Hot air balloon! Me! Who’d have thunk it? Up here. Me, who used to refuse to walk over the high bridge over the motorway and go a mile further along to the underpass instead. Is that turbulence? Do you get turbulence in balloons? No room for a black box recorder here. Not with four of us in the basket: me, Chris, Titus and Jen, who is down for the weekend. One of Titus’s toys, this. Seems to be in control. Took lessons years ago. His dad. Professional. Did it for Virgin. Flew with Branson. Hung out with him and Mike Oldfield and Oldfield’s kettle drums. Oldfield shy, still looking like a boy at thirty-two. Avoiding going over the field of cows now. You can’t do that, Titus says, because the cows think the sound of the burning propane is the aggressive roar of a giant skybeast and freak out. Going south, down the river. Cottages on their own. Mystery homes, invisible to the land eye. Secrets of the sky. How on earth do you get to these places by car? Chris’s hand in mine. Think Jen is cool about me and her. Seems it. Two of them talked about millinery. Jen is taking a course. Chris did one last year. Compared hats. Seemed to hit it off. Almost left them to get off with each other. Chris, eating a nobbly orange. Sailing the peel away on the wind. Likes the big ones. Not me. I’m more of a satsuma boy. I watch her. Lines blurring. What am I? Lover or biographer? Can I be both? Titus taking us lower, following the curve of the river. Don’t think he’s going to crash land. Got some champagne with him. Expensive stuff. If you end up on private land you have to give the bottle to the owners. Tradition. ‘Every landing is a crash landing if you’re in a balloon, really,’ he says. Reassuring. That confidence, rife, even up here. Nothing touching him. Bending with the wind, fragrant, easing through it all like he’s made of flowers. Could I make myself like that? Is being like that within my capability, with where I’m from, who I’m from? Anyway, doesn’t matter. Not much matters up here. Not the book, because who will read it. Not the rent, because it’s not due for another month, and besides Titus said I could earn some money by doing some picking if I like. Harvest soon. Reddening land below. Looks like a map: a map of what I’m writing. But who will ever see it? Who cares? And that doesn’t matter either right now, because I’ve got Chris. Hand back in mine now, sticky from the orange. Does this work, two broken people together? Are we jigsaw pieces, or just shards? Shut up, Martin. Stay out of the future. Stay here. It’s good up here. She’s good. Life’s good. Cucumber’s good. Look at it all below you. Is that the spooky barn we walked past? It is. Is that the building where ‘Sister Blue’ was recorded? It is. Is that the sheep you cuddled last week? It is. Is that your estranged father? No. It is a Jersey cow. Is that the pub where you decked the esteemed newspaper editor Richard Peck? No, it’s not. That’s a million miles away, in another universe. We can do this, Chris. We can do it here, I think. Look, it’s the mist. I can’t believe it. The one you said still looked for the river, even though the river was filled in years ago. It’s the actual, famous mist. Well, not famous, more like cult mist, really. Famous in a quiet way, underappreciated. That poor, sad mist. Never stops searching. And then it goes. But then there’s more mist, and I suppose even though it’s not the same mist, it is the same mist, and everything starts over again, and, even though it’s different mist, made of different particles, I suppose it never forgets. It will always be here, trying to find the answer to its question.