Danny Faulkner felt a tingle in his scalp, jolted upright in his seat and smacked instinctively at the spot on his head. He blinked, examined his blank palm and looked around the room, faintly irate, as if it was someone else that had struck him, then sat still and held his breath until he could see it, the dark vibrating dot of a midge tracing a wavering circle in the air.

Danny yawned and shifted in his seat. He had fallen asleep, right there at his desk. The laptop’s screensaver had come on. The screensaver image was a landscape, depicting a valley of densely clustered, rounded, ­node-­like rocks covered in a delicate layer of palely glowing green moss. The photo was ­other-­worldly, like the surface of an alien planet, but it was only a lava field in Iceland, according to the caption.

The midge circled buzzing in the air and drifted in front of the window, where Danny lost it in the light. Out on the lot the sun was beating relentlessly down on the still and silent rows of cars. The sky had no clouds in it and was the bright chemical blue of the dye they put in ice pops. Just looking at the sky was making Danny thirsty. It was a gorgeous Friday afternoon in July, but what the weather was doing was none of Danny’s business, confined as he was to the dim and sweltering back office of his father’s Nissan dealership until the clock struck five.

Danny looked up at the grilled vents in the ceiling. He reckoned there was something wrong with the room’s air conditioning. Air seemed to be circulating, it just wasn’t doing anything. Danny decided to test his suspicion. He snapped shut the laptop, rolled his chair into the middle of the room, and ­carefully – recklessly but ­carefully – stepped up on to the seat and reached for one of the ceiling vents. He was right; the jet of air dropping from the vent was no cooler than the tepid air already in the room. The midge zipped by his ear. He spouted his lips and blew futilely in the bug’s direction. The chair began quaking skittishly on its casters. Danny steadied himself and jumped to the floor as the chair shot out from under him and thudded into the wall.

A few moments later Danny’s father, JJ, stuck his head into the office.

‘What was that?’ he said.

‘What was what?’

‘Don’t be buckassing.’

‘I’m not buckassing,’ Danny said, glancing at that section of wall the chair had collided with. He thought he saw a faint grey ­scuff-­mark, looked quickly back at his father.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘what’s with the air con? It’s like a furnace in here.’

‘It’s sticky, all right,’ JJ said. ‘I’ll get Grealy on it. Did you hear from Ben?’