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conversation, with a fat man stuffing his face at the smorgasbord .
    â€˜Quite a spread, eh?’
    â€˜Free food. He lays it on.’
    â€˜That’s Jonas. A generous guy.’
    â€˜He thinks he’s some kind of eccentric.’
    â€˜How long’s he lived here again?’
    â€˜Dunno. He just appeared.’
    â€˜Interesting guy though.’
    â€˜Yeah? Tries a bit hard.’
    Fletcher went from room to room. Mortensen was a bushcraft nut, his living room filled with books on tracking, plants and foraging. A delicately carved set of wooden cutlery and a deep bowl edged in neat Celtic loops told him the Norwegian was pretty skilled with a crook knife.
    He knew people with similar skills. They all veered to paranoia. Like Spooky Anderson. Anderson ran Ultra Marathons and once on a winter survival exercise sheltered inside a deer carcass. As he watched a pretty, red-haired woman flicking through a box of records Fletcher wondered if, come the End of Days, he’d rather join forces with Spooky or Mortensen.
    A few minutes later, he slipped upstairs. The smaller bedroom he used to sleep in was empty, the larger one used by Mortensen. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, listening to the voices drifting up from the back garden through the open window.
    The mistake came downstairs. Passing the living room on his way out, he glanced inside. The red-haired woman who’d been flicking through the records was talking to Mortensen. Fletcher hesitated, now wondering if he recognised her. In that moment, Mortensen looked across, a hint of a smile that promised an introduction if Fletcher hung around any longer. As he turned away he bumped into a teenage girl in a blue jacket, a black bow in her hair.
    She smiled, such a familiar smile. The party noise became suddenly muddy. That quick-sense of being underwater, sinking deeper. He walked carefully towards the door, an aperture receding the closer he got.
    Â 
    You’re running. I watch you. Your family walks behind you. Mother, father and little brother. You let go the hand of your father to run with the kite. The red kite you have pestered him about for so long. Down by the Sangin bazaar is space enough to fly a new kite. Like the little girl with the blue jacket, who also flew a kite, a yellow diamond, soaring above a brown river under a troubled sky, the fabric whipping and twine singing and her own father holding her tight in case she flew up, up and away, into and gone on the winter wind but happy, so happy, it was all so thrilling, like the Wizard of Oz, looking down on the patchwork landscape and all was innocence and wonder and let the wind take her, up and across green fields and grey seas to sink on cooling thermals closer to that other land, the shattered mountains with their ice-cream peaks, sinking to meet you, another little girl, a little girl with a red kite, who watches her drift down to the jigsaw blocks of the desert town, to the bazaar, and even as the noise becomes louder, troubling, all that matters is the kite. You must suspect something, why else are your eyes dropping from sky to earth? You must suspect but still that smile as you absent-mindedly walk towards me, your father shouting as I am too but how can you possibly understand my language, shouting as a black Toyota exits an alleyway in a white flash, spitting gunfire. Still you haven’t run and I don’t know why, everything is happening too quickly and I have to return fire , I must, and then I notice your kite, a kite just like another’s.

Six
    Fixation, it was different from obsession. Jonas was obsessed with plants and animals, tracking. It happened over years, the ongoing delight and surprise of a universe still coming into focus. Obsession was just across a hazy psychological line. So although Jonas could recognise badger scat he’d never spent hours staring at it, as Eggers did with Petra from Eurocamgirls.
    Every lunchtime for