‘Good morning.’

‘Morning,’ said Norah, watching the postman set the basket at her feet.

‘If you’d sign here, please,’ he said, thrusting a small digital gadget at her. He looked so young that Norah felt like asking whether he shouldn’t be at school, but she bit back the question and signed. She always felt sorry for the parcel postmen she saw scooting around all over the place—paid a pittance and forever in a rush.

‘Bit like you,’ Sandra had once said, when Norah mentioned this to her, and Norah had laughed.

The man had already dashed off to his next job. Norah heard the downstairs door close behind him and eyed the delivery with suspicion. She couldn’t see a card anywhere—perhaps it had slipped into the cellophane under the basket. Cautiously, she began to take off the rustling wrappings. What an eco-sin, Alex would have said—he was stricter about such things than she was. She looked more closely. It was a huge basket of fruit. Apples, pears, green and red grapes… Had Tanja sent it to apologise for her behaviour the other day? There didn’t seem to be anything weird or dangerous about it, so Norah picked it up, carried it into the flat and put it on the living-room table. Then she stuffed the cellophane into a bin liner in the kitchen and was on her way back to the living room when the doorbell shrilled again.

This time it was the food, and as Norah unpacked it, she suddenly realised how hungry she was. She ate the two summer rolls straight out of the polystyrene box without even sitting down. Then she tipped the noodles into a dish and got out a fork. Today she would eat at the dining table like a civilised person, not at her laptop again—she’d got into bad habits these last weeks.

In the doorway she stopped.

The sun shining in at the window threw a broad strip of light across the living room onto the table, making the basket of fruit look like a Dutch still life. But it wasn’t the painterly beauty that captured Norah’s attention; something had been hiding in among the apples and pears and grapes. Scuttling across the table, heavily antlered, their black bodies almost surreally large, were three stag beetles.

36

I’m on the moon. That was her first thought when she opened her eyes and blinked in the sunlight.

Or Mars.

She couldn’t speak, could only stare as she took first tentative steps on the slippery ground, conscious that there was usually nothing here but water. Gallons and gallons of water.

‘I know,’ said Valerie, as if Norah had said something, or as if she’d read her thoughts. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’

Norah nodded.

All her life, the reservoir had been a vast lake. She had picnicked on its shores as a child, camped by it with her friends when she was old enough, swum in its clear waters more often than she could remember. Now, since being drained for repair works a few weeks before, it was transformed. The reservoir bed was dry—an apparently endless waste of pebbles and mud in every shade of brown and grey. Norah turned and looked up at the dam, dizzy at the sheer height of the wall and the thought of the unimaginable quantities of water that usually filled the lake.