The train makes bathetic, burst-bladder sounds as it slides over the river towards the north shore.

‘You know,’ Ralf says, ‘you worry too much.’ Around him, bleeding away from his stolid outline and misproportioned goatee, I begin to catch glimpses of the wiry, physical man who actually occupies the seat opposite me. He is preparing to stand. His head emerges from out of Ralf’s head, a crocodile cracking through an egg. His arms emerge, Shiva-like, from out of Ralf’s arms. They wave about, collecting newspaper, satchel, umbrella. For a second the men, virtual Ralf and flesh-and-blood stranger, coexist in mythic form. ‘We’re bringing something new to life here. It’s got integrity. You just have to trust it. You just have to look.’

Ralf fractures, winks, and vanishes. The stranger, oblivious, shrugs his coat on.

Leaving the station, I cross the Canal by a footbridge, heading towards the Forum and the quiet, stone-clad purlieus of the Ministry of Trade. As I walk, the bridge’s functional iron latticework clads itself in statuary, dust, and a kinder, more southern light. So far, so unreal. I glance twice towards a newspaper icon, blinking tantalisingly close to my focus-point, and it swims into centre-view, unfurling translucent headlines. Another military adventure going sour.

I near the end of the bridge and enter a world of solid hazards, reading as I go. The platform makes an executive decision about the amount of hallucination a body can cope with, and wraps its architectural dreams back into the struts and braces of the actual bridge. I get back the sound of my leather-soled shoes on the walkway’s iron grillework.

Still the real eludes me. I enter my meeting in the grips of an awful dream where every solid thing, every brick and kerbstone, has come adrift and floats before me, contingent, weightless and untrustworthy.

AR, like most technology, has bathos at its heart. To survive, it must never quite unveil itself. It must always fall some way short of its promise.

Technology is, in the end, just another species of pornography.

THIRTEEN

A couple of days after I found and hid her corpse, Dad began to worry after Mum. Why hadn’t she phoned from the camp?

We knew one other camp regular. Gabby was the daughter of Frankie, the hotel’s long-serving day manager. Frankie visited her daughter every weekend, bringing her freshly laundered clothes and a car boot full of fist-sized bottles of supermarket beer. A veteran of the civil protest movement, she spent Saturday afternoons teaching her daughter and her friends rappelling techniques and how to tie figure-eights. Gabby and her friends were building tree houses and walkways. The forest floor was damp and dirty and vulnerable; come winter, they were planning to take to the canopy.

Every few weeks Gabby came home. ‘Delousing leave’, Frankie called it, and not without reason, since after a month or so ‘embracing the base’ Gabby’s head was a mass of rat’s tails, as though strips of horsehair stuffing from an old armchair had been woven through her hair.

The speed with which Gabby had changed from child to angry young woman was startling. She seemed in one season to have swapped frilly party dresses for fatigues and a webby, moth-holed jumper. She had always been a big girl and after months outdoors her weight had acquired a shape, a purposefulness.

Gabby and Frankie, Dad and I sat in the hotel dining room, around the big table near the fireplace. The mood was sour and frayed. At some point Gabby had decided to meet all Dad’s enquiries with a small, confident smile and, under the pressure of Dad’s unrelenting questioning, it had become a rictus, a sneer of defiance.

Dad was insistent. ‘There has to be some central – some central thing – some centre.’

If the protest movement had had a centre, the gates of the airbase would have been cleared long ago. As it was, the movement pulsed its way around obstacles. When assaulted, it retreated into itself then swelled again, like some science-fiction blob.

‘But there are young girls there,’ Dad fretted. ‘There has to be some protection.’

No one felt they had to point out that Mum had long since ceased to be a young girl.

Gabby was returning at the end of the week and said she would do what she could. All she could really do was pass on our fears. The camp was tenuous and scattered – we were going to have to rely on the gossips to carry the word around the base.

Every day after school I went exploring down by the river. I moved about cautiously, on guard against strangers, soldiers, and above all, Michel. I could not be sure that Michel had abandoned his own fascination with the river. It was Michel, after all, who had invested ‘our river’ with its meaning. It was Michel who had run it, explored it, who tore his skin on its thorns, and imagined its future, and, for all I knew, still wove millennial dreams round its withered, tilting trees and rusting white goods.

I stayed away from the ring of fridges, afraid I might run into him, though what he’d have found to do here, other than fantasize, I could not imagine. Anyway, I didn’t see him.

Four days after she returned to the camp, Gabby phoned Dad. I was making us pasta when the call came through. A tension came over him, hunched there, a reed too brittle to bend. I thought at first it must be the police.

But no. The farce I had made of everything just rolled on and on, a wave too powerful to check.

‘Sara never even turned up at the camp.’ He came forward and embraced me. I put my arms round him. I felt him shake. I held him, keeping him together. This again. This again, and always – keeping Dad whole against the wrack thrown up by Mum.

The river ran slow and deep along sunken cuttings. The banks were sand, and the river had cut itself a deep bed, but nowhere did it run particularly fast. There were bathing pools, or what would have made bathing pools, but they were very deep. The banks had the consistency of damp sugar, and the water ran milky brown, always.

Something the size and shape of a human corpse could not have floated far downstream. This whole stretch of river was one complex muddy snare. There was too much growth. There were too many pools, and too many reed beds, too many soft, estuarine places, almost-channels, forks. There were too many trees. She must have fetched up somewhere, bloated and bleached, with the plastic bag still wrapped round her head. Once she was found (someone was going to have to find her, eventually) it was going to be obvious to everyone that Mum’s was no simple suicide. Suicides do not asphyxiate themselves then leap into millraces. She had had assistance. She had had company. She had had someone get rid of her body. When they found her – and someone was bound to find her – their first thought was not going to be suicide. It was going to be murder.

I had to get the bag off. I had to find her and take the bag from off her head.

The nights were drawing in. When I got home from school, the conservatory was so cold I could see my own breath in the light of the porch lamp. I stepped inside and reached for the wall switch—

No. I drew my hand back, breathing clouds of light into the dark.

I passed through our rooms and out among the halls and landings of the hotel. The empty rooms nagged at me. The place was virtually mothballed now. Wounded servicemen were no longer being billeted with us, and Dad, with all his worries, had neither the time nor the will to spirit up yet another clientele.

Mum’s presence had held together, by the weight of its demands, a home that made very little sense now that she was gone. Relieved of the pressure she exerted, the place was flying apart – drawing room and dining room and bar and check-in desk. Our own apartments, too, were getting bigger and colder.