Frontispiece

1

Everybody said: so?

As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me.

Okay, not everybody said it. I’m speaking colloquially, like in that phrase everybody’s doing it. What I mean is, it was a clear marker, just then, of that particular time; a kind of litmus, this dismissive note. It got fashionable around then to act like you didn’t care. It got fashionable, too, to insist the people who did care, or said they cared, were either hopeless losers or were just showing off.

It’s like a lifetime ago.

But it isn’t – it’s literally only a few months since a time when people who’d lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported: so?

And when a government shut down its own parliament because it couldn’t get the result it wanted: so?

When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them: so?

When a continent burned and another melted: so?

When people in power across the world started picking off groups of people by religion, ethnicity, sexuality, intellectual or political dissent: so?

But no. True. Not everybody said it.

Not by a country mile.

Millions of people didn’t say it.

Millions and millions, all across the country and all across the world, saw the lying, and the mistreatments of people and the planet, and were vocal about it, on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page.

To which the people who knew the power of saying so? said, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page: so?

I mean, I could spend my whole life listing things about, and talking about, and demonstrating with sources and graphs and examples and statistics, what history’s made it clear happens when we’re indifferent, and what the consequences are of the political cultivation of indifference, which whoever wants to disavow will dismiss in an instant with their own punchy little

so?

So.

Instead, here’s something I once saw.

It’s an image from a film made in the UK roughly seventy years ago, not long after the end of the Second World War.

The film was made in London by a young artist who arrived in the city from Italy when London was one of the many places having to rebuild themselves in those years nearly a lifetime ago, after the tens of millions of people of all ages all across the world had died before their time.

It’s an image of a man carrying two suitcases.

He’s a slight man, a young man, a distracted and tentative kind of a man, dapper in a hat and jacket, light on his feet but at the same time burdened; it’s clear he’d be burdened even if he wasn’t carrying two suitcases. He is grave, slim, preoccupied, terribly keen, and he is silhouetted against the sky because he’s balanced on a very narrow brick ledge which runs round the edge of a high building, along the length of which he’s doing a joyous and frantic dance with the beaten-up rooftops of London behind him; no: more precisely, those roofs are way below him.

How can he be going so fast and not fall off the edge of the building?

How can what he’s doing be so wild and still so graceful, so urgent and blithe both at once?

How can he be swinging those cases around in the air like that and still keep his balance? How can he be moving at such speed next to the sheer drop?

Why is he risking everything?

There’d be no point in showing you a still or a photo of this. It’s very much a moving image.

For several seconds he does a crazed but merry high-wire dance above the city going far too fast along the zigzagging path of a ledge that’s the width of a single brick.

So:

Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life, Sacha’s mother says.

Then she says, Sacha, what is that? Where’s it from?

Sacha is having breakfast reading her phone in the front room. The TV is on with the volume turned up several notches too high and her mother is shouting over the top of it.

Don’t know, Sacha says.

She says this at normal volume so it’s perfectly possible her mother didn’t hear her say anything. Not that it makes a difference either way.

Heroine of my own life, her mother is walking up and down the room and saying it over and over. Heroine of my own life, then it’s something about a station, a station shall be held. What’s it from?

Like it matters.

Sacha shakes her head without shaking it enough to be noticed shaking it.

Her mother has no idea.

An example of this is what happened last night about the quote Sacha found online for the essay about forgiveness she had to write for Merchiston’s class later today. To mark one week since Brexit they’ve all been made to write an essay on the subject of ‘Forgiveness’. Sacha is deeply suspicious of forgiveness. The act of saying I forgive you, it’s like saying you are less than me and I have the moral or superior upper hand.

But that’s the kind of truth-spirit that’ll get you a B instead of an A from Merchiston, to whom the whole class now knows exactly how to respond in the way that gets the required marks.

So, late last night, because it has to be handed in today, she looked up some quotes on the net.

As a writer from the last century so devoutly said, Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

Her mother had come into her bedroom without knocking, again, and was standing reading the screen over Sacha’s shoulder.

Oh, that’s good, that quote, her mother said, I like that.

I like it too, Sacha said.

Is devoutly the right word? her mother said. It sounds more philosophical than devotional. Is it a devotional writer? Who wrote it?

Yes, it’s a devotional writer, Sacha said though she’d no idea, didn’t know who wrote it and had written the word devoutly because devoutly sounded good in the sentence. But now with her mother breathing down her

neck and holding forth about who, she brought up Startpage and typed in the words irreversible, flow, history. The quote came up.

Someone european-sounding, she said.

Ah. It’s Arendt, Hannah Arendt, her mother said. I’d like to read Arendt on forgiveness, I’d like that a lot right now.

Ironic, Sacha thought, given that neither her father nor her mother looked likely to forgive each other anything any time soon.

Though I don’t know that I’d call her a devotional, her mother said.

What’s the source?

Brainyquote, Sacha said.

That’s not a source, her mother said. Does it give the original source?

Look. It doesn’t. That’s terrible.

The source is Brainyquote, Sacha said. That’s where I found the quote.

You can’t just put down Brainyquote as your source, her mother said.

Yes I can, Sacha said.

You need better source reference than that, her mother said. Otherwise you don’t know where what Hannah Arendt said comes from.

Sacha held the screen up. She turned it towards her mother.

Brainyquote. Quotepark. Quotehd. Azquotes. Facebook. Goodreads.

Picturequotes. Quotefancy. Askideas. Birthdaywishes. expert, she said. All these places come up when you type in bits of this quote. Those are just the top sources. There are masses of sites quoting her saying it.

No, because if these sites are just saying they’re quoting her, that’s not good enough, her mother said. You’d have to go through all those sites until you find what it is they’re actually quoting from. Context. It matters.

Yeah, but I don’t need to know that, Sacha said.

Yeah but you do, her mother said. Check and see if any of those sites mentions a primary source.

The internet is a primary source, Sacha said.

Her mother went away.

Everything went quiet for about ten minutes.

Sacha began to breathe normally again.

Then her mother who’d clearly been on the kitchen laptop looking up Brainyquote Quotepark and so on shouted up the stairs as if she’d been personally insulted by Brainyquote Quotepark and so on: None of these sites, not a single one, gives a primary source, Sach. I can’t find where Arendt wrote this. So you shouldn’t use the quote. You can’t.

Right, thanks, Sacha shouted back from her bedroom.

Then she continued doing what she was doing regardless of her mother.

It might not even have been said by Arendt, her mother who’d come halfway up the stairs now was shouting.

She was shouting like nobody could hear her.

It’s not trustworthy, her mother shouted.

Who needs a school homework assignment to be trustworthy? Sacha said.

I do, her mother shouted. You do. All human beings who use sources do.

Worrying about stuff like this was what her mother’s generation did as displacement activity from worrying about the real things happening in the world. Still, just in case her mother had a point –

How about if I note at the end of it that the internet says it’s by Hannah, uh, Sacha said.

She looked online again to get the second name of the person who said it.

Not good enough, her mother shouted coming into the room unasked again. Because there’s no proof Hannah Arendt ever said it. What if it was someone else, someone who isn’t getting the credit? Or. What if nobody said it in any original source and someone somewhere just made up that Hannah Arendt said it, typed it into the net and then it spread through all these sites?

Then Hannah Arendt, whoever she is, would be pleased, Sacha said (at normal volume so her mother would realize her own loudness). It’s a good thing to have said.

You can’t speak for Hannah Arendt, her mother said (yes, less shoutily, good). How would you like it if the internet quoted something or other then said that Sacha Greenlaw said it?

I wouldn’t mind. I’d be pleased that someone somewhere thought I’d said something good, Sacha said.

Oh I see. Approbation’s what it’s about. You’re acting like you’re Robert’s age, her mother said.

No I’m not, Sacha said. If I was still only thirteen, or happened to be Robert, please God no, I’d have said: return yourself forthwith to the age of pointless educational pedantry.

Come on, Sach, her mother said. Source. It matters. Think why.

What I think, Sacha said turning to face her mother. Is that I’m working at the correct acceptable level.

The level of attention I’m talking about is necessary for everything, her mother said getting louder again (like louder meant she was more right). And

what you call the correct acceptable level is nothing but a social stratagem.

Now her mother was waving her arms about so much in the air in Sacha’s room that she actually knocked the lampshade swinging.

What if you woke up one day and found that it said all over the net that you’d said something you’d never say in a million years? her mother said.

I’d just simply tell everybody that I never said it, Sacha said.

But what if you went online and found thousands of people angry at you regardless? her mother said. What if something like what’s happened to your little brother happened to you?

You can’t do anything about that kind of pile-up, Sacha said. So I don’t care who thinks what. I’d know I was telling the truth. And I am the source of me. Go and bother him. I don’t have time for this.

I would. But he’s out, her mother said.

It’s ten o clock, Sacha said. He’s thirteen. What kind of a parent are you?

One that’s doing her best for both her children against insurmountable odds, her mother said.

This has to be handed in first thing, Sacha said.

What if your reputation was ruined and you couldn’t go anywhere because everybody was calling you a disgrace and a liar? her mother said.

I’d forgive them, Sacha said.

You’d what? her mother said.

Forgiveness, Sacha said, is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

There was a short pause, almost like when people pause in a play at the theatre. Then her mother laughed out loud.

Then Sacha laughed too.

Her mother came and gave Sacha a hug at her desk.

My bright girl, her mother said.

Sacha’s chest filled with the kind of warmth that once when she was really small she’d asked her mother about because it felt so nice and her mother’d said that’s your inner summer.

But you’ll have to be brighter even than that, her mother said now still hugging her tight. Bright girls have to be brighter than the, the.

Correct acceptable level of brightness, Sacha said into her mother’s side.

—

That was last night. This is next morning. Sacha’s come through here to try to have her breakfast in peace while checking the news and everybody’s

posts on Facebook on her phone. But there is no peace. Her mother is maundering round the front room shouting words and waving a cup of coffee whose contents sometimes spill over and hit the parquet; Sacha has had to move her bag a couple of times.

The TV is turned up too high and the news announcers in the studio and out in the world are maundering on too in their usual surreal way. Since Sacha watched that TV show where celebrities dress up in costumes with huge masked heads and sing a song, and a panel and an audience try to guess who’s behind the mask, it has struck Sacha that actually everyone and everything on TV is like someone wearing a mask. After you’ve seen it, you can’t not see it.

Take it off! Take it off! the panel and the audience shout at the celebrity who loses and has to unmask, so that people can see at last who’s been in there all along.

Take it off! Sacha once saw a gang of men shouting it at a girl down near the pier.

Whether I shall turn out to be, her mother says. Heroine of my own life.

Whether that station, that station, shall be held by anybody else. Will be held.

Just look it up, Sacha says.

No, her mother says.

I’ll look it up for you, Sacha says.

No. Don’t, her mother says.

The don’t is said with all her mother’s fierceness in it; these days her mother is constantly forgetting things and constantly trying not to look up online the things she’s forgotten. I’m so menopausal. It’s the menopause.

Like you can defy the inevitable by shouting its name at it. She is trying to make herself remember things rather than look them up. In real terms, what this means is her mother annoys everybody for half an hour then goes online and looks up whatever it is she can’t remember.

Will be held by anybody else, she says, whether that station will be held by anybody else. For God sake, Sach. Turn that down so I can hear myself think. So I can hear myself not think.

Can’t. He’s put it somewhere, Sacha says.

Robert has already left for school. One of his more recent japes is to turn the TV volume up several notches too high then hide the remote, because the remote is the only way they’ve got of getting the TV to do anything. The on/off button on top doesn’t work any more (this TV is quite old; their father

took the new one next door when he went). If you unplug it you risk not getting it to turn on again. So they don’t.

The too-loud thing on the screen right now is a news report about an evangelical rally that has something to do with the American president.

Call him, her mother says. See if he’s with your dad.

Next door dad. Like a TV sitcom from her mother’s generation.

He won’t be, Sacha says.

Just in case, her mother says.

Sacha calls Robert’s mobile. It goes straight to voicemail.

Off, Sacha says.

Course it is, her mother says. I’ll knock on the wall.

He won’t be there, Sacha says.

Ashley won’t let Robert in any more since he 1. stole her little harp thing she plays her welsh tunes on, 2. sold it in Cash Converters then gave her the money for it in an envelope like he was doing her a favour, and 3. told her (even though she’s Welsh which is actually also British) she wasn’t welcome in this country as anything but a tourist now.

And Mercy is taking the bible belt by dollar-storm, the TV reporter says.

They’re calling her the great white hope.

It’s true, Sacha can’t see a single person who’s not white in any of the footage of the Mercy Bucks Church of the Spirit.

He told me to tell you. He tells me direct. He’s telling me now. I can hear his holy voice, the holy voice of the great God almighty speaking to me from his own holy mouth, he’s here, he’s saying it right now, mercy, mercy (mercy, mercy! the people in the church are shouting back at her, or maybe Mercy, Mercy, since Mercy’s her name).

Who is that? her mother says as she passes through the room again and stops in front of the TV.

It’s a great white hope, Sacha says. God speaks to her direct in his holy voice from his holy mouth into her earhole.

Mercy Bucks, her mother says. That’s a made-up name. And that’s a terrible accent. She looks really, really like Claire Dunn. If Claire Dunn were thirty years older. Which, let’s face it, she will be now.

You always think people on TV are someone you know, Sacha says.

No, I recognize her. I worked with her. If it’s Claire she’s had a nose job, her mother says. The nose is different.

The nose is different because it’s not anyone you know, Sacha says.

She gives her mother a sidelong look. Usually when her mother brings up her acting past it’s a signal that she’s in a fragile way. Sacha’s mother was in acting once, back before she met their father and before she did something in advertising that she gave up when she had Sacha and her brother. It is all also connected to things that can’t be said out loud by anyone in the family about her mother’s mother, who died when their mother was only Robert’s age, by swallowing too many tablets, which their mother says was by mistake and everybody including her mother knows probably wasn’t really by mistake but never says it. (Not even Robert.)

But her mother doesn’t look fragile. She just looks a bit tired.

The report ends with a camera shot on the back projection behind Mercy Bucks of a clicker showing the amount of money being donated rising hundreds of dollars a second.

The next news item is about the wildfires in Australia.

They’ve had a hot January, her mother says.

The hottest since data began, Sacha says. And it’s February now and those fires are still going.

Get the news up on catch-up for me, her mother says. Let’s get another look at Claire.

Sacha holds her hands up and out.

Can’t, she says.

Her mother feels down the sides of the couch for the remote. She checks behind the things on the shelves. Then she stands in the middle of the room at a loss.

Sacha hates it when her mother is at a loss.

Probably in his room, Sacha says.

Or he’s taken it to school with him, her mother says.

Sacha goes into the hall and pulls her coat on. She checks herself in the mirror.

I can’t get catch-up to work, her mother shouts through from the kitchen.

I’ve got to go, Sacha calls back through.

But she goes through to the kitchen at the note of panic in her mother’s voice.

It’s true; BBC iPlayer isn’t working; it’s not just her mother’s uselessness. But Sacha can save the day for her mother and still get off to school, because Pastor Mercy Bucks has her own YouTube channel.

MERCY BUCKS SAVES

All the titles of Mercy Bucks’s videos have the word white in them.

White on the skin of his body.

Behold a white cloud.

The branches have become white.

Sacha clicks on the most recent video, uploaded yesterday. A great white throne. 44.4k views.

In a high-ceilinged modern church the words Gain From The Gospel are haloed in fluorescent light behind the figure of Mercy Bucks.

Add Kings 21.2 to Matthew 6.33, Mercy says. And I Will Give Thee The Worth Of It In Money plus But Seek First His Kingdom. It’s the only way anything will ever truly add up in life because God is the boss of our corporation. God is the ultimate accountant. And God knows everything. God knows you. God knows what you have and what you have not. Don’t think God the father can’t see into even the most encrypted bank account. God can reckon to the dime, to the cent. Exactly how much you’re willing to shortchange God. Exactly how much you’re willing to sacrifice in God’s name to become a person of spiritual property. Because God smiles on those who sacrifice savings. God rewards those who render unto God what belongs to God. God windfalls those who prove themselves worthy. God showers in benefits those who are benefactors to God’s good church.

Mercy Bucks says it all in her singsong way and the congregation sways and rocks in the broadcast light like they’re at a rock concert, punching the air with their phones, breaking into singing, Mercy Mercy Hallelujah, to the old tune of Glory Glory.

Mercy holds her hand up to quieten them.

And God says that nobody, nobody who truly believes, could ever say anything bad or denigratory or damaging about our president, she says.

Sacha starts laughing.

God says anybody who says such things is speaking evil with tongues, Mercy says. God knows the impeachment trial was evil. God cleared our president’s name with every breath our president takes! I know God. God knows me. Believe me. Believe me. I’m a woman hotlined to God, God’s got me on direct dial and God told me to tell you to support our great great president who’s here on earth to do a great great work, the great great work that God the father and Jesus the saviour have personally entrusted him with

–

Sacha is laughing so much now that she nearly topples the chair she’s on.

Her mother is shaking her head.

I suppose the fact that we’re all a lot more accustomed to blatancy these days means that blatancy itself has to get even more blatant, her mother says.

Yeah. But what a fraud, Sacha says.

T’was ever so, her mother says. Since summer first was leafy.

Now her mother’s saying lines from when she was an actress. But the only thing her mother was apparently ever really in was a washing-up liquid advert on TV back before everything. Sacha was shown the advert when she was little, there’s a video of it in a cupboard, now unwatchable because there are no video players left alive. In it a young woman, a slim and coiffed stranger, unbelievable but it really is her mother, way back then, bends down in a kitchen to take a dish from a small boy who is wearing a policeman’s hat and explaining to this woman who’s meant to be his mother that in not getting these dishes clean enough she’s committing a crime.

– so donate, donate, donate and do right, to help me prepare me the way of the Lord, because oh dear Lord day by day three things I pray, see me clearly, love me dearly, follow me on social media and donate day by day by day by day –

Now she’s just quoting bits out of Godspell, her mother says.

What’s Godspell? Sacha says.

Old musical, her mother says. We did Godspell together. We did Much Ado. Then we did the Shakespeare / Dickens summer tour of the eastern counties.

Meanwhile the camera is doing close-ups on the people in Mercy’s audience. Some look proud. Some look broken. Some look desperate. Some look lit with hope. They all look poor. Most are holding their phones in the air and waving them. The others are using their phones to donate. The screen soft-focuses close up on Mercy’s face.

Yep, her mother says. Definitely.

Will I sleep it or do you want to keep watching it? Sacha says.

– are you sad? I see you, are you lonely? I see you, are you anxious? are you wired? are you mired in sin? I see you, are you tired? can’t you get hired? has life made you a shadow of yourself? are you more dead than alive? are you a ghost of yourself, a wraith? then listen because, God sayeth through me, it is required, it is required –

Sacha moves the cursor arrow to click the page away.

It is required you do awake your faith, her mother says.

– awake your faith, Mercy Bucks says a split second after her mother does, a split second before Mercy Bucks disappears off the screen.

Her mother nods.

Winter’s Tale, summer 89. I was Hermione. She was Understudy. Sacha, you’re going to be really late. Do you need a lift? Oh no, silly me. Ms Car Embargo 2020. I forgot.

You didn’t forget, Sacha says. You’re just unable to allow for other people’s attempts at heroism.

I don’t know that I’d call a refusal to travel in anything petrol-based an attempt at heroism, her mother says. A principle, maybe. But heroism?

What’s Winter’s Tale Summer 89? Sacha says.

The Winter’s Tale is a Shakespeare play, her mother says.

I know that, Sacha says (though in reality she didn’t or at least wasn’t completely sure).

And summer 89 is long gone. Antediluvian now, her mother says.

Anti what? Sacha says.

Ante. Before. Diluvian. The deluge, her mother says. Twenty past. You’d best run.

Sacha picks her coat up off the floor, shoulders it back on and kisses her mother on the cheek.

God bless, her mother says.

Did God just tell you to say that by speaking direct into your ear in his holy voice? Sacha says.

He did if you pay me a fiver, her mother says.

—

Car embargo. Like it’s a joke, a fad.

Anti diluvian.

Sacha quite likes words. She doesn’t really get to, though, at home, because Robert’s meant to be the one who likes words.

On her way to school she looks up anti diluvian on her phone.

Spelt slightly differently it means before the Flood capital F.

Yeah. As if the Flood capital F belongs to the past. We’re all antediluvian right now.

Not even when they see the pictures of Australia burning do they admit it.

Not even when half a billion dead creatures – meaning 500000000

individual living things dead – is only the death toll from one single area.

Not even when they see the photo of Australian people with no summer daylight standing breathing red dust air on a beach under a red sky, sort of hanging like puppets nobody can work the strings of, and a chestnut horse just standing there in the middle of them, bewildered, grave, like proof of blamelessness itself, while the ball of fire spread on the horizon behind them like a melting butter sun.

500000000. Sacha tries to imagine, and to respect, each dead creature individually. She lays out across a blasted plain the dead animals two by two by two by two by two million, further than any eye can see, kangaroo cinder with kangaroo cinder, wallaby ash with wallaby ash, charcoaled koala, charcoaled koala.

Her imagination isn’t big enough.

She already knows she is never going to have children. Why would you bring a child into a catastrophe? It would be like giving birth to a child in a prison cell. And Brighton’s a good place, one of the best in the country for green things, the only place in the whole UK with a green MP, and even so people here too on the local news are saying global warming’s a hoax stop trying to frighten me stop frightening my children with rubbish so they can’t sleep it’s fine I’d actually like some warmer weather the globe could be doing with it summer all year round would be great. Her own mother is one of those cracked people. It is like her mother’s more freaked out by what the menopause is doing to her than she is by real things happening in and to the world.

Menopause is real too, Sacha’s mother says now in Sacha’s head.

Whoa.

But wait.

Is that – what just happened in her head – the same as God speaking into Mercy Bucks’s ear?

Yeah, but Sacha’s mother didn’t actually speak in her ear or her head there. It’s just that Sacha knows what she’d say if she were here. Because she knows her mother so well.

But God isn’t real. Sacha is pretty sure about that.

God is a figment of human need and imagination.

Her mother, though.

Definitely real.

But. Wait.

Because: God is several kinds of real, 1. in being ‘real’ to the people there at those religious shows who believe in God, 2. in being made ‘real’ to them because he apparently physically ‘speaks into someone’s ear’, and 3. in being a ‘real’ figment of Mercy Bucks’s imagination with very real lucrative consequences for Mercy Bucks.

So. What does that make Sacha’s mother?

Or, more precisely, what does that make Sacha’s imagining of her mother?

Imagine you are a flower in water but that your time of taking in water as a plant is over because you’re naturally starting to dry up, and the water – though you can’t understand it, being a flower and everything – no longer goes up your stem in the same old way.

That’s the kind of thing her mother’s taken to saying. It is driven by a Freudian envy of young people, especially her daughter.

I wonder if flowers feel like this, like I do, when it happens to them. Do flowers feel like they lose their dexterity? do they bump into things all the time? do they forget things constantly? do they think that Simon Cowell’s name is Simon Callow even though they know full well it’s Cowell but they just can’t get to the name through their neural paths for some reason any more?

Sacha blows air through her teeth out of her mouth in disdain.

Getting old is pathetic if you use it as an excuse for no longer being responsible.

Her mother could make more of an effort.

Sacha is never going to be like that.

Given what’s happening planetarily, Sacha is unlikely to get to an age when it’ll happen anyway.

Her mother’s lucky she got to live so long.

You’re the one talking imaginary rubbish, her mother says in her head. It’s all going to be fine.

Her mother, real or ‘real’. Both are deluded.

Still, she feels a bit guilty for feeling irritation at her and for being this rude inside her head about her.

What was that thing, about heroines holding up a station? She will look it up and text her mother what its source is. This will both annoy her mother and please her. Two birds one stone.

Horrible proverb.

The horror images fill her head. Something that had once been a bird in a sky, a wingframe broken and wayward, jutting out of stripped scorched ribcage.

A bird in the hand is worth.

No. A bird in the hand is unnatural unless that bird’s actually chosen unforced to sit on your hand of its own free will.

Bit long for a proverb, though.

Two birds in the hand?

St Francis.

She thinks about the film in Italian they watched back when her parents were still living in the same house and watched the things with the subtitles that her mother didn’t like and her father liked, back when she was Robert’s age. It was about St F. trying to do his morning prayers under the trees but the birds love him so much that they crowd into the branches all round him and sing and cheep their love so loud that he has to ask them to be quiet because he can’t hear himself pray.

Then all his monks crowded round him too to ask him where he wanted them to go and do their God spiel in the world. He told them all to turn round and round and round on the spot and keep spinning till they fell over from dizziness. One by one they all fell over. Then he stood above them and said, okay, so whatever direction you ended up facing when you fell over, you go that way my brothers and spread the word.

She passes Tesco. There’s a guy in the doorway but it isn’t Steve.

She hopes he’s all right wherever he is. There are a lot of homeless people out today; it’s bright and dry. The last time she saw Steve he told her about the sixteen busloads brought down from Nottingham and the northeast.

Free trip to the south coast, he said. One way trip. They dump them wherever the MP’s not a Tory. Town’s full of them. Sent them to the seaside.

May as well all be on our holidays I tell you, cause nobody’s making any fucking money now they’re all here.

She gave him what change she had in her pocket that day. Someone had stolen his boots.

Thanks, love, he said.

Keep warm, she said.

Do my best, he said. You too.

She imagines Steve on a screen and a clicker showing the donations behind him like the one behind Mercy Bucks, except Steve’s is going up

really slowly in increments of 10p. She imagines Mercy Bucks spinning and spinning on the altar of the Mercy Bucks Church of the Spirit like a break dancer who can’t stop or a needle gone mad on a compass, Mercy demonstrating to her audience how to spin round and round till they all fall down. Then Mercy Bucks going round all the fallen-over dizzy people like on a battlefield, tending to them tenderly and pickpocketing them while she does.

She imagines her mother now nipping out the front door in the winter sunny glare and through the gates and up the steps with all her invisible blades out – a bit like a Swiss army knife display unit in an army and navy stores, a giant red penknife that revolves on a stand with all its attachments splayed – and knocking at her father and Ashley’s front door to see if the remote’s in there.

Her mother never uses the key her father gave her. She always knocks.

She imagines Ashley opening the door to her many-bladed mother and standing there blank. Can’t hear. Doesn’t understand. Saying the nothing and shaking her head and closing the door again.

Her mother won’t get any work done with the TV left on so loud.

Not that there’s much administrating to do any more, for a business that’s been brex-fucked.

She thinks of her mother this morning wandering round the front room shouting the words whether and heroine over the TV noise.

Oh yeah. Station thing.

Find the source, send it in unspoken obeisance to the Source Queen.

She types the words whether and heroine into the search bar on the phone.

Up comes drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs, then quite far down, something about Jane Austen and Victorians.

She clears the search bar.

She types in the words station, held, and life.

Stuff comes up about how long people can live in space stations.

She adds the word heroine.

Stuff comes up about drug addicts.

She scrolls and scrolls – then there’s a single visual of Greta Thunberg, the photo with her hood up in the yellow coat that looks like a fisherman’s coat, the one where she looks like she won’t be fobbed off by anybody or anything.

Heroine of my own life!

Only the mighty Greta can upend the internet’s determination to make the word heroine refer not to a female hero but to a misspelling of a Class A drug.

As if whoever was typing it in was bound to have meant heroin not heroine, heroine being such a little-used notion.

Sacha thinks of Brighton station with the little slip-through entrance, the taxi rank and the place for bikes, the people in Pret and M&S. She imagines it all, all of the above, held in the palm of a giant hand. But whose hand?

No one’s hand.

Sacha’s own hand, now that she’s imagined it.

No point in asking anyone else to hold your world.

She stands at the school gate, wipes her phonescreen clean of prints on the underarm of her coat. As she does, the phone flashes up a text.

It’s from Robert.

think am about to do somer thing stupid;-\ down on beach opp shit st pls come rght now if you can i need a hand for 3 mins

—

It’s the pls rather than the rght now that does it. It signals real urgency, given that any politeness her brother used to have is well gone.

It might be a trick.

It might be real.

By shit st he means Ship Street.

Sacha steps back from the gate before anyone sees her who might ask her why she’s loitering and not coming into school like she should be.

She texts Mel who will be in registration already.

Melaneeee can u pass on apology & message ive a home emergency & will be in in 1 hrs time thanx mel (heart emoji heart emoji) sachxxx If it’s a trick? She’ll kill him.

She loves him, but. He’s her little brother. But. He is clever, like really clever. But. It is as if since he turned thirteen a dark visor has come down over his eyes and he is looking out at everyone and everything through a metalled slit. From being the kind of boy who used to say brainy but random things like watermelons are 92% water and 8 per cent everything else, which means the water quantity = 92% and the rest is melon, so melon actually only = 8%, and the really exciting thing is that you can make a maths equation out of anything, even a fruit or a vegetable, he has become

the kind of boy who gets sent home for saying things in class like why is there anything wrong anyway with saying a black person has a watermelon smile?

Did you really say the things they’re saying you did? Out loud? To a whole class? And a teacher? his mother said looking up from the email that came from the school asking her and their father to attend a meeting about their son.

Robert, you can’t say things like that, Ashley said.

This was back when Ashley was still speaking.

Yes I can, he said. Anyone can say anything. It’s called freedom of speech. It’s a human right. It’s my human right.

It’s not a joke, Robert. It’s depraved, Ashley said. These are depraved things to say, and not in any way funny. How can you say such things?

Easy, he said. I also explained to them why people hate women for being girly swots and only useful for sex and having children, especially children that you don’t admit to having, because being a man is all about spreading our seed.

Robert! (chorus of voices.)

And basically everybody, including quite a lot of women, think that women should shut up, he said. You’re always saying we should listen more to history and what it tells us about ourselves. I say history gave us the scold’s bridle for a reason.

In the email the school had told them that Robert had reduced a class to laughing anarchy by standing up and saying these things.

You’re quite the satirist, Robert, their father said.

No, I’m quite the pragmatist, Robert said.

I won’t have him in the house if he continues to say things like this, Ashley said.

It’s one of the last things Sacha remembers her saying before she stopped speaking altogether.

You don’t have to resort to bigotry to fit in, his father said.

Are you calling our prime minister and other political leaders bigots?

Robert said. Stop talking down our great country. We should be standing up for Britain. Anything less is treason and reveals you to be a doomster and a gloomster.

Just tell your father, Robert, the thing you said about education, the one that particularly angered your teachers, his mother said.

I simply noted, like our prime minister’s chief adviser wrote in his blog, that children who come from poverty or grow up in it aren’t worth educating because they’re just not up to it, Robert said, they’re never going to be able to learn anything so there’s no point in the state paying for them to have an education they’re always going to be congenitally unable to use. And in this I’m only repeating what our own prime minister’s chief adviser thinks. And our prime minister, because his chief adviser’s so good at what he does, was recently elected with a huge majority. So what does that teach you?

It made Sacha laugh.

Till Robert began to be foul about her, like when Jamie and Jane, who her father had had to lay off, came round for (apologetic no hard feelings) drinks at Christmas and Robert stood at the door and announced to the whole room,

my sister is an idiot. She actually thinks she can change the world, that with a bit of a nudge from her and her woke friends anything will change. It’s St Sacha’s most recent way of getting attention, and Jane, who’s from New Zealand, said to him, so you’re a bit of a sceptic then, Robert, is that your way of getting attention?

and he told her she was foreign and made fun of the way she spoke.

Sciptic.

Then the police came to the door when they caught him cutting nicks into the seats of a bike-stand of parked bikes. They said he’ll be liable for a youth caution and he’s not too old to be arrested and charged with criminal damage or to find himself at a Secure Training Centre for a six-year-stretch. The police who brought him home were kindly even as they said the stern stuff.

Their kindliness clearly annoyed Robert, who announced to the police that it would be worth being charged or whatever just to think of all those cyclists getting home with wet patches up their anuses.

He is what her mother calls intransigent, what her father calls acting like a bloody moron and what Ashley, if Ashley were to speak out loud, would call something so expletive that their father would literally have to leave her and move back home again.

It’s because he’s been so bullied, Sacha said when Robert wasn’t in the room. It’s because you moved him to a new school. He has to alter who he is to survive.

They don’t know what to do about the stuff on social media, the stuff that followed him, like social media didn’t even have to draw breath, from the

old school into all the phones of all the kids at the new school.

Her mother is worried about him.

Her father is angry about him.

Sacha knows he is brilliant.

She remembers the day he took the Alexa out and down to the beach hidden in his jacket then dropped it casually over the side of the pier into the sea shouting down after it, Alexa, tell us how to do the breast stroke. She remembers the day he actually started wearing the trainers that had been, until then, exhibits in the Robert Greenlaw Gallery Trainer Exhibition on the shelves in his room. She remembers the film he made on his phone, and this was in the old days before it was so easy to make films on your phone, of the disconnected way that people look when they’re listening to music on their headphones on the train or on a bike or walking along a street; the film he made showed their eyes, and the way they sat moving without even knowing they were to a beat that was nothing to do with what was happening round them in outer reality, and as the soundtrack to the film Robert, who was only nine when he made it, recorded himself following headphoned people around the town asking them questions about themselves which of course they couldn’t hear.

That film he made had so shaken Sacha when she saw it that she’d stopped wearing her own phones, except in private, for quite a long time.

But this last while it is as if Robert has attached a dimmer switch to his own brilliance and like he is randomly turning it down as low and dark as it can go then thunking it up to dazzling, and vice versa, meanwhile the person she knows has become trapped in there. He flickers and flashes like one of the arcade machines on the pier.

He’s her brilliant brother.

She also resents that she has to be the sister always aware of her brilliant brother. Like it’s her lot. For life.

He’s the kid who – when he’d taken to doing all those personality quizzes online one afternoon, and Sacha’d sat and watched him for a while before saying, you know they use those quizzes for data collection and sampling?

and he replied, but I am a data-anarchist and am consciously lying in my answers, I always make up a person who’s answering them so as to ruin all their culled data, and Sacha said, yeah but you know, Rob, even those made-up people, because it’s you who’s making them up, are all still you – looked

up at her with such dismay in his face that it nearly made her cry to see him so defeated and she had to leave the room to stop herself feeling it.

Now.

Where is he?

She scans the beach.

Just nine in the morning but there’s always someone on it; she can see a few people, a young couple down by the water’s edge, some old people pointing out to sea, someone with a kid and a dog.

She can’t see Robert yet.

But her phone goes.

It’s not from Robert. It’s a text from Mel.

Hey not in tday sach (frowny face emoji) woman in Waitros told my mum

‘not to breathe near her children’ then a guy said she should be wearing facemask my dad went apeshit punched him (frowny face frowny face) meltdown big time (frowny face emoji with x x eyes) curtains closed on our windows blinds down today don know what else to do. Doc who was whistlblower Dr Li just died think am losing my mind sach ‘healthy society cannot have just one voice’ he is my hero told them in dec it was bad but they dint listn thority made hm shut it & now he is gon RIP i keep cryin i cant stop xxx

Melanie’s grandmother is Chinese.

Sacha thinks of the pictures of the virus online, the drawings people have created to approximate the virus. They all look a bit like little planets with trumpets coming out of their surface, or little worlds covered in spikes of growth, a little world that’s been shot all over its surface by those fairground darts with tuft tails from the old-fashioned rifle ranges, or like mines in the sea in films about WW2.

The net is all photos of people in other countries with masks over their mouths and noses.

According to the net people got it from eating snakes. Other places say bats and pangolins. Stuff has gone viral online about Chinese people eating little yellow snakes on skewers.

Why would anyone want to eat a snake? Or a bat? Or a pangolin?

Unless the eating snakes thing is a racist way to link the virus to racism and being used as a slur against Chinese people.

Anyway it came from eating wild animals.

But why would anyone anyway ever eat any creature that has to be killed just so that someone can eat it, when there’s so much you can eat in the world without killing anything?

The longer Sacha lives the more insane she realizes the species she belongs to is.

She texts Mel back.

Heart emoji. Kiss emoji. Kiss emoji. Boxing glove emoji. POW emoji.

Knight in shining armour emoji. Muscly arm emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji.

There is no emoji she can think of that’s an anti-racist emoji.

There are probably loads of racist emojis, and nothing obvious to send someone who’s been racistly done over.

Why is that?

She leans on the rail and looks out over the beach.

The sea is grey even in the sun.

She exchanges a look with a seagull.

Winter for a while yet, then?

Afraid so.

Oh well.

The seagull, bright yellow at the beak and feet, settles its wing feathers and looks away.

Its beak sticks out like the masks people wore centuries ago in Venice in the plague.

She thinks of those little cotton facemasks of now. They’re like nothing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the real masks, the ones on the faces of the planet’s liars.

All manner of virulent things are happening.