I’ve never told anyone about my cellar because I know that, as soon as I speak of it, it will cease to be truly mine. Even if issues of legal ownership were not to arise – and I’m fairly certain they would – people would want to see it, look into its origins, make it into news. I mean, good God, a thing like this could go viral, all round the world. And, even supposing that sort of media attention could in some way be avoided, my friends would certainly expect to share my find. I can imagine them now, whooping with excitement as they run up and down the stairs and along the corridors. I can almost hear them planning the parties we would have.

But that of course would be the end of everything that I most value about my cellar. If I were ever to share its secret, it would just be another bunch of rooms from that day on, however unique its construction, however mysterious its origins, however stupendous its scale. And, like so many millions of other rooms in every city and town, and in every single country all around the world, it would be given functions – storage, office space, accommodation – and be cluttered up, as other rooms are, with chairs and pictures and computers and desks and cupboards and beds and people and chitchat and TV and all the other props and rituals of that dreary and repetitive little dance that people call life. If I keep the secret, on the other hand, my cellar is something else entirely, barely of this world at all.

So I speak to no one about it, and have permanently abandoned any thought of moving anywhere else, or of embarking on any relationship which might, at some point, raise an expectation of staying over or – heaven forbid! – moving in. Not that I’ve had any interest in such relationships lately. At the beginning, before I’d completely absorbed the full implications of my discovery, I did still go out and meet with other people. I occasionally even invited friends back, getting a bit of a thrill, if I’m honest, from watching them in my little home, chatting and laughing about nothing as people do, without the slightest inkling of the vast and mysterious spaces beneath them. In fact, I used to give them tours of the house, the way you do, showing what I’d done with the various rooms – the knocked-through wall here, the clever little storage units there – just so I could listen to them coo about how spacious it was, how clever I was at making space. I had a job not to laugh out loud.

But as time went on, I became less interested in human interaction. Increasingly, when social opportunities were offered me, I turned them down and chose the cellar instead, until eventually the invitations all but died away. At one point I contemplated putting it about that I’d joined one of those secretive cults whose rules forbid fraternising with non-believers, and whose beliefs are sufficiently obnoxious to prevent anyone wanting to fraternise anyway. I thought it might be a way of putting an end to the last annoying trickle of invitations, as well as potentially embarrassing spur-of-the-moment visits. But these problems seem pretty much to have solved themselves now, leaving only the occasional irritant of telephone enquiries about my well-being from my more persistent friends.

When I bought the house, there had been no cellar mentioned in the details I received from the estate agent, and I’m quite sure the previous owner had no inkling of its existence. I myself found it purely by accident one day when I was investigating some loose boards in the middle of my living room floor.

Ever since I’d moved in, I’d been irritated by a patch of carpet there that subsided slightly when I stepped on it. However, when it actually came to doing something about it, the annoyance those boards caused me had always seemed pretty trivial in comparison to the time and trouble that would be involved in moving the furniture and rolling back the fitted carpet. In particular, I was put off by the prospect of shifting a largish dresser which I hadn’t bothered to move even when I redecorated the room. But that particular Saturday I noticed that the wobbly board or boards had now actually stretched the carpet to the point that it never quite lay flat. Since I happened to have nothing else in particular to do that day, I decided I’d try and fix the problem right there and then.

I piled all the furniture, other than the dresser, at one end of the room. I took the drawers out of the dresser and stacked them in the hallway, and then I went next door to ask my neighbour Dave if he would help me shift the dresser itself. I had to offer Dave a cup of tea after that, of course, which was tiresome, and listen to him discuss the merits of the five interestingly different combinations of motorways and A-roads that he’d used over the years when visiting his in-laws in Doncaster. But when he’d finally gone – it was about 11 in the morning by then – I rolled back the carpet, identified the loose boards, and pulled them up to see what was going on. It turned out that one of the joists beneath them had at some point split, with the result that it was sagging slightly in the middle, and was only held together by a couple of fibres.

All that was really needed was a little extra support at the weak point, and, since the joist was only half a metre above the concrete base of the house, that was a simple matter: it could simply be propped up with bricks. To make things even easier, I happened to have some bricks in my back garden, left over from building a wall, which would be more than enough for the job. I was about to go and fetch some of them when I noticed – and I could so easily have missed it! – what looked like the corner of a metal hatch in the concrete. That was unexpected. A hatch to gain access to where? I pulled up more boards to allow me to get down next to it and pull it open. Inside I found a set of descending stairs, disappearing into darkness.

I felt rather excited. It seemed I had a cellar down there which had somehow been forgotten about along the way as the house passed from owner to owner. I realised that it would almost certainly be too damp to be of use – otherwise why would the stairs have been boarded over in the first place? – and, since I had the whole house to myself, I had no real need for extra room in any case. But there was something profoundly satisfying all the same about the idea of having more space at my disposal than I’d known about. I’d always hated clutter – that was the simple explanation for the spaciousness which my friends had always admired – and I’d always considered myself to be the polar opposite of a hoarder. The house was sparsely furnished, I didn’t collect ornaments or keep books that I’d already read, and anything I didn’t actually use any more was promptly dispatched to the dump or a charity shop. But space I liked – you could never have enough of that – and my favourite dreams were about discovering new and unexpected rooms.

Intrigued and excited as I was, though, I did hesitate before going down the stairs. I can even remember wondering whether to go round and fetch Dave again so as to have someone with me. How I’ve changed! It seems extraordinary to me now that I could have contemplated such a thing even for a moment! But I saw things differently then and, apart from anything else, there was a vague apprehension in the back of my mind that there might be some criminal explanation for the hidden cellar. What if there were bodies down there, for instance?

After a few seconds thought, however, I decided that Dave was unnecessary and I fetched a torch and began to descend the stairs on my own. Dead bodies would certainly not be pleasant, but they did seem rather far-fetched. And if there were new rooms for me at the bottom of those stairs, I wanted a chance to savour them without dreary old Dave beside me to spoil the moment by prattling on about the various cellars he’d encountered over the years, or the relative merits of plastic membranes and waterproof rendering as a means of keeping out the damp. How different everything would have turned out if I hadn’t made that choice !

When I reached what I’d assumed to be the bottom of the stairs, I discovered to my surprise that I was still surrounded by concrete walls. It was simply a landing, and the stairs just turned and continued downwards. Even more strangely, the same thing happened another storey down: I reached a second landing, and there was still nowhere else to go but either down or back up again. Clearly this was no ordinary cellar. I must admit I began to feel rather scared, although it would have been difficult to say exactly why.

Three storeys down, further below the ground than the roof of my house was above it, things changed. I could hear the absence around me straight away and, when I pointed my torch outwards, a whole corridor revealed itself in front of me, with doors down either side. How long the corridor was I couldn’t tell at that point, but it clearly extended beyond the boundary of my house, and was too long for the beam of my small torch to reach the end of it. Sweeping the beam around me, I soon discovered that it wasn’t the only one. There were actually four corridors radiating out from the stairway at right angles to one another. I noticed a light switch in the corridor in front of me, and, not really expecting it to work, I flipped it on. To a distance of some fifty metres, the corridor was suddenly as bright as any normal well-lit room. There were blue doors down each side of it, five metres apart, and after every second door there was an opening into a side corridor. Beyond fifty metres, the lights hadn’t come on, so the corridor disappeared into darkness. I soon established that the other corridors were just the same, and flipped on lights in all of them. But there was more. The staircase continued downwards, and when I shone my torch down the narrow well, I found that, as with the corridor, it continued beyond the distance that my beam could reach.

I felt really afraid then, a strange, pure terror, as if I was in one of those nightmares where nothing actually happens except for fear. Certainly my alarm didn’t come from a sense of physical danger: there was no threat to myself that I could see. Nor did it come from a feeling that I was doing something that might get me into some kind of trouble. Why shouldn’t I descend a staircase beneath my own house? No, as I say, it was a pure terror, a distillation of terror, that arose from my complete inability to make any sense at all of what I was looking at. What possible purpose might this place have? Who could have made it? How could it possibly have remained undetected up to now, and why was it underneath my house? It wasn’t just having no answers to these questions that was frightening, it was the fact that I had no sense at all of where an answer might be found.

But it was too late to turn back. Even if I’d climbed straight back up those stairs at that point, rejoined the world above and nailed the floorboards firmly down, my house would have become an entirely different place. Until today it had been a straightforward little semi in an ordinary street, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room, but it could never go back to being that, any more than a piggybank-full of one-pound coins could ever again mean the same to a National Lottery winner. My house was a mere pimple now, a tiny outcrop, a shoebox made of bricks, perched above an enormous hidden space which – such was my modest estimate at the time – quite probably had more rooms in it than my entire street.

I was terrified and disorientated, but, even then, I sensed the possibilities. Even at that early stage, scared as I was, I had an inkling that what I was now experiencing as fear might quite readily and easily be repackaged as an intense, almost sexual, excitement.

I went to the first door on the right and, feeling rather foolish, knocked on it. There was of course no answer, but I found this in itself unnerving – it’s interesting, when you think about it, how ready we are to reinterpret simple absence as sinister brooding presence – and I stood in front of it for a full minute before I’d gathered the courage to turn the handle. The room was completely empty. I flicked on the light switch inside the door and found the walls pristine and white, the floor covered in a plain grey lino that looked as if no one had ever stepped on it. There was no furniture, no trace of human occupation, but this one room was bigger than the living room in the little house three storeys above me that I supposed was still up there, although it already seemed almost irrelevant to my life.

Eli waited. Behind and above him was complete darkness. In front of him was an empty arena. His fellow archangels around its perimeter were shadowy forms in the dimness, waiting silently, just as he was doing himself, for the performance to begin.

A single tall figure stepped forward into the middle. From the pitch darkness beyond the arena, a great sigh arose from countless unseen watchers, spreading outwards and upwards like a tide. For this new presence was no mere archangel, this was the Clockmaker himself. He stood out there for a moment, while silence fell once more, and then he raised his hand. Pouf! – a brilliant point of light appeared, suspended above them all.

Again that great sigh came from the darkness on every side and, in the intense brightness of that tiny light, Eli glimpsed for a moment the cherubim and seraphim out there, the dominions and thrones. Tier after tier, this whole vast angelic host had been waiting for all eternity to admire the Clockmaker’s work.

The point of light expanded rapidly, diminishing in brightness as it did so, until almost the whole arena was filled by a huge dim sphere, leaving just sufficient space round the edge for the archangels to keep their vigil. It was time for Eli and his companions to get to work, and they set to it at once, each one leaning forward to peer intently into the depths of the sphere.

Straight away, Eli saw lights in there. He saw great skeins of light, strewn through the void, each one made up of millions of little disc-shaped clumps of glowing matter that span around like wheels. And when Eli examined the wheels closely, he found that they too were made of smaller parts. They were tenuous structures of the most extraordinary delicacy, consisting almost entirely of empty space. These wheel-shapes were not solid clumps as they had at first appeared, but were so full of emptiness as to be almost imaginary: wheels sketched out in the darkness by billions of separate specks of light, each one following its own allotted path. And Eli saw that, as these little specks travelled round and round the centre of each wheel, waves of pressure passed through them, so that the specks clumped closer together when the wave reached them, and moved apart again as it passed by, creating graceful spiral bands of brightness that themselves moved round the wheel. Each tiny wheel was really two wheels revolving at different speeds: a wheel of specks, and a wheel of waves that moved through the specks!

Laughing with delight, Eli turned from the spectacle to point it out to the hidden watchers who were seated, row after row, on the dark tiers behind him. ‘Observe!’ he cried. ‘The same matter forms two separate wheels simultaneously!’

A sigh of appreciation rose up among the cherubim and seraphim, the thrones and dominions. But, even before the sigh had faded, another archangel on the far side of the arena was calling out just as excitedly as Eli had done: ‘Look! Even the smallest of these lights has tiny spheres revolving round it!’

Again the sigh in the darkness.

‘Notice how they also spin on their own axes!’ called a third archangel.

Another sigh.

‘And see how the whole spreads outwards!’ called a fourth. ‘This whole area is constantly expanding, just so as to be able to contain it.’

The Clockmaker had created Time, no less, and here in front of them, wheel within wheel, was the Great Clock that gave it form.

Sigh after sigh rolled outwards and upwards in the darkness.

‘What do I love best in all the world?’ Mike Staines answers himself without the slightest hesitation. ‘This key fob! I’ve had it more than fifteen years! It’s solid steel. Go on. Hold it. It’s satisfying, isn’t it? You can really feel the weight of it in your hand.’

There are three pint glasses on the table, each about two-thirds full.

‘Fifteen years I’ve had it,’ Mike says. ‘I got it in America. Everyone thinks I’ve had it engraved with my initials but actually it already had MS on it when I bought it. There was a company in Pittsburgh called Maximum Steel, apparently, and it used to give these things out as gifts to customers. I bought it in a little junk shop in Philadelphia, when I lived over there in the early nineties.’

The key fob is like a slender matchbox in shape, but with rounded-off edges and corners. Set into one face of it is a tiny sphere which Mike rolls back and forth with his thumb, showing on one side a black MS enamelled on a white background, and on the other, a white MS on black.

‘Look at that woman over there with the purple scarf,’ says Dave Greaves. ‘Look at her with her nice new haircut trying to be someone. Here I am, she’s saying, I am Judy Fotherington – or Kath Hesselthwaite, or Trish Underwood or whatever her name might be – I am Judy Fotherington and this is what I stand for and this is what I am doing in the world, and this is how I choose to look.’

Mike presses a catch on the side of his key fob.

‘There’s a complete set of little tools in here, look, miniature versions of the stuff that Maximum Steel used to sell. They fit so snugly inside that you wouldn’t know they were there. A little can opener and bottle opener. A screwdriver on the end. And scissors, look, and a metal toothpick, and here – look – a little blade. They’re real tools too, even though they’re so small. I’ve used all of them at one time or another. You know those moments when you need a bottle opener, or wish you had a knife? Well, here they are and they do the job perfectly. They just need a little drop of oil and a wipe down once in a while.’

He snaps the catch closed and the little tools are gone.

‘But in every city in the land,’ says Dave, ‘there are thousands of women like Judy Fotherington, who stand for all the same kinds of things, are involved in all the same kinds of activities, wear the same kinds of clothes, go out with the same sort of nice but ultimately disappointing men as that bald bloke there she’s looking so delighted with.’

Mike turns the keyfob in his hand, its cargo of keys jangling beneath it.

‘I really like looking after it,’ he says. ‘That’s the other thing about it. I polish it every week or two. That’s why it looks so shiny and new.’

Apart from those pint glasses on the table, there are two packets of dry-roasted nuts and a silver tobacco tin with an ornate letter J embossed into its lid.

‘It probably sounds crazy,’ Mike goes on, ‘but with this in my pocket I feel stronger, as if this little toolkit equips me somehow. Do you know what I mean? The tools and the keys equip me for life. Not that I’m superstitious, mind you. Not at all. Well, you know that, don’t you? You know I don’t believe in anything supernatural. Homeopathy, acupuncture, you name it: I can’t be doing with any of that stuff. But that’s the really great thing about my key fob. It doesn’t work by magic.’

‘People don’t understand numbers,’ Dave says. ‘That’s the thing. I mean, if I asked you how many people there were in this city you’d say – what? – getting on for half a million? You’d say that, and you’d think you’d answered my question, but do you really know what half a million means? I mean, just quickly, without stopping to work it out, do you think there’ll be half a million days in your life? No, nothing like. It won’t even be forty thousand. You could be introduced to ten new people every day of your life, from the day you were born to the day you die, and you still wouldn’t have met the number of people who live in this city.’

‘Psychology, yes,’ says Mike, ‘but not magic.’

‘And this is just one city,’ says Dave, ‘and not even a particularly big one. Yet there’s that woman in the purple scarf, and that bald chap with her, trying to be characters, trying to be individuals, trying to persuade themselves they signify something.’

Jeffrey Timms laughs. ‘Well, perhaps they do, you miserable sod! What makes you so sure they don’t?’

‘There’s just one problem with this key fob,’ says Mike. ‘I’m frightened I’ll lose it. I know it sounds daft but I worry about it every single day. I mean I could drop it down a drain, couldn’t I? Or someone could steal it. Or I could leave it behind on a train, or a bus, or in a taxi. It’s nearly happened more than once, I can tell you. And the maddening thing is that there was another fob exactly the same as this one in the shop where I found it. I just wish I’d bought it while I had the chance and kept it as a spare. Believe it or not, sometimes I actually wake up in the middle of the night and lie there kicking myself that I missed the chance to have that other one sitting safely at the back of a drawer somewhere in case of need. But then I think: no, that would take away from this one. The whole charm of this is it’s the only one I’ll ever have. That’s the point of it really.’

He sighs.

‘But it is hard. In fact, to be honest with you, the worry about losing it almost cancels out the pleasure of owning it at all.’

There are twelve tables in the room, each one surrounded by human beings.

‘And how many pubs are there?’ asks Dave. ‘How many pubs in this city? Sadly not as many as there were, but I reckon it must still be about two hundred or so, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just threw it away,’ says Mike Staines.

‘Hard to put a figure on how many of them are this kind of pub,’ Dave goes on, ‘the kind that people like us drink in, I mean, and people like Judy Fotherington there and that bald guy, but let’s say twenty per cent. I reckon it’s probably more than that, but let’s just say twenty. That still makes – what? – forty pubs in this one city where, on this very night, there’s—’

‘Or even give it to someone else,’ says Mike, ‘just so as to be free from the worry of it.’

Jeffrey laughs and pats him on the back.

‘Well, that’s love for you, mate,’ he says.

When the first clamour of birds came sweeping across the lake, the professor’s wife was already wide awake. It was going to be one of those grey luminous days, she knew, when every splash and croak was full of meaning, and things suddenly happened with no apparent cause. She needed to get outside.

But the professor ate his breakfast very slowly, with the paper propped in front of him against a jar of honey.

‘Good lord!’ he observed amiably. ‘What will this awful government do next!’

‘Just go,’ she answered him in her head. ‘Just drink down your coffee and go!’

He spread another piece of toast, first with butter and then with marmalade, being meticulously careful in each case to go right out to the very edge of the slice. Then he poured himself a second cup, and turned the page.

‘Situation in Europe looks pretty dire.’ He took a bite from his toast and chewed thoughtfully while he continued to read.

What did he need to read the news for anyway? He’d be listening to it on his radio all the way to work, the same stories over and over.

It’s April, the air is mild as cream and I’m sitting at my front window in a suburban street, tapping the keyboard of my laptop.

Right opposite me is a primary school. Children are running about behind a spiked iron fence. And in the middle of the playground, between the fence and the school, is a magnificent flowering cherry tree.

Masses of white blossom! Pure and bright as heaven!

There was a delicious, agonising goodbye in Ellie’s car, with gentle hands, and moonhoney, and lips still warm from the night, but at last reluctantly they had to heed the honking taxis and the shouting man.

The car door closed. Space and time opened up between them. Thomas watched Ellie rejoin the stream, waved and blew kisses, then turned to hurry into the station, feeling for his ticket in his jacket pocket.

‘I really must catch this train,’ he’d told her. ‘I wish I could stay longer with you, I truly do, but I need to be there for this meeting.’

And yet, when it turned out he’d got the time wrong and that his train was already pulling away, he found he didn’t care that much about the meeting, or mind that the hour and a half he now had to wait would be on his own when it could have been with Ellie. He phoned his work to apologise – really it was no big deal at all – then bought some coffee and sat on a kind of gallery above the platforms, under Victorian arches of iron and glass, with four or five big intercity trains beneath him, lying side by side beneath their power lines like metal whales.

What could be better than the solitude of a railway station at half past 9 in the morning, he thought? It was beautiful as a cathedral, but a cathedral whose god was real and performed miracles many times in every hour. It was a temple of power and speed.

The caffeine lit him up, transforming his veins into branching fingers of contentment. He watched the pigeons, the electric trolleys, a giant electric advertising hoarding that changed every ten seconds: girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit – girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit…

Another train came hissing to a standstill right below him. For two seconds it just stood there, and then suddenly, all along its flank, doors slid simultaneously open to disgorge a crowd of people with bags, suitcases, baby buggies, bicycles, who began at once to hurry towards the city. In poured another crowd, equally keen to get away.

For some reason, the image came into his mind of a great sphere hanging up there at the mouth of the station where the trains came and went. One side of the sphere was in sunlight where he couldn’t see it, the other within the shadow of the station roof.

Darius strode across the park on his way to the pub. He was a big man, over six foot tall, solid and broad like the rugby player he’d once been. His great thick mane was just beginning to turn grey, and grey hair spilled out from the open neck of his shirt.

It was a blowy evening. With each new gust of wind, a row of big chestnut trees to Darius’s right began to dance, the great round clumps of foliage swaying back and forth across the trunks like the massive breasts and thighs of giant women. Over on his left, beyond the open grass, was the town hospital. All his daughters had been born there, as Darius himself had been, and three of the group of friends he was going to meet that night.

In the middle of the park, a father and his young son were flying a kite. Darius had flown kites here too, when he was a boy himself, and when his own daughters were growing up. The girls had a big red one, he remembered, and the oldest had a pink one of her own with a pony on it that never really worked. This kite now was bright blue. When those big trees began to dance, it strained so hard towards the sky that the father and son together had a struggle to hold it down. Darius remembered how that felt, the string as hard as metal wire. The boy yelled out with excitement at the power he felt in his hands. The dad glanced at Darius and smiled.

The pub was right on the edge of the park. It was called the Live and Let Live, and when those giant tree-women danced and the kite string turned to wire, its sign creaked and swayed on its rusty hinges. In the bright, windy evening, Darius put his hand to the door.

1.

‘He is your father, Isola,’ says Nanny B. ‘He is your own papa. We know you haven’t seen much of him. But men have business to attend to. He has ten thousand Africans working for him, or so they say.’

‘I know he’s my father,’ scoffs Lady Isola. ‘I’ve seen him lots of times.’

Only recently has it occurred to me that Nicola was also young. She was nine years older than me, and at the time she seemed wonderfully knowing and grown-up, with a husband and kids and everything, but she was only twenty-eight.

She was a mature student on the same course as me at Bristol Poly. We got talking one day, in the little café attached to the library, about a coursework project we’d been set, and we agreed to meet again from time to time to support each other. I assumed she’d latched onto me because she thought I’d be useful to her. I was a very bright student and, though she was very able herself, she’d left school at sixteen and hadn’t played the academic game for a long time. So I guessed it was me that was going to help her, and not the other way round, but I was perfectly happy to play along, just for the pleasure of her company. She was lively, full of irreverent energy, and very quick to laugh and smile. She also swore a lot and, in seminars, she and another mature student, her terrifyingly beautiful friend Fay, spoke about sex in a frank and matter-of-fact way which I found fascinating and disturbing in equal measure, a window into a world which I longed to inhabit but had no idea how to reach.

It was the third time I met with Nicola, this time in a little hippie place a mile or so from the campus, that I first realised there was more to this than just helping her with her coursework. We’d met at 11, and, after two cups of coffee, had got to 12 o’clock without even mentioning the project. I was a creature of doubt, but even I had to admit to myself that there was really no doubt about it: an attractive, properly grown-up woman was enjoying my company for its own sake. She even laughed at my jokes.

Nicola seemed to notice some change in my face as I registered this, for she smiled, reached over and lightly cupped her hand over mine.

‘We’re two of a kind in some ways, aren’t we?’ she said.

Two of a kind! Spoken to this very shy young man who had spent years worrying if he’d ever manage to negotiate a relationship with any woman at all, that phrase was like a shot of heroin into a main artery! Up to that point, I’d known that I liked Nicola and of course I’d known that I found her very attractive too (although this was true of several other women on the course, including Nicola’s friend Fay), but from that moment onwards, I was utterly and desperately in love.

When you look out into the world you can’t see your own face. All you see is a kind of frame round the edge of your field of vision, with, somewhere towards the bottom of it, a shadowy out-of-focus blob that’s the tip of your nose. I often had the feeling back then that this absence of a face wasn’t just the result of my particular perspective, but was the actual case. I really didn’t have a face, in other words. Other people could look straight in, much as you might look in through the window of some psychic washing machine, and see the tangle of anxiety and shame and frustrated desire that was whirling round inside. So I felt this burst of gratitude and love, but then I panicked. Fearing that Nicola could see straight into my head, I looked quickly away from her to avoid her gaze, and realised to my dismay that I was blushing violently.

‘Oh Rick, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to embarrass you!’ Her hand was still resting on mine, and she gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘It’s just that it’s a very long time since I laughed so much, or felt so comfortable in anyone else’s company.’

I made myself look at her again. Her brown eyes were warm and kind. She wasn’t mocking me, I could see. She didn’t think any less of me for having blushed. Incredible as it might seem, Nicola didn’t just see tangled wet stuff churning round when she looked at me, but an actual face with eyes and nose and mouth, which for some strange reason she’d grown to like. She’d always looked pretty to me, but now she had suddenly become quite extraordinarily beautiful, and I saw that what she had to give, in every single respect, was exactly what I’d always wanted.

‘Me neither,’ I said, quite truthfully. ‘We seem to find the same things funny, don’t we?’

‘We really do,’ she said, and then: ‘It’s getting stuffy in here, isn’t it? Have you got time for a bit of a walk? I could use some fresh air before I put my nose back to the grindstone.’

The hippie café was in the suburb of Clifton, which was a slightly more bohemian place then than it is now. We walked up to the green and then to the famous bridge across the Gorge. Neither of us had set a time limit on this little outing, but at about the point we paid our five pence toll and set out across the bridge, we must both have realised that we’d crossed some kind of line. But we pretended not to notice, continuing to talk animatedly about the course and our lives and the world in general as we headed, without actually discussing where we were going, towards the woods on the far side of the Gorge.

‘I love Leigh Woods,’ Nicola said, ‘don’t you? Have you got time to walk into them just a little bit?’

So then we were under the green leaves together, just me, and this dazzlingly beautiful grown-up who’d sought out my company, walking to a particular spot that Nicola knew, where we could stand and look down into the Gorge. The tide was in, I remember, and some sort of tugboat was coming up the river.

‘I really meant what I said back there in the café, Rick. I didn’t mean to be heavy about it, or to make you uncomfortable, and I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you, but I really do feel at home with you, like I’ve known you all my life.’

Soon after that, we kissed.

A small greenhouse stood on the paved backyard of a long unoccupied house. It had a concrete floor and a single aluminium shelf. On the shelf stood three empty plastic flowerpots, with a fourth lying on its side. A watering can, moulded from red plastic, rested on the floor by the door.

It was the middle of a summer afternoon. Up until midday, the sky had been clear. All morning, the radiation had been pouring down from the sun, with no cloud in the way to reflect it back. Outside the greenhouse, the sun had warmed the soil and the roof of the house, and heated the black tarmac of the road it stood on to the point that it had become soft and sticky. In their turn, the soil, the road and the roof had warmed the air above them. As the air warmed, it had risen upwards, cooler air flowing in beneath it to take its place.

Inside the greenhouse the sun had also heated everything that was there: the aluminium, the concrete, the plastic pots and the red watering can. They too had warmed the air above them, but, unlike the air outside, the air in the greenhouse was trapped by the glass roof, which meant that, even when it was hot, it still remained close to the warm concrete and the aluminium and the plastic. And so the concrete and the metal and the plastic had continued to heat the same already-heated air, as if they were a hotplate on a stove, and the greenhouse was a saucepan with its lid on. The air became very hot in there, and far hotter than the air outside.

Later on, as morning turned to afternoon, the sky clouded over and a cold wind began to blow. The air outside the greenhouse, already so much cooler than the air within, became colder still. But the air in the greenhouse, still sitting over that warm concrete and aluminium, stayed warm. It would cool down eventually, of course, but it would do so much more slowly than the air outside. Only the glass cooled quickly, because of the cold air rushing over it.

It so happened that the humidity was high that day. Inside the greenhouse, the warm air came up against the much colder glass, and some of the water vapour that it was carrying began to condense on the cool surface. Quite soon, the whole inner surface of the glass was steamed up, covered in a layer of tiny water droplets.

Some of these water droplets were heavier than the others, to the point where the constant tugging of the planet Earth beneath them became stronger than the surface tension that held them against the glass. The droplets on the glass windows began to slip downwards and, as they slipped, they collided with other droplets, absorbing the water into themselves and so becoming heavier still. The larger they grew, the smaller was their surface area in relation to their mass. As a result, the pull of the planet became stronger, relatively speaking, and the surface tension weaker. So the drops moved more quickly, and absorbed water more quickly too from yet more droplets. And all the greenhouse’s windows were striped with the paths that these heavy drops had made.

The same thing happened under the glass roof, but here, when they had accumulated enough mass, the droplets didn’t just slide down the inside of the glass but also began to drip. The drips fell straight downwards through the still-warm air inside the greenhouse, to splash onto the concrete floor, or the aluminium shelf, or sometimes onto the plastic pots or the can.

Having shed some of its weight in this way, a droplet would stop dripping, its surface tension once again strong enough to hold it together, and it would resume its descent down the inside slope of the roof, until it had accumulated enough water from smaller drops to rupture once more and release drips.

This sequence of events had happened many times. One of its consequences was that, while the glass of the roof, like that of the windows, was striped with the trails of water droplets, these roof trails were punctuated at more or less regular intervals with bulges, like beads on a necklace, where the water had paused and dripped.

A man called James lives in one of the two groundfloor bedsits. He’s the same sort of age as me, in his early thirties. He is tolerably good looking, always wears a jacket and tie and is, as my aunt Angelica puts it, ‘very well spoken’, all of which would also be a fair description of myself. I first met him when Angelica became convinced that some intruder was ‘prowling round’ inside the building. At her request, I called on every resident to ask if they’d seen strangers on the stairs.

When James met me at his door, I could see him noticing my surprise that a man like him should be living in a place like this. The two of us really were quite alike, and he acknowledged this with an odd little smile: sly, complicit, and strangely self-satisfied.

‘By the way,’ he told me, when we’d finished discussing Angelica’s imaginary prowlers, ‘I should warn you that I may not remember you if I see you again. Did a stupid thing, you see, a few years back. Got a bit depressed and tried to kill myself with the exhaust of my car. I wouldn’t recommend it. Memory’s all shot to pieces. Can’t hold onto anything for more than ten minutes or so.’

It seemed odd to me that he should reveal something so personal when we’d only just met, but the strangest part was the way he smiled as he told me about his calamity. It was the same smile he’d greeted me with, the smile of a schoolboy with a sick note that will get him off for the rest of term.

On the opposite side of the hall to James lives a Brummie woman called Sheila, who James refers to as ‘the bag lady’. I gather she’s in her fifties, though it would be hard to tell, because she has no front teeth, a ravished, bloodshot face, and is sort of shapeless, as if all the various parts of her body have been broken up so many times that, in the end, any attempt to properly reassemble them has been abandoned, and they’ve just been tossed anyhow into a roughly body-shaped sack. According to James, who seems to know a surprising amount for a man with a ten-minute memory, she really did used to live on the streets until Dr Hodgson took her in. ‘She still drinks a bottle of sherry a day,’ he told me, smiling as he watched my eyes for a reaction.

Sheila dotes on James, cleans his room and brings him cups of tea. I’ve had to call in on him a number of times since that first occasion, all in connection with various worries of my aunt’s, and I’ve several times witnessed him receiving these offerings of Sheila’s in a way that reminds me of some colonial district officer accepting a gift from a benighted native: amused, puzzled, slightly contemptuous, but nevertheless pleased. ‘I know it’s absurd, but what can I do about it?’ his half-apologetic expression seems to say as he glances towards me and sees me watching. But it is only half-apologetic. There’s always that trace of self-satisfaction and complicity. He and I are too well brought up to mention it, that look seems to say, but we both know I secretly envy him for living in a bedsit with a worn lino floor, and having a bag lady to care for him.

Once, on some errand of my aunt’s, I intruded on the two of them watching a TV game show. James was in his armchair, Sheila kneeling at his feet with her hand inside his fly.

‘Oops,’ he said, pushing her away.

‘Bad moment.’ But even then, he smiled.

On that particular morning I’d travelled down to London by train from Cambridge, where I’d been participating in a conference on problems of governance in emerging economies, and had stayed overnight with some friends. I arrived at King’s Cross at 8.15 or thereabouts. I stood in a queue at a food stall for a couple of minutes, meaning to buy myself a croissant and a cappuccino, then decided that I really didn’t need them. I’d already had one breakfast and I was, and still am, over two stone overweight. So I abandoned the queue and headed down to the southbound Piccadilly Line in order to travel to the Holborn offices of a certain NGO, small, but highly regarded in the field, which funds experimental agricultural projects in southern Africa. They’d commissioned me and an old colleague of mine called Emily to do an evaluation of one of their projects, and we were due to present our provisional findings at 9.30.

There was a train waiting at the platform. I climbed onto it near the front and, although of course it was pretty full at that time of the morning, I was lucky enough to find myself a seat. On the way up from Cambridge, I’d gone over our provisional report and jotted down some key points. Now, as the train moved off, I went back over the notes I’d written to make sure I’d got them clear in my mind. I was keen to make a good impression because I wanted to pick up more commissions from this particular outfit. They paid well and I needed the work. My wife and I had recently separated, so we had two houses to pay for instead of one, and my daughter Jasmine was about to start at university.

The doors closed. The train picked up speed and plunged into the southbound tunnel. I looked up for a moment at my travelling companions: Londoners – black, white, brown – reading, playing with their phones, listening to music, or just quietly sitting or standing in that little capsule of air and electric light and thinking their private thoughts as they hurtled through concrete and clay. People sometimes talk about the loneliness and alienation of big cities but I felt a surge of affection for these city folk, who every single day encounter many times more human beings than they could hope to get to know in an entire lifetime. How many other species would sit quietly and harmoniously in such a confined space with so many fellow creatures they’d never met?

I arrived at the office in time to get a cup of coffee before the meeting, and have a quick word with Emily, who’d travelled up from Brighton. Two more people arrived, Peter and Amina – we knew both of them pretty well: the overseas development community is a small world – and the four of us went through into the meeting room to wait for the most important person, Sue, who as head of the NGO’s research section, had commissioned our work.

Sue arrived late, looking very agitated.

‘Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a whole series of bomb attacks in the Underground. The whole tube system has shut down.’

We put off the start of the meeting. Amina set up her laptop on the table so we could watch the unfolding story, both to figure out its immediate implications for our day and to process it in a more general sense. There were suggestions at first that as many as six bombs had gone off, but the reports gradually settled on three: three different trains, one at Aldgate, one at Edgware Road and one at Russell Square. But then, just when that seemed to have been clarified, another bomb went off on a bus. How many more would there be?

I don’t remember the timing of it all, but at some point I figured out that the train bombed at Russell Square was on the southbound Piccadilly Line and must have followed directly after the one I travelled on. I looked back at my peaceful space capsule, hurtling through the earth, and imagined another one just like it, another collection of ordinary London people – white, black, brown – reading, listening to music, or just thinking their own thoughts, as they followed my train into that same dark tunnel. But, in their case, this familiar scene had been abruptly torn away like some flimsy canvas backdrop. Some of them would have been buried under corpses, or trapped by bits of train, or impaled by other people’s bones. Some would have been blown to pieces. Some would just be terrified. I imagined a second or two of silence and then screaming voices everywhere, from up and down the train, like the voices of the damned in hell.

‘My feeble attempt at dieting hasn’t succeeded in reducing my weight,’ I told the others, my voice wobbly, ‘but it may quite possibly have saved my life. If I’d bought that croissant, I’d have missed the train I came on, and caught the one after.’

I was pretty shaken for many days afterwards, but I didn’t suffer the survivor guilt that some people report after a close shave of that kind. I guess one day I may eat these words, but I’ve never really got that ‘Why me?’ stuff. The answer, it seems to me, is quite simple: I didn’t buy the croissant. What more do people expect? How exactly do they imagine this universe is arranged?

And as to the question of why anyone could feel justified in killing and maiming people who he or she didn’t even know, well, that wasn’t a mystery to me either.

Two faces look out from a windscreen: Ralph’s on the passenger side, Eve’s above the wheel. They’re not speaking to each other. In fact they haven’t really spoken for this entire holiday. They’ve exchanged practical information when required, agreed on outings, sorted out meals, but there’s been no communication between them about themselves.

There’s a reason for this, which Ralph knows and Eve doesn’t. All she knows is that Ralph is absent – not unpleasant, not unhelpful, but simply absent – and that this absence is of a new quality. Something or someone beyond her field of view, some powerful gravitational force, is tugging his attention constantly away from her. When she asks Ralph a question and he answers, it’s as if a receptionist has been left in charge of his voice, quite polite most of the time and sometimes positively solicitous – as receptionists can be, when they sense that a caller is becoming annoyed – but never authentically Ralph.

‘There’s something on your mind,’ she says now. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’

He laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s been deliberately chosen from a range of options, as if from a set of dials or sliders: Volume 3, Warmth 1, Nonchalance 10. ‘As I keep saying, it’s just the usual stuff. Work worries. What’s going to be waiting for me when I go back on Monday. All of that.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘I need a weewee,’ says Lily’s voice from the back.

Go out into the middle of the ocean, turn vertically downwards, continue in that direction for two miles until you reach a place where there’s no light and the bare muddy sediment stretches away in every direction like a desert. That’s where you’ll find Ooze. Not that Ooze herself knows where she is, or that there could be anywhere else. Not that she knows she’s Ooze.

Ooze has no eyes or limbs, only a narrow body with a mouth at one end of it, an anus at the other and a spinal cord along its length. She is essentially a tube. Her brain is no more than a smallish swelling at one end of that spinal cord. She can’t think as we can. She can’t reflect or reason. But that doesn’t mean she can’t feel. She knows pain, she knows fear, she knows pleasure, and she experiences them all with no less intensity than we do. Or perhaps even with more, for Ooze has nothing to mediate her feelings. She can’t say to herself ‘This is just a feeling’ or ‘I feel this way now but it will soon pass.’ Feelings are all she has.

Ooze may have no eyes but she has senses. She tastes the water around her. She knows which way her body is oriented in relation to the sea bed, though she doesn’t know the thing below her is the sea bed, and doesn’t even conceive of herself as inhabiting a world separate from herself. She’s sensitive to even tiny fluctuations in the pressure of the water against her body, including the vibrations that we call sound. She can feel the touch of objects against her skin, and particularly against the nerve-rich ring that surrounds her jawless mouth. And she has another sense too, an electric sense – let’s call it tingle – which alerts her to the presence of other living creatures, including other individuals of her own kind.

She does not conceive of them as individuals, though, or as her own kind. To her they are tingly presences that make her furiously angry, either by intruding on her own patch of mud, or by being in her way when she chooses to move.

Ooze doesn’t conceive of herself as an individual either. To herself she is the entire universe, and, though I have spoken of her as ‘moving’, she doesn’t really experience herself to be moving as we’d understand it. For how can a universe move? Where could it move to? Ooze just knows that by wriggling her body in a certain way, she can pull new water and mud into existence in front of her and push old water and mud into nothingness behind her.

Ooze is always hungry, and she is always anxious. The two are closely related. She is the universe, and therefore immortal, so her fears are not centred on the possibility of ceasing to exist, but the function they serve is precisely that of keeping her alive. She fears all the time that she will find nothing to eat, however much mud and water she calls into being. And even when she finds food, her constant worry is that those tingly things that fight will appear out of nothing, as they sometimes do, and take it away from her.

There really is very little to eat in Ooze’s world. Nothing grows down there. Every source of nutrition comes from above and, unlike mud and water, it can’t be summoned towards her by wriggling movements of her body. It simply appears. As a matter of fact, though Ooze doesn’t know this, her food consists of corpses, sometimes whole, but more often in tiny fragments. Dead fish, dead seabirds, dead crustaceans, dead seals: they reach her after descending slowly through those two vertical miles of water. Often they have descended part-way and then become bloated up with gas and risen back towards the surface, only to descend once more when their guts burst open, or are breached by carrion eaters. All of them have passed through many different realms in their journey from the upper waters to the bottom of the abyss, and all have been gnawed, chewed and plucked at by the many creatures who wait for dead flesh at each different level from the sunlit surface to the sunless depths, just as Ooze herself waits down there at the bottom of everything. Each layer has its own particular specialists in the processing of dead meat.

By the time they come to rest in Ooze’s realm, the animal corpses have usually been torn to pieces. In most cases they reach her as tiny specks and motes: single fibres, individual bones, solitary scales and teeth, which may have been churning around in the eddies and currents of the middle levels for days or weeks or months. They’re too small to truly satisfy, but better than nothing at all, and nothing at all is pretty common too. Hungry and anxious, Ooze has often waited for weeks on end without the smallest scrap to eat. (Though of course she doesn’t know of days or weeks, for the only rhythms she experiences are her beating heart and her pulsing gills.) All she can do is wait, tasting the water as it passes through her gills, feeling the flux and tremble of it against her skin.

This was their third date and Judy had suggested a walk not far from where she lived, followed by lunch in a local pub. It wasn’t the ideal day for it, Gerry privately thought, and he wasn’t so keen either on her choice of walk. Under a low grey sky, the country around them was flat not only in the sense of having no hills but also, so it seemed to him, in the sense of being 2D, as if not only colour but the third dimension had somehow been leached out of it. And, in this austere, minimalist landscape, Judy had chosen the most minimalist of landscape features to walk along. It was apparently once a defensive barrier, thrown up in the Dark Ages to protect the East Angles from enemies to the west, but that didn’t alter the fact that it was a dead straight bank of earth beside a dead straight ditch.

‘Think of the labour it must have entailed,’ said Gerry, trying to work up an interest. ‘No diggers, no bulldozers, no trucks. Just human beings with picks and spades and baskets.’

It was a very conventional observation to make in such a spot, no more exciting really than the landscape itself, and it had probably been made in this exact same place many thousands of times before. But Gerry’s theory about conversations was that they were like jazz. You might start out with a simple chord sequence or a banal melody, but you built things up collaboratively from there. This had seemed to work quite satisfactorily on the last two dates, and, although Judy was a somewhat less confident soloist than he was – he was a science fiction writer, after all, and riffing on ideas was in a way his job – she had seemed to enjoy the game of starting with a simple theme and ending up in new and unexpected places.

Today, however, she remained silent.

‘And all for what?’ added Gerry. ‘Nobody now remembers which side of this line their ancestors came from, or what the fight was about that necessitated all this work.’

‘Well, I expect it was useful at the time,’ Judy said.

It was a reasonable comment he thought. In fact, it was rather an interesting one if you stopped to think about it. Barriers were useful. Indeed, they were absolutely fundamental, because…

But there was something about her tone that made him feel reproached. ‘Let’s not go off on yet another of your rambles, Gerry,’ it seemed to say. So he didn’t pursue the subject any more, though he wondered a little resentfully what exactly was interesting about this bloody ditch, if one wasn’t allowed to think about its history or its purpose.

Their talk moved on to more everyday matters – work, their respective kids, her family in Bristol, his ex, places they’d been and people they knew – but he felt that reproach still, lurking there behind everything else she said. She’d seemed to enjoy his company on their last two meetings, but this time, there was no doubt about it, Gerry was getting on her nerves. In fact, having developed a feel for the life cycle of these encounters, he thought it quite likely that this would be the final date. It was as if he was a new shoe, which Judy had found quite comfortable when she first put it on, but now was starting to pinch and chafe. Most probably she’d ask the assistant to take it back and fetch her another pair. He felt sad about that.

After a couple of miles, the dyke was bisected by a busy dual carriageway, which they crossed via a footbridge. Engines snarling, tyres hissing, cars and trucks hurtled beneath them at 70, 80, 90 miles an hour, half of them rushing eastwards, the other half heading west with equal urgency. This struck Gerry as mildly amusing.

‘All this self-important haste, in two opposite directions!’

When Judy smiled faintly but didn’t answer, he felt a moment of mild panic. ‘I’m sorry if I’m boring you,’ he almost burst out, ‘but I’m just trying to have a conversation.’

That would have been silly of course. It wasn’t as if they’d been walking in silence all this time. They’d been having a perfectly reasonable chat about their kids and holidays and so forth, and Judy really wasn’t obliged to respond to every one of his observations about their surroundings, particularly the rather dull ones which were all he’d managed so far. What really was his point, for instance, about the dual carriageway? That roads should only go one way? That no one should go anywhere at all? That everyone should travel round together in a herd? (It was typical of Gerry that he enumerated these alternatives in his mind, and briefly weighed each one.)

On the far side of the bridge, there was a stile in a hedge, and beyond that, suddenly and, to Gerry, completely unexpectedly, there was a large and very famous race course, with hundreds of acres of mown grass, and miles and miles of white railing.

A bit of the dyke had been levelled out to let the race track through, and they had to cross over there to climb back onto the earthwork. Once they were up on top again, they could see a starting gate, only about fifty yards ahead of them to their left. It was a long metal structure with rubber tyres which had been towed into place by a tractor and, to Gerry’s surprise, racehorses were trotting up to it right now, with jockeys in multicoloured liveries casually chatting to one another as they brought the animals round into the stalls. Gerry knew nothing whatever about horseracing, but it seemed to him oddly informal and off-hand that a race should begin in this way, over here by the dyke, with no one to watch the horses set off other than him and Judy who just happened to be passing. And the jockeys didn’t seem at all like the intense gladiatorial competitors he’d seen in sports page photos. They reminded him more of those delivery drivers whose job was to deliver cars to showrooms. They simply brought horses over here, it seemed, batch by batch, rode them back again as quickly as they could, and then fetched another lot.

But then again, he thought, who’s to say that gladiators themselves didn’t chat as they waited to enter the arena?

‘You alright, Septimus?’

‘To be honest, Lucius, I really could have done without this today. My bloody tooth is killing me.’

‘I keep telling you, mate, you need to get that pulled! It won’t get better by itself.’

‘I know, but have you ever watched it being done? It must hurt like shit.’

‘Of course it hurts, you wus, but then it’s over and done with, isn’t it? And you can stop thinking about it.’

‘Yeah, but knowing my luck, I’d get the old thumbs down in the next fight, and then it would all have been for nothing.’

He didn’t mention this imaginary exchange to Judy. He would have done on their previous dates – he would have put on accents and everything to make her laugh – but his instinct was that it just wouldn’t work today. It wouldn’t be funny enough. It would come over as grey and 2D, like everything else.

A simple admission of ignorance, however, would surely be in order.

‘This is going to sound stupid,’ he said, ‘given that I now live only about ten miles from here, but I’d always assumed that a race course would be lined with excited spectators all along its length.’

It just seemed all wrong to him that, apart from himself and Judy, who hadn’t even come here for the race, and a couple of officials beside the gate, the horses and jockeys were completely on their own. The white rails of the track headed diagonally away from the dyke across a great empty expanse of mown grass. And yes, now that he looked he could see in the distance a big concrete grandstand full of people, but it was a mile away from here, a different place entirely, the people just dots, the stand itself like a toy.

But then the gates opened and the horses were off, running together in a group between those lonely white rails, and Gerry realised he’d been wrong to imagine that there was no one here to take an interest. Almost at once a strange sound started up in the distance from the far side of that empty expanse of grass. It was brutal and primitive, an apelike hooting, harsh and violent, that rose in intensity to a kind of peak, and then stopped completely all at once, as the horses passed the distant stand, and crossed the finishing line.

In the silence afterwards, giant amplified voices boomed out, soothing the crowd and instructing it. He couldn’t hear the words – they were all scrambled up by being repeated by many different loudspeakers that were out of sync with one another – but their authority was unmistakable.

Gerry turned to Judy with a smile.

‘Who needs science fiction, eh? Who needs imaginary planets? What could be more alien than planet Earth?’

She glanced at him, but then looked back at the distant stand. He was really getting on her nerves that afternoon.

‘Oh come on, Gerry. It’s just people. Just a bunch of ordinary people, having a bit of fun with their friends. What’s so wrong with that?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with it, Judy. Nothing at all. That wasn’t my point at all. I was just noticing how strange it was.’

Good God, he had no objection to people having fun! People needed all the fun they could get in this grey, flat, empty world. And if they could cheer and yell and get excited even in this dreary place, about something so fundamentally dull and trivial as a bunch of running animals with men on their backs, well, all credit to them.

He turned to face her.

‘You’re finding me irritating today, aren’t you, Judy?’

There were more announcements from the loudspeakers in the distance. These voices that they could hear from a whole mile away were truly giant-like in their reach, and yet they seemed small and inconsequential in this great hollow space under the sky, just as the race track itself did.

‘Not really, but I just don’t see why you have to mock everything all the time.’

More horses and riders were already trotting out towards them across the grass.

‘Mock? I certainly don’t mean to mock.’

‘Well, okay, maybe mock isn’t quite the right word. But you always seem to want to drill down through everything that people do, examine it, take it to pieces, and you never seem satisfied until you’ve got to the point where whatever thing it is you’re talking about just looks silly and meaningless. It’s… I don’t know… It’s as if someone were to show you a book, and you couldn’t help yourself from pointing out that it was really just wood pulp and ink, or that words were really just arbitrary sounds. Why not just read the words and enjoy what they have to say?’

Gerry laughed. ‘That’s a fair point, actually.’

Why was he always so unwilling to take things at their face value? Why did he always feel the need to step back from whatever was going on and see it from a different angle to everyone else? Judy had seen him as mocking, but the truth was that he admired and envied the ability of others to engage with the everyday world on its own terms, and he often berated himself for not being more like them. Judy herself was a paediatrician – she was Dr Judy Fotherington at work – and when she talked about what she did, he was amazed by the scale of the problems she had to resolve every working day, weighing up possibilities, dealing with distraught people, and, hour after hour, choosing courses of action that might change whole lives for better or for worse. He knew her job would terrify him. He knew that, unable to face the responsibility, his mind would keep skittering away. And then something would go wrong, and it would be his fault.

They talked about other things now, a sister of Judy’s who’d not been well, Gerry’s son who’d been having problems at school, and it wasn’t until later, when they turned to walk back again, that he returned to her point.

‘I really don’t experience myself as drilling down in search of meaninglessness, Judy. Quite the opposite, in fact. I feel myself to be seeking meaning.’

When they were back alongside the starting gate again, with its rubber tyres, they stopped to watch another race begin. Gerry recognised some of the riders and liveries from before. That red-headed guy, for instance, in the purple and green diamonds. It was the same riders, over and over, on a different set of horses.

Of course the city has long been famous as a place of wonders. Even in medieval times, visitors enthused about its fountains, colonnades and gilded spires. But every visitor, then and since, seems to agree that the greatest wonder of them all is the Sphere of Truth. Some six metres in diameter and with its entire surface packed tightly with images and hieroglyphs, it is recessed on a vertical axis into the face of the cliff that forms the city’s northern edge, so that one side of the sphere is in full view, while the other is hidden inside the rock.

I spent ten months over there in my youth, but I never learnt to read the inscriptions myself. Many years of study are required to master that uniquely complex ideographic script, developed specifically for the purpose of expressing abstract ideas in a highly compressed form. (So that, for instance, a single hieroglyph can represent ‘The idea that, in principle, human society is capable of improving itself indefinitely’, or ‘The belief that human beings should not necessarily be rescued from the negative consequences of their own actions’, or ‘The proposition that subjectivity, rather than material existence, is at the core of the universe’.) However, the script was beautiful and the images even more so: diagrams, symbols, scenes from stories, all beautifully inlaid with enamel so bright that it almost seemed luminous. In more peaceful circumstances, I could have spent many hours quietly examining those pictures from the tiered galleries provided for that very purpose.

But during my time in the city there was no peace in the vicinity of the Sphere. It was a scene of constant conflict. So much so that, if set down in any part of the Cliff Quarter at any time of the day or night, I could easily have found my way blindfold to the Sphere, simply by listening out for the shouting and the angry screams. Even in the early hours of the morning (when, in those days, the Sphere was only illuminated by the weak flickering glow of nearby street lights) there were people in front of it hurling abuse at one another. During the day, larger numbers gathered, and I saw stones and rotten vegetables being flung, and sometimes full-scale fights between rival groups that might each be twenty or thirty strong.

What the people of the city were arguing about, and what their forebears had argued about for centuries, was the position of the Sphere on its axis. No one disputed that the artefact was precious, or that it was a repository of the city’s wisdom, but what maddened people was that at any one time, half of that wisdom was beyond the reach of human eyes. Everyone knew that what was hidden was an alternative way of seeing the world that might challenge, or even overturn, the accepted wisdom that the Sphere now revealed.

One group favoured turning the Sphere in a clockwise direction from its present position, believing that this would expose certain much-needed truths that were now hidden in the rock. Once, quite soon after I arrived, I witnessed these Clockwisers myself as they very briefly gained the upper hand, set their shoulders against the Sphere’s enormous bulk and managed to shift it slightly. The Anticlockwisers, though, soon put a stop to this. They wanted to turn the sphere too, but in the opposite direction, believing that it was on the left-hand side of the hidden hemisphere that the really important truths were hidden.

There was intense antagonism between these two groups, but each was also internally riven. Among the Clockwisers, a faction known as the Completers believed that only a short turn of a few degrees was required in order to fully expose truths that could currently only be glimpsed in partial form along the right-hand edge, but there were also Deepers, who believed the really important material was much further back and completely hidden. Similar divisions were present among the Anticlockwisers. What is more, within both the Clockwiser and Anticlockwiser camps, there existed revolutionary factions which believed that the position of the sphere should be entirely reversed: everything hidden should be revealed; everything revealed should be hidden. The Clockwise revolutionaries were called Reversalists, the Anticlockwise ones Renewalists, and they were said to hate each other with a great passion, in spite of sharing the same ultimate goal.

In addition to the various factions of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers, though, there was a third whole group which believed that the side of the sphere currently revealed was the one that contained the really vital truths and the most beautiful images. Centuries of history, these people argued, had brought the Sphere, like the polity itself, to its perfect resting place, while the hidden side contained only flawed and outmoded ideas, which would only sow confusion if exposed to the light. This last group, known as the Achieved Perfectionists, was the largest of the three and, throughout the history of the city, had always been the dominant force. One reason for this was that the other two groups tended to cancel out each other’s efforts, both being able to call on the Achieved Perfectionists as allies if their opponents looked like gaining the upper hand. The other reason was that the Achieved Perfectionists had always had the support of the city’s elite, which, naturally enough, was suspicious of anything that might unsettle the established order.

There had been times indeed, and not so long before my stay there, when the Achieved Perfectionists had used their political power to proscribe the activities of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers, surrounding the Sphere with armed guards to prevent anyone from touching it (and so allowing visitors to examine it in peace, I couldn’t help wistfully reflecting). This was no longer the case in my time – the law now protected the right of the various groups and factions to hold and express their views – but in practical terms the Achieved Perfectionists did still dominate. Over the ten months I spent in the city, I visited the artefact many times and, though I occasionally witnessed it being shifted a centimetre or two this way or that, a move in one direction was invariably followed by a move in the other. The image that was at the centre of the hemisphere when I first saw it was a group of male and female figures in brightly coloured robes, and it was in the exact same place, as far as I could tell, when I paid a final visit to the Sphere on the day I left the city.

Pictures of the Sphere were still strictly forbidden during my time there. Both making and possessing such images were very serious offences that attracted lengthy prison terms and it had only been comparatively recently – a matter of decades – that the penalty for both crimes had ceased to be death. Nevertheless, after leaving the city and returning home, I managed to find quite a number of pictures that had been made over the centuries in secret by more intrepid visitors than myself, and I discovered that, in spite of the dominance of the Achieved Perfectionists, the Sphere did shift over time. A century and a half previously, for instance, a Swiss traveller named Anton Gustave Meuli had managed to disguise himself as a local trader and his bulky camera as a chestnut stall, and had risked the garrotte to take a blotchy daguerreotype which shows that group of robed figures in a position very definitely to the left of the central point. Three centuries earlier, the sixteenth-century Florentine painter Guiseppe Merccini produced an astonishingly detailed reproduction by memorising small sections of the Sphere’s surface, one at a time, and running back and forth between it and his studio. He was eventually caught and duly executed – in fact, he was dismembered between four oxen in the city’s main square – but luckily for us, his painting was smuggled out, and it clearly shows that group of robed figures some way over on the right-hand edge of the visible hemisphere, while the most prominent image in view is a strikingly large and complex flower-like design on the leftward side which was completely invisible in my time, though still spoken of longingly by the members of an Anticlockwiser faction who called themselves the Lotus People. Yet, interestingly, in Merccini’s day, just as in mine and Meuli’s, the Achieved Perfectionists were the dominant group, insisting that what was currently revealed of the Sphere contained its truest and most vital messages, and that what was hidden deserved to remain unseen.

My stay in the city was more than a quarter of a century ago, though, and the city has since then become part of the modern world. After a long period of negotiation, a reforming administration has installed a powerful electric motor which slowly turns the sphere so that it completes an entire revolution in a week. (In the deal struck between the various factions, it was agreed that it would turn clockwise in even years and anticlockwise in odd ones). Nothing is concealed any more, and only moderate persistence is required on the part of the visitor to view every part of the Sphere.

What is more, the ban on reproductions of the Sphere has also been lifted. Photography is still prohibited for copyright reasons, but it has now become possible to view every image and hieroglyph, simply by buying guidebooks or DVDs. Also available for sale these days, as I hardly need tell you, are those now ubiquitous revolving globes which can be found on so many mantelpieces, alongside Eiffel Towers, Big Bens and Spanish bulls. My great-aunt spent a weekend in the city with her friend Gill only last year, and acquired a large and rather expensive one with an interior light and its own electric motor.

Not surprisingly, since there is no longer any part of the Sphere that is lost or hidden, all the various factions of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers have pretty much faded away, having lost the reason for their existence, while the modern heirs of the Achieved Perfectionists claim to have finally achieved a truly permanent settlement which accommodates everyone and excludes no one at all.

Curiously enough, though, the resolution of this ancient quarrel has led to a general loss of interest in the Sphere itself. I’m told that the only citizens of the city ever to be seen in front of it these days are tourist guides and souvenir sellers, and that, among the younger generation, the ability to read those strange and intricate hieroglyphs has now almost completely died out.

‘The poor guy’s a victim of emotional abuse,’ said Tim’s friend Peter to his wife Sue, as they sat on their sofa watching TV. ‘He can’t do anything without her criticising him.’

Sue didn’t agree.

‘Well, it’s his own fault,’ she said. ‘It’s too easy to paint a woman like Mary as some sort of harridan. She makes demands of Tim, yes, like I do of you and you of me, but she meets no resistance.’

‘Okay. So she gets exactly what she wants.’

‘She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t at all. Because resistance itself is one of the things she’s seeking. It’s like a child behaving badly as a way of finding the boundaries that will keep her safe. Not that Mary’s a child, I don’t mean that at all, but we all need those boundaries. You and me provide them for one another. We both know the limits of what the other will tolerate, and it makes us feel safe.’

Peter considered this for some time.

‘I guess you’re right. That’s interesting. I’ve never looked at it like that before. I mean, obviously I know that if I behave in certain kinds of ways you won’t put up with it, but it hadn’t occurred to me before that I actually need that from you. You’re right, though, I do.’

‘Well, it’s the same with me. Remember how I used to fly into a tantrum sometimes, all those years ago, when things didn’t go as I wanted? You just wouldn’t play along with it, would you? You just ignored me completely till I pulled myself together. So I stopped, didn’t I? And a good job too. You helped me to grow up.’

‘I guess if I’d have been someone like Tim I would have run around in a panic, desperately trying to figure out what I had to do to placate you.’

‘Exactly. And if I’d been someone like Tim, I’d have done the same when you went into one of those week-long sulks you used to go in for.’

Peter nodded.

‘Tim can be very passive,’ he conceded. ‘He’s like that at work as well. Dick treated him appallingly in a meeting the other day. I mean really appallingly. We all looked round at Tim, waiting for him to react – I mean it’s not like Dick is even his boss or anything – but Tim didn’t say anything at all. Not a word. He just looked down at his hands, and kind of… swallowed.’

‘Swallowed? That’s interesting. I’ve seen him do that too.’

‘He always does it when Mary has a go at him. You remember that time at the Gibsons’ party, for instance? Okay, I take your point, it may well be his own fault, but all the same, she really did humiliate him, dressing him down like a naughty child in front of everyone. And he just swallowed.’

‘Yes, and remember when we went to Tenerife with them,’ Sue said, ‘and that guy in the market blatantly ripped him off. You wait for him to react, but he just—’

‘—swallows. You can see his Adam’s apple move. You can almost hear the gulp. Pathetic really.’

‘And he’s so big. That’s the weird part. The tallest man we know, the broadest across the shoulders, a great big guy. He’s like a bear that thinks it’s a mouse.’

Peter laughed. ‘I do like him, though, for some reason.’

‘I quite like him too, though I often want to pick him up and shake him. I guess there’s a reason he is as he is. I just don’t accept that Mary made him that way.’

She watched the faces on the TV screen.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘he’s absolutely full of rage.’

Peter looked round at her in surprise. ‘Who? Tim? Are you mixing him up with someone else? The man hasn’t got an angry bone in his body! That’s his whole problem, surely?’

I made a mistake at work. I got a large order completely wrong, costing the company a great deal of money, and losing us a particularly valuable customer at a difficult time when our profit margins were at rock bottom and we were struggling to keep our market share. There was no real excuse for my blunder, and, as often seems to happen, I compounded my original mistake by making other secondary errors as I struggled to put things right.

I’d been summoned to Head Office down in Bournemouth to explain myself. There was a very good chance of losing my job and I was terrified. I’d been part of the sales force of this same company for over twenty years. I knew I wasn’t as sharp and energetic as I once had been, and that my value to the company, such as it was, lay in my knowledge of the company itself and the people it dealt with. I very much doubted I could find another job on anything like the same money, or even another job at all, but I had a big mortgage to pay and two teenaged kids, who I’d brought up by myself since their father’s death ten years previously.

‘You’re amazing, Jenny,’ my friends used to say to me back in those early years. ‘Full time work, kids, all by yourself. None of us know how you hold it all together. We know we couldn’t.’ I’d brush this off, as you do – ‘Nonsense, you’d do exactly the same as me if you had to. I just didn’t have a choice’ – but actually it had been very important to me, and a source of great pride. I felt bitterly ashamed that I’d not lived up to it, and at the same time I felt resentful, because actually, whatever I said to my friends, most people couldn’t do what I had done, most people would have stumbled, and that being so, it seemed very unfair that I should have this shame to deal with, and they should not. Most of all, though, I felt afraid: afraid of what faced me in Bournemouth, and afraid of what lay beyond: telling the kids that we’d have to move somewhere smaller, for instance, stirring up memories of that old catastrophe of their dad’s suicide.

It was a beautiful September day when I drove down, with air as clear as newly cleaned glass, achingly blue sky, and trees just lightly brushed with gold, but I saw all of this through a complicated cage of painful feelings which had the effect of setting it beyond my reach and denying me the solace it might have given me, just when I needed it most. I was terrified of being told off. I was dreading the humiliation of being cross-examined and found incompetent or unprofessional, after so long in the job. I worried that perhaps I never really had been any good at this job I’d done all these years, and that my bluff had finally been called. I rehearsed every small mistake I’d ever made, every embarrassing gaffe. And over and over again, I imagined having to tell the kids that the life I’d given them was going to have to be dismantled. Without the job, we couldn’t keep the house. We couldn’t even live in the same area.

Worry comes readily to me. I can put on a good impression of being calm and unflappable but the truth is that, even on an ordinary day, there are always a lot of things niggling away inside me, and I often find it hard to sleep. I guess when your husband suddenly kills himself, it does sap your confidence in your ability to control events. But actually I think I’d always been the worrying kind, even as a kid, and there were plenty of more recent things to worry about: Ben’s difficulties at school, for one, and my friend Carrie’s cancer, and my relationship with Harry that hovered all the time between being on and being off, and never quite settled either way. I worried a lot, but it was bad this time. This was the bedrock of everything that was under threat, and as I drove through the New Forest, I felt quite sick with fear.

All around me, the warmth of the sun was making the heather steam. A herd of deer were grazing peacefully by a stream. But that was out there. That was for the happy people. It gave me no pleasure at all, no respite. It had nothing to do with me.

As I do when I’m anxious about a meeting, I’d set off ridiculously early so as to be absolutely sure of not arriving late. As a result, when I reached the far side of the forest, I realised I was only twelve miles from my destination with nearly two hours to fill before the meeting. To kill some time I pulled over at a Little Chef place, sat at a window table, and, after ordering a coffee, began to read through, yet one more time, the various papers that I’d brought with me: the documents from HR, my own statement setting out the somewhat flimsy extenuating circumstances I’d been able to scrape together, and a list I’d compiled of some of the important contracts I’d secured for our company over the years, by way of demonstrating that there was a positive side to my balance sheet.

When the coffee arrived, I took a sip and, for a while, carried on looking through the papers. But I was getting quite panicky now. I really wasn’t taking in what I was reading, and I realised I’d just get myself into even more of a muddle if I went over it any more. So I pushed the papers away and took another sip of my coffee. I’d barely noticed the first sip, but second time round I felt the warm buzz as the caffeine entered my bloodstream.

I put the mug down again and, as I did so, I noticed how the steam rising up from it caught the sunbeams streaming in through the window beside me, and it suddenly struck me that the sunbeams and the steam each made the other visible. I was sufficiently intrigued by this, that I began to experiment. When the steam rose through them, the parallel sunbeams that were revealed were as firm and steady as bars of metal, but if I gently blew the steam away, they disappeared completely into empty air, only to reappear when I stopped blowing and let the steam rise from the mug once more. I blew again, very gently – it only took the smallest puff – and watched the steam and the sunbeams vanish again, and then rapidly reassert themselves as the temporary agitation I’d created settled down. I stopped interfering after that, and just sat and watched the play of steam and light over my coffee, enjoying the sensation of the sun warming my skin as I sat by the window with the bright world outside. It was several minutes before I noticed I was completely at peace.

At peace? Me? Surely not! But I prodded my feelings carefully, and it really seemed to be the case. The things I’d been worrying about hadn’t vanished, the dreaded meeting still lay ahead of me, the future was still full of uncertainty and threats to myself and the ones I loved, but even so, right then, I felt entirely content. It may seem an odd thing to say, but it was as if I’d suddenly remembered an ancient deal that was the basis of my existence, and could see that it was necessary and fair. You can have no mind at all and be completely at peace, as sunlight is, or steam, and that’s always an option, as my husband Dick proved: you can always revert to being inanimate matter. Or you can have a mind that knows it’s alive and is capable of pleasure and delight. But if you choose the latter, you have to pay the necessary price for it in vigilance and worry and suffering. No one can live in the Garden of Eden, even though it’s where we come from and where we’ll return. That’s why it’s so peaceful.

There was a sea running east to west between two big brown bodies of land. In the eastern part of the sea there were many islands, and among them one island in particular that was long and thin in shape. At one end of this island a holiday resort had grown up, with bright lights, discos, rows of restaurants and music thumping till dawn, at the other there was a village falling into decline at the foot of an extinct volcano.

Thomas, who was going through a somewhat difficult time, had gone to the resort at first but was now in the village, eating a salad of tomatoes and goat cheese by himself, outside the small café where he’d rented a room, a place that also doubled as a general store. As Thomas munched, the big plane tree in the middle of the square was throwing long and somehow dreary shadows towards him over the cracked and oil-stained tarmac to remind him that the day was ending and the streets of this very quiet village would soon be empty and dark. A stooped old woman in black turned to stare at him as she hobbled past. He smiled and raised his hand in greeting, but her cold appraisal didn’t so much as flicker. This was not a welcoming place. Apart from one other, smaller café, there was nowhere else in it that he could go, and many of the houses were empty and boarded up. As the café proprietor replaced the empty bread basket with a full one on the chequered plastic tablecloth in front of him, a worm of doubt stirred in Thomas’s mind. Had it been a bad decision, coming here? Wasn’t he going to have a very dull and very lonely week?

‘There was an Irish woman here earlier, a young woman about your age,’ his host said. ‘Very pretty. She had arranged to meet some friends here for camping, but they missed their flight. It will be a couple of days before they join her, apparently. I offered her a room, but…’ he paused to give a comically bewildered shrug, ‘but she said she was going to sleep outside.’

His name was Spiro and his rugged face kept reminding Thomas of a gone-to-seed version of Zorba the Greek, as played by Anthony Quinn. Thomas suspected that Spiro was well aware of the Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the earthy, sensual Mediterranean man, and consciously played the part: a Greek playing a Mexican actor playing a Greek. But then again Thomas knew that, when the worm stirred inside him, it always made him ungenerous and a little paranoid.

‘There’s a temple here, isn’t there? A ruined temple? I thought I’d go and look at it before the light goes.’

‘The temple of Aphrodite,’ Spiro winked broadly, ‘the goddess of love. It’s about two kilometres away, along that track just there.’

I remember when I first saw the moon. It was on a summer evening when I was fifteen years old. I was with my two friends, Chaz and Mick, in a disused quarry. The moon was just a couple of nights away from being full, so there was still a sliver of shadow to prove it was a sphere. And when I looked carefully, I could see how the shadow’s edge was broken up by the contours of craters.

‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ I said. ‘I must have seen the moon hundreds of times but I swear this is the first time I’ve ever really seen it!’

It wasn’t just a light in the sky, that’s what I was trying to say. It wasn’t just a set of facts in some illustrated book about astronomy. It was really there, far away and unreachable perhaps, but every bit as solid an object as I was, and part of the same continuum of space.

‘Yeah, nice,’ said Chaz. He was busy, and glanced up without any real interest.

‘Go on, look at it!’ I told him. ‘It’s amazing. The moon’s real! It’s truly in the world. And so are we!’

That last bit was the best part, actually. If the moon was real and separate from us then we were real too, distinct entities who were also truly in the world. That might seem obvious, but it came to me as a revelation.

Jeremy Burnet’s neighbours were concerned about him, and the woman who phoned the police said she was calling on behalf of them all. They were fairly sure Mr Burnet was in his house – his car was parked in the street and his bike locked in its usual place – but he hadn’t been sighted since a Saturday afternoon just under four weeks ago, when some of them had seen him going out in his car and returning with items from a builder’s merchant, power tools and such, although there’d been no sign or sound of any work going on in the house either before then or since. Mr Burnet had looked as if he hadn’t washed or shaved for weeks. The woman who called the police had tried to greet him – she’d known him a number of years – but he’d just stared right through her as if he didn’t know she was there. And he’d always been such a tidy man, too, the sort that didn’t like anything out of place, and yet the garden was now completely overgrown, and the living room curtains at the front had been drawn for months, day and night, while the bedroom curtains were never closed at all.

What had finally prompted this call, though, was that one of the other neighbours had been contacted by Mr Burnet’s elderly mother who was too frail to visit him for herself. She said she was worried because her son never phoned any more, and never picked up when she tried to call him. And surely, said the neighbour who’d rung the police, even if Mr Burnet had somehow managed to slip away without any of them noticing, he’d have let his own mother know where he was going?

Two police officers went to Jeremy Burnet’s house, a policewoman and a policeman. Their names were Cheryl and Pradeep. They rang the doorbell for several minutes, and then called through the letterbox. ‘Hello, Mr Burnet? Are you there? It’s the police. Could we have a word? You’re not in trouble of any kind, but we’re just checking everything’s alright. Your neighbours are worried for you.’

There was no answer, though, not even that indefinable feeling of presence, that sense of something listening deep inside the house, that in Cheryl’s experience you tended to get when someone was in but didn’t want to be intruded upon. ‘Either he’s not there or he’s not well at all,’ she decided. Pradeep nodded. He was the younger of the two by some years, and tended to defer to his colleague’s wider experience.

Cheryl was about to make a call to the station about a warrant to break down the door, when one of the watching neighbours remembered he had a key. Jeremy had given it to him one hot summer several years ago, he said, ‘before all of this started’, so he could come in and water Mr Burnet’s patio plants for him when he was taking a holiday in Spain with his then-girlfriend. Mr Burnet had asked the neighbour to keep it in case he ever locked himself out.

The key turned in the lock, and the two police officers entered, stepping over a drift of mail. The door of the living room was open. There was a cream-coloured sofa and chairs, and expensive-looking curtains drawn across the window. The light was switched on, though it was the middle of the day. However, what they immediately noticed was the wide-open hatch in the middle of the floor, from which a rug had been rolled back and shoved aside. There was a concrete staircase descending inside it, and light shining up from below. It was a very odd place to put a set of cellar stairs, but there they were, and it seemed exceedingly probable that they would find Mr Burnet at the bottom of them.

Cheryl leaned over the hatch and called down the staircase. ‘Mr Burnet? Are you down there?’

‘We’re just checking to see if you’re okay,’ added Pradeep.

There was no answer, no sense of presence at all, though the echo was surprisingly deep and strong.

Cheryl drew in breath. She had dealt with a few corpses in her time – self-hangings, traffic accidents, a knifing once, a couple of people who’d jumped in front of trains – but you never really grew out of that initial shock of stark primitive horror. ‘Okay, Prad. Let’s go down and have a look.’

They’d assumed they’d descend for the equivalent of one storey, and perhaps find two damp low-ceilinged rooms down there. But that wasn’t what happened. A storey down, the stairs just turned and carried on their descent. The same thing happened again at the next level. It wasn’t until the third storey, when there was enough space between them and the living room above to insert another whole house, that everything suddenly opened up. Long corridors, well lit by office strip-lights, radiated out in four directions, with doors and the openings of side corridors arrayed on either side. And the staircase continued on down.

They could feel goosebumps rising on their skin, and a strange, pure, abstract kind of terror.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Cheryl. ‘What is this?’

‘We need to call for help,’ said Pradeep in the particular, slightly strangled, voice he used on the rare occasions he asserted his recent training over Cheryl’s considerable experience. He would have been hard-pressed to say what they needed help with. Corridors, rooms, stairs: where was the threat in that? Yet Cheryl concurred at once, as almost anyone surely would have done in the same position. The police exist to maintain order, after all, to enforce boundaries. What the two of them had discovered was quite clearly so strange and inexplicable that reinforcements were needed to keep a solid boundary in place between reality and hallucination. Two people were simply not sufficient to reassure one another that what they were seeing was actually there.

‘I’ll do it,’ Cheryl said. There was no signal down there, so she climbed up the stairs again to Mr Burnet’s living room and stepped out of the front door to make the call. It was good to see the daylight and hear the sound of traffic on the main road nearby.

Four neighbours were standing out there now. Several more were watching from their own front gates up and down the street. They all searched Cheryl’s face for clues.

‘Is he…?’

‘We haven’t found him yet. Do all these houses have cellars?’

‘Cellars, no. We don’t have a cellar.’

‘Us neither. I don’t think anyone has one on this street. I’ve never heard of one.’

Soon two whole van-loads of police arrived, along with an ambulance, while a second patrol car brought a uniformed inspector to take charge. Blue lights flashed importantly and Mr Burnet’s house was quickly separated from the everyday world by a magical strip of blue and white tape. Yet what was the emergency? A missing man, and a cellar of implausible magnitude!

A small crowd was beginning to form. Passers-by from the main road at the end of the street saw that something was going on and came wandering up, with a slightly furtive air, to find out more. Several police officers remained outside the house to enforce that stripy blue boundary, while the inspector, a sergeant, a dozen other police officers and two paramedics accompanied Cheryl back into Mr Burnet’s living room, and down those strange concrete stairs.

‘I had a quick look further down,’ Pradeep told them when they joined him in a well-lit corridor, three flights of stairs below the surface. ‘Two storeys down actually. It’s exactly the same as this on the next two levels – doors, corridors, lights – and the staircase carries on down even after that. I don’t know what’s going on here, but—’

‘Mr Burnet?’ the inspector interrupted him, cupping his hands round his mouth. ‘Mr Burnet? It’s the police! Are you alright?’ There was a long deep echo and then a silence, which all of them felt a vague need to cover up with activity and talk.

‘It must have been here a long time, or people would—’

‘I thought I’d seen some pretty weird things in my time, but—’

‘Let’s try some of these rooms,’ the inspector said.

Several officers began opening doors in the corridors. Most of the rooms were completely empty, their white walls and grey lino as pristine as if they had yet to be used. One had a bucket and a mop inside it, another an empty water bottle. Oddly, each door had a blank yellow post-it note stuck to it.

Cheryl glanced at Pradeep. ‘Inspector, why don’t myself and Pradeep find out just how far down the stairs go?’

The inspector shrugged. Of course he had no more idea of what they were dealing with than anyone else. One of his staff back at the station had made a call to the MOD to ask if this was a nuclear bunker or some such, unlikely as that seemed; others had called the city’s planning department, the land registry and a well-known local historian, but no one knew anything about it. There was no record of Mr Burnet’s house having any kind of cellar at all, and it had stood there since 1923.

‘Sure, why not,’ the inspector said. ‘Go down to the bottom and report back. If you see anything that worries you on the way, just come straight back up. Meanwhile we’ll begin a room by room search of each level from the top down.’

Chris Beckett is a former university lecturer and social worker living in Cambridge. He is the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, 2009, for The Turing Test, the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2013, for Dark Eden and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award for Mother of Eden in 2015 and for Daughter of Eden in 2016.

The Holy Machine

Marcher

Dark Eden

Mother of Eden

Daughter of Eden

The Turing Test

The Peacock Cloak

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Chris Beckett, 2017

The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78 649 0506

E-book ISBN: 9781786490506

Printed in Great Britain.

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