pausing to scrape at the earth suddenly with its front paws. Anna rapped her knuckles on the window. Something about the dog confused her. Rain poured down suddenly through the sunshine, the discarded pages sagged visibly under the onslaught as if made of a paper so cheap it would melt on contact with water. Anna rapped on the window again. At this the dog winced, stared back vaguely over its shoulder into the empty air. It shook itself vigorously — prismatic drops flew up — and ran off. The rain thickened and then tapered away and passed.
Out on the lawn, humidity wrapped about her face like a wet bag, Anna collected up as much of the book as she could and leafed through it. It was the novel the boy had recommended to her,
Aluminium foil — as brown and sticky-looking as if it had been used to cook a roast — clung in ragged strips to the inside of the nearest window. Peering anxiously between them, Anna made out the dining room. No improvements were ongoing there; nor was there much furniture or ornament. Two upright chairs. A gateleg table fifty years old. Green linoleum caught the dim light in ripples. On the table stood a pressed-tin box with a glass front, about eight inches by four, someone’s small prize brought back from Mexico during the cheap air-travel decades, in which was displayed the following peculiar diorama: an object the size and shape of a child’s skull, nestled on a bed of red lace like offcuts from cheap lingerie and set against a black background (scattered with sequins and meant, perhaps, to represent Night). Otherwise nothing, except the rolled-up carpet propped in the corner opposite the door. Though the telephone seemed close, Anna couldn’t see it. It continued to ring for a minute or two. Then came a loud, amplified click succeeded by the impure electronic silence of the open connection, and a clear voice that said:
‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’
At that the connection broke. A dark figure appeared in the internal doorway, and after two or three quietly bad-tempered attempts a wheelchair was pushed into the room. Its occupant had deteriorated since Anna last saw him getting into a cab in front of Carshalton station. One corner of his mouth was drawn up rigidly; his bald head, exhibiting the deep uniform tan of ten days on some abandoned Almerian beach, shone with ulcers. He entered sitting upright in the chair — ankles crossed and knees apart, one hand performing an unwittingly hieratic gesture at the level of his chest — but fell forward almost immediately against its restraining harness of broad nylon webbing. His head dropped slackly to the right — this brought into sharp relief the tendon at the side of his neck, and offered his left ear to the white cat on his shoulder, which, as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity, adjusted its balance; purred; licked inside the ear with precise delicate motions. All the time Anna had been in the house, he had been there too, slumped in some other empty room, his liver-coloured underlip drooping and one blue eye open in the heat. The harness, with its central quick-release mechanism, looked too robust for any forces the movement of a wheelchair might produce; while the seat itself had bulky, over-engineered qualities, like something in a now- obsolete experiment. She knew she should have recognised him all along. Perhaps she had. Had he recognised her? Impossible to tell. Underneath her amnesia the memory itself lay swaddled. It was the unthought known, always tucked carefully away, a self-deception under a self-deception. How could he have grown so old? The telephone began to ring again, the white cat jumped on to the table and walked about fiercely. There in the water light of the unreconstructed dining room, the Mexican box glimmered like tarnished silver: the dark figure behind the wheelchair reached over to pick it up.
That was enough to send Anna out of the garden, stumbling down the side passage, hurrying away from 121, The Oaks to the relative sanity of the suburban afternoon, all the rest of which she spent wandering confusedly about, up one long street and down the next, heat ringing around her from cracked paving, until she emerged blinking and puzzled, hard by Carshalton Ponds. The High Street lay uneasily under the sun, full of excavations — shallow, affectless scoops, the product of underpowered machinery and half-hearted plans, fenced off behind a long maze of red and white barriers, which, like the cars in the street, resembled plastic toys pumped up to appeal to some infantile aesthetic.
A room the colour of a headache, she thought. And why had the window once been covered with roasting foil?
Her journey home was slow. The train — as poorly maintained as any public machinery since the serial recessions of the 2010s — failed repeatedly, a minute here, two minutes there; then twenty minutes at a station somewhere near Streatham, during which period, a boy and a girl of college age, who had been kissing energetically since they got on, played a complicated little game at the open carriage door. He stood on the platform, while she leaned out towards him from the train. He kept saying: ‘Well, tara, I’ll see you back there.’ She would wait for him to go, then — when he remained standing there on the platform five feet away grinning at her — laugh and say, ‘That’s what you think, is it?’ Then they would both laugh, the boy would half turn away, and they would start again.
‘I’ll see you back there. We’ll decide where to put it then, it’ll be fun.’
‘It won’t go in the corner whatever you say.’
‘I’m off now, anyway.’
‘I bet you are.’
Suddenly the doors began to close. ‘Tara then,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll see you back there.’
‘Tara,’ the girl said, turning away. At the last minute she squeezed between the doors, struggled off the train and threw her arms round him. They took a few stumbling paces along the platform towards the exit, laughing and bumping hips and wrestling at one another’s shoulders. The girl made a fist and scrubbed at the boy’s scalp with it. ‘Hey!’ he said.
By the time Anna got back it was almost dark. Craneflies tumbled into the windows, stumbling and crawling stupidly about the glass, pinned there by the papery force of their own wings. The cat was out. Anna filled his bowl with tuna surprise, and put two goat’s cheese and spinach tartlets in the oven for herself. Marnie rang while they were heating up. ‘What a day!’ she told Anna. ‘Work was just appalling.’ Morning traffic had made her an hour late, she said. ‘The whole of Clerkenwell was at a standstill.’
‘Darling,’ Anna said, ‘it’s been at a standstill for twenty years.’
Looking for something equivalent to offer, she told Marnie about the lovers on the train. ‘After they’d gone,’ she finished, ‘I turned to look at the other passengers, and I was the only one smiling.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I felt like a fool,’ Anna replied, without a moment’s thought.
‘Still,’ Marnie said: ‘Romantic.’ Then she said that she had a hospital appointment the next morning. ‘It’s just a scan,’ she said. ‘But I wondered if you’d come with me.’
‘Of course I will!’ Anna said, astonished.
‘It’s nothing, I expect,’ Marnie said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
One in the morning: unable to sleep, Anna switched on the 24 hour news, hoping, though she would not have admitted it to herself, for some indication that Michael Kearney had come home. Nothing overt, she thought; just something casual buried in the coverage of a scientific conference. A clue. All she received was a sense that there were no longer any real events in the world — that, whatever the ‘news’, nothing was actually happening until the camera turned its eye on each short jerky scene. Palm trees — enacting ‘stirred by an evening wind’ —would jump suddenly, almost guiltily, into life as the wire service prepared to objectify them. In the satellite lag before the stringer spoke, you heard a faint, repetitive voice which sounded like gak gak gak. Later she stood in the new bathroom, whispering anxiously:
‘Are you there?’ and, ‘You do like it, don’t you? You did say you liked it!’ Her erratic five-year transit of the suburbs and dormitories of South London — launched after the death of Tim Waterman, accelerating when Marnie left home — was over. The events of the afternoon had proved that. Nothing had been solved. She was still unable to remember what happened all those years ago, the night Michael entrusted her with the pocket drive. She stood by the bedroom window, rooting through her handbag. Out in the garden, a faint mist crept across the meadow from the river to melt among the orchard trees. Eventually she found the drive and held it like a titanium shell to her ear, as if it might have verbal instructions for her. ‘Oh, Michael, I know you’re there. Can’t you just come back and
