“You can’t keep running away from it forever, you know.”

This made him laugh harder for a moment, then stop.

Kearney’s adolescence had passed like a dream. When he wasn’t in the fields, he was at the imaginary house he called Gorselands, with its stands of pine, sudden expanses of sandy heath, steep-sided valleys full of flowers and rocks. It was always full summer. He watched his cousins, leggy and elegant, walk naked down the beach at dawn; he heard them whisper in the attic. He was continually sore from masturbating. At Gorselands there was always more; there was always more after that. Inturned breathing, a sudden salty smell in an empty room. A murmur of surprise.

“All this dreaming gets you nowhere,” his mother said.

Everyone said that. But by now he had found numbers. He had seen how the same sequences underlay the structure of a galaxy and a spiral shell. Randomness and determination, chaos and emergent order: the new tools of physics and biology. Years before computer modelling made bad art out of the monster in the Mandelbrot Set, Kearney had seen it, churning and streaming and turbulent at the heart of things. Numbers made him concentrate more: they encouraged him to pay attention. Where he had winced away from school life, with its mixture of boredom and savagery, he now welcomed it. Without all that, the numbers made him see, he would not go to Cambridge, where he could begin to work with the real structures of the world.

He had found numbers. In his first year at Trinity someone showed him the Tarot.

Her name was Inge. He took her to Brown’s and, at her request, to a film called Black Cat White Cat by Emir Kusturica. She had long hands, an irritating laugh. She was from another college. “Look!” she ordered. He leaned forward. Cards spilled across the old chenille tablecloth, fluorescing in the late afternoon light, each one a window on the great, shabby life of symbols. Kearney was astonished.

“I’ve never seen this before,” he said.

“Pay attention,” she ordered. The Major Arcana opened like a flower, combining into meaning as she spoke.

“But it’s ridiculous,” he said.

She turned her dark eyes on him and never blinked.

Mathematics and prophecy: Kearney had known instantly that the two gestures were linked, but he couldn’t say how. Then, waiting for a train to King’s Cross the following morning, he identified a relationship between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at the railway station. This similarity rested, he was willing to admit, on a metaphor (for while a cast of the Tarot was—or seemed—random, the sequence of destinations was—or seemed—determined): but on the basis of it he decided to set out immediately on a series of journeys suggested by the fall of the cards. A few simple rules would determine the direction of each journey, but—in honour of the metaphor, perhaps—they would always be made by train.