Jack realized she was still referring to the television and he sat back on the couch.

“See him?” she pointed at the TV, spilling coffee again.

“Watch yourself,” Jack warned her.

“I’m fine.” She rubbed her leg without looking. “This is where it all went wrong. We could have won that match had it not been for him.” She pointed again. “Gerald Fitzwilliam, getting injured right there in the second half.”

“Mmm,” Jack replied sipping his coffee and watching the amateur footage of the match jumping up and down on the screen. Most of the time all he could see was a blur of green followed by closeups of Bobby’s head.

“It was Adam McCabe’s fault,” she tutted, and shook her head. “He should never have been put in midfield.”

Bobby brought me up a small winding staircase, which led to his residence above the shop. I sat waiting for him in his living room on an impressive leather couch I imagined somebody had impatiently waited to be delivered, for longer than the average four-to-six-week period. He brought me in a glass of orange juice and a croissant and my ravenous stomach gurgled in thanks.

“I thought everybody was supposed to eat in the eatery,” I said, attacking the fresh croissant, which flaked in my hands.

“Let’s just say the chef has a soft spot for me. She has a son my age back home in Tokyo. She slips me food every once in a while and I occasionally tease her, disgust her, and do other son-like things.”

“Charming,” I murmured, face covered in pastry.

Bobby was staring at me, his food untouched on his plate.

“Whapft?” I said with a mouthful of food. He continued staring and I quickly swallowed. “Is there something on my face?” I felt around.

“I want to hear more,” he said sombrely.

I looked sadly to the remainder of food on my plate, wanting so much to finish it but knowing by the look on Bobby’s face that I owed it to his mother to start talking fast.

“You want to know about your mum?” I washed down the crumbs with orange juice.

“No, I want to know about you.” He got comfortable on the couch while I watched him, suddenly uncomfortable, with my mouth agape.

“I was told you ran an acting agency. Was it through the agency that you became friends with my mum?”

“No, not really.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You don’t run an acting agency do you? You don’t seem like the type.”

My mouth dropped open and I felt oddly insulted. “Why, what type of person usually runs an acting agency?”

“People that aren’t like you,” he said, but with a smile. “What do you really do?”

“I search,” I said, smiling. “I hunt.”

“For talent?”

“For people.”

“For talented people?”

“I suppose everybody I look for has a talent of some sort, although I’m not too sure about you.” Bobby looked confused and I decided to drop the awkward humor and place my trust in him. “I run a missing-persons agency, Bobby.”

At first he looked shocked. Then, as the realization hit him, he began to smile, the smile grew into a grin, the grin worked its way into laughter, laughter became the addictively funny sound I knew so well, and then I was laughing too.

Suddenly he stopped. “Are you here to bring us all home or are you just visiting?”

I looked at his hopeful face and immediately felt sad. “Neither. I’m stuck here too, unfortunately.”

At moments when life is at its worst there are two things that you can do: 1) break down, lose hope, and refuse to go on while lying facedown on the ground banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2) laugh. Bobby and I did the latter.

“OK, here’s what you have to do. Do not tell anybody else this news,” Bobby said.

“I haven’t. Apart from Helena and Joseph, nobody else knows.”

“Good. We can trust them. The idea for the play was Helena’s?”

I nodded.

“Clever move.” His eyes glistened mischievously. “Sandy, you really need to be careful. People were talking this morning at the eatery.”

“People don’t usually talk at the eatery?” I joked, tucking into the remainder of my croissant.

“Come on, this is serious. They were talking about you. The group of auditionees must have told their friends and their families here about what you’d told them, who in turn told a few other people, and now everybody’s talking.”

“Is it really that bad that they know? I mean, what harm will it do if they all know I used to look for missing people?”

Bobby’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy? The vast majority of people here are settled and wouldn’t go back to their old ways if you paid them, and not just because money is of absolutely no use to them here. But there are a number of people, the kind of people that are how I was when I arrived. These people haven’t found their feet yet because they are still trying to find their way out. Those people will latch onto you like you don’t know what and you’ll be wishing you’d never opened your mouth.”

“Helena said the very same thing to me. Did that happen before?”

“My god, did it happen before. Well not exactly the same circumstances.” He waved his hand dismissively and dropped the dramatics. “Years ago, before I even arrived here, some old guy claimed that some of his things kept going missing. If you ask me it was his mind more than anything. Well, as soon people heard, there wasn’t a toilet he could go to without company. He was followed absolutely everywhere. When he went to the eatery, people flocked to his table; they followed him to the shops and even waited outside his home. It was madness. Eventually he had to give up his job because huge numbers would shadow him.”

“What was his job?”

“He was a postman.”

“A postman? Here?” I screwed up my face.

“What’s so odd about that? We need postmen here more than anywhere. People need to get letters, messages, and packages to others in surrounding villages, because even though we have telephones, televisions, and computers, there’s no network or service on any of them, just static and a lot of fuzz. Anyway he couldn’t keep cycling into villages with a trail of people behind him. Villagers were giving out about it but the people who followed him thought he was miraculously going to find his way out of here.”

“And what happened?” I asked, now on the edge of my seat.

“They all drove him crazy, even more crazy than he already was. There was nowhere he could go in privacy.”

“Where is he now?”

“I dunno.” Bobby appeared suddenly bored by the story. “He disappeared. He’s probably a few towns away or something. Joseph would know, as they were very close. You should ask him.”

A chill entered my body and I shivered.

“Are you cold in here?” Bobby asked, incredulous. “It’s always so hot upstairs, I find. I’m absolutely sweating.” He picked up our plates and glasses.

He may have acted cool, but I saw him. I saw him from the corner of my eye, giving me a long, long look before he exited the room. He wanted to see if his seed had been planted. He needn’t have worried. It had.