‘This is the master bedroom.’

What was I supposed to say?

‘This is the living room.’

When Poppy spoke, it was always at the shrill end of her register, as though she was pleading in her own defence.

‘This is the kitchen. And this is where you came in.’ Did she imagine the tour had disorientated me?

We ate in the kitchen, squatting on chrome stools upholstered in black vinyl. The stools were old. Their leather-look texture had worn off and they were as slippy to sit on as if they had been oiled. The table was worse – a chipboard thing, laminated in frictionless wood-effect plastic. It was the kind of table you get in caravans. It was attached to the wall. You let it down by pulling a handle.

Poppy laid out matching cutlery. Glasses. Cups. Cake knives. There was barely any room for food. ‘I’ve made you a cream tea.’ There was a freezer-cabinet cream cake. Dry, feathery home-made scones with cream. A fruit salad with cream in a jug. Everything in tiny portions.

Poppy had laid out plastic laminated place-mats for us, and our plates moved about on them while we were eating. Watching me, Poppy’s anxiety reached fever pitch – she was afraid I might place too much weight on the table’s mechanism. ‘Please don’t lean on the table. Don’t put anything heavy on the table. It’s a let-down!’

I was more concerned with trying to keep my arse on the stool. I kept slipping off, trying to reach things as they spun away from me across the table’s ice-smooth surface. Afterwards I buzzed from all the sugar I had eaten, and the back of my mouth felt fluey, clotted with uncooked flour.

‘We should have eaten outside! In the garden! It’s such a nice evening. We could have eaten outside!’

She insisted on washing up. ‘I know where everything goes.’ Michel and I went into his bedroom and he dug out a cassette tape for us to listen to. We sat on his bed. It was incredibly narrow. ‘It’s a two-foot six.’ Poppy came in to put clothes away.

She gave Michel no privacy at all. How could there have been much privacy, in a space as cramped as this? Michel’s room was as long and narrow as the living space on board a yacht. There was a fluorescent tube in the ceiling, and its grey, pitiless light brought the walls in even further. It felt, sitting in that room, like being squashed into a Tupperware box.

I remember there was this weird, wood-effect plastic panel that went around the wall. ‘It’s to stop the bed from marking the wall,’ Michel explained.

‘What’s the problem with the bed marking the wall?’

‘Mum doesn’t want it to.’

‘The bed’s in the way. She’s never going to know whether it’s marking the wall or not.’

Michel’s bed ran lengthways along the left-hand wall. His desk, narrow as a shelf and veneered in wood-effect plastic, ran lengthways along the right-hand wall. There was a cupboard to the right of the door, which, instead of opening normally, slid along metal runners ‘to save space’. Michel’s bedroom door, the let-down table in the kitchen, the shelf-like desk and the sofa in the living room, its seat so narrow it might have been built for children, were all parts of Poppy’s on-going programme to single-handedly ‘save space’. (Poppy’s talk was modular, a collection of preprocessed jargon phrases strung together. After a few days of this, everything she said began to acquire a meaning beyond itself, like a word repeated so often it turns strange in the mouth.)

Poppy burst into Michel’s room whenever she felt like it. Or she tried to. If you leant against Michel’s wardrobe, it slipped on the thin nylon carpet (sick-green cobwebs on a ground of darker green) and blocked the door. The bang the door made when it hit the edge of the wardrobe was startlingly loud.

‘Oh! Mind the paintwork! Come and move the wardrobe!’

When the wardrobe was in the way the door could only open a couple of inches. Poppy did her best to peer through the gap. Her eye hung in the darkness of the hall, disembodied. An eye without a face. ‘Are you all right in there, you two?’

At night I slept in Michel’s room, on a camp bed that had once been his dad’s. It was made of canvas, stretched over a tubular steel frame. It was comfortable, but if I needed the toilet in the middle of the night, there was no room for me to just roll out of the bed. (I tried it once and cracked my head on the edge of the desk and ended up stuck under the desk, tangled up in the legs of Michel’s bright orange tubular steel chair.) Instead I had to shimmy down to the foot of the bed until it tipped up on end.

The sliding door rattled when I opened it.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘What’s going on out there?’

‘I’m going to the toilet, Poppy. I’m fine.’

The lavatory and the bathroom were separate rooms. The lavatory door had a lock and a key, and Poppy kept the key on the outside of the door. Not on the inside, so you could guarantee your privacy, but on the outside, so she could leave the lavatory window open when she went out and still secure the house. Anyway, this is what she said. It’s just as likely she locked Michel in the lavatory as a punishment, or used to, before I turned up. Certainly that’s what it looked like.

The toilet pan sat under a small, high window. Sitting on the pan, I was just a couple of inches short of being able to lean my head on the door.

‘Is everything all right?’

Back in the bedroom, Michel was awake, sitting up in bed, waiting for me. I leant against his wardrobe, slipping it into the path of the door.

We waited, listening for movement. He pulled the sheets away. It took my eyes, still dazzled from the lavatory light, some minutes to adapt. Michel was already hard. His hand was on his prick, moving a little, as he watched me standing there, framed against the white gloss of his little wardrobe, a child’s wardrobe – you could still make out the silhouette of the plastic bunnies that once decorated its doors. He watched me slip off my T, watched me slip off my pants. I was just as hard as he was. Starlight sheened his thighs, his arms, his prick. Light glistened round the dark bulb of his prick, I wanted to touch it. More. I dared, that night, what I had not dared before. Fingers to my mouth, the salt there, good. I bent my head and felt his hands in my hair, bringing me down, his prick, so beautiful, rigid in the little light – ribbed and veined and very salt.

A bang.

A disembodied eye.

‘Is everything all right?’

EIGHTEEN

Ralf, too, has taken to wearing AR-enabled contact lenses. There is something cold, something faintly repulsive about them. They are supposed to make Augmented Reality more appealing. And they do, in a twisted, self-fulfilling way, by making ordinary human communication just a touch less pleasant. It’s hard to read a person’s face when you can’t read the pupils of their eyes.

Eventually it occurs to him to ask, ‘So what are you doing, Conrad?’

I have signed an agreement locking me out of Augmented Reality for eighteen months following Loophole’s sale. Perhaps I will go back to it. Perhaps not. The whole business has begun to unnerve me. It’s not the same now that the old dev crowd has dispersed.

I took Ralf to task over Bryon Vaux’s party trick. It didn’t even occur to him to apologise. Vaux had given him the impression that the trick was by way of professional joshing. I couldn’t make Ralf understand that Cobb – whoever he was, private detective or actor or pure avatar – had frightened me.

Ralf said to me – he actually said this – ‘You have to bear in mind the difference the new superconductors have made to how we deploy inductive video.’

What he meant was: there is technology out there now that can hijack the optic nerve. No glasses necessary. No lenses. A strong enough magnetic field, well-shaped, bends a mind to the desired shape. The equipment they’d used to have Cobb ‘visit’ me that night – I never found it. Either the devices were too small to spot, or more likely their energies had been directed at me from a distance. A van parked in the street. The house opposite. If you can do that, you can warp any part of the real. Reality has been aerosolised, the senses weaponised against us. Every sensation is Muzak now.