The phone went through to voicemail, after a suspiciously medium number of rings. If it was off or out of range, it would go straight through. If nobody was there it would ring ten, fifteen times. If someone was cutting her off, it would ring precisely six and a half.

‘Hi, it’s me again.’ She didn’t say her name, imagining some phone-stealing stranger listening in to all her previous voicemails, getting criminally fixated. Had she left any personal details? Was there any way the phone thief could find her? Christ, get over yourself, Petra. ‘Dunno if you’re hearing this, but if you’re okay, please get in touch or come see me to prove it. I’d really like to know. Okay, bye.’

She got back to the shop with a sandwich and a coffee from the Greek deli, her phone stashed deep in her pocket. There were a few customers in, Petra saw through the windows, but Suki was smoking in the alleyway, clutching herself in the cold wind chasing up the alley. She hadn’t bothered to put on a coat, even though she nursed her cigarettes. It needled her. Petra pushed through to the shop and slumped down on the stupid stool behind the counter.

* * *

<7 Panther Road>

The message came at six, just as Petra was locking the shop. Suki had left at around four, with strict instructions to ‘bathe in the glory of the blacklight of the impending apocalypse and all the good music it’s flushing out at the moment’, which meant, in Suki-ese, that she should enjoy the playlist she’d devised for her after lunch, made up of the most obscure and mournful emo tracks that she thought would match her slumping mood.

What Petra needed was a pick-up, not a dark mirror to amplify this unaccustomed gloom. She wasn’t used to feeling depressed and she wasn’t one to nurse needless introspection, but Vincent’s abandonment had hit her. She’d really believed they were on the same wavelength. She’d trusted that he felt the same way about her; she thought she’d seen it in his eyes, felt it in his body. There hadn’t been any doubt about that. And the show still reverberated in her mind. No, more than her mind – an all-body hallucination, like being back there in reality, but worse. Twisted, warped. The flashbacks hit her sharply and without warning. She’d never taken acid, but this was exactly how bad trips were described. Could Metamuse have spiked the drinks with hallucinogens to enhance their effect? They couldn’t get away with that, surely. Would they want to?

Whatever the case, Petra was just trying to calm her breathing after a fragment of a very convincing waking dream – she’d been lying on her stomach on the floor, looking into a small door built into the skirting of a dark room in a grimy old house. Though it was bitterly cold, she seemed to be wearing just a T-shirt, and maybe she’d been dragged there because the T-shirt was rucked up and the skin of her bare stomach was grazed and stinging. She could feel the grit of the dust and jags of splintered wood, but worse were the balled pads of something the drag across the floor had dredged up – fur or mould or something soft and organic, a little bit sticky.