She felt in those first moments of sunlight that she might not return to this small house that she had shared with Fergus for so many years, or that even if she did, everything would be different, never quite the same again. Unease stirred, but she also had the sensation of moving inexorably towards something dark but necessary; that nebulous feeling that something was going to happen.

She got out of bed and pulled on Fergus’s towelling robe, caught the scent from a vase of freesias the gallery had sent, which stood on her dressing table. All part of this safe life she led. She padded downstairs and drew back the sittingroom curtains. The man next door was wheeling his bicycle down his path, pausing at the gate as he always did to fix his cycle clips. The teacher two doors down was gunning the reluctant engine of her Fiesta. Fleur found she was listening for it to start and thinking, This time tomorrow I will be in Singapore.

Fleur looked down across the glinting wing of the plane onto acres of perfect white cloud the texture of fluffy mashed potato. She remembered as a child the thrill of believing those clouds were solid enough to sit on, that she could have jumped from one floury cushion to another.

The mystery of land mass, ocean and sky from a height never left her. The changing patterns and shape of mountains and desert and the progress of herself encapsulated in tons of moving metal remained a wonder of human engineering.

It was as if, once airborne, between lives and destinations, all normal, taken-for-granted things were rendered, by stress or fatigue, abnormal. As if she was circled by an odd tight silence, worn like a cloak to distance herself, making her progress, a stranger among strangers, infinitely obscure.

Travelling forward through time, arriving thousands of miles into an unfamiliar or distant landscape of tomorrow, imbued Fleur with an almost catatonic immobility and invisibility. She neither moved nor undid her seatbelt but sat and stared out at the wondrous mass of virgin cloud.

An old man on the aisle seat was telling the woman between them how he had built the pipeline down in the vast dry expanse of desert below them in Dubai. For thirteen years he had toiled in the unforgiving sun, taking water to the Bedouins. His skin told the truth of an engineer’s harsh life in the sun. Unmistakable patches of skin cancer marked his hands and face like a badge of office.

Normally Fleur would have been fascinated by his reminiscing, but she wanted to remain in her no-man’s land, devoid of social interaction, the telling of stories, the re-telling of lives. She loved it when the lights went out, when the blinds went down against the night outside and she could lie tiredly listening to the rustle of passengers, the dull plom of the bell as they asked for drinks, the swish of recycled air around the cabin, as inexorably they ploughed through the night sky to Singapore.