The women groaned from the couch. The red-haired man yelped and gasped. A telephone rang in the distance. The Mexican box, illuminated suddenly from within, emitted a cloud of fine white ash, which poured up and out into the room. ‘My name,’ said a voice from the box. ‘My name is—’ Then: ‘Is anybody there?’ Brian Tate struggled to answer, but nothing would come out of his mouth. He had plunged one hand into the cloud of ash, and seemed to be offering, for the approval of something Anna couldn’t see, the remains of the cheeseburger. After a moment, the glass door of the box fell off its hinges and Tate’s white oriental cat burst out. Snatching the hamburger, it jumped on to his shoulder and began eating. At this the women redoubled their efforts, moaning, straining, grinding busily at themselves, their activity driving the room towards a state in which it would be both dimensionless and yet full of possibilities. Shimmers distorted the air around the sofa: jumping to his feet, the boy gave the wheelchair a violent shove in a direction without logic – it was parallel, Anna thought, to an axis the room didn’t share – and suddenly it had spun away on a curious spiralling trajectory. Tate and his cat went with it, growing smaller and smaller as they accelerated, until they vanished into an upper corner. The figures on the sofa fell silent. Their will dissipated, their clothing disarranged, their shoulders covered with ash like victims of bombardment, they slumped in foetal postures. With a sharp report, the window cracked from side to side and fell into the flowerbed at Anna’s feet. The boy poked his head out and said, ‘Hey, you should have come in!’ He was tucking his penis into his jeans like a roll of soft pale chamois. Anna shuddered unhappily. She hurried out on to the street and glared back at the roof of 121. What did she expect to see? She wasn’t sure. Brian Tate and his cat, perhaps, spinning upwards into a milky overcast through which could be made out every so often two or three unidentifiable stars, the only evidence anyone has of the infinite space in which we believe we live.

She had remembered everything but it meant nothing.

‘I’ve had enough, Michael,’ she said, as if Kearney really had come back from the dead and was standing beside her, the way they had stood nearly thirty years ago outside the same house, in the aftermath of events equally strange and destabilising: ‘I’m up to here with it all.’