Mr McKinley wriggles himself upright again. ‘Now hand me the lighter and open the window a bit more. As for you two: stay away from the smoke. It’s not good for you. Put the music back on, would you? A bit quieter. I’ve got something you may be interested to hear.’

Chapter 32

Old Kenneth McKinley takes a shallow puff of the cigarette that Susan made, blowing the smoke out straight away, and closes his eyes again. Then he raises his head and looks first at us, then at the lengthening column of white ash on the end of the cigarette.

I go to the record player and somehow find the ‘on’ button. The black disc revolves, the arm-thingy descends, and the strange, discordant music begins again. Mr McKinley waits until I’m sitting down.

‘I don’t actually smoke it, you know,’ he says. ‘My chest cannit take it. I just like the smell. It helps me to think.’ True to his word, he doesn’t place the cigarette in his mouth again, but holds it in his fingers, allowing the smoke to curl up to the stained ceiling.

Then he starts speaking, and it is exactly as though he is giving a speech. Something he has said before.

‘There was a time – not so long ago, either – when the world seemed as though it was open to new ideas.’ He pauses, then fires us a look over his round glasses. ‘Are you listening?’

‘Yes,’ Susan and I say in unison, and we really are. There is something about his way of talking that forces you to pay attention.

‘Well, that was the world I grew up in. Everything was changing; everything was new. Jet aeroplanes, heart transplants, space travel, foreign holidays, pocket calculators, central heating, colour television, cures for this disease and that disease, computers, oh – the excitement about computers!’

Mr McKinley wafts the cigarette under his nose and resumes his little speech.

‘After the horror of the war with Hitler, we thought we were creating the perfect world! And all the while we were ignoring what was right in front of us. What was right within us. Inside us! Hmm? And look at us now, eh? We’ve become more interested in staying alive for as long as we can than in actually living the life we have.’

I shift on the couch and the paper under my bottom crackles. This has all the signs of a speech that could go on for a long time, but I don’t care. I think I know where this is going, and I want him to get to the Dreaminators. Susan has leaned forward and is nodding along enthusiastically.

‘The limits of the conscious mind, my wee friends, have never been discovered. As for the un-conscious … well, that might as well be limitless.’ He sighs. ‘But no one wants to know. Not these days.’

He flicks the cigarette, with good aim, out of the window.