It’s not fucking funny, he says to me, and he fixes me with this stare, this fucking stare where his head doesn’t move at all. That’s another thing that happened to him when he came back. When he spoke to you he never moved his head. I know that sounds unremarkable but try it yourself. You can move your eyes or whatever but try speaking to someone without ever moving your head. It’s fucking disconcerting, I’m telling you. And at first you don’t even realise what it is about it until you figure it out. They don’t move their heads when they talk to you. You realise that and you get the creeps. That’s a Special Branch technique. I’m giving nothing away here but watch out for it. The non-head-moving. Strategic non-head-moving. It’s a giveaway. A giveaway that they’ve had training. So as he calls this number and he utters this phrase. This phrase that he says has the power to unlock the future, is what he utters.

There’s no one on the end of the line. When he phoned this number someone picked up the phone without speaking. He’s in deep here. He utters the phrase. The person on the other end of the phone doesn’t respond. You can hear a transistor radio in the background. It’s playing music. What music? I says to Kathy. How do I know what music? she says. What the fuck does it matter what music? It might have been important, I says to her. But carry on.

There’s this music playing, this unknown music. And he stays on the phone. Davy stays on the phone and waits for a response but there’s none. He listens some more. He listens some more and that’s when he says to me that he understood the first lesson. He says that he gets it right there. Listen to yourself, he says. That’s the first lesson. The phone call was a feedback loop, he says to me. The phone call was a silent meditation between himself and his alter ego, and he says he felt supercharged. He says he hung up the phone after who knows how long. Long enough to get the message, he says, and he was buzzing. This is dangerous behaviour, I says to him, this is deluded behaviour. But he just looks at me with this fucking stationary-head thing and it’s enough to make you jangle.

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