Dan scratched a finger repeatedly against the side of his face as his mind fought for an appropriate dismissal to Josh’s observation. He couldn’t think of one. “You could well be right.” He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. “So, are you saying that it’s my fault that you dropped out of university?”

Josh laughed. “No, actually, I’m not. And, to be quite honest, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference if you had sent me to another school. I’ve always had a natural aversion to all forms of education.”

Dan smiled at his son and walked back into the room and scooped up a pile of clothes from the floor. “I’ll put this lot in the washing machine. You bring down the rest.”

6

It had happened exactly one month and two days after he lost his job. At the precise moment when the first news report broke on the radio, he had been standing in the kitchen, making himself a mug of instant coffee to accompany his lunchtime sandwich. He remembered that he held the spoon brimming with coffee granules hovering above the mug, frozen in his actions, as he listened to the broadcast. By the time that the reporter had signed off, promising to keep listeners up to date with news as it broke, and the incongruously lighthearted music had started once again, only two minute coffee granules had fallen to the base of the mug. In the plethora of reports that filled the newspapers for the next two weeks, it became clear that others throughout the world had also remembered exactly what they were doing, down to the last detail.

He had immediately turned on the television and watched, transfixed at the scenes that were being beamed live from New York. He knew the building so well. He had been in it so many times before, but still he found it impossible to orientate himself, to tell from the shaking, street-level camera shots which tower had actually been hit. When he eventually realized that the one that housed the headquarters of the company for which he had worked for fifteen years still stood, apparently unscathed, he felt a moment’s selfish relief that his colleagues would be all right and that they would be able to escape. It could only have been a moment, because as he stood there, no more than three feet away from the television screen, he watched in horror as the second aircraft hit the surviving tower.