‘Oh.’

I continued to follow this flittering presence around the room with my eyes.

Shall I offer myself up for you, Mr Huff? the child wondered, with a gentle laugh, drawing closer, leaving a light residue of the glitter on my arms and then withdrawing again.

Offer yourself …? I asked, jerking my arm away. The sensation of the dust was strangely painful. An exquisite, non-existent pain. I remembered once being stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the ocean off Acapulco. I came out of the sea and there was a bright mark on my lower leg, circling my calf like a whiplash. But I was completely unaware of it until someone kindly pointed it out to me. Then there was this curious interlude – an in-between time – during which my body knew that it had been attacked but my brain couldn’t quite process the fact. Like that odd pause after a toddler falls over, when he processes the fall, grades its significance, then inhales, sharply, to bawl out his furious response. Exactly like that.

‘Pardon, Mr Huff?’ Mrs Meadows glanced up from the tea caddy.

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘three bags,’ I said.

The child had briefly withdrawn, but then that soft sound returned: the broken … antique … broken bamboo chimes … although that hardly describes it … and I saw the dust in the furthest reaches of the room, settling on the heads of literally dozens of people … a dense sea of people … the dust making their presence manifest … all these ghostly shapes … holding out their hands to the dust, that they might be made … whole … real … for even the briefest of interludes. A terrible groan of conjoined yearning and love and pain and desire echoed around the room. I even saw a dog – a dog, a small shadow terrier, jumping up on to its hind legs. It was with a woman who reached out to restrain it, whispering a muttered expletive … The entire room was … like it was exposed by a golden searchlight … and all these … should I call them spirits … souls? Reaching out their arms with this mournful sigh … then the laugh of the child … So many of you! she tinkled, the debt is so huge … but we will pay it off, we will pray for you all … we will offer everything up … if we can only just … if we can only …

Then a sudden, terrible roar of interference – a babble of voices, but all shouting together, hysterically – like the start of the day’s trading at the London Stock Exchange.

The souls sighed again, a hoarse, whispering Ahhhhhhhh! and what struck me was how these two sounds were both completely separate, independent and all-consuming, yet they were both perfectly clear and fully audible, in that same instant, when normally … the only way I could understand it was that these two things – or three things, even – were all happening together but at completely different times. I was very struck by this feeling. Very struck by it. Almost … almost unnerved by it.