She waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the interior of the house.

  ‘… this?’

  Instead of inviting her in, Owen keeps the door half closed.

  ‘You had other things on your mind. I didn’t want to trouble you. I hear Frankie’s out of the woods now. That’s great news, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m here to talk to you about.’

  ‘I suspected as much.’

  A single cough comes from upstairs.

  ‘Is that him?’

  ‘JJ. Yes.’

  ‘Your… lover.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know you’re committing adultery, don’t you? I’m very angry with you, Owen. Nodge – your husband, incidentally, as well as my beloved godfather – is going out of his head with grief. But doubtless, you know that already.’

  Owen doesn’t make any response. China crosses her arms.

  ‘You actually haven’t talked to him?’

  A Siamese cat, lithe and slightly sinister, winds its way through between Owen’s legs and stares at China through vast green eyes with resentment.

  ‘Boo! Get back inside!’

  Owen manoeuvres the squealing cat back into the living room and shuts the door behind it. After a second or two, he returns to the still only half-open front door.

  ‘I thought talking to Nodge would just exacerbate the wounds. Clean break and all that. You know.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ says China, taking a step up from the path onto the polished red doorstep. ‘You just couldn’t face the mess you’d left behind you.’

  ‘That’s not really fair.’

  ‘How long are you going to keep me out here? Can I come in?’

  ‘Well… it’s not really allowed… with the virus and… ’

  ‘Where’s JJ?’

  ‘In bed. He’s not feeling well.’

  China, taking a mask out of her bag, puts it on and simply pushes the door fully open. Owen gives way. She walks through the hall into the living room. The house, she notes, is surprisingly suburban. Chintz, pale, thick carpets and English landscapes on the wall, even a George Stubbs reproduction of a bucking chestnut horse. A vase of fresh flowers sits on a faux-antique coffee table next to an outsize book on English country houses. There is a sunburst mirror and a grandfather clock. She nearly trips over a footstool with a frilly trim.

  ‘I hope this is all meant to be ironic,’ says China.

  ‘JJ has very eclectic taste.’

  ‘That’s one word for it.’

  She makes her way across the living room and walks through the open sliding glass doors that lead into the garden. She takes a seat on a bamboo garden chair with a cream cushion. Owen follows her, also now wearing a mask, and opens his mouth to speak, but China speaks before he can get anything out.

  ‘Let me come to the point. Have you fallen out of love with Nodge?’

  ‘That’s typically direct of you,’ says Owen, sitting down on the adjacent chair. The garden is small but lush, with huge banks of roses and bursting blooming peonies.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No,’ says Owen, staring at the ground. There is a puddle of water where the sprinkler has been operating.

  ‘Are you in love with this man – JJ or whatever his name is?’

  Owen puts his finger to his lips, glances upstairs towards the bedroom where she presumes JJ is sleeping. Owen checks that the bedroom window is closed, moves a little closer to China and lowers his voice.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So what the hell are you doing living with him, then?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this… ’

  ‘On second thoughts don’t bother explaining. Dad told me all about it.’

  Owen picks off a scrap of dandelion fluff that has blown onto his navy blue shorts.

  ‘I’m sorry, China. I didn’t think enough of the impact it would have on you.’

  ‘Everything has an impact on everyone.’

  ‘But I can’t see what I can do about it.’

  He is having trouble removing the final flowers of the dandelion. The sound of violent coughing emerges through the window upstairs. Owen glances up again.

  ‘ ‘Rona?’ says China, raising an eyebrow and following his gaze.

  ‘He’s got none of the other symptoms. Testing negative. Probably just a cough.’

  ‘Old people get ill. He’s too old to be a father, Owen.’

  Owen slaps at the remains of the dandelion. He suddenly looks haughty and defensive.

  ‘Better an old father than a reluctant father. Or a father who is going to be disqualified by the system. Anyway, they say that you can’t go back,’ he finishes sullenly.

  ‘Who are “they”? Do “they” have an office somewhere?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  He is still examining his shorts, although they are perfectly clean now. China fixes her eyes on Owen’s ‘Can’t Hide my Pride’ T-shirt.

  ‘Ironic,’ she says.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning you should be ashamed of yourself.’

  Owen stares off into the garden where a mower sits among half-cut grass. A sprinkler is distributing a thin spray of water that separates into a perfect rainbow under the powerful sunshine.

  ‘Look at the colours,’ says Owen faintly.

  ‘Do you know where a rainbow is, Owen?’ says China.

  Owen turns away from the sprinkler.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s in your head. It’s a construction of your mind.’

  Coughing emerges from the window upstairs, more frantic now. JJ sounds as if he is gasping for breath.

  ‘I’m going to have to go and attend to him. Anyway, I’m not sure why we’re talking about rainbows.’

  He rises from the chair.

  ‘Sit down again, Owen. I’m sure he’ll survive a few minutes longer. The point is this. I think I have a solution to your problems.’

  In the distance, the sprinkler falters and the rainbow, only a second ago so bright and real to both of them, dematerializes.

  23 June 2020

  The woman has been moved into temporary accommodation during the lockdown, a room little more than the size of a walk-in wardrobe with a single bed, a sink and an adjacent communal toilet in a badly converted office block. Her room also has a small window that shows, on this day, a patch of blue sky.

  She knows this arrangement is going to be temporary. The moment the virus finally reaches a safe enough level, she will be back on the street again. It’s all window dressing for the council and the government or the charities or whoever it was that made these decisions. Apparently, it didn’t look good for homeless people to be on the streets of Brighton during the Rona, so they had scooped her up and put her here. She doesn’t care one way or the other.

  Yet somehow confinement to a bed in a dry room has made the endless scramble of her thoughts, always chasing after one another in the dark and crashing against invisible walls, seem to become still and begin to clarify. Perhaps that was also because it has been nearly impossible to get any drugs or beg any money. After a bad couple of days – no, weeks – the drizzling mud that had saturated her mind for so long had become patchy, allowing her to glimpse scraps of clear sky.

  Flashes of memory come into her head sometimes that make her desperate for a fix, but now she can’t escape the sear of the lightning. Her madness had protected her for so long – her madness and the drugs and the drinks and the pain – that letting go of it, even a small bit, was a form of agony.

  A picture now forms in her head of a child. It is little more than a baby. It looks at her in a certain way, a way that makes her uncomfortable, makes her scared. Was she meant to love it, to care for it? She didn’t know how.

  Darknesses that had been buried or forgotten come back to her whenever the image of the child visits, fogging her mind and driving her into a race to outpace the blackness, a race into alcohol, into whatever she can get her hands on. In the past, when drugs erased the child from her awareness, it was a relief. She could get on with the project of dismantling herself without interference. She could learn to forget everything again, make it all un-happen, at least inside her head, where it counted.

  She sees in her mind a blank, and then a hospital wall, and then a picture of her on the street and then the rest of her life, a flight from reality that ends here. Here where there was no reality, only need, but right at this moment, in her tiny room, the reality is creeping back. She doesn’t like the feeling – and yet there was something there that she could recognize was calling to her. She cannot help but turn her gaze inward as long-forgotten truths beckon, threaten and summon her.

  The world is empty and the people she meets in the corridor are unfriendly and distant and wearing masks – without drugs to hold the community together, all the street people have retreated into their private nightmares. No sharing of needles or bottles. No mumbled sentimental declarations of eternal fealty.

  Fealty. Where had that word come from? Who had she once been – to use a word like ‘fealty’? Whoever that person was, she had long gone, and the woman wasn’t sure that she wanted to meet her again. Be her again. Yet the silence, and the dry, warm room, and the circle of blue above her head – it kept pulling on a thread somewhere, and the thread seems to be attached to a bow that was slipping loose. A million bows and knots, all of them slipping, loosening.

  I don’t like it I don’t want it, she repeats to herself. But it seems she can’t escape. If she goes back to the street, they would scoop her up again, and she would end up here, or somewhere else where thoughts could chase her and her oblivion run away from her.

  She has even begun to wash her clothes – there is a laundry room – and dry them on the bathroom radiator which never turns off, even in summer. It is odd not to smell of piss and sweat anymore. One day, two nights ago, she took a bath and washed her hair with the hard soap they left out for the tenants. When she left the bath, to use the small thin towel she had been given, and looked in the cracked, stained mirror, she got a shock, because in front of her was something like a person, something like the woman she half-remembered once being.

  It won’t last, it can’t, because nothing does, but also the people from the council had been bringing her medication for months and for once she found herself being organized enough to take it every day.

  More light, light that hurt but somehow cannot be resisted, floods into her mind. It stabs at her brain; it aggravates and picks at the shredded remnants in the cage of her chest. She keeps taking the medication, keeps gazing at the patch of blue. Something is taking shape inside her, a certain kind of sequence of thoughts that are beginning to discern and tabulate their own order.

  She listens to the television blaring from the room of the resident next door, an ancient Somali man, some rubbish or other; she has never much liked television.

  Here it comes again. Memory, seeping, rising. Why doesn’t she like television? Everyone likes television. Everyone on the street talks about some crap they had once come upon, slumped on a dredgy sofa and watched like the zombies they were. Like she is. Or had been. Is.

  There is a book in the drawer in the room. It is a Gideon Bible. On impulse, she opens the first page and begins to read. It is the first book she has read for many years, not that ‘years’ mean anything to her, those numbers and figures that, like months and days, marked the passage of time.

  Time. You didn’t move through it; it moved through you. It is moving through her now, like a gathering tide, like a flood, dislodging screens and blockages and prising open thick, heavy curtains that had cut her off and protected her for so long so long so long.

  A name keeps coming into her head, and she can see the shape of the letters, and she can imagine the face behind the letters, and she can feel the feeling that comes with the face, but she cannot… not… quite… put… her… finger on it – or her or him. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to put her finger on anything that would let in more light. Or take her finger off something that has so long been blocked.

  She examines her pinky finger. There is a mark of skin there that is more indented, darker, than the rest of the skin of her finger, she sees, as it catches the light.

  PART THREE Recovery

  July 2020: London

  Frankie inspects his tailored suit, brilliant white shirt and green shot silk tie in the plate-glass window of Farley & Ratchett. The ghostly tramp of lockdown has been exorcized. He is satisfied that he looks as he was pre-lockdown – professional, smart, able, efficient. On this day, he has indulged in an expensive shave, haircut and scalp massage at George Trumper in Piccadilly – a treat to himself after so long confined to quarters. The F&R office has opened again, and after working there for two weeks, having fully recovered from the virus, Frankie can sense the tide of life flowing in his direction.

  F&R suffered during the lockdown. Margins are now tight. One of the most senior salespeople has got seriously ill and isn’t coming back for the foreseeable future. Long Covid, apparently; that was a thing now. Frankie knows that Simon Farley needs him. He needs the business and he needs Frankie’s experience and expertise to guide them back into the good times.

  Farley had long promised Frankie a partnership and knew Frankie wouldn’t stay around if he wasn’t offered one. The lockdown and the departure of the ailing salesman had highlighted Frankie’s importance to the firm. Frankie’s summons to ‘an important meeting about an important question’ had come yesterday, and by the pleased and anticipatory tone in Farley’s voice, Frankie had little doubt what the meeting was concerning.

  As Frankie walks through the shining glass entrance into the immaculately clean, tidy and polished office, Farley, behind his desk at the back of the room, raises his head and greets him with a special estate agent’s smile, full of carefully prepared warmth. Behind the smile, there is just business, only ever business.

  ‘Hello, Frankie,’ says Farley amiably. Farley is so amiable Frankie almost considers it a form of mental illness. He has, for as long as Frankie can remember, worn a Marks & Spencer brown suit. He considers designer garb an expensive indulgence and believes that ‘dressing down’ gives him the common touch with clients. He is also wearing his perpetual brown brogues which tend to squeak rhythmically when he walks.

  ‘Simon.’

  Farley half-rises from his chair, holds out a hand and Frankie shakes it. Farley takes a bottle of hand sanitizer out of his pocket, drips it on his hands and rubs them vigorously together. Those seated in the rest of the office sneak glances at the two of them through the transparent screen of Farley’s partitioned office space. They have an idea what is going on because Farley mentioned it in confidence to Jane – once the office help, now underperforming only Frankie on the sales roster as a senior agent. To Frankie’s resentment, she has leapfrogged him to become a junior partner in the firm. Jane has trouble keeping secrets and the perceptible buzz in the office indicates the news has leaked.

  Feelings on the shopfloor are mixed. Frankie is liked, but, like the fictional Bernard who Frankie had read about in Death of a Salesman after China had thrust it into his hand, not well liked. But then no one at F&R really likes one another; they just tolerate each other as they manoeuvred for position, power and wealth. As a consequence, there is a certain amount of natural jealousy towards the idea of Frankie prospering.

  Frankie glances to his right. The faces in the office are pressed to phones, while all the hands tap at keyboards. The mouths move, broadcasting whispers – imprecating, supplicating, manipulating. He wonders with a shock if what they seem to him – shallow, artificial, uncomplicated in their greed – is also what they see when they look at Frankie.

  An unwelcome question pops unbidden into his head. What has he become? Thirty years of graft and selling and negotiating and schmoozing and where has it got him? The prospect of a partnership in a small and lately declining estate agency business. Here’s where he would stay until he was fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five. Then retirement. Then death.

  Farley rises and beckons him out of the cubicle and towards the more private back office which was more or less unchanged since they had moved into the premises a decade ago. As they enter, Frankie notices that it is looking tired and shabby, but then what was the point of keeping up appearances when no one was going to witness them, when those appearances would accrue no profit?

  Farley sits himself plumply behind his desk and indicates the chair on the other side. Frankie lowers himself into the space and blankly examines the strip-lit room, windowless apart from a tiny pane of glass showing a square of uncertain blue sky way above Farley’s head.

  As the chair takes his weight, Frankie realizes how much he hates this room – its careful neutrality, its uncared-for utilitarian air, its self-aggrandizing desk legend – ‘A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world’ – John le Carré – its smell of stale air and chemical stain remover. Simultaneously, to his mild surprise, he realizes that he hates Farley too – whereas before, he had thought he was only indifferent to him, imagining him always as nothing more than a means to an end.

  Perhaps he hates himself as well. Because wasn’t it true that Farley was him and he was Farley, and Farley was Ratchett, and Ratchett was Jane, and they all together made up this office, all backstage scenery for the accumulation of wealth through deception and charm?

  This is his destiny. He will work, now, as a partner within these walls for the rest of his useful life, selling empty space, pretending he needed the money, taking the money, spending the money on things he didn’t need. Occasionally ogling women clients behind dark glasses, occasionally meeting up with China, perpetually longing for something he couldn’t name or describe. It seemed he was always trying to get back to where he was.

  Now he realizes he isn’t even where he is.

  ‘So, Frankie. I expect you know what I wanted to see you about?’

  ‘Was it to ask about my birthday present?’

  Frankie’s fifty-first is a few weeks away. Farley laughs, indulging the joke.