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stared at the screen in a dead fashion, not absorbing the information in front of him, his eyes glazing over, until he brought on a headache. He tried to clear the backlog of filing that had built up on his desk, but the sight of all the correspondence and having to go through it carefully made him nauseous. Something about the sight of words written in English was making him ill. It was only later in the day that he discovered the effect was not confined to English. A French client had sent him an email and, although Barclay was fluent in French (as well as in German, Spanish and Russian) he could scarcely bring himself to go through the whole communication, although it was a matter of contractual importance to the company. Somehow, by shuffling papers aimlessly around his desk, Barclay got through the day, and he left the building harbouring a sense of resentment at the canned beans ad for having succeeded in embedding itself in his mind.
    On the bus home, he took a window seat and readied his mobile phone to take a photo of the ad as he passed it by. He was determined to try and find some clue as to the meaning of the words in the unknown language. The bus slowed down in rush hour traffic as it passed the roadside hoarding and he captured a clear crisp image. He scrutinised it during the whole of the journey, almost missing his stop.
    Barclay prepared himself a light dinner and ate idly as he transcribed the words from the image stored in his mobile phone onto paper, and then rifled through his reference books in order to identify the language and decipher the meaning. He could find no trace of information about it.
    After three hours of fruitless labour he was so angry at himself for dedicating time to what he now considered a worthless hoax and a definite marketing gimmick that he deleted the image from the phone, tore up the paper upon which he’d written down the mysterious characters and gave up on the whole investigation. He couldn’t bear to read any more of the novel he’d started a week before, since he suffered from a sudden return of the same word sickness he’d experienced earlier in the day, and instead watched television until sleep crept up on him.
    •
    Travelling into work on the same bus route the next day, Barclay again scanned the tacky tabloid newspaper that was provided free of charge each morning. He told himself that he would only complete the crossword and would not, on this journey, allow himself to be annoyed by the celebrity gossip that infested its pages. But as he leafed through it, in search of the crossword, he stopped at an article that caught his eye. Unusually, it had no accompanying photo of a drunken reality TV star, a scantily clad footballer’s wife or even a pop singer with tell-tale traces of a white powder around their nostrils. But more unusually, it was written in an obscure language. Barclay could not be entirely certain, but strongly suspected that it was the language of the billboard advertisement he’d seen yesterday. He carefully tore around the article and put the piece of paper into his pocket. He had no wish to carry the whole tabloid around with him for the rest of the day and run the risk of being mistaken for someone who had an interest in its drivelling contents. He wished, however, to retain a copy of the article itself since he realised that the significance of this new language’s appearance was not confined to a cheap marketing gimmick. Now that he had more than half a dozen words from which to make a comparison, he might even be able to find out more about it.
    When the bus reached the corner where stood the billboard advertisement for canned beans, he saw that the one adjacent to it now sported a new ad for a brand of pills delivering its message in the same mysterious language. Was it aimed, he thought, at some freshly arrived wave of immigrant workers from a cryptic corner of the European Union? During the last thirty years Barclay had seen the steady