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“I know where you live now, Mr. Pether’ and ushering him across the road to the side street full of retirement homes. “What’s happened to his shoe?” said Julia. “Was that the emergency?”
    Two fire engines appeared on the brow of the hill as the window of Fine Films exploded, strewing the pavement with blackened glass and releasing a wave of flames which rushed up the facade. Mr. Pether and his supporters hunched their shoulders simultaneously and came downhill faster without missing a step, as if performing a routine they had rehearsed. Jack leaned on Julia and slapped himself across the forehead with the flattened shoe. “Got to laugh, haven’t you?” he said, and did.

FOUR
    Sometimes Laura thought cycling was her favourite thing in the world. Cycling to school made her feel important and responsible and trusted by her parents, but cycling by the river on a Sunday morning was best of all; though a few people were walking large dogs, for hundreds of yards at a time she had the promenade to herself. The wind hummed in her ears and brushed her hair back over her shoulders as her long legs pumped almost effortlessly. She remembered thinking she would never get her balance, all one weekend which she’d spent trying not to fall off as her mother ran beside her, but Laura had been little then, only three years old.
    She was paced by container vessels which glided upriver with a slow muffled beat which seemed to come from deep underwater. Once she raced a speedboat. When she reached Seacombe she waved to the downtown skyline of Liverpool, where her mother would have arrived by now, before switching into first gear so as to pedal uphill over the cobblestones of the bus terminal. From the top of the slope she was able to cycle home by a route full of houses for sale.
    At the edge of Liscard, where the large stores were, she passed a slim three-storey house overlooking a junior football game in Central Park. From the top window she would be able to see the horizon of the sea. Imagining how life in a big house would feel was an adventure in itself. If her parents owned that one she could play on the swings in the park whenever she wanted to, though she was a bit old for that, or if they lived opposite the library beside the graveyard near her school she could change her books every day as soon as she’d read them and hear the trees around the library giving a voice to the wind as she lay in bed. From the library she cycled past her school and across a bridge which appeared to carry a side street over nothing in particular, and eventually left a leafy square by a footpath which emerged onto the steepest road above the bay. The thought of cycling down it made her catch her breath. She wheeled the bicycle to a crossroads and pedalled home, the houses for sale inhabiting her mind like dreams.
    She was enjoying trying to choose her favourite as she turned along her road and saw Jody Venable walking towards her, preoccupied with not stepping on the cracks between the flagstones. “There you are,” Jody said, walking normally as though she was too grown-up to do anything else. “I came to see if you were in.”
    She was wearing dungarees over a blouse Laura hadn’t seen before, and a necklace so thin it was visible only as a sunlit gleam. “Did you get those in Greece?” Laura said.
    Jody nodded, tossing back her blonde hair, which was streakier than ever. “I brought you something back. You can have it now so long as you don’t wake my dad.”
    “I’ll just leave a note in case anyone comes home,” Laura said and ran through the house to unbolt the back gate while Jody wheeled the bicycle into the alley, where a dog in a yard gave a token bark. As Laura wrote her message Jody leaned her hands on the working surface in the kitchen and lifted herself to sit on it, letting herself down again as it creaked. “I bet you’re looking forward to moving,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
    Unexpectedly, Laura found that