I told this secret to the careers officer while she listened very carefully. Great, I thought. She knows what I’m talking about. I showed her all the information I’d collected about becoming a photojournalist or camerawoman, and when I nished talking she carefully put it to one side and slid an application form in front of me.

‘While you’re thinking about that, there’s a full-time job going in Woolworths,’ she said. ‘They’re looking for people like you. I’m sure you’ll get it.’

I was astounded. I’d just poured out my dreams to her, the first person I’d told them to, thinking she understood me, but the whole time she was just waiting for the right moment to show me that Woolworths application form. I was hurt because I hadn’t been listened to, I hadn’t been seen and I knew exactly what she meant when she said ‘people like you’. I knew all about Woothworths. I’d already had a Saturday job there. I picked up the form out of politeness, then left disgusted.

Annie identified with him, almost obsessively. ‘We looked alike. We even sounded alike in the way he slightly rolled his Rs in words like “free” or “restaurant”. And I loved his assertions… how he would say, “I take bribes but they never influence my judgement: that’s true incorruptibility.” I was one hundred per cent part of him.

When Acquavella took him on, he said bluntly: ‘Lucian look. I’m an art dealer. I’m not an accountant. I’m not a nursemaid and if you need any of those things you’ve got the wrong guy. But you paint them and I’ll sell them.

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.

It was as if something in him cracked open. In his mind’s eye, he saw the same scene another generation back: his mum as pink smudge, being held by a nana far younger than he was now. And then the baby nana being held by great-grandma, and so on, back and back through the millennia. It was like the regular ticking of a clock and each tick a human generation. He understood, so abruptly it hurt, that he was not, as he’d always assumed, an individual. He was like one of Mendel’s peas in GCSE biology, just one of a row of seedlings in which the inherited traits – a nose, a talent, a sense of humour – were recombined and passed forward again. He was like a fish who’d always believed he moved for his own reasons but now realised he was just one iridescent shimmer in the shoal.