We were free now, Dad and I. We were weightless. We were falling, and it felt good. I didn’t want it to end, and it didn’t end, it just went on and on. I no longer seemed to need any sleep. At night I lay awake, listening to the radio under the covers. I was never tired. Things acquired an unnatural clarity. The walk to school. The cool scratchiness of a clean shirt each school-day morning.

But things were flying apart and I could not pick and choose what I held onto and what I lost. Some nights, Dad didn’t come home at all. I didn’t know who he found to be with. I felt him shucking off shackle after shackle and I waited, with a growing calm, for the moment when he freed himself from me.

At the beginning of the spring term, over dinner, Dad had news. ‘There’s this new job,’ he said.

‘Right.’

He looked at me. I watched the anger rising within him: anger from nowhere. ‘We have to talk about this.’

‘We are talking about this. I’m sitting here. I am talking about this.’

He wanted a fight. After so long at Mum’s beck and call, so many years manning the safety valves, watching pressures rise and fall, he imagined that any particle of self-interest was bound to trigger a disaster. He needed the sound of breaking glass to convince him that he was getting what he wanted.

Dad had been invited to work as a technician at a private hospital, crafting new eyes for old. It would not pay well, though it was what he’d been longing to do for years. His hobby, he said finally, had at last thrown up the chance of a modest second career.

‘You want to take this job.’

He gaped at me, hopelessly. ‘The thing is,’ he said.

I said, ‘I don’t think we can keep living our lives as though Mum’s just going to step back through the door. Can we?’

Dad studied me, hunting for a clue, a cue. He was a hair’s breadth away from telling me not to speak so heartlessly. My chest was heavy, and heaving with the need to scream my confession in his face.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to sell the hotel.’

I stared at him. ‘The hotel?’

‘This new job, it’s a long way away and it doesn’t pay very well.’ He made a sound like a laugh. ‘It doesn’t pay well at all. And to afford it – well . . .’

‘But my exams—’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s all sorted.’

‘It is?’

‘You can go stay with Michel,’ he said.

SIXTEEN

‘Of course I remember your mother.’

Bryon Vaux’s office is as sumptuous as a living room, with a fire in the grate and a decanter of brandy at my elbow.

‘Sara.’ He casts his blindsighted eyes into the middle-distance. ‘I remember the soap she made. It made us feel so almighty hungry!’

Coconut, honey and beeswax scrub. God help me, it is him. There is no mistake.

Eventually, I find the strength to come out with it. What I saw. The railway station. The platform. The figure there. Albino-white hair. A canvas bag. Gabby found the records. The dates match up. There is no longer any doubt. No wriggle room. No avoidance.

‘And you’re sure it was me? I did have a canvas bag like that. A big canvas bag. I remember it. The station, though – I mean I remember the rail station, but heading off on my last day . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Man, it’s more than twenty years ago, I can’t remember something like that.’

‘Of course you can’t. Of course. Forget about it.’

He cannot forget about it. ‘Sara. I remember her.’ He remembers whole conversations with her – conversations I never knew they’d had. Sara wasn’t an easy person. Not an outgoing person. Yet Vaux remembers her rooms: the gauzy scarves she’d throw over every surface. Her day-bed, and under it, bag after bag of unopened paints. ‘I always thought it was a shame, the way – hell, do you mind me saying this? The way her gears kept slipping.’

Who is he, that he remembers these things? What was he doing in her rooms?

When we’re done Vaux comes out with me, sees me to the atrium, and there, in time for his next appointment, sits Michel.

He looks different. Bigger. His face is weathered. He sees me and smiles, but it is not an easy smile. He walks over. ‘Conrad. Hi.’ He shakes my hand – an odd formality, but it’s not the gesture that surprises me so much as the feel of Michel’s palm. The skin is rough and broken. After ten years tapping and stroking glass, he has once again been working with his hands.

‘Well, you know each other,’ Vaux exclaims. ‘Of course. Mick, you’re a dark horse, keeping this guy under your hat.’

‘Conrad?’ Michel looks at me. ‘What’s there to hide? He’s an idiot.’

‘This idiot has built the best damned AR platform my R&R people have ever seen.’

There’s a deal more of this bullshit to weather before Vaux bears Michel off to his roaring real fire and VSOP hospitality.

Before the week is out, Bryon Vaux calls to tell me he has hired a private detective to gather all surviving records relating to my mother’s disappearance. Is this a blind – a means of distracting me from my suspicions about him?

Or is this simply what he does? This is, after all, what makes him who he is, and makes him as successful as he is. He digs and digs and digs, living out the lives of others, so that he can eventually realise them in light and sound.

I am his research project. Perhaps I am his next script.

There are veterans working the city’s bars and clubs: soldiers invalided out of the service. Land-mine victims. Purple hearts with missing limbs. Metal hands and carbon fibre feet. Chrome women. Cat women. Upright, tall, fast, oh, so desirable.

She says, ‘What do you want me to do?’

I tell her, ‘Take your lenses out.’

She smiles as she undresses. ‘No.’ Small, hard breasts and black plastic straps wound round her legs, and carbon fibre blades for feet. Dead eyes. ‘Not that.’

In the clubs, even the dancers have silver eyes. I suppose that for them it is a kind of clothing. What they find to watch behind their lenses I cannot imagine. When I first paid my money and went inside one of these places and saw all those eyeless people, the dead-eyed, the seceded, I couldn’t bear it. I walked straight out again.

I’ve hardened up since.

‘Conrad.’

Bryon Vaux is sat at a table near the door. This is not the first time I’ve run into him in a place like this, and there is no escaping him now. His lead-eyed smile. His teeth. His hands. He hugs me. I know these hands, this pressure, this smell. I have been here before.

He lets me go and his silver lenses glitter in the neon of the bar. He says, ‘A funny carry-on, this is.’

Vaux’s easiness around sex – his transparent appetite for all this thigh and tit – is faintly clinical. We watch a while as a dancer works the end of the bar. A tall Japanese. Her steel-lensed eyes, so cold, so anonymous, are a protection for her. However exposed she is to our gaze, yet she remains in her private world. What is she watching? What does she know that we don’t?

‘How did we seem to you?’

Vaux’s question takes me by surprise.

‘It must have been strange. No? When you were growing up. To be surrounded by the blind?’

Vaux’s willingness to discuss the hotel rubs so very badly up against what I remember of him – his bright hair and brute and shuttered face, his fly, his erection. Why can I not simply confront him with what I remember? Even a flat denial would be a relief. As Gabby would say, ‘Just talk to him. Idiot.’

But while my mother’s death remains a mystery, I cannot talk to him about it. Who wraps a bag around their own head? Who locks themselves in the boot of a car to die? Mum was on her way to the protest camp. She was happy. Vaux was there on the platform with her. The next day she was dead. There is no reason – no reason at all, that I can see – to suspect Vaux of Mum’s murder. His present behaviour flatly contradicts the idea. And yet.