I held up the croquet jacket, trying to figure out how tall this unnamed beau might be.

‘Do we have a positive ID?’

‘I think it’s only a rumour, Thursday.’

‘Tell me, Bowden.’

‘Miles,’ he said at last. ‘His name’s Miles Hawke.’

‘Is it serious?’

‘I have no idea. You don’t talk about these things to me.’

I thanked him and put the phone down nervously, butterflies dancing in my stomach. I knew I was still pregnant, but the trouble was: who was the father? If I had a casual boyfriend named Miles, then perhaps it wasn’t Landen’s after all? I quickly called my mother, who seemed more preoccupied with putting out a fire on the kitchen stove than talking to me. I asked her when she had last met one of my boyfriends and she said that, if memory served, not for at least six years, and if I didn’t hurry up and get married she was going to have to adopt some grandchildren—or steal some from outside Tesco’s, whichever was easier. I told her I would go out and look for one as soon as possible and put the phone down.

I paced the room in a flurry of nerves. If I hadn’t introduced this Miles bloke to Mum, then it was quite likely he wasn’t that serious; yet if he did leave his gear here then it undoubtedly was. I had an idea and rummaged in the bedside table and found a packet of unopened condoms which were three years out of date. I breathed a sigh of relief—this did seem more like me, unless Miles brought his own, of course—but then if I had a bun in the oven, then finding them was immaterial as we didn’t use them. Or perhaps the clothes weren’t Miles’s at all? And what about my memories? If they had survived, then surely Landen’s share in junior-to-be had also survived. I sat down on the bed and pulled out my hair tie. I ran my fingers though my hair, flopped back, covered my face and groaned—long and loud.

There was a thump on the door at 8 a.m. A dangerous-looking man was standing on my doorstep. I’d never seen him before, but he knew me well enough.

‘Next!’ he bellowed. ‘Back rent Friday or I’ll throw all your stuff in the skip!’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘I can,’ he said, holding up a dog-eared lease agreement. ‘Pets are strictly against the terms of the lease. Pay up.’

‘There’s no pet in here,’ I explained innocently.

‘What’s that, then?’

Pickwick had made a quiet plock-plock noise and poked her head round the door to see what was going on. It was a badly timed move.

‘Oh, that. I’m looking after her for a friend.’

My landlord’s eyes suddenly lit up as he looked closer at Pickwick, who shrank back nervously. She was a rare Version 1.2 and my landlord seemed to know this.

‘Hand over the dodo,’ he mused avariciously, ‘and I’ll give you four months’ free rent.’

‘She’s not for trading,’ I said firmly. I could feel Pickwick quivering behind me.

‘Ah,’ said my landlord greedily. ‘Then you have two days to pay all your bills or you’re out on your sweet little SpecOps arse.

‘You say the sweetest things.’

He glared at me, handed me a bill and disappeared off down the corridor to harass someone else.

My bank statements made for depressing reading. I was not good with money. My cards had reached their limit and my overdraft was nearly used up. SpecOps wages were just about enough to keep you fed and with a roof over your head, but buying the Speedster had all but cleared me out and I hadn’t even seen the garage repair bills yet. There was a nervous plock-plock from the kitchen.

‘I’d sooner sell myself,’ I told Pickwick, who was standing expectantly with collar and lead in her beak.

I stashed the bank statements back into the shoe box and took her to the park. Perhaps it would be better to say that she took me—she was the one who knew the way. She played coyly with a few other dodos while I sat on a park bench. A crotchety old woman sat next to me and turned out to be Mrs Scroggins, who lived directly below. She told me not to make so much noise in future, and then, without drawing breath, gave me a few extremely useful tips about smuggling pets in and out of the building. I picked up a copy of The Owl on the way home and was glad to see that the discovery of Cardenio had not yet broken. I smuggled Pickwick back into my apartment and decided that now was the time to visit the closest thing to the Delphic Oracle I would ever know: Granny Next.

Gran was playing Ping-Pong at the SpecOps Twilight Homes when I found her. She was thrashing her opponent soundly while nervous nurses looked on, trying to stop her before she fell over and broke another couple of bones. Granny Next was old. Really old. Her pink skin looked more wrinkled than the most wrinkled prune I had ever seen, and her face and hands were livid with dark liver spots. She was dressed in her usual blue gingham dress and hailed me from the other side of the room as I walked in.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Thursday! Fancy a game?’

‘Don’t you think you’ve played enough today?’

‘Nonsense’ Grab a paddle and we’ll play to the first point.’

I picked up a paddle as a ball careened past me.

‘Wasn’t ready!’ I protested as another ball came over the net. I swiped at it and missed.

‘Ready is as ready does, Thursday. I’d have thought you knew that more than most!’

I grunted and returned the next ball, which was deftly deflected back to me.

‘How are you, Gran?’

‘Old,’ she replied, whacking the ball towards me with savage backspin. ‘Old and tired and I need looking after. The Grim Reaper is lurking close by—I can almost smell him!’

‘Gran!’

She missed my shot and called ‘No ball’ before pausing for a moment.

‘Do you want to know a secret, young Thursday?’

‘Go on, then,’ I replied, taking the opportunity to retrieve some balls.

‘I am cursed with eternal life!’

‘Perhaps it just seems like it, Gran.’

‘Insolent pup. I didn’t attain one hundred and eight years on physical fortitude or a statistical quirk alone. I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth and the long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.’

I looked at her earnest expression and bright eyes. She wasn’t kidding.

‘How far have you got?’ I replied, returning a ball that went wide.

‘Well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it?’ she replied, serving again. ‘I read what I think is the dullest book of God’s own earth, finish the last page, go to sleep with a smile on my face and wake up the following morning feeling better than ever!’

‘Have you tried Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene?, I asked. ‘Six volumes of boring Spenserian stanzas, the only saving grace of which is that he didn’t write the twelve volumes he had planned.’

‘Read them all,’ replied Gran, ‘and his other poems, too, just in case.’

I put down my paddle. The balls kept plinking past me.

‘You win, Gran. I need to talk to you.’

She reluctantly agreed and I helped her to her bedroom, a small, chintzily decorated cell she darkly referred to as her ‘departure lounge’. It was sparsely furnished; there was a picture of me, Anton, Joffy and my mother alongside a couple of empty frames.