It reassured Seb; his brothers Henry and George, for example, supercilious though they were with him, were not, in the outside world, the intuitively-expert readers of women that he was. The nose-ring girl, for example, would not have bothered engaging either of them in conversation. It was Seb who had always charmed the ladies. Aged fourteen, you couldn’t have guessed which of your classmates would thrive in the world beyond school. But you knew that the blessed one who, by the age of eleven, had fingered a girl, and slept with one by thirteen, and spent not a term thereafter without a girlfriend, would always get lucky, even as the years passed and the jowls lengthened and the disappointments of life accumulated. The infant stud never lost his winning ways. Sometimes, the male group even sacrificed individual desires for the sake of one lifelong charmer. Seb, for example, had thrived on his reputation at school; found it burnished by his friends during lull periods at college – they practically brought the girls to his door. He hoped that because he was a man, and not a youth-oppressed woman, he would age in a distinguished way. And yet, it was impossible to escape the truth: how old he felt now. That was another, unexpected side effect of being in power. He was still on the young side, of course, for a politician. He looked good on television, or when snapped in the papers, or even in the drab constituency literature. Precocious was one of the words used in the press after he was promoted to junior Defra minister. And yet more and more frequently, Seb caught an anxious glimpse of that not-far-enough-away time when the balance of yearning would no longer tilt forwards – old enough to vote, old enough to drive, old enough to establish a household and sire children and set out some viable political ambitions – but backwards: too old to take drugs, too old to wear his favourite denim jacket, too old to risk his muscles playing rugby—

Alice shouted, Look out!

Four banners had dropped from the roof. They had been flung down, rather.

Alice squinted up at the three black figures on the roof. They were silhouetted against the sky like the elegant and inscrutable titles of the Studio Ghibli film she had just been watching with her daughter. She saw to her amusement that the banners had each been stitched with the word CWEN in different colours, yellow, green and red. The fourth banner, in rainbow colours, read: Climate Change is MAN-made. The three black figures in balaclavas were waving.

Apparently, from up there, they got a really good shot. At any rate, it appeared on all the news-websites that night, and on the cover of some local and national newspapers the next morning: Seb, looking upwards, startled, as the schoolgirls’ message hit him in yellow, green, and red—

TARA: Hit him metaphorically. We didn’t actually cause him any harm.