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.

Bird passes shelf after shelf, slotting his fingers into the spaces where removed books once stood. There are fewer missing here than at the public library, where some shelves had been more gap than books. But still nearly every shelf is missing one, sometimes more. He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.

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.