At the age of six Marnie Waterman wanted to be married. She believed this would happen when she was twenty-one, as the inevitable consequence of reaching that age. She would also have horses and drive a car. Another inevitable consequence was: she would be tall. Though she had no plan for bringing it about, the future seemed already there for her, a dreamy thing with pre-loaded contents. At seven she said to anyone who asked: ‘I’ll certainly travel.’ Ten years old saw her adding an image of herself in blocked pink satin shoes; although this, out of shyness, she kept private. Around that time the Chinese economy collapsed and everything else went with it. Media dubbed it ‘the perfect storm’. Like most of the other fathers in Wyndlesham, Tim Waterman had put up the hurricane shutters a year or two in advance. They were one of the lucky families, he explained when Marnie was thirteen: nevertheless a lot of things fell out of her future around then. Outside Wyndlesham, stagflation wrote itself over everything like graffiti. Peak oil had come and gone. No one knew how to blow the next bubble. The financial sector, stunned by the discovery that money had been as postmodernised as everything else, passively allowed the state to clip its wings. Bankers seeking explanations read Baudrillard forty years too late. Bonuses tanked. A few footsoldiers got jobs in the remaining heartlands of the industry, where they found competition fierce. Families like Marnie’s still drove everywhere, but their Range Rovers and Audis went unreplaced year on year; and though their incomes remained good they felt hard-up. Adults were forced to find new ways of viewing the idea of success; children were having to mature earlier. Some of them felt resentful about that. Sharp divisions appeared at the upper end of the middle class. Suddenly your parents could afford the Wyndlesham cheese shop or they couldn’t: Marnie’s cohort found itself defined by this. In her mid-to-late teens Marnie revised the contents of the future, but she still expected it to bring itself about. Meanwhile, her father began to look tired, then died without warning of pancreatic cancer. Luckily he’d protected the family from that too. Marnie, nineteen and a half, came home to the funeral by train – a long, grinding journey through a landscape composed of empty industrial estates and abandoned parking structures – to find Anna sad but also frisky. They spoke about how free she felt, but it turned out she hadn’t made any plans either. All that time, Marnie had been doing well at a good university, though when her twenty-first birthday arrived she turned out not to be married after all; towards the end of graduation year she accepted a job offer from one of the emerging mutual associations.