He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returned—eyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing something—he wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldn’t help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.

Yes, she lifted her arms above her head to wave. Only her hat and gloves and the powdery yellow blur of the streetlamps were visible against the whiteness of sky and earth. He could barely feel his feet or his fingers, but the rest of him was warm, almost hot, from walking. He pulsed with the sight of her, the vestige of her. She was everything that mattered to him. He felt inviolable trust.

The only other customer, a young man standing in Fiction who had been watching from the corner of his eye (for of course the painter had been recognised), went back to browsing the shelves, while Helena stood, unable to move from behind the counter, looking at the door, knowing something had just occurred and not knowing what it meant; as if his future had somehow intercepted hers, jostling it out of place, just enough to swerve her off course, the single centimetre one way or another that saves one or sets one in the path of an oncoming car.

She continued to read and he was almost asleep when Peter heard her say, ‘I missed her more than ever this time. Everywhere we were made me think of her, I almost thought I’d see her if I turned my head.’

He was fully awake now.

‘Sometimes I think I see her too,’ Peter said, ‘out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.’

‘Yes, I think you can.

Peter fell asleep at the table, his head in his arms. Sometime in the night, the power was restored. The Anglepoise leaned over him, like a surgeon, like a nurse, like a mother, and held him in a pool of light.