As they started to taxi away from the gate, Lucy looked out of the window at the parked planes, the busy push-back tugs and the brake lights bleeding across the wet tarmac. She felt a sudden tightening in her body, as if a forgotten companion she was roped to had lost her foothold and was dragging her backwards just as she was about to reach the summit. Nostalgia, she didn’t do nostalgia, but right now it was pulling her into a free fall of inexplicably poignant detail: the green and white tiles in Nathan’s shower, the energetic tedium of his mother’s conversation, the diner on the corner where she had drunk enough insipid coffee to fill that refuelling truck; the jetty where Nathan’s little sister told her she had lost her virginity the night before; the great gilded adequacy of her old life; the family that had adopted her and would now never speak to her again.

As the plane took off, she could hear her friend screaming like a jet engine and then it was as if Lucy took a knife out of her belt and cut the cord and the screaming faded as her friend fell. She couldn’t go there. She just couldn’t go there. She needed another Bloody Mary to help her sleep and to soothe the weakened muscles in her leg.

3

Olivia sat on the crowded Friday afternoon train trying to check her proofs. After reading the quotation she had chosen from Svante Pääbo – ‘The dirty little secret of genomics is that we know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living breathing individual’ – she put down the proofs and surrendered to the daydream that had pursued her from Oxford to London and had now caught up with her again on the journey to Horsham.