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torn-out magazine articles, all of them softly ruffling in the breeze that poured softly through the half-open window. 
    ‘You’re going to start recycling paper?’ he suggested. 
    Michael swung out his arm and gave him a feinted cuff around the ear. ‘Recycling paper! Smartass!’ 
    He swung around again, and picked up his pad. ‘This, my friend, is the first major new question-and-answer game since Trivial Pursuit. This is going to make millions. No, I tell a lie, billions. In years to come, they’re going to talk about this game in the same breath as Monopoly and Scrabble. That’s when you and I are living in luxury in Palm Beach, with power-boats and Lamborghinis and all the babes we can handle. Well, all the babes you can handle. I’m quite happy with your mom.’ 
    Jason gravely regarded the mess and said, ‘It looks kind of complicated.’ 
    Michael pulled a face. ‘Oh, for sure. Now it looks complicated. But think about it. Before they put a clock together, it looks kind of complicated, doesn’t it? All those little cogs and stuff. But by the time I’ve finished – ‘ he shuffled some more papers into order ‘ – well, it’ll be less complicated.’ 
    ‘The guy said he really had to see you.’ 
    ‘Oh, the guy. Did he tell you what his name was?’ 
    ‘Rocky Woods, I think.’ 
    Michael looked up at him with a grave face. ‘Rocky Woods? Is that what he said?’ 
    ‘His exact words were, “I have to see your father. Ask him if he remembers Rocky Woods.” ‘ 
    Michael covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, and said nothing. Only his eyes betrayed what he was thinking. They were darting quickly from side to side as if he were reading from an autocue, or vividly remembering something that had upset him, in more detail than most people care to. 
    ‘Dad?’ asked Jason. ‘Did I do right? Do you want me to tell him to go away?’ 
    But Michael reached out and took hold of Jason’s wrist, and squeezed it, and tried to smile, and said, ‘You did fine. How about asking him in?’ 
    ‘Okay, if you say so.’ 
    When Jason had gone running off, leaving the door ajar, Michael stood up and walked around his desk to the window. His den was not much more than a run-down conservatory on stilts, overlooking the grassy dunes of New Seabury beach, and the permanently blue waters of Nantucket Sound. The rest of the house was just as spartan – a three-bedroomed summer cottage that he had bought from a friend at Plymouth Insurance. It was all bare scrubbed boards and Quaker furniture and Indian-style rugs. When he had brought his family down from Boston to see how Michael was getting along, his friend had joked that it was like spending the weekend with the Pilgrim Fathers – ‘all succotash and pumpkin pie and how are we going to survive the winter?’ 
    Michael was a lean, hawkish-nosed man of thirty-four, with mousy, short-cropped hair and eyes that were blue and opaque, where his son’s were blue and clear. He was handsome in the way that Jimmy Dean had been handsome; or the young Clint Eastwood; a little too drawn-looking and slightly deranged and hurt in the way he looked at people. In his blue check short-sleeved shirt, his wrists looked knobbly and treble-jointed, and his khaki hiking shorts didn’t too much for his gangly legs. His movements were hesitant and shy, and occasionally almost effeminate. But there was no doubting his masculinity. Apart from the fact that he had courted and married the cutest girl at Plymouth Insurance, his interests in life were classically male: fishing, baseball, drinking beer and tinkering with things. 
    His greatest passion was what he called ‘downwind thinking’ – which meant solving problems by approaching them from downwind and jumping on them when they least suspected it. Since they had moved to New Seabury over a year and a half ago, he had invented a self-releasing weight for casting fishing lines to record distances, and converted