But the place was empty. No women around me at all.

You must have been gutted, she says. No women, you say. I’m surprised that you stayed there two minutes.

I’ve changed, he says.

No kidding. Undoing her bra. So you smelt Devotion, you say. The perfume department?

I was nowhere near, he says. I went there, of course.

And what did you see?

Not a soul.

No one spraying testers?

No one spraying testers, he says. It was Flora, I swear.

Swear all you like, she says, you know it’s a turn-on.

You bugger, he says, and then stops. Hey, that’s what she called me!

She spoke to you?

Yes. Well, it felt like it. Just in my head.

Ah, voices, she says, coming round to his side of the bed. Hearing voices now, are we? Let me examine you…

No! He laughs. I’m the doctor.

I’m Spartacus. Lie on the bed. She pushes him onto his back. Resistance is futile.

‌Alert

As the train snakes along the house-backs, Logan stares down into the gardens: narrow pockets of territory, crammed with garden furniture and an extraordinary number of circular, safety-netted trampolines, some of them so large (and the gardens so small) that they almost stretch fence to fence. Sweet, he thinks, how many parents are prepared to give up their only patch of sky to their children. This is family territory: other gardens are littered with the debris of bright plastic toys abandoned mid-play. One has an above-ground pool: a deep and greened-over well of last summer’s memory, full of hope for the summer to come. The gardens testify to lives of hard work and minimal contemplation. But they have resulted, nonetheless, in a welcome dose of wildness in these densely populated folds of London’s skirts. Only a handful are manicured: a handkerchief of emerald lawn, a tidy shed; symptoms of the daily what-next of retirement.

Logan’s head floods with wonder. How, in the blink of the planet’s eye, we humans have expanded from caves and dirt floors to this sprawl of sophisticated dwellings, plumbed into running water and electric light, connected to global consciousness by television and broadband. We are oblivious to our miraculous lives. This journey, which a few hundred years ago was a six-day walk, is now a ninety-minute sit, with tea (from the other side of the world!) brought to his table. And the woman behind him is complaining to her friend that the train was five minutes late. Logan’s uncontrollable smile provokes the man serving his tea to say, Won the lottery, sir?

Something like that, he says. Because in that moment, Logan feels with conviction, anyone with a life has won the lottery.