To Цrvar, from Crispin, with best regards.

I’ve striven to be witty since Wanda in Oils.

Letting it go feels so sodding liberating.

·   ·   ·

I STIR, STIR, stir until the mint leaves are bright green minnows in a whirlpool. “The nail in the coffin of Carmen and me,” I tell Holly, “was Venice. If I never see the place again, I’ll die happy.”

Holly looks puzzled. “I found it rather romantic.”

“That’s the trouble. All that beauty: in- sodding-sufferable. Ewan Rice calls Venice the Capital of Divorce—and set one of his best books there. About divorce. Venice is humanity at its ripped-off, ripping-off worst … I made this smart-arse remark about a rip-off umbrella Carmen bought—really, the sort of thing I say twenty times a day—but instead of batting it away, she had this look … like, ‘Remind me, why am I spending the last of my youth on this whingeing old man?’She walked off across Saint Mark’s Square. Alone, of course.”

“Well,” Holly says neutrally, “we all have off days …”

“Bit of a Joycean epiphany, looking back. I don’t blame her. Either for finding me irritating or for dumping me. When she’s my age now, I’ll be sixty-sodding- eight, Holly! Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest X-ray gizmos. So we spent the next day moseying around museums on our own, and when we said goodbye at Venice airport, the last thing she said was ‘Take care’; and when I got home, a Dear John was in my inbox. Couldn’t call it unexpected. Both of us have been through a messy divorce already, and one’s enough. We’ve agreed we’re still friends. We’ll exchange Christmas cards for a few years, refer to each other without rancor, and probably never meet again.”

Holly nods and makes an “I see” noise in her throat.

A late bus stops outside, its air brakes hissing.

I fail to mention this afternoon’s message to Holly.

My iPhone’s still switched off. Not now. Later.

“LOVELY SHOT, THAT.” There’s a framed photograph on a shelf behind Holly showing her as a young mum, with a small toothy Aoife dressed as the Cowardly Lion with freckles on her nose, and Ed Brubeck, younger than I remember, all smiling in a small back garden in the sun with pink and yellow tulips. “When was it taken?”

“2004. Aoife’s theatrical debut in The Wizard of Oz.” Holly sips her mint tea. “Ed and I mapped out The Radio Peoplearound then. The book was his idea, you know. We’d been in Brighton that weekend, for Sharon’s wedding, and he’d always been Mr. There Has to Be a Logical Explanation.”

“But after the room-number thing, he started believing?”

Holly makes an equivocal face. “He stopped disbelieving.”

“Did Ed ever know what a monster The Radio Peopleturned into?”

Holly shakes her head. “I wrote the Gravesend bits quite quickly, but then I got promoted at the center. What with that, and raising Aoife, and Ed being away, I never got it finished until …” she chooses words with practiced care, “… Ed’s luck ran out in Syria.”

Now I’m appalled by my own self-pity about Zoл and Carmen. “You’re a bit of a hero, our Holly. Heroine, rather.”

“You soldier on. Aoife was ten. Falling to pieces wasn’t an option. My family’d lost Jacko so …” a sad little laugh, “… the Sykes clan does mourning and loss really bloody well. Taking up The Radio Peopleand actually finishing it was therapy, sort of. I never imagined for a minute that anyone outside our family’d want to read it. Interviewers never believe me when I say that, but it’s the truth. The TV Book Club, the Prudence Hanson endorsement, the whole ‘The Psychic with the Childhood Scar’ thing, I wasn’t prepared for any of it, or the websites, the loonies, the begging letters, the people you lost touch with years ago for very good reasons. My first boyfriend—who really did notleave me with fond memories—got in touch to say he’s now Porsche’s main man in West London, and how about a test drive now my ship had come in? Uh, no. Then after the U.S. auction for The Radio Peoplebecame a news item, all the fake Jackos crawled out from under the floorboards. My agent set the first one up via Skype. He was the right age, looked sort oflike Jacko might look, and stared out of the screen, whispering, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God … It’s you.’ ”

I feel like smoking, but I munch a carrot stick instead. “How did he account for the three missing decades?”

“He said he was kidnapped by Soviet sailors who needed a cabin boy, then taken to Irkutsk to avoid a Cold War incident. Yeah, I know. Brendan’s bullshit detector was buzzing, so he shuftied me over and asked, ‘Recognize me, Jacko?’ The guy hesitated, then burst out, ‘Daddy!’ End of call. The last ‘Jacko’ we interviewed was Bangladeshi, but the imperialists at the British embassy in Dhaka refused to believe he was my brother. Would I send ten thousand pounds and sponsor his visa application? We called it a day after that. IfJacko’s alive, ifhe reads the book, ifhe wants to locate us, he’ll find a way.”

“Were you still working at the homeless center all this time?”

“I quit before I went to Cartagena. A shame—I loved the job, and I think I was good at it—but if you’re chairing a fund-raising meeting the same day a six-figure royalty payment slips into your bank account, you can’t pretend nothing’s changed. More ‘Jackos’ were trying their luck at the office, and my phone was hacked. I’m still involved with homeless charities at a patron level, but I had to get Aoife out of London to a nice sleepy backwater like Rye. So I thought. Did I ever tell you about the Great Illuminati Brawl?”

“You tell me less about your life than you think. The Illuminati: as in the lizard aliens who enslave humanity via beta-blocking mind waves beamed from their secret moonbase?”

“That’s them. One fine April morning, two groups of conspiracy theorists hide in my shrubbery. Christ knows how it started—a stray remark on Twitter, probably. So, the two groups realize they’re not alone, each group convinces itself that the other group are the Illuminati’s agents. With me so far? Stop smirking; they kicked the crap out of each other. The police were up in a jiffy. After that I had to put up a security fence and CCTV. Me, f’Chrissakes, holed up like an investment banker! But what choice did I have? Next time the loonies might not be hell-bent on defendingme but attacking me. So while the contractor was in, I went out to Australia, which was when Aoife and I met you on Rottnest.” She pads over to draw the curtain on the night harbor. “Beware of asking people to question what’s real and what isn’t. They may reach conclusions you didn’t see coming.”

In the street two dogs bark furiously, then stop.

“If you don’t publish again, the loonies’ll move on.”

“This is true,” says Holly, looking evasive.

“ Areyou working on another book?”

Now she looks cornered. “Only a few stories.”

I feel envious and pleased. “That’s brilliant. Your publishers will be doing backflips down the corridors.”

“There’s no guarantee anyone’ll read it. They’re stories based on people I knew at the center. Not a psychic in sight.”

“Right now, The Collected Shopping Lists of Holly Sykeswould go straight to number one on preorders alone.”

“Well, we’ll see. But that’s what I’ve been doing here all summer. Reykjavik’s a good place to work. Iceland’s like Ireland; being famous here’s nothing special.”

By chance our fingertips are almost touching. Holly notices at the same instant, and we pull our hands back onto our laps. I try to come up with a joke I can turn this micro-embarrassment into, but nothing springs to mind. “I’ll call you a taxi, Crisp. It’s gone midnight.”

“No wayis it that late.” I check my phone: 00:10. “Sodding hell, it’s tomorrow already.”