kitchen. For hours that felt like the beginning of eternity the room and the rest of the house had become appallingly unfamiliar, harder to find his way through than a maze many times the size of the building, in which every recognisable object seemed to mock his confusion. Now he grasped that the door to the small back garden was to the right of the unrelieved pane of glass above the metal sink ahead of him, while the door to the hall was on his left. He made himself turn his chair around with a protracted stuttering screech of its legs on the linoleum. There were the cupboards and the laminated working surface, but far more important, with his back to the sink and cooker and refrigerator and the garden that was mostly occupied by a pair of rusty swings standing knee-deep in weeds, he had no problem with understanding that the hall door was now to his right, the opposite of the door to the garden. How had he recaptured his sense of direction? He could only assume that talking about his condition, no matter how perfunctorily, had done the trick. His mental interlude must have been the result of all his confrontations with Justin and Tamara and Mishel, and perhaps it came of indulging his imagination too. That was best left to the creative members of the family, and for the moment he didn't even want to think about the situation at work; he wanted to celebrate the return of the sense that he'd taken so much for granted. Pocketing the mobile, he made for the hall.
Apart from Rory's portraits – Hugh and their cousins gazing ahead in frozen anticipation – there wasn't a great deal to it, since it was halved on the right by stairs. To the left the lounge recalled his and Rory's boyhoods: the old squat television with its dusty almost square screen did, and the video recorder piled with tapes so often used that their labels were palimpsests of his and Rory's handwriting and their parents' too, and the bookcase not overfull of books that Hugh had learned from his father to buy in charity shops and library sales. Just the free books Charlotte used to send her cousins before the publishers warned staff that complimentary copies should be given only to the press were new. At the top of the stairs the bathroom announced itself with a flush that never quite stopped trickling, while his and Rory's old rooms were more or less ahead and the largest, once the parental bedroom, was now Hugh's. All the doors were open, as he'd flung them during his panicky quest for his sense of direction; otherwise the diminutive hall – big enough for him, he always thought – would have been much dimmer. He turned right along it into his room.
He'd left most of the relics of his boyhood – ramshackle scale models displaying too much glue, Scottish comic annuals, a poster for an AIDS benefit concert by Hindi rappers Jihadn't in Manchester (one of his very few demonstrations of adolescent rebellion, which had his parents wondering for at least a year and very possibly still if he was gay) – in his original bedroom. The one he occupied now retained much of his parents' bedroom furniture, wardrobes and a dressing-table too rickety to move. His single bed was newer, and so were the posters for Rory's exhibitions, and the bookcase piled with material Hugh had read and written while training as a teacher. They could rouse his guilt over the career he'd abandoned because of his inability to cope, not to mention his failure to share the house, no doubt because he was impossible to live with – but just now he felt guiltier for crossing to the window and pushing the musty faded curtains wider to gaze along the deserted street. He was starting to regret having troubled his brother.
Perhaps trying to contact him had even aggravated Hugh's state, or Rory's absence from the phone had, so that Hugh had ended his first call without a word. He'd fled to the toilet, only to be unable to find his way back for longer than the most protracted nightmare, despite hearing the
As he wondered whether to apologise to Rory he saw Ellen's number. It only intensified his sense of some action it was vital to avoid. Surely that couldn't be answering the phone, though he almost dropped it from nervousness. 'Are you busy?' Ellen said. 'Can you talk?'
He mustn't burden her with his problems at the supermarket; she sounded tense enough. 'I'm not at work just now,' he said.
'Not even for me?'
She might be trying to sound innocent if not coquettish, but it made Hugh uneasy. 'How do you mean?'
'Rory says you've been finding things out for me. He called before.'
In the midst of his mounting anxiety Hugh felt betrayed. 'Why?' he complained.
'I wasn't completely clear about that. Something was wrong with his phone, I think. He kept not being able to hear me, but he was asking if you'd been in touch.'
Hugh saw this might have been his fault for neglecting to leave a message. 'What did he say I've been doing?' he was impatient to learn.
After a pause that struck Hugh as surely unintentionally cruel, Ellen said 'Looking into Thurstaston.'
If her tone seemed oddly guarded, Hugh hadn't time to analyse it. 'I told him not to tell.'
'Why, Hugh?'
Even this sounded nervous, unless he was mistaking his state for hers. As he stared out of the window he had to make an effort to identify which direction Rory would arrive from. 'He'd no right, that's all,' he said.
'You mustn't blame him. Please don't fall out with him over that or anything else for that matter.'
'I expect you'll have done all the research you want, though.'
'I don't know.' In the same odd tone she said 'What have you found?'
'I told you how it hasn't changed, where we spent the night.' This made the situation sound more intimate than he could expect her to like, and he tried to leave the remark behind. 'Maybe something could be holding it like that,' he blurted.
'Holding.'
'From inside. Something that lives there.' He did his best to laugh at his presumption or her wary echo as he added 'In your book, I mean, obviously.'
'Obviously.'
Was she teasing him? She didn't seem to be enjoying it. 'Maybe you ought to have a look yourself if you haven't,' he said.
For some reason this silenced her and seemed capable of doing the same to him, or perhaps he was confused by a sudden notion that he mustn't turn around. 'I can tell you what to look for,' he tried saying.
'What?'
He could almost have imagined that she didn't want to hear. 'Some weird name,' he said.
'Don't say you've forgotten it, Hugh.'
Her laugh sounded dutiful yet not wholly unrelated to hysteria as he twisted around to glare at the room. Of course it was deserted all the way to the door, which led to the landing and the empty rooms and the unoccupied stairs that descended to the rest of the unpeopled house. 'I wouldn't when you might need it,' he assured Ellen. 'Look up Pendemon. Arthur Pendemon.'
'Who?'
He was starting to wish that his answers wouldn't lead to further questions; he felt as if he would never find his way out of the tangle of them. He turned back to the window, outside which the street led in two directions, the one no longer than the building and the far more extensive other, which ought to produce Rory any moment now. 'He lived there, whoever he was when he was at home,' he said.
'Where?'
'At the top where we all climbed up. It says that's the site of his house.'
Hugh was distracted by a sight beyond the window, more so once he realised it wasn't beyond. A mass of cloud as black as the depths of a pit had crept above the houses opposite to blot out the sun and display his dim reflection on the glass. He was dismayed to find he was grimacing, and glad that Ellen couldn't see – and then he began to distinguish the room behind him. It was darker than his image, and at first he could only make out the vague shapes of furniture. Why did he feel unwillingly compelled to search the reflection? He'd started to wonder what was keeping Ellen quiet by the time he located an object he didn't recognise – a more or less oval shape so dark as to be featureless, but identifiable by its outline as a head. Someone was behind him.
He spun around so fast that the mobile almost flew out of his grasp. A figure imitated him, even mocking the desperate grab his other hand made at the phone, and as he recognised the presence he was able to laugh – indeed, less able to stop. 'What's funny?' Ellen's tiny voice cried between his hands. 'What's wrong?'
'I thought someone was here. It was just the mirror,' Hugh said gradually more steadily as his mirth trailed off. 'Rory will be soon. Here, I mean.'
