Zeno slowed his pace to study the lesson. The resemblance between the two was striking, even though the father was in his sixties. Another case of a man who had become a parent late in life. And why archery? Perhaps this latter-day merry man had inhabited Sherwood Forest in a previous life. The boy aimed his arrow at the straw-backed target, shot—and missed. The arrow in its short flight brought to mind the second part of his quest; the part that had opened like Ali Baba’s cave on the charabanc to Bournemouth.

It was Rick’s theory that Zeno of Svevo had been named after Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek born around 485 BC. Not much was known of his life, except the floruit he left, a small collection of philosophical puzzles of astonishing ingenuity. These puzzles were known to students since Zeno’s day as the paradoxes of motion.

It was by way of these that Zeno of Wapping transferred his identification with an imaginary gypsy ancestor to an even greater outsider. For he came to believe that in the solving of these conundrums he would prove himself a worthy inheritor of his name. He applied himself daily to the many unsettling limbs of Zeno’s arguments that he learned had defeated more accomplished thinkers than himself. Bertrand Russell was said to have taken with him to his grave the disappointment of failing to solve Zeno’s puzzles. And Aristotle didn’t appear to have seen the implication of his fellow Greek’s artful gem.

For months Zeno had addressed these paradoxes of motion, facing them in his mind from different angles, as a mountaineer studies a seemingly unscalable rock face. As time passed and he found he was no nearer a solution, he narrowed his field to the third conundrum in the series, which stated: ‘The arrow in motion is at rest.’ To which the ancient Greek had commented, ‘For what is in motion moves neither in the place it is in, nor in one in which it is not.’

The boy yelled as he put an arrow in the bullseye, but by then Zeno had moved on.

On this Midsummer’s Eve excursion, Zeno felt no nearer to solving the puzzle, yet there had been moments when a solution had felt close. Once, on an overnighter from Glasgow to Leeds, while the other young men were busy kissing and cuddling with groupies at the back of the coach, Zeno had been dozing across two seats near the front. He’d woken to find his mind curiously clear and receptive. He discreetly asked himself, Why was the arrow in flight at rest? and waited. The front of his mind remained tranquil, but from its depths came a sensation of movement as though a trapped bubble of air was slowly surfacing from the darkness. The sensation increased, spreading throughout his body, and he knew without thinking that if his brain tried to reach for it consciously, the very action would halt the movement. It was moving closer, ever closer to his comprehension when Slim Stiff—Iron Dick, to some—shouted from across the way: “Oi, Zeno—what’s the collective noun for actors, four letters?”