Mother slid me a five pound note, uncreased, flat on the table. I didn’t move. Except my eyes. I moved those. In my head, to look at the note, and then to her, and then back at my book.

“Take it.”

I continued to read. I was learning about the Aztecs.

“Take it.”

I slid my eyeballs around in their sockets and pointed them toward her again. And then I gave in and put my book down, and rotated my body and planted my feet on the hardwood floor, and met with her properly.

“No thank you,” I said, taking the note. Quetzalocoatl would have been ashamed.

You fold the orange paper in two, and then in two again, along the same axis, so that when you let it unfurl it formed an “S” shape, slowly bouncing outwards like one of those fortune-telling fishes, the kind that have a good go at looking into your future but either find it too impenetrable or too depressing, and give up and go limp. You watch it dance and die for a moment, and then screw it up, along with the remains of the silver foil, get up out of your seat and shuffle over to the bin in the corner and toss it in. No one looks up, as far as you can tell. But they probably do. Furtively, quickly, Just because no one’s staring doesn’t mean no one’s looking. You make your way back to the hard plastic chair.

My parents met next to a vending machine. She’d been after a twix, but there were none. So she got stuck, thumbing the confections through the grubby window with her pupils, trying to decide what would be a worthy substitute. Who doesn’t sell a twix? She’d asked. Hm? said the man behind her. She hadn’t noticed that she’d been standing there for several minutes and a queue of one had formed. Are you talking to me? No, sorry, hi, hello. She was flustered. And she knew the only thing that would remedy it would be a twix. I have a twix, said Dad. I’ll share it with you if you like. Mum was suspicious. He held up his twix, two fingers, he said. What are you after? asked Mum. A cherry coke, said Dad. Such a good drink. He nodded. Such a good drink.

You unstick yourself from the sweaty leather of your office chair and hoist yourself up with the armrests and onto your feet. The chair rolls backward slightly as you do this, with a little scuttling sound, as if it were afraid of your display of strength. You swivel it round and position it safely back under the desk, wedged in so it can’t go anywhere. You glance quickly at the others, but they don’t look up. Maybe they’re already dead, you think. Silently, you slip away to the other side of the room, past six more rows of drones. A couple raise their eyes to you as they feel your breeze on their cheeks, but inevitably only linger on you for a second, and then look somewhere else, toward the ceiling, as if using your image as a stepping stone.

You  know, you can never go back home. It just doesn’t work. Not once you’ve really left. This was the last thing he’d said to you on the day before you went, as you both faded out of consciousness like the floor of a pond fades from solid to liquid. And then through the quiet hours of goo and dirt and shit, and floating weeds, you reached the morning border between water and air, and unlike the murky bottom, this was an instant transition from peace to wakefulness, as he dropped the tin coaster from the bedside table while bringing you your coffee. Sorry, he said. And on that last day, he knew that the battle was lost, and instead of trying to persuade you to stay he was just nice, and kind, and calm, and good. And then, really, you left.

A lamb appeared at the door. He could tell because he had an Amazon Ring™️ camera and he’d got a notification on his phone. How odd, he thought to himself, a lamb, in Islington. He set down the two edge pieces whose compatibility he was just about to check, scraped his chair back over the wooden floor, and made his way down the half-flight of stairs—during which point the bell rang, and he said “Coming!!”—and down the little corridor to the door. He unbolted the bolt and unchained the chain, and twisted the key to the left two times to unlock the lock. It had frozen slightly shut, due to the combination of an unseasonably cold January and a leaky shower extractor pipe from upstairs. He gave it a good bash and a pull and it opened.

“Hello there lamb,” he said, looking down at the meagre-looking animal, “Are you alright?”

“I’m looking for the party,” said the lamb, “Is this Sarah’s house?”

And, a little puzzled, he replied, “Sarah lives next door.” And the lamb said thank you and trotted next door.

You take the path up from the river to the right, past the belvedere. You slow down to a stop, make a quarter-turn clockwise and run your gaze over the sooty stones. They are broken now, and cordoned off with bent metal gates and inelegant tape. You hold your in hands front of your face, as if to dive, but with your palms facing outward instead of inward, and you prize open the tiny gap in the air that serves as the opening to the corridor between now and then, and you climb inside that tunnel and shuffle yourself along and sit and watch. And you lie there on your front in the passage of time, watching yourself and your friends climb onto the roof.

She opened the door to his wardrobe and fumbled for the light switch. She found it nestling behind the sleeve of what felt like a real fur coat. The only thing he’d ever truly dreamed of was a walk-in wardrobe. The other boys would spend days and nights watching the football together and would cheer and leer and elbow and jostle. Meanwhile he’d sit alone, or sometimes with her, cross-legged on the floor, eating cheetos, gaze glued to the screen, the pixels washing his face with greens and pinks and blues, as a cosmo-clutching Carrie explored her sartorial Narnia. The warm fluorescent light of the closet grew brighter as it gained its courage. And she saw, on the racks, in all the coats and sweaters and shirts and tops and pants and leggings and sequins and shoes, all the different versions of him, in all the different combinations, folded away and hanging up on the rails, nestled side by side and on top of each other, like a catalogue of every angle of his soul. A wave of nostalgia and joy and grief flooded her, and all she wanted to do was sit down on the floor, cross-legged, in the middle of it all. And so she did, and she took the fur coat from its rack and cradled it, rubbing its soft arm across her face.

You step through the open door and your foot fails to catch the floor, and as you crumple, with a  yelp, into a long dark fall, you try to readjust and reconstruct, erasing your old expectations and addressing this new reality, and your back twists round and you compensate, raising your right knee to your chest and twisting your neck up and left, further than it wants to go, and it clicks unpleasantly, and you try to remember to breathe in. And as you stabilise, still tumbling down the unlit, wallless chute, you realise that that probably was not the door to the lavatory.

“Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I don’t keep my phone on me. And I was doing something else. And I don’t answer calls unless they’re planned. I’m a busy bee, Kate!”

He started to untangle this in his head as Kate continued talking at him. He’d learned to zone out “…and if it had been winter who knew…” knowing that he could catch little snippets and manage to piece together the conversation, fill in the blanks “…he’s a fucking idiot…” and make a passable case for having actually paid attention to her conversation, which was the same pretty much every time and always as one-sided. And so he untangled his explanation in his head, and recognised that, as much as he genuinely thought it might have been a little bit true, he realised he actually wasn’t a busy bee at all, more of a lazy locust, and was lying both to himself and to Kate. There are the types of people you pick up the phone to, and the types of people you don’t. And Kate was the latter.