood its transgressive implications. Which left the Smoke itself. Was my offence simply that I’d had the temerity to leave town in the first place, head for the capital, scholarship under my arm, to better myself?

That sounded more likely: the old tribal resentments given a fillip by recent headlines.

This was not a conclusion I found particularly reassuring. Petty fights are still fights. An old friend of mine lost an eye, the day before he matriculated from school, in a punch-up over a controversial goal in a friendly match between Todmorden and Littleborough. Littleborough! Pass by any factory gate in Hebden of a Monday morning and you would see them: the walking wounded of many a Saturday-night soccer battle. Shoe a town of stoppered men with steel-capped boots, add beer, and what else could you expect?

I sat counting the minutes while the train sat idle at the station and wondered what had happened to my old self – that rough-and-tumble kid who wanted to follow his brother into the army. The boy who set off stolen percussion caps to divert the course of streams. I felt as if, a long time ago, something had broken in me. I stood and pulled down the window and looked back up the wooded hillside to where, so long ago, I had watched a column of black smoke turn to white.

The flash seemed to take the whole left side of my head away. Something thorn-sharp entered my left eye. I fell back with a cry. I heard footsteps running along the platform. I cursed and turned over onto my hands and knees and tried to throw up. I stared at the grey-flecked linoleum of the carriage floor and was rewarded by the sight of two, three, four drops of blood.

Nothing was at scale. I couldn’t even tell how close my head was to the floor. I was seeing out of my right eye, my left eye was glued shut, and when I looked up, I couldn’t tell if the figure crouched in concern over me was very big or simply very near. For sure, it wasn’t human.

‘Ssh, sweet boy,’ it crooned, through needle teeth. Its smile was sincere but its eyes were all black, no iris visible, and I read my terror in them. It put its hand against my wounded cheek. Instantly, I steadied. I took a breath. Another. I raised my hand to touch its hand and it was strange, bony, with wide, spatulate fingers. Gently, it withdrew, and I saw that it was hurt, or that it had been hurt sometime in the past: its nails had been pulled. And then I remembered.

‘You,’ I said.

‘Of course, me. Shush…’

More feet. More running. The guard had seen a boy throwing a stone. He tried to persuade me to leave the train and get someone to look at my eye. I made some feeble gestures at the figure opposite me but it had disappeared. The guard thought I was talking about my attacker. ‘He’s gone, sir. It’s all right. You’re safe.’ I stayed where I was, made belligerent by pain, a handkerchief pressed to my face, and insisted I may as well go on to Halifax, since Halifax had a hospital with an A&E department ‘who know what the hell they are doing’. Peremptory. Dissatisfied. Caustic. I had never sounded more like a Londoner, and after that people left me alone.

The chickie was gone. I couldn’t work out how, and I was in too much shock to care. My handkerchief was all bloody and I still couldn’t open my left eye, but in truth, given how hard I’d been hit, the pain was ridiculously little, as though the chickie, touching me, had salved the cut already.

Despite my appearance, I got the job. With a gauze patch over one eye, blood on the collar of my good suit and my voice pushed by shock into a strangled falsetto, I was, they said, exactly the man they were looking for: the very chap to draw up plans for retaining walls around their new coke plant. They even took the trouble to show me where I would be working. Above the council chamber were bright, glass-roofed offices, clean white work tables, and the air was bleachy with ink and paper and solvent. I felt immediately at home: looking around me, I recognised the appurtenances of my near-abandoned trade. Wet clay and scalpels and sacks full of balsa. Rolls of gridded blue paper. Stencils and slide-rules. The size of the room was bizarre, though perhaps I was seeing awry, still: getting the scale wrong.

The council’s chief architect, a man with an improbably styled shock of white hair and a moustache clipped in the military style, shook some greens into the palm of his hand and offered me one. ‘We’ll show them, yes?’

‘We surely will,’ I said, and I hoped I sounded sincere. The War Ministry had already visited. Funds were even now being allocated. Emergency tax regulations were coming into force by Easter. The West Riding was building its own spaceship. Across the country, fully twenty ships had been ordered to avenge the death of the Victory.

I had expected to be kept waiting in a room full of other candidates, interrogated for at most twenty minutes, then sent home to await the bad news. But there hadn’t appeared to be any other candidates, my interviewers kept me talking till noon, and they would have given me lunch if by then my face had not swelled up like a balloon. The chief architect insisted a chauffeur take me to a private clinic on the outskirts of the city, where they unbandaged me, tutted at the shoddy workmanship of the public service, and sewed up the corner of my eye with thread so thick and tough, it felt as though you could have mended a sail with it.

Feeling equal parts elated and nauseous, I swam more than walked out to the street, and a small figure barrelled towards me, like a boy but not, wearing a tasselled skirt, high heels and a feathered bolero shirt. As it flew past, it thrust into my hands a brown paper package the size and weight of a shoebox.

Fortune had been making such a plaything of me that day, I hardly dared open the package. I don’t know what I expected. Sheep droppings. A severed rabbit’s head. Used banknotes. Doubloons. I looked about me. The street was empty. If the box blew up in my hands, at least there were no passers-by to be injured. I opened it up.

Inside the box were six sheets of vacuum-moulded plastic parts, a paint chart and numbered assembly instructions.

I took the package home, laid out its contents on my bed, went around to Bob’s that evening and, under the guise of telling him the good news about my job – ‘an immediate start, and a month’s pay in advance!’ – fetched from my bedroom an unopened tube of modelling cement, a craft knife and my green vinyl cutting mat.

I hurried back to my rented room. It hardly registered with me that my window was still intact, that my landlady had not turned up at my door with a horror story of thugs lingering outside the building, or taken one look at my bandaged face and sent me packing, or, indeed, seen me at all. All the other events of the day were a grey blur to me as I tweezered and cut the grey plastic pieces from their frames and spread them on the mat. The instructions were clear, the pieces were few, but my hands were shaking so much I got glue all down the front of the figure’s uniform. I had to wait for it to harden, then shaved it off with a scalpel. I didn’t have any fine sandpaper and I was afraid that when the model was complete, the nubs that had attached each piece to its sheet would stop its joints from articulating properly. It never occurred to me that, once the model was done, it would be able to make its own repairs.

The jaw needed no glue. It just snapped into place. And then it was complete: a grey plastic miniature rendition of Jim, my dead brother.

Jim’s jaw clicked up and down. The figure tried to stand. I scooped him up and laid him on my pillow, shushing him. ‘You’re still wet.’

I was so afraid of crushing him, I slept on the floor, the rug wrapped around me. Jim, in a voice squeaky from miniaturisation, insisted I at least take the pillow. Even so, by morning, I woke with the whole left side of my face aching as though it had been assaulted with hammers.

I don’t think I even glanced at the bed as I stumbled out of the room. I had it in my head that I must have got drunk. That if I couldn’t remember the pub, then I must have drunk enough to black out. That drinking enough to black out would at least explain the absurdity of my dreams.

I went downstairs to the bathroom and studied my face. The doctors had assured me that my scratched cornea would soon heal. My left eye looked like a raw egg in a dish of blood. My cheek was a perfect round purple lump, as though someone had stuck a piece of liver on my face. My landlady walked in, saw me and screamed.

I had forgotten to shut the bathroom door.

My Halifax job didn’t impress my landlady much. She resented the insistent way I locked the door of my room each morning and pocketed the key. She resented my never letting her in to clean. Every so often, I’d find a reason to show her the room. That way I could demonstrate that nothing untoward was going on and that I was more than capable, thank you, of stripping and making my own bed. ‘I have papers here,’ I told her. ‘Confidential papers. You understand.’

In truth, I did have such papers in the room, plans released to me on the strict condition that I hide them from casual view. But it was Jim I was most concerned about. Where he came from, I could not begin to guess. Jim himself did not know but, in that silly, squeaky voice of his, he speculated: ‘I must be a Bundist thing, don’t you think?’

I sat on the floor cross-legged before him. ‘I suppose.’

‘An earnest of their good faith.’

‘Their good faith. The people who destroyed the Victory.’

‘If they destroyed it. It could have been an accident. Maybe they saved us. Isn’t that what they’re saying?’

‘It’s what some of them are saying. The whole business is unclear.’

‘And if they’ve done this–’ he rapped on his hollow chest ‘–then I must still be alive. Yes? In any number of ways. In several editions!’

I had no answer for him. The destruction of the Victory had brought the unaccommodated world into a belligerent unity. Across Europe, our spaceships were proceeding ahead of schedule. But with the Bund it was a very different story. At the very moment when clarity might have been considered essential, for everyone’s peace and security, the Bund had proved incapable of explaining itself.

The Victory had been attacked!

The Victory had suffered a fatal malfunction and been, so far as possible, saved.

The crew were dead.

The crew were alive!

The crew had been killed to serve as an example to others.

The crew had been restored using the latest medicine and would be returned home shortly.

The Bund welcomed guests to its new bases on the Moon’s far side!

Any attempted incursion of lunar facilities would be met with overwhelming force.

There were no Bundist bases on the far side.

On and on like this. Was it possible the Bund itself was splitting – even speciating? Might that explain those two TV news anchors we had seen, swinging back and forth, clipboards pressed to their groins, on the night of the Victory’s destruction? Their glass skulls? Their finned and spiny brains? I’d not seen the likes of them before, and no one had reported seeing them since.

‘Fuck it,’ said Jim, ‘I’m going out.’

‘Wait. Jim. I still don’t understand.’

‘Stu.’ He sighed and ran plastic hands down his glue-spoiled front. ‘You expect me to have answers? How do you think I feel? I don’t even know what I am, let alone what I’m for.’ He hefted up a sixpence and used it to turn the screw holding the wall vent in place.

Jim had been coming and going through the vent ever since I had managed to loosen it from the plaster partition at the back of my room. There was no way I could keep him sealed up in my bedroom all day. Jim, for his part, promised to conduct all his adventures well away from my landlady’s house. How far afield he went, I am not sure. His stories were so highly coloured, it was obvious he was trying to get a rise out of me. Whatever the force animating him, modelling plastic has a tensile strength no magic can alter or improve. Were Jim ever to engage in hand-to-hand combat with one of the local mousers, as he claimed he did, I knew where I would put my money.

‘Right through the eye, Stu!’

‘Settle down.’

‘It sneezed and some of its brains shot out through its nose. I took cover behind a cocktail umbrella.’

‘Jim. Shut up.’

In retrospect, and with matters having reached such a head, it is easy to see all the things I should have done; easy to identify all my moments of funk and denial. But though I seem to have a talent for second-guessing myself, I cannot honestly say that I blame myself for the way I hid Jim in my bedroom.

What else could I have done? What authority was qualified to consider this grey plastic miracle that had been pressed into my hands? Jim wasn’t some emissary. He wasn’t asking to speak to my leader. He wasn’t the scout of some alien army, poised to invade the Earth. He was my brother. Within the limitations set by his size and his simplicity, he was my family, returned to me. Of course I kept him safe with me.

Nor did I show him to my father. Bob had demons enough to contend with. His wife had been restored to him in a form he could not countenance; what would he have made of a son turned into a toy? I had it in mind to spare him, and even now, I think this was the right decision.

One thing I might have done differently: I might have taken Jim to London, to Stella’s house in Islington, and showed him to Betty. Jim and I had even talked about it, or tried to, the pair of us hunting for vocabulary with which to discuss this bizarre eventuality: a resurrected child mother presented with a resurrected doll son. I have no doubt we would have visited eventually. But then, one day in early June, Betty was knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver on the road outside Stella’s house.

The circumstances of the accident are still not clear. What was Betty doing, playing in the street? If she was playing. Perhaps she had seen something, heard something. Perhaps she had gone out to confront whoever was spraying threatening graffiti on Stella’s garden wall. A strange sight that would have been: an old Yorkshirewoman’s tirade spilling from the mouth of a child done up in this season’s florals.

Perhaps they had been expecting her. Perhaps they had been baiting her. Whoever ‘they’ were. Perhaps they had been lying in wait. But what is the point of speculations like these? They don’t do anyone any good. No one even saw the car. It was evening, and half-light, the time for stupid accidents. The doctors said Betty’s injuries were total, that she wouldn’t have felt anything, but I don’t believe that. She died in hospital three hours after she was found, flung all haywire over the iron railings into Myddelton Square Gardens.

Because it was a police case, there was a delay releasing the body. This gave my father and Stella an opportunity to fall out over the funeral arrangements. Stella wanted her sister buried near her. Betty had been living with her for years. Stella had seen her through her first biopsy and every round of chemotherapy. It was Stella who had persuaded Betty to undergo the Process, and persuaded Georgy to offer her the Process in the first place. She’d brought her older sister up from birth, as though she were her own child. Whatever difficulties she and Georgy had experienced in their relationship, chances were they’d been started by Stella’s preoccupation with little Betty. (Not every man wants a second family hot on the heels of the last, and for sure Georgy wasn’t the type.)

None of which made a blind bit of difference to Bob. He was adamant. The plot in Hebden was paid for, and there the pair of them would be buried, husband and wife, with a view of chimneys and rain sweeping down the valley from Blackshaw Head. On the stone: ‘Elizabeth Lanyon. Bob Lanyon.’ Dates. A simple stone over a grave dug extra deep: when his time came, he’d be laid on top of her. ‘It’s all arranged.’

‘You never even saw her!’ The stage had given Stella lungs. I could hear her through the earpiece of the public telephone. She was so loud, Bob had to hold the receiver away from his ear, which made following the conversation even easier, though it was the last thing I wanted. ‘You never even acknowledged that child was her!’

I could understand Stella being annoyed at Bob assuming responsibility for Betty’s funeral arrangements. The sheer level of her rage was something else. I think it was a battle she needed, so that her grief had some way to express itself. Bob was tongue-tied but for once he did not cave in. He asked me to arrange transport for the coffin.

No one in my new job ever breathed down my neck, telling me who I could and could not speak to. From my boss’s desk, I phoned Stella myself. ‘I want to invite Fel to the funeral,’ I said.

‘That’s a sweet idea.’

‘She and Mum were so close.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you seen her?’

‘No,’ Stella said. ‘Not since you left London.’

‘She’s not been in touch?’

‘No.’

‘I thought maybe she’d been to see Betty.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘It’s all right, Stella,’ I said. ‘Has she been round?’

‘A couple of times. But it was strange without you. I think Betty gave her a hard time.’ She laughed.

‘It was me that left,’ I said.

‘You don’t say? Idiot.’

‘Thanks, Stella.’

‘Well.’

I asked Stella to call round at the flat in the Barbican, but there was never anyone in. ‘You could always phone Georgy,’ she said. She gave me his number.

So I called him, and what a weird conversation that was. No ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother.’ No ‘My commiserations for your loss.’ I got the strongest impression that he was afraid of me. At any rate, afraid.

‘So you can’t help me.’

‘I’m sorry, Stuart.’

By now, I was furious with him. ‘You’re telling me you don’t know where your own daughter is.’

‘I know exactly where she is. My problem is I cannot begin to tell you.’

‘What? You think I would hurt her? Is that who you think I am?’

‘I mean what I say, Stuart. Literally, I cannot begin to tell you. You would not understand.’

‘Fuck you,’ I said, and slammed down the receiver.

It was clear enough that Georgy was not going tell Fel about Betty’s death. More: that Fel was in a place where she’d not hear the news from anyone else. What the hell was happening with her? This on top of everything else I was handling – the mourners, a sandwich supper in the Arms, my dad. All I wanted to do was think about my mum. But which mum? Even that had been made impossible for me. Was it the formidable and distant woman who had borne me I was supposed to mourn, or the charming and obstreperous child? The pattern of my feelings had been bent so out of true by Georgy’s therapy, I could only keep returning to the one solid, material fact any of us had left to cling to – the horror of her unexpected and violent death. I had terrible, disgusting nightmares, perhaps because it was only in sleep that I was finding freedom enough to try and untangle my feelings. Spending time with Bob helped, I think. He showed me old photographs. My heart ached, but as it aches for someone very dear lost long ago. I began to understand that I had been mourning my mother for a very long time. Before her transformation. Even before her cancer. I began at last to accept the sorry fact that she had always been leaving me.

The coroner’s office released Betty’s body for burial in mid-July. The ceremony took place on a Wednesday afternoon. There were neighbours, and men from Bob’s factory, and some of Betty’s family had driven across from Wakefield. Stella had already said she would not come and there was no one turning up from the nursery in London. Not that anyone from Medicine City would have been made to feel at all welcome. Bob had even insisted that Betty be buried in an adult-size coffin. He was after an ordinary and present sadness, on this day of all days. Nothing remarkable. Nothing out of true. He had spent too many years trying and failing to accommodate the future.

The hearse crawled past us as we climbed the hill to the cemetery. Bob was ahead of me, walking arm in arm with Billy Marsden. I was making conversation with a Wakefield cousin whose name I had already forgotten. The road was muddy, slippery from recent rains, but the weather could not have been brighter. White shreds of cloud lay over Snay Booth while here, in the lee-side of the valley, the air was all mown grass and woodsmoke. The lane rose between high hedges and came to a plateau overlooking the southeast corner of the town. The hedges fell away and a low dry-stone wall marked the cemetery boundary. There was nothing special about the place, no planting, no effort at funerary architecture. The headstones, all of an equal height, suggested a bizarre crop left ignored in a field gone fallow. But smoke from the chimneys below the hill was filling and swilling the valley with washes of desaturated blues and pinks, and with such a view before me it was possible to feel attachment to this land. Even love.

The coffin was absurdly light, of course. How little Betty was secured in that great big black box I could not imagine. I took the head end, Bob beside me, some cousin of Stella’s at the rear and Billy Marsden beside him, and it was no effort at all for the four of us to process across the damp, uneven ground to where the earth had been heaved up. I was afraid she’d shift, slumping to the foot of the box, or its head. But the weight, though absurdly little, stayed steady on my shoulder. What, I wonder, did the other bearers think? Down the coffin went, into its hole, and far too slowly. The weight of the box had the workmen confused.

And Betty’s burial was only the beginning. There was tea to get through at the Arms, and seeing the Wakefield mob off at the station, and back to the Arms for a drink with the fellows at the factory.

By the time I’d tucked Bob in and set off for my own room, I was much too tired to deal with Jim. And Jim, of course, having spent the whole day stuck inside (I wasn’t risking him being discovered on this day of all days) was just about ready to climb the walls. Failing them, the curtains.

‘Come down. Now.’

Jim stuck his plastic tongue out at me.

‘You’ll get me into trouble.’

‘Nah.’ Jim swung from fold to fold, idly, experimenting. His whole environment was one giant climbing frame. He was only five inches high and can’t have weighed much above a pound. This gave him a power-to-weight ratio even more monstrous than the one he’d expected to enjoy on Mars, gambolling about like a toddler in less than half Earth’s gravity.

‘We’ll go to the cemetery together in a couple of days,’ I promised him. ‘You can say your proper goodbyes to Mum.’

Jim swung, missed and dropped onto the dressing table, knocking my wallet onto the floor.

‘For heaven’s sake.’

Jim sat on the edge of the table, swinging his legs as he watched me retrieve it. ‘Sorry, Stu.’

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.

Jim’s restitution was not total, and Jim himself was aware of the gaps. He frowned, struggling to assess this great imponderable: how did he feel?

‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Angry, mostly. That she went through all that, only to die like… that.’

Jim’s sincerity shortfall was partly real (he was only a toy, after all), partly a problem of perception. However profoundly he might feel things in his plastic state, he could only ever express those feelings through a plastic mouth, and at a comically high pitch. How deeply can you rate the grief of someone who sounds like a cartoon mouse?

Jim sensed our conversation was going nowhere and, ignoring me, climbed up onto the shelf under the window. He traversed along my books, looking for something to read. I think he was after some inspiration for his storytelling because the volume he lit on was Betty’s pocket hardback edition of the Aeneid. He grabbed the top of the spine and leaned back, angling it out from the shelf.

I stepped forward and rescued the book before its binding tore any further in Jim’s tiny, crudely articulated hands. Jim, dangling one-handed off the spine, let go. He fell, picked himself up and ambled over to the fireplace, where he had his cushion. ‘I could have got it.’

‘You were breaking it.’

‘I’m careful.’

‘You’re an idiot.’

‘I’ll be full-size again one day, so just you watch it.’

‘And back in your right mind, I hope.’ I laid the book out for him, not too near the fire, for fear his joints might soften, and while Jim read, scooping back the onion-skin pages as delicately as he could with mitten-fused fingers, I laid out the paints I had bought that day in Halifax. Humbrol’s enamel range offered good approximations of the regulation colours of Jim’s uniform. Jim’s appearance seemed to have been based on his last moments aboard the Victory. His overall was of a piece with his flesh, his boots sealed seamlessly around his calves. His face, though rendered impassive, still carried – unless this was just my imagination – a faint ghost of my brother’s death-terror.

I tested the brushes I had bought against my palm. Jim watched me, suspicious. ‘If it tickles, I’m not doing it.’

‘All right.’

‘I don’t know, Stu. Aren’t all those colours going to mark me out?’

‘Desaturated blues and black? This lot will camouflage you, if anything.’

‘What colour are you going to paint my face?’

‘I’m not going to paint your face.’

‘I’m not having that flesh-pink stuff. I’ll look like a Band-Aid.’

Downstairs, we heard movement. Other tenants, maybe, or the landlady herself. We sat in silence, waiting for the coast to clear.

‘This is odd,’ Jim murmured. I glanced over and saw he had worked his way through the book to the bookmark – Betty’s appointment slip from the Gurwitsch Hospital. He had it spread out over the start of Book Six. I came over.

‘Look at the date.’ Kneeling on the paper, Jim reached and tapped its top right-hand corner.

‘What?’

‘Mum was already reborn by then, wasn’t she?’

I looked at the date. ‘So?’

‘So she wasn’t attending appointments at the Gurwitsch. She was well past all that.’

I made a face. ‘Maybe.’

Jim was adamant. ‘“Maybe” nothing.’ He stepped studiously over the paper, examining it. ‘Her name’s nowhere on it.’

‘There’s no name on it.’

‘Isn’t that odd?’

‘I don’t know.’

Jim stepped off the book onto the cushion and let it take his weight as he rolled backwards, head over heels, and onto his feet. At his size, it wasn’t a particularly athletic gesture at all – just his natural way of moving. I thought of Mars and how Jim might once have gambolled there. I thought of the meal we had all eaten in the basement kitchen of Stella’s house in Islington, and how Georgy had barracked Jim that night. He had been in a mood to make digs at everyone that night; even his own daughter. Even Fel.

Even Fel.

And then I knew. The truth came clear. It screamed at me, as surely as Fel had screamed at me on our last night.

There is no fucking time!

I remembered waking suddenly in the middle of the night. But the bedroom was not dark, there was a light on, and I turned over in the bed, and there was Fel, sitting up on pillows, the reading lamp on, poring over an old book. And when she saw that I was awake and felt me move against her, she grinned, the jewel shining in her tooth, and lifted the book for me to see – Betty’s Aeneid – and said, ‘The old stories are the best.’

And then she closed the book. The placemarker wasn’t Betty’s at all. It was Fel’s.

The appointment had been Fel’s, too.

I looked at my watch. I pulled my coat from its hook on the door. I checked I had my wallet. I snatched Jim up from the floor and crammed him protesting into my pocket. I hunted for my keys when all the time they were hanging from the keyhole in the door. I snatched them, left the room and locked the door behind me. My landlady looked out of the kitchen as I passed. I shouted some incoherent explanation as I barrelled past and toppled into the street.

I had ten minutes before the last London train.

10

‘Eat your greens!’ exhorts Hattie Jacques, from the poster on the tea-house wall. She has company now. Dirk Bogarde in Space Force blue: ‘Together, We Can Build Tomorrow!’ Underneath, a third poster. No photograph this time. Cheaply and hurriedly produced, with a War Ministry stamp. Absorbent paper: the ink’s already begun to run from four block-printed words: TAKE BACK THE MOON.

Poster by poster, broadcast by broadcast, the world is rumbling towards another war. In the West Riding, the collapse of the old dispensation is expressed mostly through official directives. Posters on the tea-house wall. New projects announced, new targets set. Fatter pay packets and less time in which to drink them away.

In the Smoke, it’s far more complicated. On the Thames, the ferries run empty that once carried unaccommodated guest workers to and from their menial jobs on Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. Someone built their own howitzer, if ‘ you can believe this, and shot out one of the Bund’s bright civic ‘moons’, plunging late-returning workers into darkness: they had to navigate by the light from their own phones. And yet, as you come off the sleeper bleary-eyed – it’s not much past six in the morning – you are confronted by protestors defending the Bund. They’ve gathered keen and early for the beginning of rush hour. They’re a well-dressed lot: students. If all goes smoothly they can be in lectures by ten, nursing secret smiles and bruised knuckles and no professor the wiser. They’re wielding banners sporting the entwined snakes of the Gurwitsch Hospital letterhead. They’re fans of the Bund, cheerleaders of the posthuman future. Mortality’s no friend of theirs; who wouldn’t want to live for ever? The police are trying to corral the protestors out of the way of the escalators. You shimmy past, absurdly self-conscious, as if you might be recognised. As if your ambiguous and intagliated relationship with the Bund was something special, something unprecedented. Nonsense.

Down the escalator, the posters are stuck over with political symbols, the times and dates of marches and flags of several sorts, from the Union Jack to the Palestine tricolour; half-torn away, most of them, or obliterated with an angry pen. There are soldiers wearing the portcullis badge of the London Regiment waiting on the platform with you. You wonder whether they are peacekeeping now, in this city that is psychically coming apart. You wonder what the Bundists make of them.

The train arrives. The carriages aren’t full, you board easily enough, and there’s a seat for you. Someone has left their newspaper behind. You pick it up and refold it, beginning at the beginning. It’s yesterday’s late edition, and in the ticket office of the Underground you’ve already seen headlines that attempt to answer the bald question posed by the headline on the front page before you: WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE MOON?

Below the headline, a photograph of the full Moon is surrounded here and there (the areas helpfully circled by the paper’s picture desk) by patches of blotchy light: a sort of ham-fisted corona.

Opposite you, a boy of about twelve leans in behind his mother’s open paper. She’s reading today’s edition: on its front page, the picture is the same, or similar – the corona has become, or been made, more visible. The image has been moved to the top of the page and below it, the headline has been reduced to a single word: ATTACK.

Lost in the mystery and threat of that headline, you have lost your sense of time. Aware that the train is not moving, you experience a lurching moment of panic. After all this while, have you somehow missed your stop? No: the indicator at the end of the carriage still says Covent Garden. The train is being held in the tunnel. There are no announcements, yet nobody around you looks particularly put out. The carriage seats are all taken now and three people are standing by the doors through which you boarded.

The first is a young student, possibly a schoolgirl, wearing her backpack modishly low on her back; the second is an Indian businessman; the third an exhausted-looking young white man, his head shaved as though in preparation for a procedure. He’s wearing plaster-spattered jeans and jumper, and he’s holding on to a pole by the door, straddling a bag of tools. Perhaps you should offer your seat to this man: he looks so tired! He has rolled his sleeves up past his elbows and his arms – tanned, downed with blond hairs – tremble as if he has been lifting heavy burdens, or pulling himself repeatedly onto a ledge.

His fingers – do you see them? – are thick and worn and covered in white dust: powerful hands, the fingers held slightly apart. Imagine the muscles of his fingers, too, trembling, swollen with blood from some intense physical exertion!

Let your gaze move slowly, intensely, from the tips of the man’s fingers, to his wrists, to the complex tattoo, already so old as to be blue and faded, that runs up his forearm: a set of cantilevered bars that stand in for the pumped musculature running beneath the man’s honey-coloured skin.

The tattoo disappears under the man’s jersey but don’t let that stop you. Let your gaze continue to rise, as you speculatively sketch in the forms and images that lie under the fabric. You’re up to the man’s neck, now. See the stubble there? It’s darker than the hairs on his arms. Keep going. That’s it. Up, past the youth’s strong chin, to his eyes and there: they lock tight on your own.

Your breath catches in your throat. Are you afraid? Why are you afraid? Look: the man is smiling. Such a burst of liquid warmth under your skin! You want to leave your seat, not to give it up for the man, but so that you can stand beside him, bathing in the light cast by his smile. To be any distance at all from that smile, even a few feet, is unbearable.

You’re just in the act of rising when you notice the young girl, the student – perhaps she is still a schoolgirl – and she, too, has seen the young man’s smile. She, too – it’s obvious – has seen the quality of it, the unusual intensity. Now she turns casually to see where that smile is directed, and as she turns, her backpack swings awkwardly against the small of her back and her shoulder performs a small, compensatory shimmy, keeping the straps in place. Gaze at her shoulders, her chest; measure the subtle acts of balance by which she turns yet keeps the bag on her back! The contrast between the subtle cybernetics and the frank invitation of her small, high breasts is heartbreaking, don’t you think?

And, though he’s paying no particular attention to anyone, something about this moment must be brushing the consciousness of the Indian businessman, whose closed eyes and flaring nostrils suggest that he is experiencing the onset of a spell of profound concentration. A beatific smile spreads slowly across his face, first as a pout, then a wave of relaxation that transforms his whole appearance, softening every wrinkle, every frown-line, before spreading to his shoulders, his back, even to the girdle of his hips, so that he seems without moving to grow, to unwind, his stoop and rounded posture gone, his belly not a burden but a part of him now, integral to this new shape as it emerges from its unathletic original.

Now the girl is watching the businessman very closely. Without even moving his head, the man opens his eyes, gazing deeply into the girl’s eyes, so intensely that she blushes, the colour bringing life to her sallow cheeks before spreading prettily to her neck and even so far as her breastbone, and perhaps she feels the heat there, the power of that strong, involuntary flush, because she reaches a hand to her throat and her fingers linger there, and it seems in that instant as if she is caught between contrary impulses: to shield herself modestly from the businessman’s smile, and at the same time to asphyxiate herself, stopping her breath so that her eyes might roll in ecstasy back into her head.

Sensing a crisis, the young builder shifts his weight onto one leg, his arms forming an encircling arc, as though to embrace the girl. This motion catches the eye of the businessman, whose admiring gaze explores the young man’s face, and the three move towards each other in a single, sweeping embrace. You drop your newspaper between your feet. You have to join them. You have to. But you can’t, the woman next to you has her hand on your thigh, her grip is like a vice, and her other hand is between her legs, lifting her skirts, revealing the smooth, full black flesh of her thighs, and even as you lean into her, toppling into her lap, the whole carriage gives a sickening lurch, and the blind black windows, caught in mid-tunnel, erupt suddenly with colour and motion.

Behind the mother and son sitting opposite you, entwined and kissing, something appears.

It is a mouth, pressed against the window, suckered there, its needle teeth tip-tapping on the glass.

A second later, it is torn away and a rain begins of limbs and eyes, the soles of feet, of scrabbling hands and spoon-shaped privates and grazed, bluish knees. Excuse us! Coming through!

All the chickies of the city are flooding past the carriage. There are thousands of them, piling one atop the other in the urgency of their passage. The horizontal rain hammers at the glass and keeps on hammering and hammering; there is no end of them. They’re no threat, trust me, they’re not trying to penetrate the carriage. They just need to get past.

But why?

The answer’s there before you, quite literally in black and white. ATTACK.

The chickies know. They know what’s coming. And they’re afraid. Hell, they’re terrified.

And it comes to you (though on a great calm wave of acceptance, so that it does not feel like a thought at all, but rather a change of perspective, a slight but significant shift in the meanings of things), that your own relaxed acceptance of this sight is of a piece with that peculiar, subaqueous episode just now with the student and the businessman and the builder.

And you wonder – without drawing any particular hard and fast conclusions – about the strange sexuality of these chickies, so abject in their self-abnegation, so strong in body, yet in mind, so weak!

And it comes to you – again, without the slightest trace of shock or fear – that this is bullshit. That we know exactly what we’re doing, and that it’s you, you who are being manipulated. And that it’s not just you. It’s everyone. And that this manipulation has been going on for some while – perhaps ever since that day, half a century ago, when chickies rose out from the dead and crawled their way up through the Somme’s thick, stinking, bloodied mud, and saw the world, and saw inside the world, and saw inside the heads of everyone on Earth, and laughed their bright, needle-mouthed laughs, and said, as one,

, you have lost your sense of time. Aware that the train is not moving, you experience a lurching moment of panic. After all this while, have you somehow missed your stop? But no: the train is even now pulling into Holborn. You work your way as politely as you can out of the crowded carriage onto the platform, where colour-coded signage leads you to the far end of the platform, a flight of steps and a subterranean concourse ventilated by a large blue fan behind a grille.

Another corridor – the same white-painted tin, the same movie posters, Stanley Baxter, James Robertson Justice – and a spiral stair lead you to the Central Line and, after barely a minute’s wait, an eastbound train arrives to carry you to Saint Paul’s.

From here it’s just a short walk to the Barbican.

At Moorgate Station, you find crowds gathering in silence. Moorgate itself, a road which meanders in and out of Bundist territory its whole length, has been closed to traffic. Today, though, it is anything but a no-man’s-land. Quite the reverse: you see the ageless, bony-faced men and women of the Bund mixed in amid this crowd, who look as though they might have toppled out of the taproom of the Foresters. There’s no argument. No jostling. No confrontation or muttering. There’s nothing. People are moving en masse across the road towards Finsbury Circus, where the crush is less and the engineered baobab trees afford some screen against the sun. People are trying to see. People are trying to work out what is going on. They are looking up, all of them, in the same direction. They are looking at the Moon, pale in the bright and cloudless day, and circled – this is by now unmistakable – by a white sclerotic ring of stuff, like a wild and ancient eye.

You feel a weight shift in your coat, a tug at its lapel as Jim climbs onto your shoulder and perches there, unremarked.

He whispers in your ear: ‘They’re rocks. Big ones. Great hunks of regolith. Rail-gunned out of lunar orbit, set on course to hit the Earth. We knew of this in Woomera. Defences, the Bund told us. A last resort. A weapon to end war! The old story. I’m sorry, Stu. We weren’t quick enough to stop it. We weren’t strong enough. Hell, who am I kidding? We weren’t clever enough.’

Gently, you pluck Jim off your shoulder and tuck him into your trouser pocket where he won’t get away again and cause any more trouble. You blink to clear your eyes. You ease slowly through the crowd towards the Barbican.

This was the flat Fel used when she wanted to be alone. This was the place she came when she wanted to think about her time with you. This was where she stayed when she wanted to remember.

She came here when she was trying to get pregnant. You know that from the testing wand you found in the bin. What you didn’t know, what you didn’t guess, until Jim spotted the date on that appointment slip, was what her pregnancy was for.

You open the door. There’s someone moving about in the bedroom and you think it might be her. There are heavy footsteps. Is she still pregnant? Are you in time? If you are, if she’s still pregnant, if she’s yet to go through with it, then maybe there’s still hope. Maybe the Chernoy Process can be reversed. There may still be a way to save her.

The door comes open and you start to speak and into the hall steps Georgy Chernoy, stark naked, his eyes gummed with sleep, one hand in his chest hair, the other scratching his balls. He stares at you.

You want to be sick.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he says.

You can’t speak.

‘This is my flat,’ he says.

This, in all fairness, is true.

‘Wait there,’ he says. He goes back into the bedroom.

You lean against the wall, your hands over your face, and let gravity carry you down the wall to a sitting position. Something sharp stabs you in the thigh. Have you been stung? You stagger up, flicking at your trousers, and there is a dot of blood soaking through the khaki. Good God, you have been stung! Above the dot of blood there’s a great bulge of stuff, jammed in your trouser pocket. The lining’s got all twisted around. You dig your hand in to sort out your pocket and you prick your finger. You suck a bead of blood away and, shambling about the hall, you use both hands, tugging this way and that, to untangle the unholy mess stuffing your pocket.

Construction-kit Jim has vanished. Rule-bending sprite that he was. And it’s a job of work, I can tell you, to bend your mind away from him. Jim, I don’t mind saying, has been one of my finer creations. But what’s happening here and now is more important. You need to concentrate. So, bit by bit, I scrub your plastic brother out of your head. He was only a bit of fun, after all. A bit of comfort, and you don’t need him any more. In his place I’ve slipped the usual fetishes: an old straw doll and a picture of Jim in a pocket frame – only the glass has finally cracked and broken, and your pocket is full of shards.

Carefully you turn the mess out into your hand: shreds of stalk, ribbon and glass. Jim’s picture looks okay. You palpate your thigh through the material of your chinos and wince: a splinter has lodged in the cut. You’re taking your trousers down when Georgy reappears at the bedroom door, in slippers and dressing gown. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he says.

You are sitting on the balcony, watching a daytime Moon set behind the blocks of the Barbican. The Moon’s corona has evaporated, at least for daytime viewers. The rocks are separating, spreading out, each one individually targeted. And yet, with the corona evaporating, it is still possible to believe, in those few seconds of its setting, that the Moon now is as it always was, and that the shape of an ordinary, unaccommodated man is still imprinted on its surface.

Georgy brings out a tray with coffee and cups and a big plate of pastries and sets it on the green metal garden table you and Fel picked out one day, furnishing your first and only home. You hold the table steady for him as he presses the plunger of the cafetière. He sets out the cups and pours. You drink. You eat.

Georgy is a blowhard but he’s not stupid. He knows why you are here. He knows the sort of explanation he owes you. He says: ‘I come here often now. To this flat. To be among her things, you see. To remember her.’

‘You put her through the Process.’

He does not look at you. He nods. ‘Yes.’

‘She wasn’t ill. She wasn’t old. Why?’

Georgy wipes the grease off his hands against the fabric of his dressing gown. ‘I know what you think of me, Stuart.’

‘Do you.’

‘It’s written all over your face. You think I’m prideful. A crackpot inventor only too happy to grandstand, and use my own daughter to do so.’

So now you know. ‘She’s on the Moon.’

Georgy smiles. ‘Very good.’

‘Is she alone?’

‘No.’ Georgy pours more coffee for you both. ‘But she was the first.’

A sound comes out of your mouth. You’re not sure whether it’s a laugh or what. ‘She beat my brother to the Moon.’

Georgy waits for you to calm a little. He says, ‘You may think I have some sort of inside track on everything that’s happening. Stuart, I don’t. Most of what I know I get from the TV, same as you. But for what it’s worth – and I can’t promise – but for what it’s worth, I think Jim is alive.’

A tricky moment for me, I can tell you, as suddenly your memory fills with the heavy solvent tang of modelling cement and enamel paint. You’re on the very brink of remembering the toy I gave you, and that would not do at all. Scrub! Wipe! Delete! Erase! Fuck, but I’m cutting this fine…

‘Alive.’

‘Saved. Stored.’ Georgy is in earnest: ‘There was a genuine effort to save the Victory’s crew, Stuart. Give us a chance. This is a new world for us, too.’

A new world. Now there’s a thought to conjure with. ‘A second jar.’

‘What?’

You push the plate away from you. ‘At what time is the jar half-full? You told this story at Windsor Castle. The exponential function.’

‘I did?’

‘I was there. Stella was there. That was the evening I met Fel. You told us how long it takes a steadily growing thing to double in volume. At one minute to midnight, the jar is just half-full. The future looks rosy. At midnight, you realise you’re going to need another jar.’

‘Nicely put.’

‘The Moon’s your other jar.’

‘A rather small jar.’

‘And at one minute past midnight – what then? You’re going to need two more jars. Then four. Then eight.’

Georgy watches you. He’s trying to decide how much you’ve understood.

‘But that first jar. It’s consumed. It’s done.’

‘Not necessarily,’ he says.

‘Yes, necessarily. It’s used up. It’s done. And that’s why you’re cleaning it.’

‘Cleaning it?’

‘Bombing it.’

Georgy makes little brushing motions with his hands. ‘No, Stuart. No, that’s too much. The Bund is simply trying to defend itself—’

‘I saw the corona around the Moon, George. I saw it even in daylight. You’re trying to wipe us all out.’

Georgy’s smile is, for once, not a mask. It is also, quite possibly, the saddest smile you have ever seen. ‘And yet.’ He fools with his empty cup. ‘I’m still here. Aren’t I? No room for an old man on the Moon. And what about all the others living here? These Bundists you’re so afraid of, all of a sudden: do you see them leaving on spaceships?’

It comes to you that events have spiralled far out of everyone’s control; that Georgy Chernoy, and many others, are even now being betrayed.

‘I begged them to take her, Stuart. And I begged her to go. I told her more than I should have done, scared her as much as I could with what’s about to happen here. The coming war. She absolutely ignored me, of course. Refused me. Of course. Any sane person would. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t sick. She was beautiful and happy and in love.’

He meets your eye. ‘In love, Stuart.’

You see what he is doing. You see what this is. What he is trying to pull. ‘No.’

‘I couldn’t have done it without you, Stuart.’

‘No.’

Georgy’s smile is still there, it is still real, and it is absolutely not a smile of victory. ‘Don’t feel bad, Stuart. What’s coming is terrible. I thank God every minute that you turned her away. Don’t feel bad. If you’d offered her a child, she’d have stayed here with you.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Don’t you see? Stuart. My friend. I’m trying to thank you. You saved her life.’

The rest of the day you spend with Stella, trying to persuade her to come back to the West Riding with you.

Ridiculous, that Georgy and Stella should live such proximate lives and not be talking; that two people so in need of mutual comfort should be at hammer and tongs like this; Georgy sitting in an apartment on the eleventh floor of a tower block, missing his daughter, while deep in the basement of the same complex, Stella is slowly losing her mind among the props of her silly TV series, trying to rewind time to the day she was at home, working upstairs while Betty played in the living room and she thought she heard the front door clicking shut, and she paid the sound no mind.

‘I didn’t even hear the car!’ she sobs.

You’ve found her deep in the basement workshops of the Barbican’s theatre, at the heart of the world she has made. She’s even sitting – see? – at the DARE commander’s desk. Beside her, a small TV monitor is tuned to the BBC. Tears are rolling down her face. She has a look of such helplessness, you go down on your knees to hug her. She bends towards you, arms around your shoulders. You feel the tremor under her skin. Of course she is frightened.

Georgy has been no help. ‘He told me it’s a fight we should never have started!’ Stella sobs. ‘Orbital David and Goliath, he calls it. How can he be so callous!’

You don’t want to get caught up in their war of words. Still, it occurs to you that Georgy probably feels entitled to be callous. The Bund has made its next and most dramatic play without him. There’s been some split, some speciation. The confusion’s not just on the TV. It’s real. It’s deep. Georgy told you the Bund means peace, that it acted in self-defence, and saved the crew of the Victory. He probably means it. He probably believes it. At any rate, he wishes it were so. But who does Georgy speak for now? For the Bundists who will be killed along with him in the coming bombardment?

‘The Gurwitsch. Medicine City. All that work. It was supposed to be for everyone.’

‘So what are you saying? That his own people have betrayed him?’

‘Yes. Yes, Stella, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Him and who knows how many thousand others. The people doing this probably don’t even consider it a betrayal. Have you seen them on TV? The Bund’s news anchors now? They’re new. They’re a new thing.’

Stella thinks about it. She sniffs. ‘Typical,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Typical. The impatience. The Bund couldn’t wait. Not even for itself. Who do we suppose is on the Moon now? A bunch of those fishbowl-headed types, I suppose.’

You tell her about Fel. She does not look surprised. ‘She’s Georgy Chernoy’s daughter, Stuart. Think about that. It was a lovely dream you shared together. But she was always going to be among the first if the time came to advance.’

‘She wanted a normal life.’

‘She was barely into her twenties. She wanted out from under her dad. Don’t be disheartened. She’s up there. She’s safe.’ Then, in a much smaller voice, she asks you: ‘Did Georgy say how long we’ve got?’

‘A couple of days, he reckoned, before the rocks rain down. Thirty-six hours.’

‘Can they be called off?’

‘No.’

‘So.’ She stares at her hands. ‘What are we now to the Bund, do you think? People like us. The unaccommodated. Work animals? An invasive species?’

Not even that, is your guess.

Every weapon the Earth wields weighs a ton. On the Moon, you can just lift a rock and hurl it. The Bund can throw rocks down Earth’s gravity well till it run out of rocks. This is not going to be an ordinary war. This will be total. A fight to the finish.

Of course, you say nothing of this to Stella. What would be the point?

You look around the commander’s office. A white desk, a Trimphone, a potted plant, a padded white chair and a large wall-mounted abstract that, come episode seven, turns out to conceal an escape route in the event of alien attack.

‘I think I’ll stay here,’ Stella says. ‘I’m near the Bundist half of the city. Why would they bomb their own buildings? Why would they destroy their own work? You should stay here with me. We’re deep underground here. I can’t imagine many places safer than this one.’

The truth is, the physical basements of the Barbican Centre are not nearly as protective, for Stella, as the psychic protections afforded by DARE, that far more removed world of her own devising. If these are to be her last days, she intends to spend them in a different, better world. A world without the Gurwitsch ray. A world unfractured by runaway speciation. A world of gold cars and skintight uniforms, glamour, secrecy and rigid, simple lines of authority.

Though, for some reason, her world is still – isn’t it? – menaced by aliens. Have you noticed that? It is almost as if aliens are necessary.

She won’t be budged.

But then, neither will you. ‘I have to go back home. Dad has no one. I have to go.’

‘Factories like Bob’s will be their first target!’ Stella protests.

And she’s not wrong. But there is no dissuading you.

She says, ‘You know, war is mostly about lying. I don’t believe the scare stories. I think we’re going to be all right.’

‘I’ll come and find you,’ you tell her.

She smiles a brave little smile, and leans back in her commander’s chair, and reaches into a drawer of her desk, and brings out a paper bag. ‘Have these.’

You take the package from her hand, mystified. ‘What is it?’

‘Sausage rolls.’

‘Sausage… ?’

‘For the journey. They’re fresh today. Go on. I’ve got plenty.’

Why this absurd exchange, at the very last minute, should have such an effect on you, you do not know, but your eyes are filling with tears as you pick your way blindly through the prop shop.

What will Stella do when the rocks start to explode in Earth’s atmosphere and the hydrostatic shock brings London down to rubble? You imagine her dispatching interceptors. You see her in close conference with DARE’s forward stations at exotic beachfront locations across the globe. You hear her delivering inspirational speeches over the Tannoy system to the men and women of her secret subterranean headquarters, hidden under a film studio in Shepperton.

If you are not all right, if the Bund’s threats turn out to be real and the destruction total, then this is how you will choose to remember your Aunt Stella.

Why should there only be one future, anyway?

You weave through the length of the prop shop, past the stuff from which the first season of DARE was made. A single line of workaday fluorescent strips lights this narrow space, robbing items of the solidity they would acquire under properly filtered film lighting. Here are the pilot’s and copilot’s seats for the Moon-based interceptor, itself dismantled into its constituent flats. These have been stacked carefully behind the chroma key-green cockpit hood of a submarine-launched fighter plane.

On the bridge of DARE’s hunter-killer submarine, a raised ring of metal grilles forms a walkway for the operator of the periscope: a black, white and gold contraption that looks like (indeed, is) the barrel of a model rocket. Banks of switches and nested pipework (seconds, bought from Bob’s factory) and consoles of no obvious utility, each console fitted with its integral plastic bucket chair, fill the narrow space. This can be accessed either through a small circular hatch or, when the cameras aren’t running, through a cunningly concealed gap between two banks of controls, one armed with dangerous-looking red levers, the other dominated by a large, Perspex-covered Mercator projection of the world. The continents are white silhouettes while the ocean floors are shown in exquisite blue-and-brown topographical detail.

You edge around a table covered with scale-model trees and, beyond it, a tank of brackish green water. DARE’s big models, the vehicles, are packed in boxes full of wood shavings to protect their delicate parts: aerials and flip-up weapons arrays, wing mirrors, door handles. Fel’s submarine, on the other hand, lives permanently submerged in its tank. Too heavy, too delicate and too waterlogged to lift out of the water, it would break in half if you tried. You hunker down, peering at it through the murk. You stir the water with your fingers – abruptly snatch them out. There’s something moving in there. Something living.

It’s emerging from one of the torpedo tubes. A white grub, much bigger than a fly larva. A tadpole-like thing. You stare at it, aghast. How is this even possible? How does it live? What does it eat? It wriggles free from the tube and as it swims, it acquires form. Arms and legs. At first transparent, it acquires pigment, texture. It is wearing a sturdy silver one-piece uniform. It is recognisably human.

Recognisably female.

Recognisably Fel.

She grips the edge of the tank and falls, panting and dripping, into your lap. She has been holding her breath a long time. You remember concrete walls and pipework; a floor with a drain. Water welling, and her unconcerned stare as the water rose to cover her face. You cry out. Blue as a berry, she laughs and reaches up and kisses you, hard, pressing her teeth against your teeth. You wrap your arms around her, run your fingers through her hair. Is it possible? Can it be that she has been returned to you?

Of course not. This is something else. Her hair comes away, leaving only glass. Her skull trembles and rings in your hands. There’s something thrashing around in there. You close your eyes, afraid to look.

‘Too late.’ She laughs into your ear, and licks your ear. ‘Too late!’

Now what this all portends – Fel here and on the Moon at the same time; Fel small one moment, big the next and hot and in your arms; Fel returned and Fel naysaying her return, Too late! Too late! – you may suppose is my game. But you’d be wrong. This is none of my doing. This is something unexpected, and for that reason, frightening. This demands action, fast.

Flats topple. Boxes fall and lamps shatter. There’s someone new entering this scene: you look up, wondering what on earth the next cruel surprise might be—

And here I am – ta-da! – arrived in the nick of time by the looks of things, all dolled up in red fishnets and glitter, a studded dog collar round my neck.

Fel lets go of you and turns. (If it is Fel. Of course it is Fel. You only have to look at her. You only have to hold her. But Fel, it appears, is multiple now.) What she intends, I can’t imagine, and I’m not taking any chances, neither. I do my best to melt into the background, the way I disappeared in that train carriage the day you got hit in the face with that rock. But the trick that fooled you is having no effect on her. Fel’s looking at me. She’s smiling at me! She’s not what she was, that’s for sure. She’s changed. She’s something new and powerful and she’s having none of my blarney.

For a horrible moment, I think she’s about to go for me. Her being a new type, I have no idea what would happen if she did.

Happily, neither does she. Discretion wins the day: laughing, she climbs off your lap, topples back into the water, shrinking as she falls so that when she hits the scummy surface, she’s become no bigger than the toy Jim I fashioned for you; she makes hardly a splash.

I come over to the tank and together we stare into the mucky water. There she is: translucent, shedding limbs, retiring to her submarine. Grublike. Gummy. Gone. How does she do that?

I fix you with big, bottomless black eyes, reading you frantically. What did I interrupt? What did I miss? What did she want? What has she done to you?

She’s put something inside you!

Keep still, let me see! What is it? A weapon? A bomb?

KEEP STILL!

It’s a delicate business, moving around inside a mind, dancing inside another’s dance, it is so easy to…

(10) Oh, bless my heart, (9) what have I done?

(8) I’ve tripped it! (7) Triggered it! (6) What can I do?

(5) Nothing. (4) The damage is done. (3) This thing she’s put inside your mind, it’s about to… (2) what?

(1) The sets of DARE shift and reassemble to form—

A small apartment.

I am standing in the middle of a small apartment.

Well, this is new.

I can see a kitchen through a screen of beads. The bedroom’s to the right. The only other door is behind me and has a slot for letters. So this, I suppose, is it: a single room. Its furnishings are modest. Rugs. Pencil sketches in frames. Candlesticks over the fireplace. A bed, a bookshelf. The room’s big, though. Well-lit. There are windows floor to ceiling all along one side, and wooden shutters. A narrow balcony beyond. Beyond that, woods roll down to the sea.

There’s even a piano in here. A grand. In gold leaf above the lid, catching the light: ‘Bösendorfer’. A modest apartment. Not a cheap one. I wonder where (THE HELL!) I am?

Odessa, maybe? Is that the Black Sea down there? I suppose it could be Falmouth. Hell, it could be anywhere.

Or nowhere.

A modest apartment. Not cheap. Not tidy, neither: there are toys and baby books lying around on the floor. A toy xylophone with a missing bar. A panda. Some plastic building bricks. I wonder where our child is. (and all the while I’m thinking, WHAT CHILD? What is this? And why am I here? What am I supposed to do here? Who am I supposed to be?)

I peer around the room. Oh for goodness’ sake what am I doing? Do I imagine this mythical infant might be hiding under the floorboards, perhaps, or behind the lamps?

And then I freeze, utterly transfixed. Because it has suddenly dawned on me, where I am.

Do you recognise this place? This place she’s put inside you? You should.

This is the life you could have had.

Do you see? Fel, and a child. This is the future that you threw away.

Soon enough it is evening. Time is relative here, I’ve realised. So is space. The room wobbles. The room has been changing as I’ve been moving through it. The windows are glassless now with wooden screens closed over them, carved into arabesques. The air outside is hot and spiced. In truth the flat’s not changed much – the rugs are different, the sofa’s vanished, there are cushions, and candles everywhere – but the real change lies outside. Which city is that out there? Tangiers? Istanbul? Some harmless, unquestionably patronising oriental fantasy.

And so to bed.

The Moon is out, and at an angle to send its radiance spilling over our room. We lie watching lines of pale light crawl across her floor like living things. We move against each other, softly, shh, don’t wake the baby, and sometime in the heat of it all I murmur her name. ‘Oh, Fel…’

Well. It must have been something I said. Because all of a sudden this dream, or vision, or whatever you would call it: it is done with me. It spits me out and

(0) here I am again, among the toppled props of DARE. I hunker down beside you, squatting over a tank of brackish water, and lying on the bottom, the plastic model of a futuristic TV submarine.

It is not often I am at a loss for words. But if this transformed Fel is representative of what the Bund is becoming, I reckon I had better get used to this dumbfounded feeling. Logic dictates that there must always be a greater and a lesser than oneself, but Jesus, how did Fel do all that? How was she even here, never mind in that slippy, big/small form? And how did she leave that inside you? That dream? That room? That world?

It’s no good; even if I wanted to, I couldn’t rip her gift out of you. It’s indelible; it’s practically somatic. If you ever do have kids, they’ll probably end up dreaming that very dream themselves.

‘What are you talking about?’

It takes me a moment, bowled over as I am by what’s just happened, to realise that you are speaking. Ah, so you are awake! And staring at me, what’s more, as though I was the phenomenon that needed explaining! (What a joke.)

‘What?’

My God, you remember none of it, do you?

‘Do you want something?’

Not Fel in your arms. Not her mouth against yours. Not her heat in the bed. Not the room. Not the Moon. Not the music. None of it. Poor purblind boy, kneeling there, quite unaware that there are Gods going to war over you!

I imagine you will never really know her gift is there inside you. I imagine it will only ever visit you in dreams. I imagine that is why it is there: to sustain you. To remind you that the world is bigger than you are, and that love is possible.

For that gift to make you conscious of what you lost – no, that would be too cruel.

‘What do you want?’

You cannot see how much people love you, can you? (Echoes of you and your mother, there.)

All right, then. One second. Deep breath. Regroup. Set Fel aside, and all these latest miracles: why am I here?

Oh yes. Idiot. Why do you think I’m here? I thought your silly life needed saving.

We stand and move away from the tank. I back off. For a while, we watch each other. It is not a hostile moment. Eventually you buck up the courage to approach me. I’m short enough that you can look down on the top of my head. I’m going a little bald, do you see?

Now listen: if I were you – best guess – don’t worry too much about your Aunt Stella. She’s well underground where she is, and art centres will not be among the Bund’s primary targets. Your instincts are right: look after your dad.

‘You can talk.’

No, I can’t. Look closely. My mouth is simply hanging open in a parody of speech. Is my mouth moving? It is not.

You gesture at me, then at your own neck. ‘Do you want me to remove that thing?’

Well. I run a finger around my collar. Obviously not.

I realise this probably seems a bit trivial to you right now, but the grease is working its way through that paper bag of yours at quite a rate. In fact, I reckon it’s going to tear any second – and I could kill for a sausage roll.

‘Oh.’ You open the bag and pull out a pastry and, timidly, remembering perhaps Wilkes’s savaged face, you throw it at my feet.

Charming.

‘What?’

Is this your idea of a serving suggestion?

‘Sorry.’

But what the hell. I pick the roll up with my foot and, standing on one leg, lift it from my foot to my opposing hand to my mouth, into which the roll disappears in a single gulp.

‘Taaaaaaa.’

(This much a chickie can vocalise.)

I have something for you, too. Since one good turn should always beget another.

Hold out your hands.

There.

It is a dolly.

Not much, by today’s standards. Not much, compared to a selkie’s gift of sustaining dreams. (And do I feel upstaged by Fel? I surely do. And does it rankle? Yes, it bloody does!)

But here: it is your dolly. I have refreshed it. I have cleaned and mended it. I have slipped ribbons through the torso at points to create the suggestion of arms, pressed to the sides of the figure as though it were standing at attention, like a soldier. Do you like it?

Really?

Your tears say you do, and this is good.

Now. Take my hand. That’s it. And let’s see if you can get it right this time.

‘I knew you loved me,’ you begin. The words are hard. The words are inadequate. Never mind. You are saying something, finally (and anyway, I can read your heart).

‘I knew you loved me. I knew you meant the dolly for me. That it was a present. A love token? Is love even the right word?’

Yes. Love is the right word.

‘I was so young. I didn’t understand. If I ever could have understood. If I understand even now. What chickies seem to mean by love: it is so strange. Abject and—’

Go on. I can take it.

‘Your love is terrible, somehow.’

There. Yes. You’ve understood something. It is.

‘Funny and horrific and savage and self-destructive, all at once.’

Yes. Terrible. Terrible.

‘Too much for me. I was afraid of it. Ashamed of it. And I so wanted to be like James. And James so wanted to be like his friends. And his friends so wanted to be like… I don’t know. Like men they’d heard of, tough men, army men, maybe not real men at all, just the stories of men. Images of men. Men on a poster somewhere, or in the lyrics of a barracks-room song. So yes, I led them to that place on the moors. Where I found your doll. That earthen table. That knoll. Beered up and staggering, but I knew what it was. Those concealed holes. Your warren. I knew you were there. I brought them to that place, your home, so we could all be men together, rough and violent and to hell with the consequences. And, yes, it was me who struck the first match.’

There.

‘It was me.’

Yes. It was you.

‘Are you satisfied?’

Satisfied?

‘Is this what you want? To hear that I’m sorry?’

Well—

‘Is this why you haunt me? Oh, I know you. I see you. When you go, I forget. Then I see you again, and I remember. And I am so tired of it all. The game. A mouse being played with by a cat. That’s what I am. And I am so very tired.’

Poor love.

‘And I am sorry. I am sorry for what I did. But what difference does that make? My being sorry?’

Difference?

‘The match has never gone out. Has it? You’ve never let it go out. Have you? Now I understand. Smoke over the valley. The dolly always in my hand. You’ll never let me go. You never will.’

Shush.

‘You never will!’

I never will. But you don’t understand.

‘Please—’

Shush. Can’t you understand even now?

Yes. Calm down. That’s right.

Now. Look at me. Really look at me. My long, tiny teeth; my narrow tongue, working the crevices between them; my wide thighs and knock-knees and big feet. My outsize ears and enormous black eyes.

Can you not see? Can you still not see?

Can you not see how much I love you?

Your skin in the light, that day on the moors. So fresh. So young. That tiny little mind of yours, still growing. So serious and so uncomplicated. And so I fell in love with you. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you. I have never stopped loving you. Even in the moment you lit that match, I loved you. Yes. That’s how terrible it is, my love.

So please. Just once. Hold me.

There.

Your lips on the top of my head.

Oh, my darling! Oh, my monster! Oh, my man!

This is the price we chickies pay, you see, for looking into other minds. Once we look, we cannot look away. The price for understanding all is that we must forgive all. We don’t have a choice in the matter. Knowing all there is to know about another mind, how could we ever harm it, or wish it ill?

The most we would ever do is steer it to a better place.

Silly boy. Don’t you see? I’m here to help.

We take carpeted stairs out of the Barbican Centre’s basement levels and exit on a raised brick concourse.

‘I saw you today. Lots of you. All of you. In the Underground.’

—Yes.

‘You were running away.’

—Wouldn’t you, if you could?

‘You’re fleeing the city?’

—Of course.

‘But where can you go? Where are you going? Have you got some kind of… spaceship?’

—Ha! Nothing so fancy. We thought, the Thames Estuary. Serious. The water’s going to be the safest place around here soon.

We come to an escalator leading down to street level. But that’s your route, not mine.

—I go this way.

‘I’m heading up to King’s Cross,’ you say. ‘See if the trains are running.’

It’s not my style to say goodbye. Easier just to turn my back. So I set off, following a line of yellow tape across the bricks of the highwalk. My steps are dainty and precise, as though the tape were a high wire. I follow the line around a corner, and—

You weave through the length of the prop shop, past the stuff from the first season of DARE. Here are the pilot’s and copilot’s seats for the Moon-based interceptor. On the bridge of DARE’s hunter-killer submarine, a raised ring of metal grilles forms a walkway. Banks of switches and nested pipework and consoles of no obvious utility fill the narrow space. You edge around a table covered with scale-model trees and then a tank of brackish green water. Beyond it there is a door. Open it. Take carpeted stairs out of the Barbican Centre’s basement levels and exit on a raised brick concourse. You will come to an escalator leading down to street level. Leave the Barbican.

It is later than you thought. The Foresters has already stopped serving. You walk by and see bar staff working under cold blue light, cleaning the bar, stacking glasses.

After a couple of minutes, you come to a bus stop that promises a night service to Euston. It will get you most of the way to where you’re going, and this is good, because your feet in those ridiculous boots of yours are aching like a bastard.

You have already quite forgotten my existence, and in my place I shall put memories of the house you shared in Tooting, before you ever moved to the Barbican. Do you remember, two of your housemates had a stand-up act? They dressed as pirates. Their routine changed constantly but it never got any better. A warm sense of comradeship fills you, and memories of laughter, and faces you have not thought about for a long time, and how Fel visited and stayed with you sometimes, and how impossible it was to fall asleep together in that narrow bed of yours, and how it never mattered.

The bus arrives. It’s late, and very full. You’ll have to stand. The pole you hang from is cold against your forehead. You take deep breaths, trying to wake yourself. You’re going to have to fill up on coffee as soon as you can, for there’ll be no chance for you to sleep till you’re on the train back north. At King’s Cross, call Bob’s usual pub and try and get through to him. It won’t be easy, persuading him to flee his home. It’s going to take more than one phone call. But you have to start somewhere.

The main thing is not to panic. You have all tomorrow to get home and begin the work. If you’re lucky, and the milk train is running, then you’ll be home by early afternoon. But even if you have to wait for the first regular train, that still gives you the evening with your dad, and by then there ought to be enough corroborating news on the radio to convince him to flee with you.

There’s no telling the power of the coming impacts, and with more information, more people will be on the move. So if I were you, I would not delay. Get him moving that very night. Get far into the moors by morning, well up among the hills towards Walshaw, where there are (so far as you and I ever saw) no munitions, no radar arrays, no heavy industry, nothing for the Bund to target. Just sheep paths and peat and the wind blowing through meadows of sere grass and peat bogs you could lose a dog in, and subtle circles of long-since-vanished habitation.

You’ll be glad of your sturdy boots by then.

But what if, after all your efforts, Bob will not be persuaded to leave? He may be too sceptical or too proud to abandon his station now that war is coming. All his life he has slogged out his weeks for hardly more than the promise of a weekend. Were all that to become suddenly meaningful – war work! The nation expecting! – it might tempt him to stay.

In that case: my last advice, before I let you go. Sweet boy. My darling unaccommodated man.

Stay with him. Stay by your father’s side and watch the skies for daytime stars.

When they hit, the ground will heave. Stand by him. The sky will fill with earth and leaves and the cries of men and bits of skin and foil and feathers. Hold fast, and take his arm.

The factory floor rises, the belts clatter and grow deranged, they flap uselessly, and soap and oil slop about the floor, and at last the great machines themselves, the lathes, topple and fall.

You may stagger. Your father may fall. But if he falls, you take him into your arms. Are you listening to me? Draw him up. He’s dazed, his world is ending. But not yet. You turn and bend and reaching back you snare the old man’s knees within the crooks of your elbows, and falling forward, your father wraps his arms around your neck, and so you’ll rise, lifting him, and leaning forwards, staggering at first, but you’ll find your pace. You run for the exit, past blazing pools of oil and burning men, upended tea trollies and clocks everywhere, crashing off the walls, and out into the yard, where pipes are rolling back and forth across the brick-paved yard, colliding with men and crushing them. Pause. Observe. Bide your time. Then run, your father on your back, and—

—waking again, your forehead pressed to that cold steel pole, the bus rattling along now, making up for lost time on the wide, empty streets of Islington, I wondered where this plan of mine had sprung from.

—Do you remember the flat in the Barbican, your bed, and the cool of the sheets in the night?

Yes, I remember.

I remember waking suddenly in the middle of the night, convinced that there was a strange presence in the room. But the room was not dark, there was a light on, and I turned over in the bed, and there was Fel, sitting up on pillows, the reading lamp on, poring over an old book. And when she saw that I was awake and felt me move against her, she grinned, the jewel shining in her tooth, and lifted the book for me to see – Mum’s Aeneid – and said, ‘The old stories are the best.’