The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

Genres: General Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

An astonishing and innovative blend of horror, folktale and disturbing realism, The Leaping is the first instalment in what is shaping up to be a genre-defining series. Jack finished university three years ago, but he's still stuck in a dead-end job in a sinister call-centre in Manchester. When the beautiful - and rich - Jennifer comes into his life, he thinks he might have finally found his ticket out of there. The only problem? His boss is interested in Jennifer as well, and there's something strangely bestial about him . . . So when Jennifer buys Fell House, a mysterious old mansion out in remote Cumbria, a house party on a legendary scale seems like the perfect escape. But as the party spins out of control, Jennifer and Jack face the terrifying possibility that not all the guests may be human - and some of them want to feed.

Release date: April 29, 2010

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

The wind wakes me up in the early hours and I confuse the present with a memory; one summer, years ago, we were kept awake by the wind, because it was really strong, powerful. I remember hearing the slates coming off the roof and imagining them whipping through the air like huge lethal crows, and hoping that they wouldn’t land on either of my parents. I don’t know why they would have been outside. Maybe it was that fear that kept me awake, not the wind. In the morning, when it got light, we found that the whole of the village had been covered in this red, dusty film, making windows and windscreens dirty and thick. It was sand from the Sahara blown over by some high, snaking wind, high above the clouds and the cities that I used to believe were in the clouds, and oh, our white car. The car wash at the garage, all that sand, all that sand from the hot, dry, red desert, down the drain at the petrol station. My mum said that it had happened once before, when she was very young, and there had been this other time, she said, when she woke up one night, and the sky was dark red. The sun hadn’t come up, and it was the middle of the night, but the sky was brick-red, cold, dead, barren, and she had never known what that was, and her parents hadn’t been able to explain it, and it had scared her. She had been four or five or something, and her hair was a huge big knotty ball around her head. She’d said it scared her, since she was only a kid, but I think it would have scared anybody.

My bedroom is dark still, and I should get back to sleep because I’m in work at nine. It’s only when I close my eyes again and listen to the wind that I remember I was dreaming. I was dreaming about a red sky. The way things can connect in your head without you knowing about it – it makes me shudder. I was dreaming about a place with no people, like a desert or the moon or something. And the sky was all red. A deep red, like a sunset, but more complete. Just completely red. And there was somebody walking towards me. Some sort of giant, huge he was, gradually blocking out the sky as he got nearer, but he was only ever a black silhouette. His knees were bent the wrong way.

Mum said that when I was little I would ask what was at the end of the sky. And she’d say space, the universe, and I’d ask what was at the end of the universe, and she’d say nothing, nothing, and I’d say, but what’s actually there? And she’d say OK, OK then, Erin, OK, a big brick wall. A big brick wall. A big red brick-red wall.

Is there a door, I’d say.

No, she’d say.

No door.

Ice Bar was quite full, but we managed to get standing room near the tiny, comfy bit with the sofas – separated from the rest of the club by a pair of heavy curtains – so that when the sofas became free we could just hop on. The walls and floor were brown and the sofas were cream and there were low, black tables with little tea-lights on each one and the music was too bland even for me to be able to say what genre it was.

‘I hope he’s OK,’ Erin said. ‘He said his mother sounded a bit fretful on the phone.’

‘Sure he’ll be fine,’ Graham said. ‘Francis thinks everybody’s down all the time. He always thinks there’s something wrong.’

‘But still,’ Erin said. ‘I hope they’re all OK.’ She drew deeply on the straw that protruded from her Long Island Iced Tea and her large, green eyes scanned the small, dark room for Taylor. ‘Where’s Taylor?’ she asked.

‘He’ll be here soon,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t finishing work until eleven.’

‘He’ll be properly fucking some monumentally screwed-up fresher in her Playboy shit-pit of a bedroom,’ Graham said. ‘I bet.’

‘Shut up, Graham,’ Erin said. ‘You’re such a rapist.’

‘It’s hardly going to be a fresher,’ I said. ‘I mean, we’re not even at university any more.’

Graham just shrugged and downed his Stella, spilling a little into his massive blond beard. ‘Just a joke,’ he said, and looked around hungrily.

‘Taylor told me he likes you, Erin,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but I want him to tell me,’ she said.

‘You know Taylor,’ I said. ‘He’s not the most forthcoming of people. Why don’t you tell him that you like him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know!’ She smiled and laughed. Her face was surrounded by thick, red curls. Her skin was pale and smooth and her high cheeks were lightly freckled.

Taylor is lucky, I thought, he’s a lucky boy or, rather, a lucky man, but I didn’t say it. He probably knew it, but was one of those people who pretty much kept his thoughts to himself.

‘This is shit,’ Graham said. ‘What are we doing? What’s the plan? Are we going to go anywhere good?’

‘We’re waiting for Taylor,’ I said. ‘Remember?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Hey! Those dickheads are going. Quick – get the sofas!’

‘Have you taken anything tonight, Graham?’ I asked. ‘You seem jumpy.’

*

‘Just the usual,’ he said. ‘Just a pill.’

Taylor was tall and dark-haired and thin-faced and looked a little bit like a young Richard E. Grant, which Erin liked, and that’s what mattered, I suppose. He emerged from between the curtains and, spotting us immediately, made his way over to us, picking his way through a maze of soft leather beanbags and amorous couples.

‘Evening,’ he said. ‘You all OK?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Erin said, quickly.

‘I’ll be better once I’ve got about ten more drinks inside me,’ Graham said. ‘Either that or some fit girl’s finger.’

‘I’m all right, thank you,’ I said. ‘How was work?’

‘You know better than to ask that,’ Taylor said.

We all worked at the same place. A monolithic building that was a multi-storey call centre somewhere near the middle of Manchester, comprising of floor upon floor of old, unreliable computers, broken spirits and bowed heads connected via black, curly wires to telephones that crouched like bulbous insects on the dirty desks, the humming of tonnes of electrical equipment, the frustration of bad maths, the pure panic of not knowing all the answers all the time, right now, come on, what are they paying you for, you been to school or what? The slimish scorn of the nation, dripping through earpieces and trickling into our open ears like warm, lumpy milk. You heard people say all kinds of things. The building towered up into the greenish city sky and burrowed down, it seemed like, burrowed down and down all the way to hell. There was something of the hell-wain about it. The hell-wain was a vehicle, an old coach that reputedly rattled around transporting the souls of the dead. The call centre had that kind of lifeless, limbo-esque feeling to it. The place was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and we all worked varying shifts.

The pay was low, but with five of us living together we got by with enough left over for a social life.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘It was terrible,’ Taylor said. ‘It was as terrible as ever. I won’t go on about it though. Ended up getting a bus over here with Kenny Hicks. He’s here somewhere.’ Kenny was a manager. He was a little man with a mouth too big for his head that flapped open and shut like a cat-flap in the wind, spilling all kinds of rubbish.

‘All the more reason for us to be leaving, then,’ Graham said. ‘Come on. Let’s go somewhere good.’

‘Graham,’ Taylor said, ‘when are you going to realise that all of these clubs are essentially the same? It doesn’t make any difference where we go. They’re like supermarkets or music television channels. Besides. I’ve just bought a drink. And I don’t drink fast.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Graham said. ‘I could be at home watching porn.’

‘I’m going to get a drink,’ I said. ‘Anybody want one?’

‘Same again, please,’ Erin said.

‘I’m coming with you,’ Graham said. ‘I want to assess the situation.’

‘What situation?’ I said.

‘The female situation,’ he said.

Taylor shook his head and rolled his eyes. I stood up, and gestured for Taylor to sit down next to Erin.

‘Just tell her,’ I whispered, as we passed each other. ‘For goodness’ sake.’

I saw Kenny standing at the other end of the bar, but he didn’t appear to have noticed me so I made sure not to make eye contact. Kenny was there, then, and Kenny – he had this big, weird grin, like his facial muscles relaxed into it, like the widest possible smile was the natural at-rest state of his face.

Graham lingered beside me, looking about desperately, his big, shaggy, dirty-blonde head twisting and turning like the head of a mop being rolled between somebody’s hands. He was tall and broad and scruffy, with bright blue eyes and a fair-sized beard and bit of a beer-gut. He ate women with his eyes.

‘Why don’t girls want to sleep with me, do you think?’ he said.

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘What are you drinking?’

‘Double Jack Daniels, Jack. Jack Jack. Ha. And a Stella, please.’

I looked at him. ‘You’re drinking a lot. And you’re taking a fair few drugs.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I like it. It takes the edge off.’

‘Takes the edge off what?’

He shrugged.

We got served, eventually, and as we turned away from the bar with our drinks in hand I risked a glance in Kenny’s direction. Typically, he saw me, and grinned ghoulishly. It was as if he were just looking me directly in the eyes whilst smiling at something in his memory, not at me at all. The expression put me in mind of some twisted little sprite, some Puck, thinking up a nasty practical joke.

When we got back, Erin and Taylor were having an in-depth conversation about Milton Friedman and Iraq, which I didn’t fully understand. They looked up as we passed them their drinks.

‘Hello again,’ I said.

‘Hi, you two,’ Erin said, and then finished what she was saying to Taylor.

‘I was hoping they’d be kissing or something,’ I whispered to Graham.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I wish they’d fucking get on with it.’

Later on, we were near the club, outside a fast-food place called Chicken Jack’s, adrift in a tide of confused, randy drunkards, taxis, take-away wrappers and neon. It could have been one of a hundred or more such streets across cities all over the country, all of them pretty much the same. Sometimes I would forget that we were in Manchester, and I would allow myself to think that we kept stumbling into some other dimension, some sort of shared space, which everybody mistook for a specific location. I would often get the feeling in supermarkets.

We were eating chips, looking around ourselves, trying to decide whether to get a taxi or just walk. Taylor was charming the girls with long, elaborate jokes, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

Next to Chicken Jack’s there was a small, dark alleyway that didn’t appear to have a name, and I could hear something, some noise coming from its dark mouth. It sounded like there was somebody up there laughing, or coughing. After a moment I could tell that it was definitely coughing, so I drifted towards the alley, away from the others, concerned. As I got closer it started to sound worse, like an asthma attack or some sort of fit.

The alleys that branched off the main street all joined up together behind the scenes, forming a complex warren inhabited largely by homeless people. I pictured them living in a kind of cardboard city made out of empty Chicken Jack’s pizza boxes, which was probably a little romantic, but it made me feel better about never having any change on me when I walked past them on the pavement.

Looking around the corner, I saw somebody up there, or at least I saw the shape of a person, somebody leaning against the filthy brick wall, coughing and throwing up. It wasn’t that unusual to see people in that state, of course, at that time of day in that kind of place at the weekend, but this sounded worse, somehow, more unhealthy, more difficult.

I edged down the alley, and I was a bit scared, to be honest, but once I’d seen them and convinced myself that they probably needed help I couldn’t very well just turn around and forget about it. The ground was almost completely covered in old newspapers, flattened boxes, polystyrene trays, chicken bones, broken glass.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hey! You OK?’

The figure didn’t say anything, but stopped vomiting, and if they could stop at will they must have been all right, I supposed. They looked up at me and I thought that they looked male, but it was still too dark to tell for sure. Then they bent over and an obscene amount of wet matter poured from their face, splashing all down the wall and piling up on the floor, substantially enough for me to see it from where I was standing, so there must have been a horrendous volume of the stuff.

I don’t like this, I thought. There’s something deeply wrong with you.

The figure looked up again, but this time a car performing a 180-degree turn on the main road behind me shone its headlights directly down the alley and the person’s face was clearly illuminated. I would have been difficult to identify, silhouetted as I was, and their body remained hidden, obscured by my shadow, but the face. That face.

Kenny. Kenny Hicks. All the car gave me was a split second, but that was all I needed to identify the dead eyes, the huge mouth, the sharp, broken nose, and it also revealed thick, dark blood running from his lips, smeared across his cheek and throat, flowing from the weird smile that bisected his face.

He was moving towards me.

I turned and sprinted down the alley, shooting from its mouth like I was being spat out.

‘We have to go,’ I said, wheeling on the others, shaking. ‘In a taxi. Come on. Let’s go. Now.’

So my dad arrives in his old white Metro. There is moss growing in the mirrors. There is moss growing along the bottoms of the windows. The whole thing is covered in rust spots and mud splats. But he couldn’t care less. Neither could I. I’ve never understood what people find interesting about cars. But then, a lot of people don’t understand what I find so interesting about crap films.

He pulls up. I make my way round to the passenger side. Open the door and duck in. I sling my backpack into the back seat. I try not to gag at the intense scent of stale tobacco smoke.

‘Alright, Dad,’ I say.

‘Alright, Son,’ he says.

‘How are you?’

‘Alright,’ he says. ‘Alright.’

‘You look tired,’ I say. He doesn’t look well.

‘I am quite tired,’ he says. ‘Was out late last night. Making the most of these clear skies. Perfect for watching, they are.’

‘UFOs?’

‘Yep. UFOs. Haven’t seen any, though.’

‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Don’t start that, Son,’ he says. ‘Not tonight.’

‘What’s all this about, anyway?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is there something up? You’ve got some bad news or something?’

‘What?’ he looks at me, briefly. He looks back out of the windscreen. He sets off. ‘No, of course not. You always think the worst. Why would we have some bad news? No.’ He shakes his head. ‘Just been a while since we saw you. That’s all.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘OK.’

‘You’ve got to drop this thing you have. About getting ill. Won’t do you any good, you know.’

‘I know, Dad,’ I say.

We are encased in a bubble of light. The car. It traverses these tiny roads. We are surrounded by that pale countryside dark. Mossy cobble walls on either side rush past at speed. This is all we see. Walls and road and naked trees.

‘Best moment of my life,’ he says, ‘was seeing a UFO over Scafell Pike.’

‘What?’ I say. ‘Really?’

‘Well,’ he says. ‘Apart from marrying your mother, of course. And her giving birth to you.’ He glances at me sideways. Kind of smiling.

‘Well, I don’t know. I didn’t mean that. I meant – what, seriously? Seeing a UFO?’

‘Yep.’

‘Why was that so good?’

‘Because I couldn’t explain it,’ he says. ‘When was the last time that you saw something that you couldn’t explain?’

‘I saw an aeroplane yesterday,’ I say. ‘And I can’t explain that. How it was working, I mean.’

He shakes his head.

‘You know, though, that the aeroplane was built by men and women,’ he says. ‘People. People who understood how the thing was going to fly. What I saw that night, that was different. Just seeing it evoked a feeling, I don’t know how to describe it, it was so strange. I feel like I can’t really describe it using human words, Francis. It was completely other.’

‘I bet I could describe it,’ I say. ‘I bet I could describe it now. ‘It looked kind of like a helicopter in the fog.’ Would that be accurate?’

‘You know,’ Dad says, ‘I’ve seen a helicopter in the fog. And that thing over Scafell Pike looked nothing like it. I’m telling you now. The sight of it, just the way it looked, placed it well outside our understanding.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘You can’t ever know that. All you can ever know is that it’s outside of your understanding. That’s all you can definitely say! That’s what I meant about the aeroplane, see. You don’t know that the thing you saw wasn’t built by people.’

‘One day,’ Dad says, ‘you’ll see something. Or hear something. Or feel something. And you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.’

Well. That would be nice, I guess.

‘You want to stop somewhere to do some watching?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘No thanks.’

My parents live in a small terrace on a small road that sticks out from a small village in the Lake District. It’s a pretty nice house, actually. All nice grey stone and flowers. They bought it years ago. When they were younger than I am now. Dad turns off the engine.

‘Here we are,’ he says. But doesn’t move.

‘OK then,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

I reach back for my backpack and open the car door. He still doesn’t move. He’s staring into space. Literally. His eyes pointing upwards through the windscreen. He gazes absently at the actually pretty amazing starscape.

‘Dad,’ I say. ‘You getting out?’

‘Yeah.’ He seems to come back. Shakes his head slightly. ‘Yep. Come on then.’

Visiting my parents isn’t all bad. The house is warm inside. All old wood. Soft rugs. Pictures of farm animals. The wooden floorboards and banisters and skirting-boards and everything else wooden seem to glow orange.

‘Hi, Mum!’ I shout through. I take my shoes off.

‘Francis!’ she says, coming through from the kitchen. She gives me a hug. ‘You’ve lost weight. Dinner’s ready. Come through. How are you? Are you OK? Is Manchester treating you well?’

‘Yes thank you,’ I say. She lets go and turns away immediately. ‘Are you OK?’

‘We’re OK,’ she says. She heads back into the kitchen. ‘Of course we are.’

My mum is called Joan. She is less of an old hippy than Dad. She is quite tall and has long brown hair, usually tied up. In old photos she’s wearing make-up but she doesn’t wear it any more. But then she looks quite young for her age, I guess. Her and Dad should both be fat, the stuff they eat, but they’re both quite thin. Mum loves books by Ian Rankin and Stephen King. She loves music by Seal and Joni Mitchell. She loves Forrest Gump and Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I don’t think she’s afraid of much. Apart from maybe something bad happening to Dad or me.

‘Throat cancer,’ Mum says, later.

‘All the rollies, son,’ Dad says, managing a feeble laugh.

‘Cancer,’ I say. ‘Cancer.’

‘Should be operable,’ he says.

‘Then why the fuck don’t you stop smoking, Dad?’

‘Language,’ Mum says.

‘Fuck off,’ I say, and she starts to cry.

I go to the room that used to be my room.

I have to get home.

The next day, over a cooked breakfast, I apologise.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just shocked.’

‘I know, Francis,’ Mum says. Dad is outside. He sits in a deckchair on the tiny patch of grass that is their back garden. Looking up at the sky.

‘What’s happening next?’ I ask.

‘He’s waiting for the date of his operation. Should be getting a letter any day now. Then he’ll go in, and you know. Get the thing cut out.’

‘And that’s the end of it?’

‘All being well.’ She smiles at me. A washed-out smile. All being well. ‘Francis,’ she says, sitting down. ‘Your father and I know how you are about all this kind of thing, and—’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think about it a lot. You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t know if I can help it, Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s everywhere. You know, I circled the word cancer every time it appeared in the paper last week. Just to see how many times. Too many. It’s not me thinking about it a lot, Mum, it’s not me. I can’t help worrying. The whole country is obsessed. It’s natural, though. I just want to prevent it.’

‘No, I know,’ she says. ‘But we don’t want it to get in the way of your life. We don’t want you to worry so much you can’t, you know. Get on with your life. That’s all I meant.’

‘What? You want me to just forget about dad dying? Is—’

‘He is not dying!’

‘No, I’m sorry. I know.’

‘This is what I mean, though. Always thinking the worst. Fear, Francis. It would be very easy now to be afraid forever. Every little pain or illness. But you can’t. Do you understand me? You can’t.’

‘OK, Mum,’ I say, and smile at her. Another washed-out smile. As if it’s not already too easy to be too afraid. I blink. ‘Mum,’ I say, ‘I think I want to go back to see my friends.’

‘What? Already?’

‘I think so. I think it would help.’

‘Oh, Francis. I don’t know.’ She starts shaking her head. ‘I don’t know about that.’ She starts stacking the empty plates.

‘As long as I stay here, Mum, I’m just going to be watching him. Waiting for him to start coughing again.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘That’s what I do.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

‘Don’t say sorry. I guess I understand, Francis. I’ll take you back to the train station this afternoon. Promise me, though. Promise me you’ll be back soon. Come back for Christmas, hey?’

‘Yeah, of course. Of course. Thank you, Mum.’

So I’m back on the small, rural train. Crawling through countryside, towns, villages. Watching the sky get deeper in colour. It’s not that late: it’s just the time of year. Late August. Warm, soft air rises up from the grimy heater running along the bottom of the side of the carriage. It smells dusty. The seats are grey with a pattern of small, green squares. Each is slightly obscured by a smaller, darker-green square. How anybody could be satisfied with the pattern is a mystery. It’s horrible. As I look at it, I start to see cells; I start to see the cells that make up human bodies. I start to imagine them splitting, subdividing, mutating. I look away.

The plastic casing that covers the inside of the carriage sides – that is, the wall of the carriage – is beige. Sick beige. The train only has two carriages. They vibrate, rattle and shake. Outside it is dark now. Two girls – one with dark-brown hair and a square jaw and the other with light-brown hair and a big, sharp nose – share jellybeans. They laugh. On the opposite side of the aisle, over the textured, turquoise, plastic floor, a boy in his early teens sits in a seat facing backwards, so that he’s looking in the opposite direction to the one we’re travelling in. He has very dark – nearly black – hair, and pale skin. He wears a dark green hoodie and black wires snake from his ears. His backpack rests beside him. Portable music players generate an electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic fields, they think, may cause cancer. Behind the boy sits a tall man with a round, tanned, shiny head. He is wearing a suit and forces a mobile phone to his ear with a claw-like hand.

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘in Wakefield.’

It is quite dark inside the train now. Not dark, but dingy, dim. A woman in a pale blue parka-style coat coughs into her hands and blows her nose. We approach a stop and the boy in the green hoodie stands up to get off. Squares of orange light float across the interior of the train as we pull into the small station. Light that’s made it through the windows. As we pull away, the squares of light are a strange whitish-yellow. Like the inside of a grapefruit. On either side of us now, industrial estates and car parks. Outside. But also, the reflections of the inside of the train are visible in the windows. They travel with us. Like ghosts, in that they disappear when the train passes a light source. But are at their most vivid in the deepest dark.

Suddenly, a large, brightly lit object appears in the windows on the left-hand side. Descending as if from the sky and approaching our train at incredible speed. My mouth drops open and a warmth spreads up from my stomach and I laugh. I start to laugh. Dad always says that space is so big that it’s stupid not to believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. I always thought he was just being a fantasist, but now. I press my face to the glass to get a better view of its approach. It’s incredible. Beautiful.

‘What’s tha’?’ asks a young boy with a Liverpudlian accent. ‘It’s gonna hit us!’

‘A UFO!’ I am about to say. To exclaim. To shout. But his father answers.

‘It’s another train, son. Another train on a higher line.’

The train runs alongside ours. I stare at all the people on it. I wonder what they think of me. A strange boy crying at them from the window across the space.

The local papers were full of the news of the remains found up that back alley, except they were all quite vague about it – they didn’t say what, exactly, the remains were comprised of, or who had been killed, or who the suspects were, or even when they thought the person might have been killed. Which suggested to me that they couldn’t, because obviously they would include all the gory details if they could.

Kenny, I thought, as I put the paper down, what were you doing down there? What was on your mouth? Could you be connected? I mean, that would have been ridiculous. But I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t forget the bloody-looking stuff on his face. But what could I have told the police? I saw a man sicking up some tomato sauce? No. No, I didn’t think so.

‘I suppose I should go to work,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Taylor, sitting across the dinner table. ‘It’s that time again.’

‘Taylor,’ I said. ‘You have to tell Erin how you feel. You have to. She told me so in Ice Bar on Friday. She said if you don’t tell her how you feel then she’s going to run off with Graham.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know.’

‘That bit about Graham, I made that bit up. What’s the hold-up, though? You know she likes you too. She’s hardly going to say no.’

‘I guess. I don’t know, Jack; I don’t know. I’m nervous. I’ve never asked a girl out before. She’s just – I just want it all to go right and for it all to be alright and just – right, you know?’

‘You sound stoned,’ I said, standing up.

‘I’m not.’

Our kitchen took up the whole basement of our house, and so was pretty big, and it was lit by one of those windows that looked out on to a kind of pit that let light down from the surface. The fridge was covered in magnetic words from the erotic-poetry fridge kit that had been arranged into sentences like TONGUE MY HOT, WET HEART and COME ON YOURSELF, DOG. Taylor would have been responsible for those, probably. There was a row of wall-mounted cupboards, along the top of which we proudly displayed empty bottles that had once contained unusual or unusually strong alcoholic drinks, and there were potted plants behind the sink.

‘See you later,’ Taylor said. ‘Might see you in the canteen. I’ll be in at three.’

‘Maybe see you there, then,’ I said.

From the road outside the house, I looked up at Francis’ bedroom window and saw that his curtains were closed. They had been closed since he had returned the day before.

The sky was a milky-yellow wash, laced with poisonous-looking streaks of brown vapour. Despite the fact that I was walking, I found myself overtaking cars and buses, the traffic so slow it was more or less stationary. The city was clogging up. All the cities were, as far as I could see, with too many vehicles, too many shoppers, too many plastic bags, and the earth, too; I had read that there were only seven years of landfill left. We were filling it up. The closer I got to work, the thicker the crowds got, the denser the mass, the slower the circulation, the wider the mouths. What day was it? Monday. With working shifts, I lost track.

Looking around the city at everybody with their massive mouths and tiny mobiles and bags of . . .