“An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.”

“You’ve been awake a whole hour?”

“My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide it out.

I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.”

“You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.”

I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?”

In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?”

“Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.”

I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.”

She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.”

“I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.”

“Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Gьnter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.”

I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.”

Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?”

“No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.”

Her sss-sssis a sort of laugh. “Second?”

“Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS and LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and as a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.”

She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heardyour heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?”

The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.”

“But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.”

I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere.

She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”

NEXT TIME I wake, Holly’s room is gray, like underneath a hole in pack ice. Whispering Antoine is long gone; the radio’s buzzing with French-Algerian rap and the clock says 08:15. She’s showering. Today’s the day I either change my life or I don’t. I locate my clothes, straighten the twisted duvet, and deposit the tissues in a small wicker bin. Then I notice a big round silver pendant, looped over a postcard Blu-Tacked to the wall above the box that serves as a bedside table. The pendant is a labyrinth of grooves and ridges. It’s hand-made, with great care, though it’d be too heavy to wear for long and it’s too big not to attract constant attention. I try to solve it by eye, but get lost once, twice, a third time. Only by holding it in my palm and using my little fingernail to trace a path do I get to the middle. If the maze was real and you were stuck in it, you’d need time and luck. When the moment’s right, I’ll ask Holly about it.

And the postcard? It could be one of a hundred suspension bridges anywhere in the world. Holly’s still in her shower, so I pull the postcard off the wall and turn it over …

Hugo Lamb, meet Sexual Jealousy. Wow. “Ed.” How darehe send Holly a postcard? Or—worse—was it a string of postcards? Was there a follow-up from Athens? Is he a boyfriend? So this is why Normals commit crimes of passion. I want to get Ed’s head fastened into stocks and hurl two-kilo plaster statues of Jesus of Rio at his face until he doesn’t have one. This is what Olly Quinn would want to do to me if he ever found out that I’d poked Ness. Then I notice the 1985 date—deliverance! Hallejulah. But hang on: Why has Holly been carting his postcard around for six years? The cretin doesn’t even know “spinarets” are “minarets.” Unless it’s a private joke. That’d be worse. How darehe share private jokes with Holly? Did Ed give her the maze pendant, too? Makes sense. When she had me inside her, was she imagining I was him? Yes yes yes, I know these snarly thoughts are ridiculous and hypocritical, but they still sting. I want to feed Ed’s postcard to my lighter and watch the Bosphorus Bridge and its sunny day and its sub-sixth-form reportage burn, baby, burn. Then I’d flush its ashes down the sewers, like the Russians did to what was left of Adolf Hitler. No. Deep breath, calm down, keep Hitler out of it, and consider the breezy “Cheers, Ed.” A real boyfriend would write “Love, Ed.” There is the “x,” though. Consider also that if Holly in 1985 was in Gravesend receiving postcards, she wasn’t being gobbled by an Ed on a squeaky European mattress. Ed must’ve been a not-quite-lover-not-quite-friend.

Probably.

“HELP YOURSELF TO the shower,” she says round the door, and I call back, “Thanks,” in a neutral tone to match. Normally I admire uncommitted matter-of-factness the morning after, but with this wooden stake called “Love” whacked through my heart, I want proof of intimacy and have to ignore a strong urge to go and kiss Holly. What if it’s a no? Don’t force it. I have a skin-scalding shower, change into fresh clothes—what do fugitives do for clean laundry?—and go to the kitchenette, where I find a note:

Hugo—I’m a coward about goodbyes, so I’ve gone to Le Croc to start the cleaning. If you want to stay over tonight, bring me breakfast and I’ll find you a feather duster and a frilly apron. If you don’t show up, then such is life, and good luck with your metamorphisis (is that how you spell it?). H.

Not a love letter, but this note of Holly’s is more precious than any piece of correspondence I’ve ever owned, bar none. That Zorro-like three-stroke His both intimate and runic. Her handwriting’s not girly, it’s a bit of train wreck, really, calligraphically speaking, but it’s legible if you squint and it’s hers. Discoveries. I fold the note into my wallet, grab my coat, clatter down the stairs, and I’m out, treading in Holly’s ten-minutes-old footsteps through knee-deep snow in the courtyard, where the morning cold is a plunging cold; but the blue sky’s blue as Earth from space, and the warmth from the sun’s a lover’s breath; and icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls; the kids are glad to be alive and snowballs fly from curb to curb; I raise my hands and say, “Je me rends!” but a snowball scores a direct hit; I turn to find the little shit and clutch my heart—pretend to die—“Il est mort! Il est mort!” the snipers cry, but when I resurrect myself they fly away like fallen leaves; around the corner here’s the square, my favorite square in Switzerland, if not the world; Hфtel Le Sud, the gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side; the crкpeman’s setting up his stall across from the patisserie where yesterday this all began; “I’m Not in Love,” claim 10cc but, au contraire, I know Iam; the crкpeman looks as if he knows that Holly’s face is all I see on every surface, there transposed; plus nape, lips, jaw, hair, and clothes; I hear her “Sort of,” “Bull shit,” “This is true”; recall her slightly elfish ears; her softnesses; her flattish nose; her guarded eyes of strato-blue; Body Shop tea tree oil shampoo; she’s nearer now with every step; I wonder what she’s thinking … Wondering if I’ll really show? The traffic’s moving pretty slowly, but I’ll wait until the man turns green …