Bixby deftly caught the art deco figurine before it hit the ground.

“Put that down.” Reynolds was standing behind him, holding a tray.

“I’m sorry,” said Bixby. “I just backed into-“

“I saw what you did. It doesn’t matter. Just put it down.”

Bixby closed his mouth, set the figurine back on the little table and went and sat down next to Benjamin on the sofa. Reynolds sat in the chair on the other side of the coffee table, putting the tray down as he did. The tray carried a coffee pot, milk in the bottle, three cups and a handgun.

“Don’t mind the gun,” Reynolds said. “It’s not for you.”

“Forgive me if I stay a little uncertain around it,” said Bixby.

Benjamin leaned forward. “Was it your wife’s?” He looked towards the figurine, her elegant hands reaching up to the sky, her lithe body draped in fluid ceramic cloth.

“Yes.” Reynolds poured the coffee, handed out the cups, sat back in his chair. “But we’re not talking about that now. We’re talking about you, Vasco. Why does nobody call you that?”

“My mother calls me that. When she’s sober enough to remember who I am.”

“And who does she remember?”

“A boy. A boy who didn’t know any better.”

“Exactly.”

Benjamin frowned. “I’ve come for your help. My girlfriend-“

“Is going to leave you,” Reynolds finished.

Bixby laughed. “Oh they said you were good, man.”

Benjamin stared at him, giving the proper question a chance to bubble up into his lips. “Why do you know that?”

It took only a month to track him down. Bixby had that unnerving knack of knowing just which stones to overturn, and how gently to prod at what was underneath them. They started out with the last known whereabouts, the house Reynolds had shared with his wife before she died. The new occupier was an introverted academic, the kind of woman who would take a carefully leaked fact from a conversation and let her curiosity and imagination run wild. In under five minutes Bixby had the name of the removals company, as well as the company who had handled the forwarding of Reynolds’ mail. The removals company had since tanked, but the forwarding company went from strength to strength, possibly because the merest hint of badge from the Future Bureau made them role over like puppies and hand over the entire file.

That led to another address, out of town, which led to a trip for both of them. Sarah happily agreed to look after Bixby’s dog, unaware that there was anything untoward in Benjamin’s sudden interest in Bixby’s radio controlled helicopter hobby, and the necessity of heading out to the country to fly it.

“I think it’s nice,” she said, caressing the velvet ears of Bixby’s greyhound, both of them watching Bixby head back to the car.

“Nice?” Benjamin faked an interest in the contents of his overnight bag.

“You and Bixby, getting out of town. Buddies.” She teased him with the word he hated. “You’ve been working so hard lately.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Sometimes it gets all -“ He jumbled his hands around in front of his face.

Sarah put out a hand to stop his. “It’s ok. I know. We don’t talk about the future.” She was smiling. They made that joke all the time: theirs was a relationship without a future.

Only now it was true.

You look at him and see only a bus conductor. He seems wise in the ways of drunks at 11.30pm, and mothers on their first outing with a baby at 10am. The worlds never collide except through him, and he brings his cold blue eyes to rest on all of it. He is in his mid fifties now, hair completely white, which he expected, and is grateful to still have hair and not be bald. He rides the bus through London, sweeping along the curve of the river from the west end to the city and back again, scooping up tourists, shoppers, lawyers, bankers and mingling them up on the worn seats of his Routemaster. This is his last summer as a conductor, with the withdrawal of the hop on and off London Bus coming sooner than anyone likes. No more swinging on the pole. No more collecting fares and checking tickets. No more dispensing the freedom of the city from the back of his bus.

It’s not the first time his life has been swiped out from under him. The first time was in ’89, when the stock markets went down and swirled his life around the plughole at the same time. Only just over forty, and slung out onto Gracechurch Street with all the other clueless suits. He didn’t have time to worry about what people would think, with a mortgage over his head, interest rates at fifteen per cent, and Barbara on diazepan. He saw the ad in the Standard on the train home, and thought ‘fuck it’. Applied, got the job, was out of his training before most of his former colleagues had realised their jobs really weren’t coming back and they’d have to find something else to do. Did he miss it? Of course he did. There were holidays in Florida, his Audi, the crisp collar of a hundred quid shirt against his neck, his heart racing in his chest when he made a good trade. The only way he got anywhere near that thrill these days was throwing a cocky, drunk trader off his bus on Cheapside on a Friday night, which, some might say, he did with more regularity than even they deserved.

The thing was they could never prove it. That’s what happens when you’re in the business of messing with the future. Sometimes the records can get lost, or mangled, or manipulated, because under the pretty pictures, it’s all just numbers. It’s so mathematically complicated, that if you’re clever enough with the numbers, then it takes someone just as crazy clever to figure out everything you did. And Reynolds never had his Moriarty.

He left the Bureau before they could hire someone to outsmart him. Said he’d had enough of manipulating things, said the technology was infantile and crude. Really it was because he was spooked. She died anyway, four weeks and three days after he’d moved and changed over one thousand four hundred little things to redirect the outcome of that one day. Instead of being hit by the grocery lorry on the corner of her street, her coat was caught in the doors of the subway train, and she’d been dragged along the subway platform into the wall. As if she’d had a marked card. Maybe not that day, but this quarter, or this year. We were trying to prove that there was no fate, no God, no controlling hand, and time and time again, we uncovered these ‘unchangeables’, things that kept playing out in the same way. Was it just maths? You slice a circle and you get pi, every single time. Is it the same? Or is it something else?

No one has any answers, least of all Reynolds, and his desire not to even think about the question anymore is the reason he’s now living in a one room apartment in Soho, under the name of Tom Green, clearing dustbins for a living.

Lenton leant on the doorframe, not in, not out. He looked at Julia’s suitcases in the middle of the living room, one large, one small, and thought of the times they had taken them away, together. He took the small, and she took the large in terms of packing, but when it came to carrying things were reversed. Many things got reversed, he thought. He’d pulled both of them off the carousel after long flights and short flights, but he couldn’t even name any of the places they’d been, except for New York. It was always her idea to go.

As it was again.

The plumbing set up its usual hum when the toilet was flushed. Lenton looked over his shoulder as Julia came down the stairs. She looked like she was off on a business trip, with her neat jacket and tasteful but bold necklace. He looked at her shoes. Weekend shoes for Julia were always converse. She was wearing heels.

“I didn’t know you had to dress up to leave a marriage,” he said.

She stopped on the bottom step, perhaps consciously, since it brought her somewhere close to his height. “Lenton.”

“No, I know. No tasteless remarks. We’re having an amicable split. Yes?” He kept turning those words over in his mind, and sometimes spitting them back at her.

She said his name again, and he suddenly thought it was the rudest thing in the world, to keep on using a person’s name when you’d decided to leave them. A name is personal, and if you withdraw from someone’s life you surely lose your rights to use their name. But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t say anything because what he wanted was for her to say his name and take his face in her hands, the way she used to, and if he told her not to say his name then she could never do that. Even if he had been so blind as to not see this coming, he wasn’t so stupid as to extinguish the only hope he had.

Benjamin was still staring at the feed on his phone. They were several drinks into melancholy and he still couldn’t stop. Normally he’d have given up, and be singing already. Bixby waved at the bartender for another round, and when the drinks arrived he lifted Benjamin’s wrist up to the chipreader so he could pay. Benjamin didn’t even complain.
“There’s something not right,” said Benjamin. “I just can’t see what it is.”
“She’ll be happier without you?”
“Maybe. But that’s not it.”
“Listen, Benj, whatever it is that makes this an unchangeable thing, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Or a big thing. You know how this works.”
“Yeah, and you know how often an unchangeable thing happens. One spilled cup of coffee here, one missed train there and whole lives rewrite themselves. But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing it happen on the same day at the same time, no matter what we mess with.”
Bixby’s stomach turned over. He’d been trying not to think about it. “Benj, stop thinking. We collect the data, we run the scripts, we go out and pick up the stray dogs and wotnot that run into roads and cause accidents and bring the city to screeching halt. We go and spill coffee on people’s suits so they miss meetings, and remind them to take their briefcases when they leave trains, all so’s things can run smooth and money can get made. Money that flows quite nicely into our accounts thank you very much, and money that could easily get diverted into someone else’s account while we get diverted into a windowless cell somewhere far away. Underground, most likely. Where people don’t care if you’re screaming. I’m not into the windowless cell thing. I’m a dog catcher. I like being a dog catcher.”
“And you’re good at it, Bix.” Benjamin drained his beer. “You know what we need?”
“What’s that?” Bixby was hoping he was going to say pizza.
“Reynolds. We need Reynolds.”
“Oh no. No. We get clocked seeing that madman, we are fried.”
“He’s the only one who’s ever-”
“And look where it got him.”
Benjamin swung round and looked at Bixby. “Look where we are now, Bix. Look where we’ve got to by playing by the rules. Crappy apartment, crappy paycheck, crappy beer in a crappy bar. No offence.” Benjamin nodded at the bartender, who acknowledged the gesture. “Sarah is the best thing about my life, and apparently it’s vital to the smooth running of the universe that she drops me like a hot potato. On a particular day. At a particular time. Doesn’t that make you just a little bit curious?”

Maude sat at her dressing table in her nightgown. She had been sitting there for an hour, since the first light crept around the edges of the heavy curtains, and gave her permission to get out of bed. She hadn’t slept well, hasn’t been sleeping well in fact, but tried not to wonder why. She got up with the intention of getting dressed quickly and making her way down to the library before the rest of the house, but once she sat down to begin she found she couldn’t get up again. There would be no one to help her dress until Liv was ready, but Liv rose so late that Maude was used to dressing herself, so her inertia was not due to that.

She reached out and touched the back of the hairbrush, and the engraved silver was cool under her finger tips. The mirror that matched it had been broken in her trunk on the way here. When she had lifted it out she had cried, because it wasn’t the only thing to have made the journey and suffered. Aunt Edith had held her hand, not unkindly but not warmly either, and said it would be sent to be mended. It had never come back. She was younger then and hadn’t dared ask about it. She remembered Liv in the doorway, her long arms stretched up in an effort to reach the top of the doorframe, oblivious to Maude’s distress.
She lifted the lid of her jewelry box, another possession of her mother’s, and pushed at the meagre trinkets inside. Her mother’s engagement ring was the only thing of real value, even if it was ugly and old-fashioned. Maude closed the lid before she could think again about selling it, taking the money and running off to a small village somewhere to teach in a small school, or taking a boat to Canada. No one would follow her to Canada.

Kevin saw it first. Mam was still shouting at Heather, and Heather was still shouting at Mam, like they had been for half an hour and half Heather’s existence on this planet. Trixie, funny little dog that she is, was barking and jumping up and down in the middle of them, like it was a game to see who could be the loudest.

“How man, look at that.” Kevin was looking out of the window, all five foot six of him silhouetted with the sinking sun, hands on his narrow hips.

“Steal from my purse again and you’ll be out on the street!” Mam was shouting.

“How! Would youse stop yellin’ and look at this,” Kevin shouted over his shoulder.

“What?!” Heather and Mam said together.

“Canny rainbow that, like.” Kevin nodded at the window.

Heather went to stand next to him first. “Ee, there’s two of them,” she said in surprise.

There was almost silence for a minute. Trixie was panting and trotting round Mam’s legs, til Mam decided to go and have a look herself. “Double rainbow,” she said. Then she went and picked the key off the top of the picture frame and opened the door to the balcony. I followed her out and stood next to her, looking across the city to the double bands of colour prettying up the sky. Kevin and Heather came out, and shut the door on Trixie. She hadn’t wanted to come out here since we moved into the high rise, but you never know with a dog like Trixie. She stood at the door, wagging her tail, barking intermittently.

“Knew there had to be summat good about moving to this shit hole.”

Mam reached around me and clipped Kevin round the ear. “Mind your language.”

“Well, man,” said Kevin.

He had a point.

(A note on the dialect: I’m a Geordie though you’d never know it to hear me speak, but I can lapse at any moment into a full on Cheryl Cole, given a glass of wine. It’s a difficult thing to replicate a dialect like Geordie, when a word like ‘how’ is used to mean ‘come on’ or ‘please’ or ‘stop it’, and ‘man’ is used constantly, often as an exclamation of frustration. I don’t entirely expect everyone to get it, but it makes sense to me.)

The end of a long day and John opened the door to his shared house with no expectations. It was dark everywhere, and he flipped the lightswitch, thinking he must be the first one home. Nothing happened.

“John? Is that you?” It was Ivy calling from the kitchen.

“Yeah, it’s me. What’s with the lights?”

“No power. Come and have a drink!”

John threw his bag down on top of the pile of shoes at the bottom of the stairs, shed his coat and threw that on top of the bag and went down the hall. In the kitchen a single candle burned in a wine bottle on the table, where Mark and Ivy were sitting. Lenton was propped up against the fridge, wine glass in hand.

“Johnny!” Mark threw an arm up in the air, and scattered half the playing cards he was holding. “Welcome home.”

“He’s pissed,” Ivy said, handing John the glass of red she’d just poured. “He’s been on his own all afternoon.”

“Power went out around four, came back from the offy around five. You play poker yes?”

“Yes.” John sat down, took a long drink.

“Then come and relieve me of my money!” Mark banged the table and started to shuffle the cards.

“It feels wrong, taking on such an easy mark.” Under the table John kicked off his shoes.

Lenton snorted. “It won’t when you’re winning.”

Ivy grinned. “Too right. That fifty quid is feeling mighty fine in my pocket.”

“All right then. You have a new player. Lenton, you’re in as well?”

The tall man folded himself into the last chair and tapped the table. “Deal me in suckers.”

They say it’s a family photo so Newton has to be included, even though he isn’t in costume and everyone has been merely polite to him all evening. He looks across at Maude, who has been jollied into a kind of feathered head-dress. She is in the same trouble he is, he thinks, cast out onto one end of the family group, while he has been cast out on the other. The middle is taken up by the young, the rich, the amusing and the important. Some of his cousins are all four at once. Liv is right in the centre, of course, newly-wed but still flirtatious. She flicks her legs up onto the couch, making room for Laurie to lie down on the floor beneath her. Laurie isn’t family, but he is always there and, as Newton knows Liv would say, ‘three hundred times more interesting than Newton’. He doesn’t think Laurie is at all interesting but he’s certain the feeling is mutual.

Philip has squeezed in behind Maude and is leaning over the back of the couch and over Liv to pull on Laurie’s collar, saying something about straightening up. Newton watches as Maude has little option but to shuffle a little more to the left. Liv shrieks with laughter at something Laurie has said and looks over her shoulder at Maude, saying ‘It’s so delicious, isn’t it?’ Maude’s face brightens with her best smile as she agrees. Only Newton is still looking when her face falls again, revealing how tired she really is. She glances over at him, and his heart booms as their eyes meet. There is a second when he thinks that any artifice is gone between them, that they are locked in a look that says they know exactly how the world works and what it thinks of them, but they are still worth something. But then she gives a little shrug and a tiny smile and she looks to the camera, playing her part in the family gathering as she always has.