At least she’d given me the details of what I was in for in a fortnight ago’s time, although I can’t say I was looking backwards to it.

  … and then, right, as if to rub her face in it, there were the helium balloons. Like he was throwing a kids’ birthday party. As if he was celebrating, and this just after her blue surprise on Tuesday. She wanted to scream; she wanted to burst into tears; she wanted to stand up, halfway through Marcus and his waffle about thinking the unthinkable, just walk across the room and break the bastard’s nose. She couldn’t understand how they had come to this.

  She’d met him when she’d joined the group, back in the spring of 2018, and not long after she’d moved into the ground-floor flat downstairs from Steve and Sheila, who had hooked up at the group before they married and suggested Alison should come along one evening. She supposed they meant well, knowing she was on her own and maybe hoping she might meet somebody – which, of course, she had. She gave the pair a sideways glance as they sat between her and Marcus, holding hands and very publicly in love. She hadn’t told them yet, about the test. She wanted to throw up.

  That first night, eighteen months ago, he’d been so sweet and tender. Even in the urgent heat of the encounter, there’d been something in his manner that suggested an endearing sadness. He’d been so fond and attentive, it had almost been as if they had been saying goodbye rather than hello. The sex had been incredible. She’d never had a lover who’d seemed so familiar with her body and its needs, right from the very start. Her throat tight, she admitted it: she’d thought he was the one. Even the pained and guilty looks he’d sometimes give her – more towards the end of their relationship than at the start, now that she thought about it – she had written off as possibly prenuptial jitters. When he’d asked if they could talk, two weeks back, she’d pathetically assumed that he was maybe going to propose. He wasn’t. And then, icing on the cake, there was the news two days ago.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do – about the baby, about anything. She didn’t even know if she should tell him. She’d been planning to, to stage the full dramatic soap-opera showdown, although what would that achieve? The way he’d greeted her when she came in, it was as if they’d never met before. As if all of the breathless moments that they’d shared had never happened, or that it was only her they’d happened to. They were like strangers, was that what he was saying? Well, OK. Message received. At least, she thought, she understood her situation clearly now.

  Except for the balloons.

  What that means is, I’m one of the concealed people ordinary humans share the planet with. We’re what a man called Donald Rumsfeld will apparently refer to in about eighteen years my time as ‘unknown unknowns’. We don’t show up in folklore, since we’ve all got different strategies by which we can avoid attention, and this is most probably the reason we’ve survived for so long, undetected and undreamed of. There’s perhaps two or three dozen separate species of concealed people in the world, although in the UK you only tend to find Snapjackets, jilkies, mormoleens and Whispering Petes. I don’t know any Snapjackets to speak to – to be honest, they’re repulsive little insect-vegetable hybrids that can camouflage themselves as nearly anything and eat domestic pets – but mormoleens and jilkies I find tolerable in small doses. We all have a sort of understanding whereby we don’t mess with other concealed people, although mormoleens are too laid-back to let this bother them unduly.

  As for Whispering Petes, the reason that nobody knows we’re here is that, from any biological perspective, we’re completely ordinary human beings. It’s just that our consciousness is travelling the other way through time. This happens not in the moment-by-moment sense, where we vomit our milk and cornflakes into cereal bowls before going to bed at seven in the morning – I don’t think that we could function that way – but more in the day-by-day sense. We wake up on Sunday morning, have the day the right way round and go to bed that night, but when we wake up the next day, it’s Saturday. If our lives were a book, you’d read the last page first, and then the second-to-last page, and so on. This has several advantages, although relationships are difficult, at least to start with. Which can be a problem, because intimate relationships are pretty much a Whispering Pete’s major preoccupation. Snapjackets do what they do so that they can ingest terriers; jilkies feed on a specific kind of energy; the mormoleens are, I don’t know, insomnivores or something; while we Whispering Petes are largely in it for the sex.

  Nobody has the first idea why we’re called Whispering Petes, when we don’t whisper and don’t seem to have more Petes than any other demographic group. I mean, something like 58 per cent of us are women. There’s a theory that we get the name at some point in the distant future, like, say, the twenty-third century, and that it’s been transmitted to the past as an oral tradition passed down from one generation to the next through normal Whispering Pete genealogy.

  As an example, in my own case, my first memories are of my deathbed in the summer months of 2059, as a drugged and muddled eighty-two-year-old surrounded by autonomous machines. My first coherent recollections, on the other hand, are of a calm and sunlit private ward in Aberdeen. Sitting beside my bed was a beautiful dark-haired woman in her seventies, and a handsome young man of barely thirty. Both were smiling at me. ‘Welcome to the world,’ she said. ‘You are Carl Wasowiec, and you’re a Whispering Pete.’ This was my wife, my darling Mila, and our son Jan, who had memories reaching to the twenty-second century. The two of them were Whispering Petes as well. It was a nice way to undie.

  Those early, elderly years were idyllic. All of us felt younger, stronger every day, although it still seemed strange when Jan reached childhood with more life experience than either me or Mila, and all three of us knew, to the hour, where things were heading. I remember one occasion when Jan was a strapping six-year-old. Mila was staring at him, shaking her exquisitely made head incredulously. ‘Look at you! How are they ever going to get you into me?’

  Jan was unborn in 2028, and Mila found her sudden, bulbous pregnancy a thoroughly unpleasant shock, although across the previous next nine months it dwindled to a much-missed nothing. We had unprotected sex over the dining table as a kind of wake. Then, two years before later, it was time for me and her to meet, in 2026, at one of the street parties thrown to celebrate the end of the pandemic years. Mila and I weren’t celebrating, though. We wept a little, and made love, and fell asleep staring into each other’s eyes on the next pillow, then we both woke up in empty beds the day before, and that was the last time we saw each other.

  After that I went into that miserable stretch of lockdowns, false dawns, riots and pandemonium, where my romantic life consisted of coarse fantasies about the supermarket girls delivering my groceries. During that period, I mostly occupied myself with looking through my many diaries and scrapbooks to see what I had in store for me once the pandemic waves reached their concluding point of origin in 2020. Even I sometimes feel a bit haunted by my diaries: dozens of them at the start, all filled with my handwriting and describing things that hadn’t happened to me yet. What I do, every night I write about the day I’ve had, and then when I wake up, that entry will have disappeared, along with the entry preceding it – which I wouldn’t be writing until later on that evening. I’ve skimmed through most of them, back to the childhood that it appears I’ll be having in Gdansk, during all the upheavals of the 1970s. It’s an eventful life. In ten years ago’s time, I get to meet my mum and dad, before the motorway collision in 2009 that delivers them to me.

  One of the most intriguing things, however, something that I thought about a lot in lockdown, was a clipping in the 2019 scrapbook that I’d had unyellowing in my diminishing collection for some forty years. It had been cut out from the Thropshire Herald, Saturday, 19 October, and the headline read TEN DEAD IN UNEXPLAINED TOWN CENTRE TRAGEDY.

  The article concerned an extirpated paranormal studies group, of which it seemed that I was going to be a member – I was mentioned in the piece as having not attended the fateful event in question due to being incapacitated by a migraine. Clearly 2019 me was lying through my teeth, because I don’t get migraines. This suggested I would be involved in what was going to happen, though the scale of the disaster meant that I wouldn’t be working on my own. From the toned-down descriptions of the scene, it sounded as if I’d be in attendance with a jilky.

  By cross-referencing with my 2019 diary, I was able to learn more. The group, which it appeared that I was going to belong to until 2016, would apparently be thinking of commencing a new area of study which might threaten the concealed people with exposure. That, it seemed, would be my motivation for the disassembly of ten human beings. As for the morality – well, for a Whispering Pete, there isn’t any. There’s just things we’re definitely going to do, and how we feel about it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. This is our existence, working backwards through a diary that’s already written, from romance to massacre, not having any choice or say in anything.

  ‘So, in conclusion, then, I hope I’ve made you think about the things we might be overlooking. Wonderful things, which might be right there under our noses.’ Marcus risked a sidelong look at David. Was he getting any of the subtext, Marcus wondered? ‘I just think it’s so important that, as individuals, we feel free to explore beyond the limits and the categories we impose upon ourselves.’ Oh, for God’s sake. Could he sound any more like he was chatting someone up? It must be obvious to everybody in the group, except the person that it was intended for. ‘We should stop dwelling on a past that never worked out how we hoped it would, and open ourselves up to new experiences.’ David was just sat there, staring glumly into space, and clearly hadn’t caught the reference to moping over Anne.

  ‘It’s just, I think, there comes a time for all of us when we’ve got to move on and perhaps, I don’t know, try something new?’ From the doubtful expressions on the other members’ faces, Marcus could already see that they weren’t really into his change-of-direction thing, although that didn’t bother him. He wasn’t really into it himself. It was just there to camouflage the things he had to say to David. Marcus had been borderline obsessed since David had arranged the purchase of his current house in 2007; had been there offering sympathy when David’s hateful gammon wife had waddled off after the EU referendum. Those bachelor evenings round at David’s, sipping beer and listening to David’s dreary 10cc collection, talking about Fortean Times – there’d been so many nights when Marcus had been sure something was going to happen, but it never quite did.

  ‘Anyhoo, that’s about it. I hope I’ve got you all excited and eager to try out some new possibilities. If you’ve got anything you want to say to me, then come and see me later on when I can make myself available.’ Was that too Kenneth Williams? Not for David, evidently. He was still gazing morosely at the ceiling. Well, for God’s sake, what had Marcus been expecting? That they’d wait for everybody to go home, and then shag on the conference table?

  Instead, everyone just sat there looking a bit awkward. Alison Macready seemed as if she was about to say something, but then Carl Wasowiec stood up and ducked his head as if he was embarrassed or uncomfortable. Had Marcus’s talk been that bad? Wasowiec said, ‘I’m sorry, everybody, but I’ve got to go. I’m looking forward to getting to know you all.’ And what, pray tell, was that supposed to mean? Before anyone got a chance to ask, Carl hurried straight out through the door that he was sitting by and left the pile of variously coloured laundry he’d brought in with him just teetering there on its chair. There was the sound of Chalcombe & Bentine’s poorly oiled street door opening, and Errol Meeks looked baffled and called out, ‘Hey, hang on. You forgot your … thing.’ But there was no reply.

  For Marcus, who could judge a fellow by his laundry, the precarious stack of clothing was a puzzle. All the different patterns, all the colours. Now he studied it more closely, there were … at the sides, it looked like pockets hanging inside out, that had elaborate paisley linings. And then – what was going on? – spilling out from these gaudy apertures, there was some kind of tinsel, except—

  My name’s Carl, and I’m what’s called a Whispering Pete.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  Bedford approached perfection.

  Angie checked the dashboard clock. It was a bit before ten-thirty on that final Sunday morning, with no people on the streets and, other than her own, no moving vehicles. All things considered, an unusually pretty August day.

  Progressing eastward down deserted Mill Street, the subdued purr of the Astra’s engine seemed almost embarrassing against an otherwise uninterrupted silence, like some noisy child she had unwisely taken to a funeral. She made a right turn into Castle Road before she reached the looming church spire of St Cuthbert’s, indicating only out of habit. There was nobody behind her.

  Sunrays fell in columns, beautifully dappling the pavements and parked cars outside the John Bunyan Museum as she passed it on her right, the mottled light resulting from that last day’s atmospheric circumstances. Angie’s weather app, for once, had been entirely accurate: ‘The heavens shall be made a sea of glass, like unto crystal, wherein seven candlesticks shall be displayed.’ Essaying a smooth curve into the Castle Road’s main stretch, she only counted four of these – baroque, floating immensities that made the stomach flip to look at them – but had no doubt the other three were lost from view, somewhere behind the tall trees rising at this end of Newnham Road.

  She made an effort to ignore the sky, just as she did her best to screen out all the other troubling elements of that eventful weekend – through a single-minded concentration on her duties as the charitable trust’s executor. The beneficiary of the bequest, back in town after a long period away, would meet her at the property in a few minutes for a viewing and a handing-over of the keys and necessary documents. She had no clear idea of her career arc after that, nor where she saw herself in twelve months’ time.

  Parking a short walk from the Albany Road junction, Angie noticed that one of the red-brick terrace houses on the street’s far side still had a sun-bleached Brexit Party poster in its downstairs window. Was it really just the end of last year when all that stuff had been going on, with half the population busily anticipating world’s end while the other half prepared for paradise? Above the Castle Mound and hidden river to the south, there was a beast that had a lion’s head, plus six wings crammed with heavy-lidded and incurious eyes. This surely was the worst possible outcome, one where absolutely everybody turned out to be right. Sighing resignedly, she climbed out of the car.

  It was a glorious day. Its air was clean and fresh, with, on the breeze, a menthol redolence that she identified as incense, perhaps eucalyptus. Also, once outside the Astra, her discovery that the pervasive hush was laced with distant birdsong made the enterprise seem less intimidating, although only slightly. Over the far end of Castle Road, off to the east, a second towering eminence presided, this one with a bull’s head but the same six wings, folded around it like enormous fans, the same indifference in their thousands of unblinking eyes. The birds were nice, though.

  Still a few yards from the Albany Road turning, she was briefly startled by her first sight of the client, glimpsed across the box-cut privet bordering the corner house. Standing in the middle of the road in front of his new residence, he had his back to her and appeared to be contemplating the allotments on Albany Road’s far side, directly opposite his garden gate and white front door, both for the moment closed against him. Though she’d done her best to banish any preconceptions, he was nothing like what she’d expected. Not so tall, for one thing. Perhaps fleshier. He had on a rust-coloured summer jacket worn with matching slacks and what seemed to be Air Max trainers. Mousy collar-length hair with blond tips and highlights, something like a mullet. He was vaping, sipping intermittently from a stylised gold fountain pen as he surveyed the straggling allotments.

  Confident now that her navy trouser suit and near-homeopathic trace of make-up had been the correct decision, Angie called a breezy greeting as she tick-tocked into Albany’s deserted quiet.

  ‘Um … hi. I’m guessing you’re my half past ten, to see the house? I’m Angie, from Carstairs & Calderwood. I hope you haven’t been here long.’

  He turned to her and smiled, slipping the vape pen into his breast pocket.

  ‘Oh, no, only a few minutes. I arrived a little early, anyway. Wanted a bit of time to wallow in nostalgia, I suppose, and get a feel for how the place is now. It’s nice to meet you, Angie.’

  He stuck out his hand which, when she shook it, felt completely ordinary. Firm, dry, confident, without electric shocks or noticeable curing of her mild sciatica. Seen from the front, he wasn’t a bad-looking man, but there was no resemblance to the publicity pictures. Not so young, for one thing, perhaps early forties or late thirties? As in her appraisal from the rear, there was a certain chubbiness about his face, clean-shaven save a tidy sticking-plaster patch of neckbeard at an interval beneath the chin. The T-shirt he had on below his russet sports coat said, ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all of the best bands.’ A Rolex. One pierced ear that had a small gilt hoop in.

  ‘So, what should I call you? Is there something that’s the proper thing to say – “Your Highness” or “Your Majesty”? I don’t know much about all this. I don’t want to be rude.’