A full moon bleached the sky white-blue last night. It shone in through the bedroom skylight on Jim Swardesley from the post office and he dreamt that he was a large bear, on all fours, running through an icy stream, with dripping bear legs, and one of the big bear grunts he did in the dream as he ran woke him up. He turned and pressed his 93.5 per cent erect penis into the bottom of Gillian, his wife. ‘Mmmtired,’ she mumbled, batting him away. ‘Go to the workroom and calm yourself down.’ Downstairs, the Swardesleys’ son, Julian, sat on the back garden decking, smoking, unable to sleep, his mind rewired to a frenetic, fizzing, popping speed by the hundreds of messages he’d exchanged with girls on a dating app on his smartphone over the last week, all of which he knew would come to nothing, and all of which was some way to attempt redemption for the trip he’d made to Cardiff the previous week to meet someone from the same dating app, who had not only stood him up but subsequently vanished from the face of the online globe: a redemption that was ultimately less about his romantic life and more an attempt to convince himself that humans weren’t ultimately cruel and heartless. Behind him, in the downstairs bedroom, his older sister Phoebe, who had passed through a similar phase in her life eighteen months ago and now used her phone in the most minimal way, slept soundly. In her dream, on the idyllic farm of her future, a group of demanding animals, including sheep, chickens, three goats and a needy open-mouthed frog, followed her around the edge of a pond, in whose unrealistically clear water she had just been washing three peasant blouses and her long blonde hair. She turned, startled for just a moment, at the gentle yet solid touch of a large slab of human skin on her bare shoulder, which she happily realised was the hand of her future husband, the co-owner of the farm, who also bore a striking resemblance to the square-jawed lead from her favourite American TV series. ‘So tell me, dear wife,’ he asked her, in his square-jawed American voice, his hair not moving a fraction in the afternoon breeze. ‘Shall we ride Antonio and Bess to the beach this afternoon, or head to the mountain and meditate?’