Frontispiece

She turns and looks at the facades of the buildings behind her.

One Thursday when she was down here quite late she looked up at that building and saw cleaners cleaning it at eleven at night.

It felt like she was meant to see it.

But it also didn’t mean anything. It was just coincidence.

Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn’t be coincidence, would it?

She turns back, looks out to sea again.

Some people say you can see France on a clear day with the naked eye, if you’re at the top of the i360.

It’s not true, apparently. France is just too far for the naked eye.

(The sigh360. The why360.)

The naked eye! Can an eye ever have clothes on?

She is a person on a pavement in a city in a country on a planet, seen from above by so many satellites that aren’t there so we can see how fine and beautiful our planet is from space but so the people who control the satellites can zoom in on people for all sorts of reasons that are nothing to do with what almost everybody and everything on the planet actually needs.

What are they for, then?

If seeing isn’t really about seeing?

Everything is mask.

She thinks about the girl she saw on TV shouting at the prime minister in Australia. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot.

Everything needs to be unmasked, right now, like that girl unmasked that man.

No sign of Robert.

She checks the time again.

She makes sure she’s got Ship Street pretty much directly behind her.

There. There’s a shape slightly further along. She immediately knows it’s him – even with his hood up she knows him. Those are his shoulders.

She goes down on to the beach.

Hi, she says.

He doesn’t say anything.

She sits down on the wet stones beside him.

He doesn’t look at her. But he says:

Can you just give me your hand, Sach, just for a minute?

He wants to hold her hand?

He sounds so small and so fragile.

So she puts her left hand out. He takes it in his, takes it right inside his (warm) jacket and dries the palm of her hand on his jumper.

Close your eyes, he says.

No, she says.

Please, he says.

Why? she says.

Just for a minute, he says.

She sighs. She closes her eyes.

He is pressing something cold and curved and glassy into her hand.

Don’t look yet, he says.

What is it? she says with her eyes still closed.

Present, he says. For the future. Wait a minute.

He holds both his hands tight over and under her hand with whatever the present is in it. He keeps his hands both clasped round her hand for what feels quite a long time like that.

He lets go. But her hand feels really strange.

There’s a quite large double-curved glass thing in it. It’s made of two connected globes of glass. It’s longer than the palm of her hand. It’s smooth, the glass of it is quite thin, and it’s got, what is it? bright yellow sand? inside it?

She tries to open her hand to look at it properly. Her hand won’t open for some reason. Whatever it is is stuck to her. Her hand is stuck to it.

It’s an eggtimer.

He holds up in front of her face, just long enough for her to see what it is, the superglue bottle.

Then he’s running up the beach and she’s scrambling after him on the stones, but it dawns on her that she has to be more careful, has to not scramble or scrabble because the thing he’s stuck to her hand is made of very very thin glass and she’s got to not break it or she’ll cut herself open and there’ll be broken glass stuck to her hand.

She yells his name.

She watches his back disappear up under the railings.

She stands on the slope of stones shaking her hand as if to shake the stuck thing off. It’s stuck right across her first three fingers. She can’t uncurl them.

She can move the thumb and the pinky. They’re not stuck. The other three fingers she can only waggle the ends of.

She pulls at it. It’s quite sore, to pull it.

Some people, a woman and a man, are coming towards her going, are you all right? can we help? is something wrong? so she must’ve been really shouting.

Thanks, yeah, no, it’s okay, I’m okay, she says.

Her phone goes off in her pocket.

She reaches for it with her wrong hand, awkward.

There’s a new text from him:

know how worried ur about how theres no time left so this woz best present I cud imagine from now on u always have time on ur hands She presses reply.

But she can’t text with this hand, the wrong hand.

She holds her phone out to the woman.

I wonder would you mind just typing in some words for me and pressing send? she says.

Sure. Of course. What would you like to say? the woman says.

Sacha thinks for a moment.

Thanks for the exceptional bonding experience, she says.

The woman laughs out loud.

The man starts looking on the internet on his own phone to see how you get superglued glass off skin.

Then the woman holds up Sacha’s phone with the reply Robert has sent back:

a smiley face emoji next to a sad face emoji next to a middle finger emoji.

How did this happen to you? the woman says.

Sacha shakes her head.

Who’s – the woman glances back at the phonescreen – Robert?

Sacha looks at the thing that’s made a seagull claw, a birdsfoot, of her hand. She tips her claw upside down so that the sand inside the glass runs, and it does run very prettily, from the first globe into the other, a fine thread of gold through the tiny opening that connects them.

My brother, she says.

Time is dimensional. Robert Greenlaw has just demonstrated not just the curve and dimensionality of time but also its multiple nature and given himself a TOTAL HIGH by affixing irremovably a piece of curved and dimensional time into the curved dimension of a mortal hand.

Heh.

!

The song he’d sing if he could still sing would be about how time is more than one thing, time is glass and sand, time is brittle and fluid, time is fragile and tough, time is sharp and blunt, time is now and ancient, time is before and after, time is smooth and rough and if you try to remove your attachment to time, time will laugh out loud and take the skin off you.

And because time is relative and there is more than one kind of time, today time can be my time and I will make it all the more mine by not worshipping acquisitive educational success, to quote Einstein. Given that Einstein himself was a rubbish school student. I mean, Einstein’s school, when Einstein was Robert Greenlaw’s age, thought Einstein was stupid.

Einstein! Infra dignit catastrophe.

So today I will go home, sneak in and up the stairs, they won’t know it but I’ll be in and invisible and upstairs playing ABUSEHEAP till the sun goes down on me, Robert Greenlaw, lone wolf, lost boy, soul of patience in exactitude.

Had he been his younger self he’d’ve cocked an invisible Robin Hood cap forward on his head right now as he crosses the street past the window of the shop he stole the eggtimer out of, but he is older now and way past being some loser who wears invisible hats. What he does is he keeps his head down, face turned away, Greenlaw outlaw with his winter coat pulled round him lined with life’s ironies keeping him warm. Outward 13 year old boy, inward true singer (all by ear by the way, a natural talent) of the subcurrent ballad of his time and times – because the two, time and times, are not the same thing.

Bookshop?

Yep.

Because:

there exists in the world a book he only recently found out about by scanning his mother’s Sunday Times and the book is about the time/s that Einstein came to Britain and especially the time he stayed in Norfolk. Robert Greenlaw isn’t completely sure where Norfolk is. He knows it’s somewhere

over there. He badly wants Einstein to have come to Brighton or anywhere in the environs of here. But. Nowhere on the net does it say Einstein came to Brighton.

Though anywhere in Sussex would do.

Host of other places, the net says yes, says London and Oxford and Cambridge and Nottingham and Woolsthorpe (Woolsthorpe? Because Newton, born there, understood in Woolsthorpe for the first time about the apple falling from the tree, discovered all the colours that make up light there too in 1666 when he was twenty four years old stuck at home away from college because of Yersinia pestis) and Southampton, Winchester, and Kent, Cotswolds, Surrey, Norfolk, Einstein even went to Glasgow, photo taken smoking pipe, spoke about relativity to a huge crowd, went to Manchester.

But not Sussex, never Sussex, nowhere in Sussex appears ever to have been graced by the sole of the foot or the mildness of face of Einstein.

Face like an Eastertime lamb, head like a dandelion clock, but a dandelion clock holding the hidden infrastructure not just of the world.

Universe too.

!

What weedy toughness.

And the internet’s not always right, though, no, the internet doesn’t know the half of it, and a new book about the time Einstein was here, on this island, might say something as yet un-net about Sussex.

And they might have this book. In that shop.

So he turns himself meek, becomes 13 year old boy again in case why aren’t you at school?

Answer ready:

physics teacher Mr Musgrave (completely made-up name, such a brilliant teacher, the made-up ones always are) has sent me here to see if you’ve got the new book about Einstein in Britain in stock, and he slinks in through the doors of the bookshop –

and nobody asks anything.

He looks.

Not in sciences.

Not in new books.

Then meek 13 year old boy goes to look on the biography shelves and

!

Boy finds book.

Boy sinks to crosslegged on bookshop floor and reads it where he opens it,

about Einstein’s father giving Einstein (as a boy) a compass and Einstein (just a boy himself) working out from that compass in his hand what magnetism might be.

Why have you never given me a compass (Robert Greenlaw to his father, in his head)?

Robert I’ve enough on my plate don’t give me any more hassle (his father, to Robert Greenlaw, most days, in reality).

It’s understandable. His father’s business is fucked. His father’s marriage is fucked. His father’s girlfriend has stopped wanting to be fucked.

Back to book.

Robert Greenlaw opens it at random again: story about when Einstein gave a lecture somewhere in England and wrote his arithmetic equations on two blackboards and the two blackboards were put carefully aside after he left because they were now treasured possessions and they got sent to a museum or special place of storage where ONE OF THE BLACKBOARDS

GOT CLEANED BY MISTAKE.

!

Einstein’s actual handwritten figures – erased.

!

Also, accompanying story that Einstein’s maths calculations on those boards had mistakes in them too.

Einstein = human

!

It is funny.

Robert Greenlaw knows from online how trolls from everywhere piled in on long dead Einstein after the BBC reported that in his diaries Einstein said some rude things about Chinese people and people from then Ceylon now Sri Lanka.

Racist and xenophobic!

Einstein! who the Nazis said they were going to hang soon as they got the chance because of him being so Jewish.

Einstein! who called for civil rights in the USA.

Einstein! who warned against the nuclear bomb and said if he’d known they would use what he discovered about quantum and relativity the way they

used it he’d have become a cobbler and mended people’s shoes all his life instead.

Well that’s what you get if you read people’s private diaries.

I am offended! shout all the lined-up people just before they’re shot into ditches in Robert Greenlaw’s imaginary computer game provisionally entitled Blood and Irony which one day soon he will properly invent and sell for a fortoon

troubled?

me?

so Robert Greenlaw checks the index at the back of the book about Einstein coming to Britain, for the word

Brighton

no

Sussex

no.

Ah.

Ah well.

He is sad, though, about it.

Why does he need to be near a place where Einstein has been, today, right now, at this point in his life?

Who knows?

It is a mystery.

He just does.

He flicks through the book again, photos of Einstein taken in the very same country that Robert Greenlaw is in right now, England.

In the photos Einstein always looks unlikely.

It is brilliant.

Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn’t need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.

Quote at the front of this book about Einstein, written by someone who saw him with his own eyes at the time:

See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare…So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast – intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump.

Plump.

It is kind of an unpleasant word to use.

(Robert Greenlaw has been called plump in his time.

It is why he is now very, very lean.)

What / where is Cromer?

Robert Greenlaw looks it up on his phone.

Ah. There. Okay.

Opposite of the blond beast. If that was written nowadays blond beast =

UK prime minister. Yesterday the blond beast prime minister tried, like the Americans, banning some journalists and not others from being let into Downing St. Some were told to stand on one side of the carpet and the others to stand on the other side of the carpet. On the one side they were going to be permitted. On the other they weren’t. All the journalists boycotted the dividing of them into two. But that won’t last. Robert Greenlaw admires above all the adviser of the prime minister, who knows how to style politics so that it doesn’t look like politics any more, who knows full well that Stalin and Hitler were possible even though everyone in old-style politics looks aghast when anyone suggests it’s possible to act the ways they did.

The people in charge in England right now are geniuses of manipulation.

Robert Greenlaw is in awe of their performance of callousness.

He is in awe of how they get away with talking about patriotism with all the fervour of 12 year olds – Robert Greenlaw still aspires to it a bit, though he’s now 13 and recognizes its preadolescent ventriloquisms.

It is all just more genius.

Prime minister, consciously dishevelled. Styled.

He puts, in his mind, the two dishevelled men together on, what was it, a beach.

Hmm.

One looks dishevelled because disinterested in looks and clothes, because thinking.

The other looks like he’s acting a bit drunk or acting like a boy not a man.

It is a brilliant subterfuge to look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing and to make people like him for it.

One is his hero for bucking every trend and rewriting the universal truths to make them truer.

The other is his hero for the opposite – for the brilliant application of lies. It is impressive. And for seeing, following, cultivating, using and

profiting big-time by the current trends, which is the best way to survive the trends.

What would they say to each other if they met? Would they talk about time? Would they talk about ethics, heroism? Robert Greenlaw knows what Einstein thinks about heroism. But the PM?

Robert Greenlaw gets his phone out and keys in ‘Einstein’, ‘hero’,

‘Prime’, ‘Minister’, ‘ethics’, and ‘time’.

A quote comes up from – Time Magazine.

There they both are, on an English beach.

Einstein: Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them!

Our PM: My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He’s a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it’s demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgement, but his instincts were right.

It’s not a real conversation. More like a caricature.

But that’s okay because this is the dawn of a new era, a caricature kind of an era.

Robert Greenlaw’s father’s girlfriend comes into Robert Greenlaw’s head.

Uch.

There is a trunk in his head, like a medieval trunk, in which he locks her whenever she does that unasked.

Take care, she used to say in the days when she still spoke. She said it instead of saying the word goodbye. She said it like a threat. Take care.

In you go. Lid down. Padlock.

Now.

Robert Greenlaw, scrolling the phone, sees again his sister’s reply, bonding experience

He smiles.

He closes the Einstein book. He is going home to play ABUSEHEAP.

Ultraviolent catastrophe.

He checks, without looking like he’s checking, for CCTV.

No. Do it like you have power.

He looks straight at the camera. He shows it himself tucking the book into his trousers, pulls his jumper down over it, pulls his coat closed, stands up.

No bells, no nothing, no sound of anyone coming after him, yep, there, see,

nobody gave a fuck,

sign of the times,

nobody even saw, or if they did, cared.

—

What Robert Greenlaw finds most curious about playing ABUSEHEAP

(subheading die a thousand deaths) is that it doesn’t matter what era/s you’re in, torture really hasn’t changed much. When electricity starts to be available it gets more everyday since every room has a socket and there are so many ordinary things that can be plugged into that socket, drills and saws, and others more excitingly innocent like lamps, toasters, hair curling irons.

One of the first things they did with the invention of the telephone is work out a way, by connecting it by wire to a human and turning its little crank handle, to deliver pain. They called it? The Telephone.

Riches, ironies. Robert Greenlaw is an Iron(y) Man. Just as well, since across the aeons and the global distances what all the peoples of the world really have in common is so many similar ways of doing humiliating and painful things to each other.

Dislocation, discomfort via acute ways of sitting / standing / squatting /

hanging. Boiling oil / tar / wax / water. Just water. Dripping it very slowly on to someone, in exactitude. Or just filling people with too much of it. Heat, cold, roasting, freezing. Heavy stones. Iron chairs or contraptions featuring spikes and blades. Finger screws. Toe screws. A global variety of boot-like contraptions via which the foot and leg bones can be wedged till broken or crumbled.

The contraptions which hold the whole body in place are often, interestingly, designated female. Skevington’s Daughter, Duke of Exeter’s Daughter, Iron Maiden. There’s also the claw-like metal thing called The Spider, for when Victim is itself a female.

That stuff’s level 3 and 4 on ABUSEHEAP. Robert Greenlaw is way beyond that now. He is Perp level 7, has access to early electricals and a chat room entry key so he can access Victim data and profiles and compare and discuss tortures in conference with other Perps. Plus, up until level 5

Perps have to do the tracking, chasing and capturing of Victims themselves

but from level 6 on, they’re presented with Victim after Victim as gifts of the game. But the twist – so to speak heh heh – is that you have to outwit Victim in interrogation and succeed in getting information, and if Victim dies before delivering the info you drop back to level 3 Drudge. If you get it badly wrong and Victim escapes, game profile plummets you into Victimzone.

There are a lot more Victims than Perps.

It is easy, to end up killing. Rat torture might look a sure bet to get someone to spill their guts – cut skin above the stomach of Victim into bloody strips then tie bag with rat in it round Victim and rat starts to eat – but it almost always ends in death, too-literal gut-spill. Robert Greenlaw’s own favourite way of killing someone who’s no longer valid (having given up all info), if he’s okay for point totals and can afford it, is Torn in Two, original medieval, in which one arm and one leg are attached to one large horse, the other arm and leg to another horse, and the horses sent in different directions.

For not-killing he favours Pear of Pain, which stops people speaking until you let them again, and Pitchcap, which the English did to the Irish in the c18th: pour hot tar into paper cap attached to Victim’s head then rip it off taking the scalp with it. (You can also fill orifices with pitch or tar but Victim’ll definitely die if you do, so use it only on Victim you don’t need anything else from.)

So far he has found that the simplest abuse gets the best results.

Jetlining (ancient practice with modernized name). You don’t need anything but a wall for that.

Fingernailing (ancient).

Dryboarding (ancient and bang up to date; if it’s working right now for the CIA it’ll probably work for you).

Level 10 gives you the latest electromagnetic torture gadgets and Robert Greenlaw is looking forward to those. Mind-altering! But only the best Perps reach level 10.

Sigh.

Only ten minutes into the game today and Robert Greenlaw is feeling the usual nothing.

He just doesn’t give a shit what Victim knows or doesn’t know.

Anyway the Perp room is practically empty. Everybody is at school.

He leaves Victim dangling, pauses the game.

Bit distracted now.

Bored.

There’s someone downstairs, on a visit. He heard them there when he came in

(and here’s what Robert Greenlaw’s achieved since he arrived at the front door half an hour ago, opened it noiselessly and shut it noiselessly: furniture polish from cleaning cupboard + hinges = noiseless entry).

a). he had a good look in whoever’s visiting’s bag by the umbrella stand.

Canvas. Heavy. No wonder. A quite large, completely round stone in it. Like a small stone football. Garden thing? Thing for top of a pillar? Old unused cannonball? He’d put it back down very very carefully. He’d climbed the stair, missed out the creaker step.

He’d heard, as he went up, people in the lounge talking.

No TV noise.

Must’ve unplugged it.

He’d halted on the landing to listen for a moment.

No one was talking about the eggtimer.

Nobody sounded outraged.

But he couldn’t hear for definite.

They were talking about – Worthing? Or – something worthy.

Bored.

b). he’d gone up the next flight then up into the loft. He got a pair of socks out of the sock drawer, put his pods in and watched a bit of porn like any self respecting 13 year old boy is ancestrally and con-genitally bound to do. He’d felt bad again after. It always makes him think (it is so fucking annoying even to have it in his head) of the story of the hunter out hunting who sees the virgins all bathing naked and of course he sits and watches them for as long as he can, who wouldn’t? so the goddess of the hunt catches him and is so furious with him for desecrating her virgins by looking at them impurely that she turns him into a stag which his own dogs not recognizing their master and seeing only a stag instead then subsequently maul to death. Robert Greenlaw, inward balladeer, soul of patience in exactitude, once wrote an essay for school based on that story and proclaiming how if you go about life seeing the pure thing when you aren’t pure yourself then the dog inside you will tear you apart.

Good boy.

!

After which Robert Greenlaw, outward outlaw, tore that essay up and threw it away on his way to school, told Milton he hadn’t done the homework

and gave him a good insolent stare back throughout the reprimand troubled?

me?

So he clicked away the 16 yr old (more like 35 really, hair in bunches doesn’t mean you’re not old) French au pair getting done by father of family, groan, banal beyond banal, anal beyond anal, fake-moaning and stilettos in the air, and tipped his invisible hat to whoever was recording him watching it through his computer’s camera since someone somewhere will have been.

Given that we all live in an open prison now and ought just to admit it and stop imagining we don’t.

Bored.

c). he watched on YouTube instead the clip he likes from the black and white German film where the jester does the crazy jerking Dance of Death in the inn and all the peasants go into a trance and follow him doing the dance too like automatons, shaking and jerking like sweaty zombies. It is called Paracelsus. It is something to do with Hitler even though it’s set in the middle ages. The jester gets into the town bringing the plague because unscrupulous merchants who don’t want to lose trade and money import their goods through the blockade. Then Robert Greenlaw stood up and did some of the jerky dance moves soundlessly round his room.

But was he the jester – or the follower?

Heh.

!

All the same:

bored.

d). he brought up the link to the live Echo feed to see if it had spoken again. One day an Echo in someone’s house woke itself up unasked and said out loud to the room, with its Echo-owners staring at it amazed, this sentence: every time I close my eyes all I see is people dying.

Of course it became a viral news story; of course some random canny Echo-owner was clever enough to set up an Echo-cam on their own Echo and since then there’s been more than a million people every day watching and listening to a live 24 hour feed for the moment when this Echo, or the god who speaks through the Echo, says something else.

Which of course it never will.

It is brilliant, Robert Greenlaw thought again looking at the screen showing an Echo, any old Echo, on a sideboard, and the number of people

online watching it right then, 360,746 (America is asleep). I mean. Who programmed an Echo to be so poetic? Who placed that little primed grenade at the heart of the machine? It always makes him laugh, the people out there hooked and waiting for the god, or the machine, same thing, to give them the message.

30 seconds later?

Bored.

e). he sat on his bed and tore the photograph out of the Einstein book, Einstein in an overcoat standing on a lot of cut grass in a field in England, hands in his pockets, cheery-melancholy.

He cut its edge straight with scissors, neat.

He tore out the one of Einstein with the sculptor standing outside a hut on either side of a clay head the sculptor’s just made of him.

He did the same, scissors, neat edge.

He stuck them both on the wall with Blu-tak.

Albert Einstein on the wall looked past him, melancholy-cheery, into the distance in his room.

What does soul of patience in exactitude actually mean?

Uh-oh. When he starts to question himself –

bored.

f). he brought up his ABUSEHEAP profile.

a + b + c + d + e + f =?

Now. New Victim on The Donkey. No guts spilled yet. Robert Greenlaw has the lackeys tie Victim’s hands behind back and suspend from the rafters.

Crack. Dislocation.

Still nothing.

Then Victim presses the button. I’ll talk.

Uch.

Robert Greenlaw sighs the sigh of an ancient tyrant who’s seen it all.

Bored.

He clicks the game off before Victim can follow through and save itself.

Almost wishes he’d gone to school after all.

Wonders if his sister still has time on her hands ha ha.

Wonders who it is, downstairs.

Robert Greenlaw silents himself out of his room and down the loft stairs again. Then silents himself down the staircases. Halfway down the last flight

Robert Greenlaw sits, but with his feet well up off the next step because it’s the creaker.

His mother is telling the visitor one of her stories about how proud she is of her children, how clever they are, how one of them at a very early age, maybe eight years old, had said at the dinner table that if a TV series could be as good as the planet Ceres and the goddess Ceres then finally we would be fulfilling our true human capacity, and how she and Jeff had been amazed that their children knew about outer space and mythology and had done all that reading by themselves.

Yeah, that was me, he hears his sister say.

It wasn’t her who said the Ceres thing. It was him. She knows nothing about anything.

The visitor sounds like a member of the educated elite. She is here because she was doing something research-wise over in Worthing and stayed overnight last night here in a hotel. She says something he can’t make out.

Then she says,

and that makes you a terrorist. They’re listed as a terrorist group now.

Everybody laughs.

His mother talks about the day someone broke all the windscreens on all the cars up the street.

His environ/mental sister starts blahing about how solar panels and not eating meat one day a week isn’t going to make enough of a dent.

It’s truly terrible. But this new generation of responsible young people will sort it out, his mother says. Thank God for the young people. I trust them.

Yeah, that’s it. Give us the responsibility for everything you’ve all messed up but don’t give us any power with which to change anything, his sister says.

His mother says something apologetic about her revolutionary daughter.

Yeah, because the planet is really dangerously near being fucked, his sister says.

Don’t swear. And darling, his mother says. It’s just not as simple as that.

Yes it is, his sister says. And you being patronizing to me doesn’t make it any less simple.

The visitor says something about how important it is to have a voice.

Almost in unison his mother and his sister start telling the visitor about his father’s girlfriend.

Visitor: Stopped speaking?

His mother: Just stopped. Can’t make any sounds at all.

Visitor: She’s lost her voice?

His sister: Yeah but it’s somehow sort of more than just losing her voice.

His mother: Her ability to make any sound at all has literally gone. When we go next door all she’ll do is shrug her shoulders. Even when Sacha stood on one of her feet when she wasn’t expecting it –

His sister: – to see what would happen, not out of meanness or cause I wanted to hurt her –

His mother: – even then –

His sister: she just opened her mouth in an O and no sound came out, though you could see it was sore by her face. I said sorry, I told her I was doing it to try to be helpful, then we asked what if we tried burning her arm unexpectedly with a hot teaspoon, you know, something when she least expected it, would that help, and she wrote down on a piece of paper, nothing works, don’t think I haven’t tried myself.

Visitor: She’d tried to burn herself? With a teaspoon?

His mother: I think she just meant she’d tried, I don’t know how, to get herself to make a noise.

Visitor: You can’t trick your unconscious.

His mother: You think it’s psychological? I think it’s definitely psychological. I said it was. Didn’t I say that, Sacha? I said psychosomatic.

His sister: Like Greta.

His mother: How?

His sister: She stopped speaking.

His mother: No, the whole thing about her was that she did speak, Garbo Speaks. Garbo Laughs. My father used to say: the ideal woman until she spoke. [impersonates her father, Bradford accent] Should never have opened her mouth. All downhill after that. [back to her usual voice] He really did!

His sister: No, mum. Greta Thunberg. When she was a little kid she went into a state of shock when she realized what was happening to the earth, and she actually stopped being able to speak. And then she realized the whole point was that she had to speak. That she had to use her voice. I asked Ashley about that, actually.

His mother: Asked her what?

His sister: If it was about the world, if she was trying to save the world.

And she wrote on the pad, not any more.

Robert Greenlaw, porous understander of his time and times, sits halfway up the stairs like in the AA Milne poem for children and remembers verbatim one of the first conversations he had with his father’s girlfriend.

His father’s girlfriend: In times of injustice you always have to be ready to speak up, to speak out loudly against it.

Robert Greenlaw: If you do, you’ll be one of the first they’ll kill.

His father’s girlfriend: It won’t come to that. Not if enough people speak out.

Robert Greenlaw: Yeah but what if it does?

His father’s girlfriend: If it does, then I’m not worried, they can kill me if they like, because I trust and I know there’ll be so many more who’ll come after me to speak out just as loud.

Robert Greenlaw: They’ll all get killed too.

His father’s girlfriend: Justice will always win.

Robert Greenlaw: Yeah but that totally depends on what the people who make the laws decide to define justice as.

His father’s girlfriend: You’re impossible.

Robert Greenlaw: You’re all too plausible.

Along with stopping speaking, his father’s girlfriend seems to have stopped writing her ‘book’ about ‘politics’. He rather hopes it’s because he sneaked into her ‘study’ at the start of January and wrote with a Sharpie on the top page of the sheaf of printed-out pages next to her name MEMBER OF

THE EDUCATED ELITE.

Because?

Robert Greenlaw knows there is no point in making lists of the lies a PM

or POTUS tells.

It is an amazing time to be alive. World order is changing.

But he also admits to himself that some bits of his father’s girlfriend’s book made quite interesting reading:

(where blah marks Robert Greenlaw’s loss of interest) language distorted, used as tool of taking control of a populace by sloganeering and emotional manipulation, is in fact the opposite of giving back control to populace blah

use of classical references and display of knowledge as rhetorical power-tools are surreptitiously also used as a marker of class and of who owns culture, who owns knowledge blah

truth gives way to the authentic lie, in other words what the voter emotionally supports, or emotional truth, which is where factual truth stops mattering, which leads in turn to total collapse of integrity and to tribalism blah

It is more likely, though, that it’s nothing to do with him. More likely she stopped writing it because a couple of nights before she stopped speaking altogether – as Robert Greenlaw, silent outlaw, knows because he has a key, often goes next door without anyone knowing, goes in quite often to see what’s in the fridge, to pick things up in their rooms and put things down again, occasionally to pocket things, to listen to them having sex (when they still did) thinking nobody could possibly be watching or listening, to take a seat on the landing, they leave the door open – that night she was talking and talking, wouldn’t shut up, telling his father in her mad girl way about a programme about WW2 home movies she’d just seen and how there was a sequence of old footage of a Nazi town having a summer festival, floats were going through the streets with women and children on them in national costume waving to people on the pavement, she talked about how the floats were hung with garlands of flowers and how at the very end, the very back of the procession, the very last image in the home movie was a caricature of a Jewish person looking out of a prison truck window through the bars, being driven away to jail and everybody laughing and waving goodbye.

It was supposed to be funny, she said. It was like a cartoon. The film was silent but everybody laughed and cheered all the same.

She was crying by then. His father said some sort of comforting-sounding things but Robert Greenlaw could tell he couldn’t really be bothered, had already had enough of this. She didn’t take the hint. She kept on being upset.

She told his father about the other home movie of a country fair, the one showing people dressed as German citizens acting like they’re sweeping the streets, with huge cartoon-sized brooms, and what they’re sweeping off the streets is people dressed in costumes of Jewish caricatures.

What she was most upset about, she said, was the way that then and now were meeting up and that it was such a caricature time then and it’s such a caricature time again.

That’s what she kept repeating through the noise of her crying. His father in the end fell asleep, or pretended to, and Robert Greenlaw didn’t blame him.

What’s her problem?

There is endless stuff always on TV and all over the net about the Nazis.

All Robert’s life there always has been.

Down in the lounge, meanwhile, the visitor has clearly just worked out that their father and his girlfriend are living next door.

She is saying something congratulatory about what a grown-up way it is to do things.

His mother says marry in May and you’ll rue the day.

His parents are laughable.

They are having a meltdown about their own deaths getting closer and closer now they are so ancient.

His father: Call no man happy till he is dead.

His mother: Kill yourself. Then you’ll be happy.

His father: Tell you what. It’ll be you that’s the death of me.

Remembering that particular fight Robert Greenlaw forgets where he is, forgets to take care, finds he’s braced himself against the memory of the fight without knowing his body is even doing it, and in unbracing himself puts both feet on the creaker step by mistake.

CREAK

Shit.

Everyone stops speaking in the lounge.

Then his mother comes to the lounge door and looks up. She sees the top of his head.

Robert? she says.

Actress pause.

She comes round and up three of the steps.

Why on earth aren’t you at school? she says.

She says it with parental indignation rather than the usual deadpan way because there’s a visitor in.

Robert Greenlaw stands up so that he is even higher above her.

In one of my quantum lives I am actually in school right now, he says.

Doing uh (he checks the time on his phone), maths.

His mother has no idea what quantum is or what he’s talking about. As per. She looks at him in bewilderment.

So Robert Greenlaw, quantum son, who knows he can get away with quite a bit by simply acting like he has the right and believes in his right to do whatever it is he’s doing, adjusts his stance to superior by squaring his

shoulders and turning his head and comes down the stairs as if there’s no question.

Oh, and Robert, his mother says. What’ve you done with the remote?

I am The Remote, he says as if The Remote is an anti-hero with the superpower of being, yes, remote.

Where is it? she says again.

It’s somewhere miles away from here by now, he says going into the lounge.

And that’ll be why they call it a remote, the beautiful visitor says.

—

Robert: sunstruck, first time ever.

First real time.

His surname melts away. He becomes just Robert, plain Robert, nothing but Robert, an unencumbered someone he hasn’t been for so long now that he’d forgotten he could.

Everything is different.

Everything, changed.

The visitor is beautiful.

His mother says her name.

The visitor’s name is Charlotte.

The name CHARLOTTE lights up like a word in a neon sign.

The visitor called Charlotte is lighting up this room.

Robert himself feels as if he too is neon, lightning zagging through him, he is shining, look at his arms, his hands, he is a source of light too because of her. No, he is light, actual light, light itself. Not just that – he is the kind of light that’s in the word delight.

He is filled with a word from childhood. It’s the word joy. It is not a word he has ever given a moment’s thought before, never in his life, and now he is a self shot out of the dark into the light, arms out wide as if to take everything into them, the whole world, the universe round it with all its galaxies, and hold them up to the light, his light, because now nothing will ever end, everything is infinite. It is like smashed light imprisoned in him till now, in pieces, sharp fragments like smashed lightbulb in the pit of his gut, has been understood, known for what it was, is and could be all at once and is now assembling itself and turning him into a BALL OF LIGHT, also quite frankly yes his balls feel full of light, and the tip of his penis, no, his whole penis, and the tips of his toes and his fingers, tip of his nose, his whole

body’s become a pointed twig on a tree whose branches are a network of pure light.

!

Hi, the visitor called Charlotte says.

Hi, he says.

Visitor.

Visitation.

There seems to be a force which bodies, by their very presence, exert upon each other:

quote from Einstein, up on his bedroom wall up in the lofty heights of the house. This is something Einstein actually said about Newton, father of gravity. But look what it really means.

!

It is now clear to Robert for the first time that Einstein was a man in love, a man motivated by love, love for everything.

He sees his sister’s hand.

It has a bandage round it.

His sister waves the bandaged hand at him.

Hi, she says.

Yeah, hi, he says. All right?

You might say, she says.

Oh – there’s a man here too.

There was no sound of a man when Robert [Greenlaw] was on the stairs listening.

Who’s he?

Is the man here with the visitor?

The man is here with the visitor.

But is he with the visitor?

His mother clearly thinks they’re together. His sister clearly does. His mother is telling him that Arthur and Charlotte kindly took his sister to A&E

after she had some kind of accident where she cut her hand open, then brought her home in their car.

Had to have a stitch, his sister says. Here. And here. The skin came right off.

She points at her bandaged hand with her other hand, up by the fingers then down at the bottom of the palm.

Right, yeah, he says. Wow.

Stitch in time, his sister says. You might say.

Will she tell?

Will she tell in front of the visitor?

Robert puts on his most unconcerned face, looks away, at the floor, makes himself look busy over at the cooker with the coffee maker while his mother talks some more about how kind the visitors have been. Then his mother takes up where she’d left off, trying to justify to the visitors why her ex husband lives next door with his much younger girlfriend.

What could I do? she says. He met her. He fell in love with somebody twenty years younger, now that’s what I call middle-aged spread. But we’re a family, we couldn’t bear not to be together. Or at least close. So when next door came up for sale we bought it and he moved out. I mean, in.

Next door dad, his sister says. One big happy family.

Yeah, but mum. He didn’t move out because he met Ashley, Robert says with his back to everybody.

His voice sounds weird out loud saying things.

He turns round. Nobody is looking at him like he just spoke in a weird voice.

He looks again at her. The visitor, Charlotte, is every bit as stunning to him as when he first saw her.

She really is that beautiful.

He is shocked.

He looks away.

He looks back.

It is like someone is shining a searchlight into him.

Come and sit down, Robert, his mother says.

He comes to the table, sits next to his mother where she patted the bench.

From here he can both look and look away.

His mother is attempting to change the subject and sound reasonable to the visitors by telling the story of the day a couple of months ago when she went into the Nationwide Building Society to pay in some money.

And the TV screen in there was playing, you know, electioneering coverage, news, his mother says. But with the sound down and the subtitles on. And the subtitles, you know the way they appear sort of jerkily on the screen because they’re being typed up by a machine while the person is speaking, anyway the subtitles kept repeating a particular phrase, the phrase was GET BACK SIT DOWN, they kept saying GET BACK SIT DOWN.

Which made me wonder what the news story was about. Till I realized that what the TV news reporter was actually saying was GET BREXIT DONE.

The visitor is beautiful even when she is pretending something with her face.

Like it’s nothing to do with you that Brexit got done, his sister says.

Sacha, that’s unnecessary, his mother says. Anyway. All over now. Done and dusted. We’re lucky. We’re all in the dawn of a new era.

The thing I find most interesting, Robert says again in his strange-to-him voice.

He is fingering the ribbing on his sock while he says it because he daren’t look up or he will forget what he’s saying. Then he remembers what he uses his socks for. He flushes red and stops touching anything. He holds his hand well away from his shin. He levels his gaze at a cup on the table. The beautiful visitor Charlotte is a blur of light beyond the cup.

What do you find interesting? the beautiful visitor Charlotte says.

A particular feature of its lexicon, he says.

Then Robert flushes up because the word lexicon sounds partly like it’s got the word sex in it.

They are all looking at him and waiting for him to say whatever it is he’s going to say next.

Lexicon, his mother says.

What’s that mean? his sister says.

It’s a word about words, the beautiful visitor Charlotte says.

The visitor is not just beautiful, she is verbally brilliant.

Yes, in exactitude, Robert says. In that our father voted remain and our mother voted leave. But that it’s our father who, in the end, was the one who literally had to. Leave.

Oh God, his mother says. Robert.

Which makes it, he says, like the people who voted leave were sort of also issuing a command. It’s quite clever, really. Like, in my physics class there’s a boy, I don’t know his name, whose father is French and has a restaurant, a good one, with a, a, star –

Michelin star? the beautiful visitor says so beautifully that Robert is silenced and looks away, looks down, then a moment later dares a look back at her from under his fringe.

Yeah, and they’re leaving, they have to leave, his sister says.

Robert opens his mouth but no sound comes out.

Something I’ve always wondered, his mother says too brightly (she is changing the subject). Maybe one of you young people can enlighten me.

What is cancel culture?

Nobody answers.

The beautiful Charlotte leans forward.

(Her scent crosses Robert.

She smells amazing.)

The beautiful Charlotte winks at his mother.

You know, she says. All that Brexit stuff, it’s nothing. It’s like, pfft. Like a fly laying eggs on a corpse. Because everything’s got to change. Everything.

And just to set the record straight, his mother says like the beautiful Charlotte hasn’t said anything, our fight, my disagreement with my husband, was nothing to do with what I voted for and all to do with your father meeting Ashley.

Yeah, but mum, his sister says. He didn’t meet Ashley till 2018. And he moved out in 2016.

His mother shrugs, breathes deeply in, breathes the air out towards the ceiling and does an actress laugh.

Done and dusted, his sister says. We’ve been done all right.

It’s going to be better, his mother says. For everyone. In the long run.

Einstein says the future is an illusion, Robert says. And the past. And the present.

You can’t stop change, the man who came here with the beautiful visitor Charlotte says.

It is the first thing Robert has heard him say.

Change just comes, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you.

Metamorphosis, Charlotte says. It’s always the answer to the unanswerable. Even if it means turning into a beetle, like in the Kafka version.

Oh I love Kafka, his mother says. A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside you. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things ever written.

Robert looks from the man to Charlotte and back again from Charlotte to the man. No. They are not sleeping together. He can always tell. There is something between them. But it’s not that.