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Rachel had called the night before to tell us that she was going to go to Poland. Apparently she’d had some strange sort of communication from an old school friend of her brother’s, and she wanted to investigate. She was pretty vague about it all, but sounded cheerful enough; excited that it’s happening yet again. I find it difficult to tell with Rachel though. K is better at identifying her humours. I think she fakes it with me sometimes – probably because she picks up on my frustration and unease about her, and particularly about her Max project. She’s an artist, I suppose. Well, actually, I don’t suppose it – she is an artist, of course she is. She works mostly with photography, but also with film and audio, and with longer-term projects in which she usually perpetrates some kind of deception and then documents what happens. In the past these have been fairly playful and quite fun. She spent a month last year telephoning random people from the phone book, greeting them by name and telling them that she’d just called up for a chat. She recorded the conversations. Most of them ended pretty abruptly with a Who the hell are you? kind of response. But a surprising number evolved into long dialogues, or monologues, some of them quite revealing. Rachel was never sure sometimes whether people believed they knew her, or didn’t care and talked anyway.

Hi there [xxxx], it’s Rachel. Just thought I’d call for a chat. How are you?

Her best-known project is the one that no one knows she’s responsible for. Until now, I suppose. It’s the Double-Decker Slasher rumour. She started that. It took off to such an extent that I think it freaked her out a bit. I suppose paranoia is a fairly easy thing to generate, or feed off, these days, and half the city seemed to believe at various times last year that people were having their throats cut on the upstairs of double-decker buses. It was an elaborate set-up and she did it really well. But it got out of hand and she has more or less disowned it now. Originally there had been plans for a show, but I haven’t heard anything about that lately. She has lots of eerie photographs taken on the upper decks of city buses, and she was going to show them, along with the fake evening newspaper front pages that she printed and left lying about all over the place, and she was going to record people’s accounts of the rumour, as they’d heard it, as they’d embellished it, and have the audio playing on a loop. But I think she’s shelved all that.

Upstairs only, on buses that are about half full – less than half full, a quarter full; the point is that they don’t have to be empty, and you sit upstairs, towards the back; you’re aware that there are people sitting behind you but you haven’t really paid them any attention, you haven’t picked them out at all – maybe one or two, probably one man, two women, something like that, two on the left, two on the right, and you sit down and you read your book or your newspaper or listen to your iPod or you look out the window, or you do all of these things because you can and the day is good and buses are nice, you can see the city go by, and then you feel something, at your shoulder maybe, what can that be, as if someone has brushed up against you, and then a sudden cold sensation across your throat, one that ends all the sounds that you’ve been hearing, one that seems to stop the world still, a thin abrupt clarity, as if you have plunged into cold water up to your neck, and you look down, you can’t seem to help looking down, and you are wearing, how strange, a flowing apron of dark blood, and you know in a slowing-down instant, in the last of your sight, out of nowhere, on such a nice day, that you’re dead.

I was one of the team on the Double-Decker Slasher project. I don’t know how many of us there were, but I’m not sure it was that many really. I was told to drop it into conversations, casually, precisely. I wasn’t allowed to give any details. I was to ask a question rather than impart information. Did you hear something about someone on a number 38 getting their throat cut? The other day? No? Well, I don’t know, I heard something, oh, maybe I heard it wrong, never mind. No more than that. And when I was with her, when we were in a pub or having lunch, or on a bus, we would have the conversation, and she was very good at lowering her voice in such a way that it would attract attention from people within eavesdropping range.

—I heard there was another slashing last weekend.

—You’re joking.

—No. The number 7. Some middle-aged woman. A passenger climbed the stairs and found her bleeding to death, throat cut from ear to ear, two people sitting three seats in front of her hadn’t heard a thing.

—Jesus.

—And the camera not working of course. And the conductor sitting downstairs reading the paper. Of course. It’s the third.

—My God.

—They don’t want to start a panic. It may be al-Qaeda. But it’s going to get out. City like this. People talk.

She shut it down when the bus companies issued a joint statement saying that the rumours were no more than rumours, and that they suspected a malicious intent and a single source, and had asked the police to investigate. There was real panic then for a few days as Rachel made all of us swear a vow of silence – convinced that one of us had overplayed it, or that the fake newspaper pages she’d printed would somehow be traced back to her. But she’d used a printer friend, Serbian Stan, and I think practically his entire life is illegal and virtually invisible anyway, and she had no real reason to worry. For a while there were ripples in the (real) newspapers and on the radio about rumour-mongering and the climate of fear, before there was another wave of terrorist arrests and talk of a dirty bomb, and everyone forgot about old-fashioned throat-cutting and was terrified again for real.

But the major thing that Rachel’s been doing, for about eighteen months now, is to pretend she has a missing brother. She’s given him the name Max. She has concocted photographs, using a picture of her uncle as a young man, altered digitally in a couple of respects – removing the moustache for example, changing the colour of the eyes, restyling the hair and updating the clothes. Her uncle is dead and she doesn’t actually have any brothers, so there is absolutely no one real to find. She’s given Max something of a biography, but she’s left most of the details blank. He was born in 1970, left school in 1987, spent some time travelling all over Europe and possibly North America and possibly the Far East, and possibly anywhere else that might come in handy, and returned here in 1992, possibly, where he lived at various addresses, mostly unknown, doing various jobs, mostly unknown, until disappearing completely in 1994, at the age of twenty-four. So she has a website about him, and she has these little posters that she sticks up, and she’ll sometimes go around asking all the people in a particular street or block of flats or bar or something, saying that she’s found out recently that he might have lived in the area or been a regular in the bar. And what she’s looking for really is exactly what she gets – people screwed up in various ways sufficient to make them believe that they knew this non-existent Max, and to offer Rachel hints and clues and insights, not into her fictional brother, but into themselves, which she duly records in some way, and stores, cross-indexed, neat, until she’s ready to stick it all in an exhibition.

Anyway. Rachel called to say she was going to Poland, in connection with the Max project. This is not the first trip abroad that she’s undertaken in the course of this. She’s already been to Spain and Morocco, and to Israel twice. She makes quite a good living out of magazine photography. And I think her father was a pretty successful businessman. He’s either dead or has retired to Israel, I actually can’t remember. I think he’s retired to Israel.

During lunch, Michael told me the story of the BOX building ghost. But before that, he wanted to talk about Rachel. He admires Rachel a great deal. He thinks she’s a great artist. Michael has strong views on these things.

—She’s off to Warsaw, you know.

—Yes, I know. She called last night.

—Oh.

He was a bit put out that she’d told us. That his news wasn’t news. He made a sulky face. He makes a lot of faces, Michael. And he does voices. I think sitting at a desk all day doesn’t suit him.

—Well, he whined.—Did she tell you what it was?

—An old school friend?

—Isn’t that marvellous? You know, this is about the seventh or eighth one who’s claimed to be a schoolmate. This chap though also claims to have seen a photograph of him, of Max, behind a bar somewhere outside Warsaw. Some hideous little Polish dump full of vodka alcoholics and toothless Catholics, can you just imagine? He lives out there now, some EU chappie. Swears that it’s Max. On his life. Poor sod. And the really pathetic thing is that this fellow has told Rachel that he saw the photograph months and months ago, and recognised it then, and even pointed it out to his wife, or girlfriend or what have you, as in, Look, how strange, there’s a photograph of an old school chum, good old Max, wonder what he was doing here, and that it wasn’t until last week that he finally got around to searching for Max on the Internet and found Rachel’s website and discovered he was missing.

—Jesus. That’s quite elaborate.

—Isn’t it? People are elaborate, though. People are Byzantine.

I’m sure that one of these days the Max project is going to go seriously off the rails. Someone is going to find out that they’re being taken for a ride and they’re going to get really angry. Of course Rachel insists that such a thing could never happen because such a person would, were Rachel genuine, actually be taking Rachel for a ride, and a much crueller and more disturbing one, and anger, should it all break down, would be entirely Rachel’s prerogative. She insists that the room for mistaken identity is slim. The photographs, while slightly altered, are photographs of an actual distinctive person, with distinguishing features (a small scar over the left eyebrow, what looks like a mole on the lower right cheek, a handsome gap between the two front teeth), and could not be easily mistaken for somebody else. Similarly, the name she has given her missing brother, Max Poe, is sufficiently unusual to rule out that kind of confusion. And the dates she has come up with – of birth and departure and return and disappearance – are unalterable. Put all of this together, says Rachel, and it simply doesn’t fit any actual missing person. She’s checked. And when someone does approach her with some story about Max, Rachel goes through (so she tells us) a complicated checking procedure to ensure that it doesn’t amount to valuable information about somebody who is genuinely missing. By which I think she means that she checks any checkable details against files for those who went missing at the same time and the same age as Max did not.

But of course no one is deceiving her on purpose. What would be the point? Any deception involved is total, in the sense that the people who claim to have seen Max, or who claim to have known him either before or after he didn’t disappear, are deceiving themselves. Completely and utterly – almost religiously. And they’re doing it for a reason – it’s in their interest to deceive themselves. Because they are divided against themselves, like nations. They’re disturbed. And Rachel is flying out to Poland to have a chat with them. It makes me nervous.

Of course she’s aware of all of this, she’s talked about it. It seems to be the point of it, in many ways. I once tried to tell her that I was worried on her behalf, but I think it came across quite badly, as if I had accused her of something, which I suppose I had. Well, I don’t suppose. I did accuse her. I actually accused her of abuse – of the abuse of vulnerable, lonely people. She was astonished, and angry, and in turn she suggested that I was jealous of her – artistically jealous – and that if I wasn’t fulfilled by cartooning I shouldn’t take it out on her. Which of course may be true to some extent – I’m not really sure – but it distracted me and confused me and I lost sight of the point that I was trying to make, which was that someone at some time was going to discover that the Max they claimed to know didn’t actually exist, and they would feel fooled, and they might become angry, even dangerously so. After the argument with Rachel I went over all the same ground with K, who immediately saw what I had been trying to say, but insisted that the disturbing nature of the Max project was exactly the point of it, that Rachel was that kind of artist, and that her work was for that reason hugely interesting, and that her friends should really only offer support, that anything else would be useless, that she was a grown woman who was completely aware of what she was doing, and that it would be patronising to tell her to be careful. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, didn’t exactly comfort me. I was still nervous, and added to it now was a new nervousness, about myself and my own motivations and my own worth in terms of what I do and what I manage to understand. It left me feeling rather stupid, to tell you the truth.

Michael never seems nervous at all. Or stupid. I imagine that appearing stupid would be the worst imaginable thing for Michael. Ever. I think he would rather die than appear stupid. I envy him really. He seems to exist without any difficulty, as if everything is easy. He is a very calm man, a sort of still point, who’s always at the centre of some derangement or other. His mother is Catherine Anderson, who I mentioned – the Catherine Anderson, the actress. His father, estranged from both of them, is currently serving a jail term for a ridiculous fraud perpetrated against a children’s charity somewhere in France, or Switzerland maybe. I think Michael is quite embarrassed about his parents. It’s difficult to get him to talk about them, though I’m always trying, just because I’m so curious. I think they’re fascinating. He will talk about his father sometimes, in a disparaging tone, full of distance and tired amusement, as if he’s talking about the latest misadventures of a character from a soap opera. Even then he’ll only talk about him while we’re alone or with other close friends. About his mother he was never very voluble. I used to think that was a kind of modesty, as if he was afraid that people would think he was making himself interesting by invoking her name. But I don’t think that now. I just don’t think he likes her very much. We used to get the occasional reference to whatever it was that she was up to, and annoyance that she had turned up to see him unannounced, or that she’d wanted him to accompany her to some function or party or other and how he felt obliged but resentful, as if it was her who was using him. But lately, he doesn’t mention her at all – not since she gave a long interview to a Sunday newspaper in which she detailed her elaborate sexual history. I don’t think they’re talking.

So, over lunch, Michael told me the story of the building ghost. Or should that be the ghost building? Michael is an architect. He works for Edwards Patten Associates – the people who designed the Lacon Tower, among other things, and the new Technology Museum which won a big award last year. I like the museum. At least, I like the photographs I’ve seen of it. It seems rather elegant. The Lacon Tower, on the other hand, always looks to me like it’s about to fall down. It makes my stomach lurch a little every time I see it. I don’t like heights. Michael tells me that it contains movement in its line. He has a voice he adopts when he talks about his work, and I’m never sure if it’s just another one of his voices or whether it’s actually the real one. It’s quieter, more intense. He tells me that the design of the Lacon Tower is intended to convey forward momentum, like the bold cursive script of a self-confident person. I asked Michael about this, about whether it is really possible to speak about a building in other terms – to say that building design, architecture, is like something else, like people or water or air or handwriting. He admitted to me that he never thought of architecture in that way – as being like other things. He thought of it simply as itself – as function and line and, to some degree, intellectual occupation of a space. He thought about architecture – in other words, in the language of architecture – without the need to translate. He tells me that the similes of architecture are simply an interface with the lay community. A way of talking to the likes of me. Do you think that is true? I don’t know whether it’s true or whether he’s just teasing me. I don’t know any other architects.

Comparisons make life easier, I suppose. We have two eyes. We see things in double before we can see them at all. In double and upside down, as far as I can remember. They are projected on to the backs of our inner skulls, and some process of the brain makes sense of them. We can’t see one thing unless it’s next to another.

Michael told me about a building project that the practice has been involved with at quite a superficial, technical level. A small team, which doesn’t include Michael, have designed a necessarily complicated access route, vehicle and pedestrian, from street to underground car park, in a new office building in some previously anonymous inner suburb which is now attracting a number of fairly prestigious media consultancy companies for a reason which Michael, he said, knows but has forgotten. I’m not entirely sure what a ‘media consultancy company’ is, but I didn’t ask. If I asked Michael to explain all the terms he uses we’d never finish a conversation. The project is a new build on the site of a nondescript, three-storey office and retail unit which had been destroyed by fire. The principal architects designed an attractive (though dated, said Michael) strip-windowed affair, with the name of the commissioning company, BOX, in art-deco pushpin steel lettering on one side, vertically, at the front. Actually, I know about BOX. I thought they were an advertising company. I know about them because I know someone who works for them. Not very well. But I do know her. And we had talked once about the possibility of my doing some work for them. Or with them, as she put it. She had asked me to send her a portfolio, which I never did. I interrupted Michael to tell him this, and he frowned at me.

—Why didn’t you?

—Why didn’t I what?

—Send them your stuff? Could have been something there, you know.

—They’re advertisers.

—Oh, no one is an advertiser any more. They’re brand presentation, media strategy, perception creation – all that.

—Well, I don’t do that.

—No, I know you don’t do that, of course you don’t do that, but the fact is you can do that, you can do it in your sleep. Visuals, I mean – the striking image, the simple stroke that conjures up a world of complexity. Don’t laugh at me. That’s their language. Could have been good money in it, you know. They’re worth a fortune. Why else would they be getting us in to make their bloody underground car park tunnel all lovely and light and poncing inspirational. The word was in the brief. Still might be money in it, for you I mean. If this whole thing doesn’t knock them off line. You should send them something.

The building, Michael went on, is one storey higher than its predecessor, and was completed on time and within budget. But it’s empty, unused. Because, Michael said, hunched down over his plate, eyes wide, putting on a voice, it’s haunted. Haunted by the building it’s replaced.

I had to wait until Michael went and got himself another pot of tea before I heard any more. It might be possible to guess that he’s the son of an actress and a con man if you didn’t already know. K gets quite bored with it all sometimes, but I enjoy spending time with Michael. I’m not sure what it is in life that he takes seriously. His work, perhaps. He likes films and music and always knows what’s new without ever describing it as anything other than old hat. And he wears, as it happens, old hats. Especially in this kind of weather. I can’t ever imagine him with an umbrella. He has a terrible fear of seeming very enthusiastic, and you can see him sometimes, taking a breath, calming himself down, dampening everything. And at the same time, he has a fear of not having anything to say. He looks stereotypically alternative, with his close-cropped hair, his experiments with beards, moustaches and sideburns, his black-framed glasses, his shoulder bag and his clever T-shirts and his canny shoes. A lot of our friends look like this. Vaguely arty, mildly unconventional, conscious of the irony but incorporating it. They incorporate everything really. And, of course, they are wholly incorporated.

The first manifestation of the haunting, Michael told me, was the inability of the lifts to reach the top floor. The first time this had happened the lift engineers quickly solved, or seemed to solve, the problem. But within hours, the malfunction recurred. Each time the lift attempted to rise above the third floor it stalled and would not budge. Endless diagnoses were made. Electronic problems, gear mechanisms that were faulty or misaligned, magnetic interference, inadvertent vacuums – all were blamed in turn and then discounted. Every time they changed something it seemed they had fixed it – the lift would climb to the fourth floor – and then it would stall again, within a day, or within hours, or within minutes. A fortune was spent on delicate sensors and measuring machines, and countless man hours were invested in analysing the data. The architects went through their plans again and again, the lift engineers removed the entire cabling system. The builders rebuilt part of the lift shaft. The cabling system was reinstalled. It worked for three days. And then, to the despair of everyone involved, and much to Michael’s amusement, the lift would once more climb no higher than the third floor. As if there wasn’t a fourth.

I told Michael that it sounded like an interesting engineering problem, rather than a poltergeist. No, he told me. There was more. While they tried to work out what to do with the lifts, and everyone started reaching for their lawyers, various other strange things began to occur.

• The telephone lines on the fourth floor misbehaved. They would go dead. Or, while working, would pick up crossed lines in unison, so that from each extension could be heard a sample section of the city’s babble.

• Two electricians, called in on a Saturday to sort out the non-functioning sockets in one of the fourth-floor offices, contacted the project manager to report the fourth floor inaccessible due to some joker having bricked up the stairwell on the third-floor landing. The project manager arrived and met the electricians downstairs. Together they took the lift to the third floor because, well, that was as far as it would take them, and went into the adjacent stairwell. The brick wall had vanished. Both electricians fled, upset, ashen (distraught, said Michael), and had refused to work in the building since.

• Four workmen from the roofing contractors were asked to explain their presence on the fourth floor one morning – they could be clearly seen from the ground, moving around behind the windows, and at one point firing up a welding gun, by at least half a dozen people. They insisted that they had been where they were supposed to be – on the roof – the entire time. And indeed, as revealed by subsequent checks, they had no access to the fourth floor. The lift didn’t go there, and the door from the stairwell had been locked the night before by a security guard who reported that he had felt ‘uneasy’ patrolling there, and had sealed it off.

• Carpets on the fourth floor had been replaced three times due to unexplained staining before they just gave up and left them as they were, including one with a strange Australia-shaped discoloration.

• When the CEO of BOX came on his first visit he got out of his car, stared up at the building and asked why there were only three storeys. Those accompanying him, including the chief architect, the project manager and the main contractor, looked from him to the building and back again. But there are four storeys, they told him. He looked at the building and he looked at them, and he looked at the building again. No there are not, he insisted. Then they had that argument, Michael laughed – that argument – about whether a four-storey building was a ground floor and three above it, or whether a four-storey building was a ground floor and four above it, and what was the difference anyway between a storey and a floor. It was only when the CEO used his finger to point and count that they all finally agreed that there was a fourth floor. Inside the building, the CEO remained silent throughout the tour, until, on the fourth floor, he was taken ill and had to leave. The nature of the illness, Michael had not been able to determine. It was simply reported that he had been taken ill, a phrase which, as Michael pointed out, covers everything from the shits to a stroke.

The CEO had not been back since. In fact, Michael believed, there had been efforts made to get BOX out of the deal entirely, and this having apparently failed, the company appeared now to be trying to sell the place without ever having taken up residency, and while still operating out of a cramped two-storey lease in the impossible city centre. But word was out, said Michael, and a sale would be difficult. He was surprised, Michael was, that it hadn’t made the papers yet.

Actually, I am myself unclear about the difference between a storey and a floor – if there is one – and I get very confused by all talk of an x-storeyed building. Where do you start counting? Surely you include the ground floor as a storey? But if so, why is the first floor not the second floor? Because surely the ground floor has to be the first floor – as in Storey 1 – rather than the zero floor, the nought floor – Storey 0. Because if the ground floor is just that – the ground floor – and the first floor is the first storey, then a four-storey building, such as the BOX offices which Michael had described, was a building with five levels. A ground floor, and four storeys above it. Or was it a four-level building – with a ground floor and three storeys above it?

I opened my mouth to voice this puzzlement to Michael, but shut it again because I was suddenly sure that we had already had this conversation at some previous time, and I was sure also that he had explained it to me and that I had forgotten. Then I opened my mouth again to suggest that the building wasn’t haunted at all, it was just jinxed by the fact that no one ever knew what other people meant when they said ‘a four-storey building’. But I shut it immediately. That was just stupid.

I have a very amateur interest in architecture. By which, Michael tells me, I mean that I like buildings. He has explained to me that what I like is actually not really architecture at all, it is the placement of people against things. He insists that I am far too interested in people to really have any proper appreciation of architecture. Most of the time of course he is joking with me, teasing, but I think that he does actually, in truth, have quite a condescending attitude towards my interest in his profession. Which, I suppose, is fair enough. Architecture is probably one of those things that we all feel entitled to discuss without ever really understanding the principles. What I’m not so sure about is just how serious he is when he insists that architecture cannot concern itself too much with people. With actual real people and their physical needs and their practical necessities. These are technical matters, and should be given only minor, cursory attention. Sometimes I think he is not serious at all, that he can’t be. Other times I’m convinced that this is what he really thinks, and that he dresses it up in deniable humour because he is ashamed of it. Maybe it is a cross between the two. Part of one thing and part of the other.

I was impressed, though, by Michael’s story of an old building refusing to allow a new one to take its place. I liked the idea that the space had been defined at a certain height, and the new construction would not be allowed to go any higher – that it did not have metaphysical planning permission. I thought it reminded me of a film I had seen once, though I couldn’t remember the details. I mentioned this to Michael.

—Oh, I know what you mean.

He was fiddling with his phone, reading a text I think.

—It’s a Bob Hope thing, isn’t it? he said.

—No, it’s European, subtitles, German maybe.

—Fassbinder? Not like him I don’t think. Who was in

it?

—Oh, I can barely remember. Something about a house and the house is actually the one doing –

—The Haunting.

—Yeah …

—Well, that’s American.

—It wasn’t American. It was in German or something.

—Well, The Haunting is an American film.

—No, it wasn’t called that.

—You just said it was.

—I didn’t. I said that in this film the house was the one doing the haunting, and that the film was German. Michael was replying to his text.

—You’re thinking of The Haunting.

—I’m not! Is The Haunting German?

—No, it’s American.

—Then why were there subtitles?

—Are you thinking of Tarkovsky? There’s a bit in Stalker –

—I don’t know who that is.

—There was a creepy Yugoslavian thing called The House. From what I remember. All bony hands on banisters.

—Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

—Menzel?

—What?

—Closely Observed Trains?

—What?

—Not that one obviously. He had another one. Powerful. Powerful film-maker. Must get it on DVD actually – Trains. Lovely film. The boy in the bath, all that. There.

Just as he finished whatever it was that he was doing on his phone, and I was about to give out to him for doing it, there was a sudden cloudburst outside. I’m not sure if there was thunder. But a wave of darkness raced through the café, bringing hush and hesitation, and then the rain hit the ground like debris. The two of us watched as people ran for cover, some of them screeching between laughter and alarm, a couple of them coming into the café for shelter, others making it across the road to a second-hand record shop. The rain was torrential. It came down so hard that after a couple of minutes we could no longer see the other side of the street. We stared out at what I can’t really call rain at all. We stared out at falling water, as if we had been transported to some jungle and were crouched in a cave behind a waterfall, mute in fear and ignorance, cold little apes in the crevice. The café was becalmed. There was no noise of voices. The radio had disappeared. There was no clatter of dishes or cutlery or cooking, no ring of the register, no tunes from phones, no movement. Only the hysterical drumming of the rain, and the gathering rattle of running water. We stared and waited, as if there was a chance that this time, this time, it might not stop. Or this time, this time, it might presage something worse. The darkness covered us, and I was afraid. It was hard in the noisy gloom to pick out Michael sitting beside me. His telephone too went dark, its little lights vanishing in his hand. On my face I could feel a kind of paralysis, as if I had neglected to blink, or breathe. I thought that it would not stop. I thought that it would never stop, not now. But it did. After just a couple of minutes. The light returned. The water became rain again. And then the rain slowly ceased.

Michael broke the human silence with his laugh. He stopped, made a wide-eyed face of mock fear and laughed again. In the rest of the café, people relaxed. Others laughed too, some shook their heads, rolled their eyes, muttered. Conversations resumed, the hubbub rose unaltered.

Then a dog appeared, walking down the centre of the road; a large, dark dog that moved with a great swagger, slowly – almost, it seemed to me, in slow motion – right down the middle of the sodden roadway, as if it was in charge here. I’m not sure anyone else noticed. Michael was fiddling again with his phone. The dog’s big head bounced gently, its powerful shoulders rolled and rippled and its tongue seemed to glisten and ooze over its pointed teeth like a bag of blood. It glanced this way and that with huge cloudy eyes, and paused, and went on, and looked, as it passed, directly into the café – directly, it seemed, at me – registering my stare, taking note of me, its hard, intelligent mind considering and then dismissing me. It went from view. A huge, loathsome dog, a deep shadow in the damp sunlight, uncollared, unkept. Dry as a bone.

I took a sip of my very cold tea.

I can’t remember anything else about lunch with Michael. We talked about Rachel. We talked about a building haunted by another building. We watched the rain. I saw a dog. I think Michael enjoyed meeting me. Perhaps I was a little quieter than usual. I had the mouse on my mind, still. And I was a little depressed by the news of Rachel’s trip to Poland. And at the end, after the rain and the dog, I was uneasy, a little nervous. I don’t really like dogs. But I think Michael had a good enough time talking with me.

It is often impossible, however, to know very much about Michael. He is rather opaque.