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who’s not your father. I don’t have a father either. I never even met mine.
    Astrid drops the half-eaten apple. It rolls off the road on to the verge. She almost drops her camera, but catches it against her as it slips. She stops. She stands in the middle of the road.
    Car, the person says as a car rounds the corner ahead of them. Astrid jumps to the side. She tries to remember what she’s said so far out loud. It wasn’t anything about anything. She never said anything. She never mentioned a father or not a father. The car swerves round her and she feels the air as it passes. It is as if a car engine is roaring in Astrid’s ears and eyes, though there’s no wind at all and the noise of the car is gone and it’s a completely calm, completely sunny, ordinary July day.
    The person has carried on walking. Come on then, if you’re coming, she calls without turning.
    She is now going quite fast. Astrid starts to run. But it’s as she catches up that it dawns on her. The whole point of being awake first in the morning is that there is nobody else about, just Astrid, yawning, near-asleep, leaning out of the open window, steadying herself with her elbows on the sill to film the light coming. All there is is the waking-up birds, all there is is the trees moving in the wind, the crops moving, no cars on the near or the faraway roads, no dogs barking, no nothing. But on one of the mornings Astrid, through her camera lens, which has a very good long range, has seen her.
    It was her.
    It was definitely her.
    It was far away, there was someone sitting on the roof of a car, a white car, Astrid is sure it was a white car, parked at the very far edge of the woods. She seemed to have binoculars or maybe some sort of camera, like a birdwatcher or an expert in some kind of nature. Funny that she was watching the only other person awake, who almost seemed, typical and ironic, to be watching her back, and now when Astrid catches her up on the road she talks as if they’re midway through a conversation and as if she takes it for granted that Astrid understands exactly what she’s talking about.
    Because listen. If you tell anybody at all, the person says, I’ll kill you. I mean it. I will.
    The person turns and looks at her. She starts to laugh, as if something has delighted her, something so funny that she can’t not laugh. She makes a wide-eyed face at Astrid and Astrid realizes that the reason the person is making this face at her is that her own face is so wide-eyed. Her eyes have gone so wide open that she can actually physically feel how wide open they are.
    The person, still laughing, reaches out her hand, puts it firmly on the top of Astrid’s head then raps twice, hard.
    Anybody in? she says.
    For quite a while after, Astrid can feel the place where it knocked. The top of Astrid’s head feels completely different from the rest of her, like the hand is still there touching her head.
    Something has definitely i.e. begun

    the beginning of this = the end of everything. He was part of the equation. They took her head. They fixed it on the other body. Then they sent it round everybody’s email. Then she killed herself.
    That noise outside is birds. It is swifts. They are making their evening noise. Birds are pointless now. Evening is pointless. They took her head. They put it on the other body. They sent it round the email list. Then she killed herself.
    It was a Tuesday. It was just a Tuesday. Magnus knows there will never be just a Tuesday again. There used to be just days in the week where everything felt like normal. It is astonishing now to think of that feeling. They walked along the corridor, just walked down the main stairs then along the corridor like it was any old Tuesday. He was wearing what he’d put on that morning. It was just clothes. The clothes didn’t mean anything other than clothes, then. Was he wearing those socks? He knows he was wearing those trousers. He was definitely wearing those shoes. Those are