Those appointments she kept with herself – South Hemisphere NV; the Mambo Rey PostIndustrial Estate, Funene; the back stairs at SiteCrime, Uniment & Poe where the light dazzled down the stairwell like the light in a religious painting of Ancient Earth: what had they achieved in the end? Nothing. It turned out she didn’t even like herself. They couldn’t relate. They were too alike, the two of them. They were too surprised by one another’s speed and perfection not to react badly. Too chafed by one another’s obduracy to talk. She got the edge over that bitch self at New Venusport. Later, poor George’s corpse made her wonder if she’d gone too far.

‘Does a person like me kill things too easily?’ she remembered asking him in nicer times.

. . . He opened my head and put in a hand. It was so gentle. I absolutely melted. After that killing yourself is easy, it’s the unthought known, toothpaste at the corner of the mouth, reflections on a false marble floor. Though as you abandon yr own viewpoint the world so rapidly loses coherence, proves so impossible to understand, that there’s nothing to be gained. Sign on a chemist shop: FA Strange. It’s FA Strange all right. I don’t get it, Michael said. Why should you? I said. Why should you get it, after all? . . .

Anna’s earlier self was drawn to the summerhouse because the heat she felt in there was her own heat. She was angry in there. She was closer to her own surface. Her attention was easier to attract. But interference proved harder than oversight—

Summer. Night. The feeling of a storm on the way. The Waterman house sits, as unweathered as an architect’s drawing, hot and airless in the river valley. It’s been a strange, lonely day. Anna Waterman looks at her own hands. She calls the cat. ‘James, you old fool!’ At nine, the phone rings. When she picks it up, expecting to hear her daughter Marnie, there’s no one at the other end. But just as she puts down the receiver she hears an electronic scraping noise and a distant voice shouts: ‘Don’t go in there! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ Within half an hour, the summerhouse has burst into flames and she sees herself – a woman hard to age, wearing a 1930s-looking floral print—running towards her from the silent conflagration. Consternation is on this woman’s face. ‘Go away!’ she calls. ‘Go away from here!’