‘Who was Cobb?’

‘Who was who?’ Ralf didn’t know or care what kind of stunt Vaux had pulled on me. And by then I was fed up. Ralf wasn’t curious, and I wasn’t in the mood to try to shake his complacency. Moral issues never trouble Ralf’s type much – for them, all questions have a technical solution.

Now Ralf is back in the lab where he feels most comfortable: a backroom boy. Beneath the puffery he has acquired – Bryon Vaux’s Chief Imagineer – he’s still his old self.

He showed me round. Right now he’s working on a full prosthesis platform: a thin exoskeleton that will do you the favour of punching you in the stomach when a villainous avatar takes a swing at you. That will trip you over if you miss that virtual step. That will shake your hand. Kiss you. Slap your back for a level well completed. God knows what.

The metro takes me home. I’m back in the old locomotive factory again – third time lucky, I suppose. I walk past a line of parked cars, studiously ignoring the horn blasts – it’s best to keep yourself to yourself on these streets – but the voice is unmistakably Agnes’s. ‘Connie! Over here!’

Hanna climbs from the driver’s seat. She looks exhausted. She shuts her door and leans against it as I approach. Agnes is still strapped into her seat in the back. She waves out her window frantically – a little kidnap victim. ‘Conrad! We were waiting for you!’

‘How long have you been out here?’

‘Not long.’

‘We’ve been ages,’ Agnes cries. ‘Ages and ages!’

‘Hello, Han.’

‘Hello, Connie.’ She seizes my fingers and squeezes them, reminding me of the lack of human contact in my life.

‘Hanna. You should have phoned.’

‘I lost your number.’

‘Mick has my number. What?’

Hanna rubs at her temples. ‘Can we come in?’

I lead them up to my new apartment on the second storey. It’s not ideal here. It’s noisy, for a start, though warmer than the rooftop rooms I’ve had before. ‘There’s not a lot in here.’

‘We’ve eaten, thanks.’

‘I had a kebab! It was disgusting!’

Hanna wants to talk – which is a novelty in itself – but Agnes gets first dibs on my attention. She has lengthened out. She has acquired a whole new set of mannerisms to lay on top of the first set. She is going to be a monster when she’s older. Suddenly the mannerisms fall away and she might be years younger as she asks, ‘Can I play on your keyboard?’

‘Use the headphones.’

‘Okay! Where is it?’

‘The other room. There’s only one other room. If it’s not the toilet, then you’re in the right room.’

Agnes goes off giggling.

‘So?’

Hanna visibly summons up strength and says, ‘Michel and I are separating.’

There is nothing I can say to this. I start preparing coffee.

‘We’ve been in a bad place for a long while,’ she says.

Strange, the way geography creeps in to these announcements. ‘We were in a bad place.’ ‘I needed my space.’ Strange and tiresome. ‘What did he do?’

Hanna ignores my attempt to cut through to the blame. ‘Michel’s very upset about things.’

‘I tried telling you that last Christmas.’

Hanna looks at me as though I were speaking a foreign language.

‘Remember?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t. Anyway. I don’t know whether he told you, but his mum died last week.’

Just dropped in there – another unfortunate event.

‘Poppy died?’

‘He went to sort out the funeral.’

‘When is it?’

‘It was yesterday.’

‘Oh.’ The pot starts to hiss and bubble. I lift it off the plate. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘I’m sorry, Connie. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t go either. I was looking after Agnes.’

‘Agnes didn’t go?’

Hanna shakes her head. ‘Mick didn’t think it was such a good idea.’

‘Right. How do you take this?’

‘Milk.’

I faff around for a while. ‘I would have liked to have been there.’

‘Yes?’

‘I would have gone.’ I never liked Poppy very much but there was something admirable about her. While Dad was tearing himself free and unable to cope with me, she had given me a home. I would have liked to pay my respects.

‘Anyway.’ Hanna takes a seat at the table. ‘He’s stayed on in Sand Lane to sort out her things.’

‘Right. Jesus, Hanna.’

‘I know. It all comes at once, doesn’t it?’

I go and glance round the door. Agnes is on the piano stool, earphones cupped round her head like muffs, bopping away to the piano’s demo track.

I close the kitchen door behind me and sit down facing Hanna.

‘It’s about Agnes,’ she says.

‘I thought it might be.’

‘We were trying for a second child.’

‘I see.’

‘Mick’s found out that he’s not – he can’t have kids. He never could have kids.’

‘She’s mine.’

Hanna stares at me.

‘Yes? Agnes is mine.’

‘You knew?’

‘Of course I knew. Look at her.’

‘Jesus Christ, Conrad, and you never said?’

It’s my turn to stare.

‘You never said a word!’

‘Hanna, I tried. Plus, it’s blindingly obvious.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Hanna, I’m not the one keeping secrets.’

‘I don’t bloody believe you.’

This is probably not the moment to remind Hanna of all the occasions she has slipped from the room, or hung off Michel’s arm, or brought Agnes along ‘for the ride’, or closed the door on me – ‘Goodnight, Conrad.’ Over the years she has deployed the entire arsenal of avoidance against me.

‘You didn’t exactly make it easy for me to say anything.’

‘Anyway.’ She drinks her coffee. ‘Obviously we’re going to need to be together in some fashion. For Agnes. Mick’s a great dad. It’s the last thing I want, to keep him from his child.’

‘I still don’t see why you’re both making such a production out of it.’

She stares at me like I’ve crawled from under a rock. ‘Can you not see . . .?’

‘I can see you playing up to every soap cliché, is what I can see. Agnes is nearly in big school, for crying out loud. Her genes are playing out in the world. They’re her genes now. Not yours, not mine. You’re not telling me Mick can’t see this? I know he has a temper but for Christ’s sake.’

‘It’s not the only problem between us. It’s all come together, is the thing. This. Poppy. When did you last see Mick?’

‘It’s a while.’ Was it as long ago as my interview with Bryon Vaux? ‘A year, easily. He’s always in the summerhouse when I pick Agnes up—’

Catching Hanna’s eye, I realise now that this has been a lie. An excuse. He has not wanted to see me. The business of Agnes’s parentage has been eating away at them a long time.

‘Mick’s been going absent a lot lately.’

‘Is there anyone?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Hanna sounds almost disappointed. ‘I don’t think it’s that. Anyway, I thought you might know where he went.’

‘You don’t?’

‘He says it’s a secret. Something he’s working on. A surprise for us. To be honest, Conrad, I’m not sure he’s well.’

There’s a more practical reason why Hanna has come into town – an appointment at the eye hospital. It’s nothing serious; only that, after years of fighting with uncomfortable contact lenses and a constantly changing prescription, Hanna has decided to have her corneas shaved to a better shape. Since she’s going in for the op, she figures she will have AR layers annealed in at the same time. It’s expensive, but the resolution is very good, far better than anything the unadorned eye can achieve.

‘How do you turn it off?’

‘Oh, Conrad.’

‘How do you turn it off?’

‘They teach you all sorts of ways of controlling the layers. Blinks and glances. You know.’

‘Okay,’ I say, in my most not-okay voice.

‘Honestly Conrad,’ Hanna laughs, ‘I thought this was your kind of thing.’

It was. It really was. First vests, then wraprounds, then lenses, and now this. But there is a difference between a product, something you have to go out and find, and a utility, something sewn in, something so integral to you that you barely notice it unless it goes wrong. AR can only ever work as a utility. Hanna knew this years ago. She teased me about it, practically the day I met her. And she told me that in the end, it was not good, if AR became what it always had to become – a kind of Muzak, smoothing and glamorising the real.