It was almost dark when she arrived home. Marnie had left irritable messages on the answerphone. ‘Pick up, Anna. I’m really very cross with you. It’s not the first time you’ve done this.’ Anna made herself an omelette and ate it in the kitchen standing up, while she rehearsed what she would say to Marnie. The last of the daylight was fading out of the sky. James the cat jumped up on to the kitchen top and begged. Absent-minded with guilt, Anna gave him more of the omelette than she had intended to.

‘I forgot to go,’ she repeated stubbornly to herself. ‘Marnie, I simply forgot.’

Later, she thought she saw a glimmer of light in the summer-house. Thin river mist had lapped up past the garden hedge and now hung between the apple trees. The grass was damp. Everything smelled sharply of itself, including the cat who – his faith in the generosity of the world confirmed – ran ahead of Anna with his tail up until he found something to interest him in the hedge. Anna pulled at the summerhouse door. Junk lay about in the dark: two leather chairs, Marnie’s old Pashley bicycle, a carpet someone had brought back from India. Rooting about under the window, she burst a cardboard box, from which spilled a quantity of ornaments, photograph frames, bits of china and silk, shellac records – family stuff of Tim’s going all the way back to the 1920s, stuff she had been meaning to clear out since he died. Each generation, she thought, leaves itself scattered in a kind of alluvial fan across postcodes and sideboards, inside wardrobes, jukeboxes, secondhand shops and places like this.

‘Titanium,’ Michael had said as he closed her hands round the computer drive: ‘Today’s popular metal.’

All those years ago she had promised to return it to a colleague of his in South London. She remembered the man’s name: Brian Tate; but though she remembered what his house looked like, she couldn’t really remember where it was. If she saw it she would recognise it. Something awful had happened, or was about to happen, the last time she was there. We never went back, she told herself. I know that. We were too afraid.

2 Hard Goods

TWO

Hard Goods

One piss-wet night in Saudade City a broker called Toni Reno made his way down Tupolev Avenue to the noncorporate space-port, out of which he ran his small but successful operation.