Now her father came to the door. He was already wearing his battered old donkey jacket, and he was pulling his trousers over his pyjama bottoms.

“Dad, what was that noise?”

“I’m not sure. It came from Abbeyhill.” The area just north of Arthur’s Seat, a half-mile away. “I’m going over there.” He glanced at Jack. “I think this wee fellow should have a day off school today.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll pack our bags.” He ruffled Jack’s mop of sleep-stiffened hair. “We’ll go for a holiday on the coast for a couple of days, will we?”

“Dad, I can’t just take him out of school. Where’s Mike?”

“Not here.” Ted glanced at her empty bed. “Neither is yer man, I take it,” he said.

“No.”

“I think you’d better find Mike,” Ted told her. “We should be together.”

“But the shop—”

Another thunderclap. Or explosion. Smaller, crisper this time.

She heard the distant, Doppler-shifted wail of police sirens, the throaty flap of a helicopter somewhere overhead.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see you later.”

Jack was left standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “Shall I start packing? What can I take?”

“First things first.” She swung her legs out of bed. “Go fix us some breakfast.”

Still sleepy, eyes gritty after being disturbed, she used the bathroom. Mundane details, bright in the unreal daylight: yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News left folded on the window ledge by her father, a final shred of paper left clinging to the toilet roll in its holder, Ted’s irritating little habit. The sunlight on the frosted glass of the window was midsummer bright.

There was no bird song, she noticed absently. No morning chorus, save for the discordant wail of the emergency vehicles.

According to the News, the patch of “quicksand” on Arthur’s Seat had reached a thousand yards across by yesterday. The scientists were saying it was still growing, but it wasn’t a neat circle; in some places it was burrowing away underground, following the seams of basalt that underlay the city.

It wasn’t a big story. It was too slow and obscure and impersonal. There was more space given over to speculation about the transfer of a soccer player from Hearts to an English club, Liverpool.

Henry said it wasn’t quicksand. On the other hand, he didn’t know what it was, she reflected, and they had to call it something. Naming something is the first step to understanding it. Was that true? What if the underlying reality was so strange that it defied the neat labels, the metaphors and parallels, humans sought to justify it to themselves?

The bathroom was warm and peaceful. She felt reluctant to step out of here, to handle Jack’s questions, to deal with the way her life was slowly tilting out of balance.