Once he had managed to break himself away from the mesmeric images of utter catastrophe, he tried to call his old office in the City. The lines were jammed. He then tried Nick Jessop, an ex-colleague who had coincidentally lost his job at the same time as himself. The domestic help informed him that Mr. Jessop had taken his baby son for a walk. At first, Dan couldn’t believe that Nick was able to carry on with such a normal, everyday routine when, twenty minutes before, an occurrence had taken place that was destined to change the world forever. And then he realized that it had only happened twenty minutes ago and that Nick wouldn’t even know about it. He told the woman to get Nick to turn on the television as soon as he arrived back in the house.

He was now desperate to speak to someone that he knew, someone that he cared about. So he rang Jackie. The receptionist told him that his wife was in a finance meeting and didn’t want to be disturbed. Dan had sworn at the girl, really sworn, and within ten seconds he was speaking with Jackie. “Is this really important,” she had said, “because I’m in the middle of an extremely tense meeting, and, by the way, don’t you dare start calling the office and using the f-word with my receptionist.” Dan had said nothing more, other than to tell her to get her ear to a radio or her eyes to a television as soon as her meeting was over.

And then he had remembered that Josh was upstairs in bed. He rushed up the staircase and entered his bedroom with such force that Josh had awoken immediately. Even in his soporific state, Josh could tell that something had happened.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” he had asked in a voice that registered real concern. “Why are you crying?”

Until that moment, Dan hadn’t realized that he was. “Could you come downstairs, Josh, and watch television with me?” He heard his voice choke as he spoke the words.

“Why?” Josh asked, jumping out of bed and hurriedly pulling on a pair of boxer shorts. “What’s happened?”

“I’m not sure, but I think that I might have just witnessed a whole load of my friends being killed.”

They had sat on the sofa together for the rest of the afternoon watching the television. They never spoke, except to murmur an occasional expletive at the sheer magnitude of the devastation. Dan tried, on a number of occasions, to contact his old office in the City, but still the lines remained busy. He had never felt so helplessly out of touch in all his life.