Driving along Route One was reminding him of the sense of crisis about motion he had first felt when he was fourteen, sitting in the back of his father’s car, returning to London on a Sunday afternoon. He had been half-listening to his ridiculous, embarrassing parents as they analysed the social currents of their deadly weekend in a draughty English house, with most of its rooms closed and the rest packed with the pompous caricatures who had stood between him and a cool weekend cruising around Camden Lock with his school friends from Westminster. British motorways in those days were usually down to one lane, making it marginally quicker to walk back to London, but on this occasion, due to some miscalculation at the Ministry of Transport, all three lanes were fully operational, and the family car was hurtling through the rain well above the speed limit. Like someone concentrating on a single instrument in the orchestra, Hunter tuned out from his parents’ tedious post-mortem and focused on the sticky sound of the tyres clinging to the wet road. In the midst of this self-imposed soundtrack, he found himself suddenly overwhelmed by the paradox that his body was immobile in the back seat and at the same time rushing along at ninety miles an hour. What was really going on? He moved his hand away from the direction of travel and wondered whether he was slowing down its journey but decided that it didn’t have a journey separate from the rest of his body or, more precisely, separate from itself. Everything was at rest relative to itself: his body, the car, the Earth, the Sun; they only achieved motion from their relation to something else: his body to the car, the car to the Earth, the Earth to the Sun, and, of course, the other way around and in relation to all other objects. His body, isolated from any other reference point, was simply always where it was, whether he was diving off a cliff, sitting on a plane or dead. On the one hand, everything was moving: waves undulating, blood circulating, particles thrown or pulled by one force or another, planets spinning, stars erupting, the Andromeda galaxy racing towards the Milky Way at a quarter of a million miles an hour; but on the other hand, everything was at rest relative to itself, just being where it was. The two rival pictures seemed to be throttling him, with both their thumbs pressing on his windpipe.

‘Stop the car!’ he shouted.

‘Excuse me, Mr Sterling, you need to stop here?’ asked Raoul.

‘No, no, sorry Raoul, I was just remembering a story.’

‘No problem, Mr Sterling,’ said Raoul, relieved not to have to stop on the cliff edge of a hairpin bend.