One in the morning: unable to sleep, Anna switched on the 24 hour news, hoping, though she would not have admitted it to herself, for some indication that Michael Kearney had come home. Nothing overt, she thought; just something casual buried in the coverage of a scientific conference. A clue. All she received was a sense that there were no longer any real events in the world – that, whatever the ‘news’, nothing was actually happening until the camera turned its eye on each short jerky scene. Palm trees – enacting ‘stirred by an evening wind’ –would jump suddenly, almost guiltily, into life as the wire service prepared to objectify them. In the satellite lag before the stringer spoke, you heard a faint, repetitive voice which sounded like gak gak gak. Later she stood in the new bathroom, whispering anxiously:

‘Are you there?’ and, ‘You do like it, don’t you? You did say you liked it!’ Her erratic five-year transit of the suburbs and dormitories of South London – launched after the death of Tim Waterman, accelerating when Marnie left home – was over. The events of the afternoon had proved that. Nothing had been solved. She was still unable to remember what happened all those years ago, the night Michael entrusted her with the pocket drive. She stood by the bedroom window, rooting through her handbag. Out in the garden, a faint mist crept across the meadow from the river to melt among the orchard trees. Eventually she found the drive and held it like a titanium shell to her ear, as if it might have verbal instructions for her. ‘Oh, Michael, I know you’re there. Can’t you just come back and help?’

No answer: except that in front of her the summerhouse burst grandly and silently into flames, as black against the sky as the woodcut illustration in a book of Tarot cards.

17 Correlation States

SEVENTEEN

Correlation States

When the Kefahuchi Tract expanded, in what came to be known as ‘the Event’, parts of it fell to earth on planets all along the Beach. Event sites appeared everywhere, sometimes in deserts or polar icefields or at the bottom of the sea: but often alongside the cities.