• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE

“You must tell me what happened to the cow,” she says for a second time.

They are leaning side by side at the railing, their bodies gently touching. She gazes straight ahead down the hill, towards the dark, waxy bushes.

“I don’t know what happened to the cow,” he answers.

It is one of those bright, windy afternoons. The sunlight gleams in discarded cans and the shiny foil of crisp packets. A shadow bounces quickly towards them across the glowing grass.

“I’m sorry, but you must,” she says, “if you’re serious.”

The shadow reaches the base of the hill and rapidly ascends. A second of darkness falls over them, then passes on its way. He is watching the side of her face as this happens. It changes the colour of her skin from yellow to grey.

They are standing directly under the path of the cable cars, one of which brought them half an hour ago to this park on the outskirts of the city. The cable itself makes a swishing sound in the air above them. They can see the cars strung out like pearls at regular intervals between the pylons, and every sixty seconds or so one glides overhead.

The attraction has seen better days. Thick grease covers the mechanisms, and the windows of the cars are streaked with grime. The cars are painted red or blue, and few of them – only one in every ten, they have counted this – contain passengers.

They find the fact that the empty cars still run strangely reassuring. As if passengers are not really the point; as if, perhaps, there is some other reason.

“Alright. I’ll tell you what happened,” he says, frowning thoughtfully down the hill, across the park, towards the city. “If you’re sure you want to know. Are you really sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “Of course I want to know.” She puts another olive in her mouth, works the stone with her tongue and teeth, then spits it neatly out over the railing.

He had intended to ask her in the cable car; that had been his plan. The trip took only fifteen minutes, gliding down past the palace and cathedral, over the railway and the dried-up river, across an eight-lane motorway and finally over trees and foliage as they crossed the scrubby parkland to this hill. They ate their picnic in mid-air, facing one another from opposite seats, drinking cava from the bottle and spitting olive stones out of the window. There was a speaker set in the ceiling, delivering a crackly commentary of which she occasionally translated a phrase, but mostly they ignored this voice and concentrated on what would happen if the cable snapped at this point or that, plummeting their car towards the ground.

“The worst would be above the motorway,” he said. “Even if we survived the fall, we’d be hit by about twenty trucks.”

“Unless we actually fell on a truck,” she said, “and then it could carry us along to wherever we wanted to go.”

“What about here, over these roofs?” he asked as their car swung over the rooftops of high-rise apartment buildings. They could see the occasional face glancing up, washing flapping brightly on a line.

“That would be ok. We’d just have to move in. Call it an act of god.”

When they passed above the park, they stuck their heads out of the window and tried to spot the prostitutes and flashers reputed to be lurking down there. It was like going on a safari. They didn’t see any, though.

“They must be hiding.”

“Or fucking.”

I’ll ask her now, he told himself clearly as they pulled their heads back into the car. But at this moment she tugged him towards her and kissed him on the mouth. Her hand was around the back of his head, and he tasted the salt of the olives on her lips, the cava-drunkenness of her tongue. He told himself to separate gently, grip her shoulders, and say it. But instead, he slipped one hand inside her shirt. The machinery of the cable car whirred, squealing as it travelled. He thought: shit, I’ve missed it again. It was too late now.

And then they came jerkily into the hangar on top of the little hill. Slow-spinning wheels reeled them in, and a carnie with a cigarette stub bouncing from his bottom lip eased their car to a standstill and opened the door.

They alighted from the car with their half-finished bottle and wandered out into the sunlight. The park was peaceful, slightly scruffy, bisected by chalky paths which criss-crossed one another in the greenery, traversed by joggers. They shared an orange and finished the cava, leaning lazily on the railing that ran around the hilltop.

There wasn’t anything to do. Soon they would head to the city again. Tonight they would sleep in a hotel, and tomorrow they would each fly home.

All the sound disappeared from the scene. The cable cars could have started running backwards. And in the dreamy silence and stillness that accompanied this waiting, he arranged the words in the order intended, and asked her to marry him.

She didn’t say anything at first. She didn’t appear to react in any way. She continued gazing down the hill, holding his left hand in her right, for the length of time it took for three red and blue cars to pass overhead.

“You have to tell me something first,” she said, as the fourth approached. “There’s something that I have to know. Truly, this is important.”

“Of course,” he said, “I’ll tell you anything. What do you want to know?”

“First, I need to tell you a story.” Another shadow passed over her face, like a thought flashing in and out. Her lips were slightly smiling, he saw, but she still didn’t look at him.

“When I was a little girl, about six or seven, I went to the beach with my family. I’ve no idea what beach it was, but it’s still very clear. A long, wide sandy beach with yellow and brown cliffs. My two little brothers were there, and my dad. Not my mum, she wasn’t around much then. I think we were staying in a holiday place, or it could have been a daytrip, I’m not sure. Anyway, we were on the beach, and I wandered off a little way on my own.

“I was holding this green plastic spade that I used to smack jellyfish. That was my favourite thing, on the beach, to smack jellyfish with a spade. So perhaps I was looking for jellyfish then, or perhaps I was just exploring. Whatever the reason, I went off alone and found myself standing at the foot of the cliffs.

“Dad had lectured me about rockslides, about children being buried in mud, so the cliffs seemed very dangerous and exciting. I walked as quietly as I could, knowing that if I coughed or sneezed an avalanche would come. I wanted to find some dinosaur bones – I imagined them poking out of the clay, the way they look in natural history museums – but I was too afraid to stick my spade in the cliff for fear of it all coming down.

“And then I looked directly up, and there, on the very edge of the cliff – huge, silhouetted against the sky – was this cow.”

“What kind of cow?” he interrupted.

“What do you mean what kind of cow? I don’t know what kind of cow.”

“I mean, what did it look like?”

“I don’t know. I’ve told you, it was in silhouette.”

“But do you think it was black and white, or brown?” he asked. “Did it have horns? I’m trying to get an accurate picture of it.”

“Black and white, then,” she said. “With horns.”

“Are you sure, or are you just saying that?”

“You’re not allowed to question me,” she said firmly. “This is my story. I was only six or seven, but I remember it all very clearly. Just listen. I said this is important.” She waited for another car to pass before she carried on. He knew she wasn’t annoyed with him. He got the feeling that she was measuring something.

“There, on the very edge of the cliff – this cow,” she continued. “It was eating the grass right on the edge, just pulling these clumps up with its teeth. It was munching so loudly I could hear it, and whenever it took another mouthful I saw little stones and bits of earth cascading down the cliff to where I stood. Each time it tugged up another clump, more stones and earth would come tumbling down. It seemed oblivious to the fact that it was so close to the edge.

“I stood there, completely frozen with fear. This is my first memory of what it feels like to be scared. I knew exactly what was going to happen – I don’t think I’ve ever known anything so surely again in
my life. I knew, beyond the slightest doubt, that it was going to fall.”

She took an olive from the jar and placed it in her mouth. He waited, watching the cable cars bobbing and swaying like comedy boats, their shadows slipping beneath them like manta rays.

“I wanted someone to come to the rescue, to stop it from happening. But I think I realised even then that there was no-one who could. Perhaps this was also the first time in my life I realised that some things can’t be helped, that they will happen no matter how scared you are. I knew this cow was going to fall, that I would have to watch it take place, and there wasn’t anything that anyone could do. I couldn’t even scream, I was so frightened. All I could do was watch.

“The next time the cow reached down for a mouthful, a chunk of the cliff underneath its hooves snapped away, like a piece of cake. Both its front legs slipped over the edge, and its body slid downwards, ever so slowly, until it was hanging almost vertically above me. It started mooing and rolling its eyes. At least, I think it did. Sometimes I think I might have added this later, the way your memory does. But I know that everything else was clear, that it happened exactly this way.

“It seemed to take an impossibly long time. It was desperately trying to right itself, but soil and rocks were crumbling away and cascading down around it. Ever so slowly, it began to tip. Cows must be the heaviest creatures. It didn’t stand a chance.

“And then it fell, just as I had foreseen. It turned a full somersault in the air, hit the rock wall with its rump, bounced off – this was the most horrible thing – hit the wall again, and started rolling. The cliff wasn’t sheer, but it was very steep, and the cow just rolled and bounced off the rocks, heading straight towards me.

“I started running. I have no idea how I found my legs, but I did. I ran all the way back to where my dad and my little brothers were, screaming at the top of my voice: ‘Help, a cow’s falling off the cliff, a cow’s falling off the cliff!’ Dad told me several years later that he’d never seen anyone in his life as terrified as this before. It really freaked him out.”

She spat the olive stone from her mouth. It sailed a good few metres through the air and pinged off a broken wine bottle. He noticed that tight smile on her lips that indicated concentration.

“After he’d calmed me down to the point where I was no longer hysterical,” she continued, “I persuaded Dad to come with me to the cliff. He left my little brothers with friends, and I led the way. I didn’t want to go back to that spot – this was the last thing I wanted in the world – but I knew I had to show him what had happened. I remember how sick with fear I felt as we crossed the beach. I thought I was going to vomit at times. My biggest terror was that we’d find the cow alive, all smashed up and bleeding on the rocks, and that Dad would have to get a big stone and put it out of its misery. This was a phrase I’d heard from adults – ‘put it out of its misery’ – and ever since then, the word ‘misery’ has had this special connotation for me, as if it applied specifically to cows at the bottom of cliffs.

“Eventually we reached the place where I’d seen it happen. I was really shivering and shaking by then. Dad was trying to keep me calm, talking on and on. The top of the cliff was all broken away, just like I remembered. But,” and here she turned to look at him, as if she wanted to observe his reaction, “but – there was no cow.”

“No cow?” he repeated, not knowing what to say.

“There was no cow, no cow at all. No sign that a cow had ever existed. I looked far and wide for it, dragging Dad around by the arm, even though there was absolutely nothing behind which a cow could be concealed. There was only rocks and mud, occasional bits of driftwood. The top of the cliff was broken away, like I said. There was even a slide mark. But there was definitely no cow. It didn’t make any sense.

“Dad became more and more concerned. He explained it again and again. ‘There’s no cow here. You can see there’s no cow. And a cow wouldn’t just fall over a cliff, they’re animals, they know what they’re doing.’ But I refused to believe in no cow. I had seen it. It had happened. I didn’t want to leave the spot, and eventually he had to pick me up and carry me back to the car. I threw a tantrum in the car-park, and cried all the way home. I didn’t talk to Dad for two whole days.

“He said that I had imagined it. Imagined the whole thing. Perhaps I had seen a cow on the cliff, and then seen a rock or something fall, and got the two things mixed up in my mind. That was the only explanation, he said. Cows don’t simply disappear. I knew it made sense, the things he was saying, but still, I remembered what I saw. I remembered it as clearly as I remembered what I had eaten for breakfast that morning – as clearly as I remembered when Mum left. And the fact that my father wouldn’t believe me felt like the deepest, most hurtful betrayal I had ever known in all my life.

“Of course, I didn’t stay angry forever. I hated him for a couple of weeks, but things returned to normal over time. We found it easier not to talk about it, the incident of the cow. I believed what I believed, and he believed what he believed, and as long as we didn’t bring it up our relationship was fine. Only once, years and years later, when I was seventeen, did the subject come up again. And then it really did some damage. I’d been bunking off school, and had failed a few tests, and he found out I hadn’t been telling him the truth. We had a terrible argument, one of the worst I’ve ever had, and in the middle of this he shouted: ‘You’re a liar! You’ve always been a liar! Just like you lied about that cow!’ And I felt like I was right back on that beach, six or seven years old, underneath those muddy yellow cliffs.

“Shortly after that, I left home,” she said.

They stood in silence for some time. The cable cars came and went as before. There was something soothing about their monotony, a kind of reassurance. Once there came a shout from overhead, and both of them glanced up to see a child waving from one of the cars, heading back towards the city. Automatically, they waved back. The motion seemed to break her thoughts, and she continued talking.

“I know I saw it fall. I know. But I’ve never been able to understand where it could have gone. Three men have proposed to me in my life, and I turned each of them down. You are the fourth, the fourth man to ask. I love you – you know that – I really do. I can’t think of anyone else in the world who I’d ever want to marry. But I asked each of these other men to tell me this before I’d give them an answer, and I have to ask you to do the same. You must tell me what happened to the cow.”

“What happened to the cow?” he repeated.

“Yes. What happened to the cow. The first man who proposed to me couldn’t provide any explanation. The second didn’t take me seriously, and turned it into a stupid joke. And the third, well, the third one tried, but failed to convince me. He claimed it had just recovered quickly, and limped away before I could return.

“Now we both know the cliff was too high for that, and the beach was covered in sharp rocks. What a pathetic suggestion that was. I know you can do better. You must tell me what happened to the cow.”

“I don’t know what happened to the cow.”

“I’m sorry, but you must, if you’re serious.”

“Alright. I’ll tell you what happened, if you’re sure you want to know. Are you really sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “Of course I want to know.”

He considers this matter carefully now. He watches the receding cable car, the one with the waving child inside, until it is just a dot on a string, and then follows the path of its trajectory along the threaded pylons to the city. From here, it is just about possible to make out the palace and cathedral, both of which they had visited the previous day. The palace was bursting with crimson and gold, black marble, satin, jewel-rimmed mirrors, to a point where the luxury became hideous, pressing down with a sickening insistence. She said it made her feel as if her eyes had eaten too much ice-cream. The cathedral was similarly layered in gold, but its echoing ceilings and stone-slabbed floors possessed an altogether different type of weight. The cathedral felt like the palace’s shadow – but a shadow that was somehow more solid than its object. Like the shadows of the cable cars seemed real in a way the cars were not; the movement of the cars was mechanical, but the shadows were alive.

He knows he has all the time in the world, that a thousand cars can come and go before he gives his answer. He imagines them passing through his fingers like beads on a rosary. It helps him think.

What could have happened to the cow? Where could it possibly have gone? He puts these questions to himself as unambiguously as he can. We’ve already established, he tells himself, that the cliff was too high for it to survive. If it had landed directly below, the life would have been smashed out of it. Therefore – assuming the cow did fall – either something intervened to stop it landing on those sharp rocks, or something intervened immediately after, removing its body from the scene.

Did the cow really fall off the cliff? He has to get this out of the way before going on.

Yes, it did. She saw it. There’s no question.

So, we know there was an intervention immediately before or immediately after the cow hit the rocks.

But what kind of intervention could halt a falling cow? As she had pointed out herself, cows must be the heaviest creatures. It would take a pretty powerful force to arrest the cow’s plunge in mid-air, and then transport it far away enough that it couldn’t be found.

How about a gust of mighty wind? he asks himself.

This seems fairly plausible at first. One of those powerful coastal blasts that can reach speeds of up to ninety miles per hour, strong enough to lift a cow and carry it several hundred feet to dump it out at sea, beyond the surf-line. The cliffs would probably channel such a blast, adding to its intensity. Although, realistically, he thinks, it would have to have been a small hurricane, and her story made no mention of stormy weather. Perhaps a localised typhoon that hurled the cow high into the air, and then dissipated quickly? But he knows that a typhoon, however localised it was, would surely have done the beach more lasting damage.

Not a gust of mighty wind. No, that can’t have been it.

Perhaps a freak wave from the sea? One of those surges that have no explanation, boiling suddenly up the beach to the base of the cliff to snatch the cow away. It could have come and gone in seconds, receding as suddenly as it appeared, unnoticed by the fortunate holidaymakers, who, of course, were distracted by the little girl’s hysterics. The cow would have floated out like a buoy. If a riptide had taken it, it might have ended up in the middle of the Atlantic.

That’s a possibility, he thinks. I’ll keep that one in mind.

He warns himself not to jump to conclusions. Wind and waves are too obvious, too easily discounted. There has to be another explanation that he’s not thinking of.

A flock of seagulls, for example.

There exist numerous stories about attacks such as this – although, admittedly, usually involving small dogs. But surely a large enough flock of gulls, with proper organisational skills, could have plucked the cow from the air as it fell and transported it back to some cave they knew about? Working together, as a team, merciless raptors such as these might of capable of such things. They are descended from dinosaurs, after all.

But how many birds, approximately, would it take to lift a cow? This is a question that has to be posed. At a rough guess, without calculations, he would estimate one thousand.

One thousand seagulls, working as a team. If this was the case – if they’d learned to organise – then surely they wouldn’t have stopped with the cow. They’d have gone on to target even greater prizes. Bungalows, fishing boats, ice-cream vans. You couldn’t keep a thing like that secret from the world.

A more direct explanation, then. It has to be something simple. Perhaps the cow fell into a patch of sinking sand, and vanished that way. Beaches are notorious for this. The wet sand closed over its nostrils, over its frightened, rolling eyes, a couple of bubbles rose up, and it was gone. A horrible way to die.

But then, was it only luck that prevented her from going the same way? She said that she had searched far and wide, dragging her daddy around by the arm, combing and re-combing the area for any possible clue. Surely, in the process, she would have crossed that spot. The more he thinks about sinking sand, the more it seems unlikely.

What, then? Surely the answer is there. He turns his head to watch her for a moment, calmly regarding the view. She is chewing the inside of her cheek. He knows she wants him to get this right.

Spontaneous combustion? No, that’s juvenile. Perhaps some rare atmospheric condition that causes vaporisation. Something present in the environment, a chemical reaction. Flint, that’s it! Those cliffs contain flint! As the cow hit the rocks below, its horn struck an exposed piece of flint, and the spark ignited the methane in its body – everyone knows cows are full of methane – causing an explosion powerful enough to destroy it utterly!

Or, more simply, an unexploded shell, half-buried in the sand. These still surface from time to time. A bomb-blast big enough to scatter the pieces? Crabs probably feasted on the bits for weeks.

But then, if there was an explosion – any sort of loud noise whatsoever – why did no-one on the beach hear it? He can think of no explanation for this, no explanation at all.

Extracting his left hand from her right, he takes a step away from her, leaving her leaning on the railing. Thoughtfully he paces the top of the hill, hands clasped behind his back, frowning at the ground. His shoes kick up cigarette butts, woodchips. Tiny pieces of broken glass glitter in the sun.

“I don’t know what happened to the cow,” he tells her, a long time later.

The sun is much lower in the sky. The pylons through which the cables run cast elongated shadows. On evenings like this, sounds seem to carry further – they can hear kids yelling on a distant football pitch, the dull roar of the eight-lane motorway.

The expression on her face doesn’t alter, but her body does. Her shoulders, in particular, seem to shrink. Her arms appear to grow longer.

“I don’t know what happened to the cow,” he says again, more firmly. “There isn’t any way to be sure of a thing like that.”

“We should be heading back to town,” she says with a vague, gentle gesture. “It’ll get dark soon. The cars will stop running.” She still has that concentrated smile on her face. Her eyes have narrowed into a squint, although there is no bright light.

“Wait a minute, I’m not finished. I need to tell you something. If the cars stop, we’ll walk.”

“And risk those flashers catching us?”

“If they do, we’ll fight our way out.” He takes her hand again.

He leads her to the little play-park over the crest of the hill. It’s empty, its swings and slides deserted, and they sit facing one another on the see-saw, their feet wedged against the ground. One seat of the see-saw is shaped like a lion, and the other is shaped like a dolphin. The lion is red and the dolphin is blue. He sits upon the lion.

“I had a strange dream on the plane coming over. It wasn’t a dream exactly. I’d been looking at the clouds going by below, and the earth going by below the clouds, and I must have fallen asleep with my eyes open. When you’re that high in the air there doesn’t seem to be much difference between dreaming and waking. I guess it was about half past five in the morning. I couldn’t believe it was so bright out there.

“I was watching the shadows of the clouds as they moved across the land. And then – I don’t know what it was, the speed the plane was travelling, maybe – the shadows seemed to catch up with the clouds and then to overtake them. Everything kind of slipped out of place, as if some sequence had been lost. The earth appeared to be rolling backwards, as if it had not quite managed to reach the top of a long hill.

“It became very hard to tell if it was the shadows that were following the clouds, or the clouds that were being pulled along by the shadows. The shadows looked so purposeful, sneaking along down there. I felt they might be dragging us somewhere, skipping over the fields like that with a bunch of strings held in their teeth, and the strings connected to my hands, my arms, which were stretched out in the sky like the wings of a plane. I could feel the air rushing past my ears. The sensation probably lasted much less than a second, I don’t know. I woke up then.

“The thing was, I didn’t know if I had. For a couple of moments I had no idea if I’d just woken up, or just fallen asleep. There didn’t seem any way to tell which event had followed which – in what order the two states had come. I felt that if I’d got it wrong, if sleeping and waking had swapped places, I’d always be out of synchronisation, and would never have any way of knowing. It was like slipping into, I don’t know, a kind of shadow life. As if my life had become its own shadow, and the real life continued somewhere without me. Or like I’d been looking in the mirror too long, and changed places with my reflection.

“And then I remembered what I was there for. That I was coming to meet you. That’s how I realised I was awake, and then everything clicked back into its right place.”

He slackens his knees so his end of the see-saw tips downwards with his weight. Slowly and smoothly she rises above him, feet dangling above the ground. They regard one another from this new perspective before he extends his legs again, and the see-saw tilts back the other way.

“When we met, by the palace, on Saturday – my intention was to ask you then. I was going to do it straight away. And then on the balcony of our room, the first night we were there. And also on the rowing boat out on the lake, and in just about every bar we’ve drunk in. But mostly, I wanted to do it at the palace. Before anything else.”

“When you were almost two hours late,” she says, with a look of amusement.

“I wasn’t late. I disappeared. This is the thing I need to tell you.”

“Yes, before the flashers come.”

This time it’s her that bends at the knees, so the lion-shaped end of the see-saw rises and the dolphin-shaped end goes down. His feet do not quite hang in the air, because he is taller than her. The tips of his shoes maintain the lightest contact with the ground.

“My plane got in about seven o’clock. I took the metro straight to the centre of town. It was too early to feel hungry, but I found a café off the plaza and stayed there for as long as it took to drink a small coffee incredibly slowly, and when I came out I still had three hours to wait. I wandered up to the palace and found the place we were going to meet, but then I felt like I needed to walk. If I’d have tried to sit and wait I think I’d have chewed the inside of my face off.

“I followed the streets for a couple of hours. There was something cartoonish about everything, none of the colours looked real. All the cars stopping and going with the lights, the flashing green crosses of the pharmacies. I guess I was still spaced out from the journey. That unreal feeling you get from not sleeping, and suddenly finding yourself in another country. And sometimes I’d stop and look at something and get dizzy with anticipation. I found it incredible to believe that this was actually going to happen, that we were really going to meet. I had to keep reminding myself that you were also arriving here, that the street I was standing on connected, somehow – if you turned left and right in the right sequence – to the exact point where you were walking now. That somewhere in this city you were making your way towards me –both of us heading directly to this single point in time.

“I arrived back at the palace a few minutes before midday. Earlier the square had been almost empty, but now there were thousands of people milling around. That accordion player with the hat was playing the same tune over and over. A big crowd of tourists was around the fountain, and I walked round it a couple of times trying to see if you were there.

“It was your green scarf I spotted first. Once I’d recognised one thing, the rest of you sort of filled in around it. It startled me, you suddenly being there. You looked so much like yourself that I almost didn’t recognise you. I think I expected to see you so much that it came as a shock when I did. You were sitting not far away, looking in the opposite direction.

“I waited for you to turn around and see me. I knew you would sense that I was there, if I watched you long enough. But you didn’t turn your head. You were looking at something else.”

“I was watching the accordion player. He looked like a murderer.”

“For a moment, I thought I might have the wrong person. I kept expecting you to turn, but no matter how long I stared at you, you didn’t seem to feel a thing. People were elbowing past on all sides, I was getting in everyone’s way. I was like a stick stuck in a stream, the current rising up around it, trying to pull it along. That’s how I felt, standing there.

“I couldn’t understand why you didn’t look around. I was about to give up, go over and put my hand on your shoulder. But then, this thought appeared in my head. I have no idea where it came from: ‘You could just walk away now, and she’d never know you were there.’

“And then, out of nowhere, I was gripped by fear. I suddenly didn’t want you to turn around. I had an overwhelming desire to conceal myself behind other people – to prevent myself being seen. And so I walked away.”

“I see,” she says.

The air is blowing cooler now. The swings move with the evening breeze, and occasionally the roundabout creaks, as if it is about to attempt a rotation. They are no longer under the cable-cars here – and there are no clouds in the sky – so the shadows that slide off her face and arms are cast by a stand of skinny pines beyond the green and purple fence that marks the play-park’s boundary.

The pines move with a slow, baffled motion, swaying against one other. Their trunks are almost grey with dust, and here and there a plastic bag has snagged in the sharp branches. He watches them out of the corner of his eye; this way they don’t quite look like trees at all.

“At first I thought I’d just walk around the palace, take a moment to collect myself, then approach the fountain from the other side, the direction you were looking in. And then I thought I’d just go down the street a little way. But as I was still thinking these things I found I had reached the end of the street, taken a left turn, taken a right, and was walking in the opposite direction. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, thinking: ‘I’ll turn around up here, as soon as I get to the corner.’ But I didn’t turn around. I kept going.

“I walked for maybe fifteen minutes. The distance wasn’t so far. I found a quiet café-bar, sat at a table near the back, and ordered a spinach omelette and a salad.

“I stayed there all that time, not thinking. The food was pretty good. I ate my meal with a couple of glasses of beer. I sat for a long time afterwards concentrating on the old film posters on the walls, trying to read a newspaper. And then I still felt a little bit hungry, so I ordered a crème brulee.

“That crème brulee was really something special. You’d appreciate it. I’ll take you there. My favourite part about a crème brulee is cracking the caramelised sugar on top – it makes a sound like stepping on a pane of glass. Did you know they have to use a miniature blowtorch to get it like that?”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” she says.

“The barman seemed amused by me. He was an old guy with watery eyes and an amazingly long upper lip, like a camel or a horse. When I paid up, all he did was narrow his eyes so the wrinkles spread around the tops of his cheeks and nose. He gave me a little book of matches with the name of the café on it. I forget it now. I left it in our room.

“And then I had a go on the fruit machine. I lost about ten euros.”

Now there is only the sound of the pines. The trunks bump without rhythm. Neither looks at the other; her eyes are focused on his knees, and he is studying the peeling blue paint of the wooden dolphin face.

“What were you thinking?” she asks, still not looking, in a careful, curious way.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything. Not anything at all. I could have stayed at that table all day, never turned on my phone, gone home the next morning, never seen you again. How easy it would have been to carry on sitting there, without being awake – and then to go on to live like this, forever. I forgot my life was real. That’s how it is when you disappear.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I guess I woke up. Or realised I was awake all the time. Just like it happened on the plane. Because you’re the only thing that’s real.”

“You were almost two hours late. I could have left, you know.”

“I know.”

“You told me you got lost.”

“Have you ever had a feeling you’ve entered into another life? Another life that isn’t yours – although it may closely resemble yours – and you don’t know how you got there, or how anything could possibly be different? Like something has been substituted without you knowing it. Perhaps, when you leave your house one day, some people sneak in and replace everything, clothes, books, lampshades, wallpaper, every single object you own, with a replica that’s identical in every way – right down to the crumbs on the kitchen table, the crack in your favourite plate. So when you get back, everything is the same – and yet, you get this feeling.”

“Yes,” she says. “I felt that too.”

“I know how we can avoid it now.”

“Fine. But what happened to the cow?” She slips abruptly from the see-saw so the lion-side hits the ground with a thump. She reaches out and takes his hand, tugs his arm until he rises. “I’m not letting you off like this. You can’t just say you don’t know what happened. What bullshit. That isn’t good enough.”

“It fell out of your life and into mine.” This is what he considers saying, as they leave the play-park and the pines and start walking quickly back towards the hangar from where the cable cars leave. “It wasn’t there for very long – it falls too fast for that.”

“It was devoured by butterflies,” is what he says instead. The shadows are merging with each other, but the cars are still strung out in the sky. “Those flesh-eating ones, with the black and white wings. A plague of them blew in from the sea. They kept it suspended in midair and stripped it to the bone in seconds. You’re lucky they went for the cow and not you. It’s a painful, ticklish way to go.”

“And what about the bones?” she asks thoughtfully as they hand their ripped-off ticket stubs over, and the next empty car bumps into the hangar where they stand, waiting.

“They devoured those too. They work that fast. Powdered them into a fine dust that drifted away with the wind.”

The carnie with the cigarette slows the car and holds it steady. He opens the door with a weary gesture, motions with his thumb.

The slow-spinning wheel revolves on its hub. The greasy cable whines above their heads, straining to pull them into the air.

“Yes,” she says, climbing inside. “That sounds possible.”

And on the journey back to the city, swaying across the dimming park where flashers lurk in their dozens below, they will not speak about what’s next. For now it’s enough to sit back and watch, through the smeared plastic pane, the palace and cathedral ahead of them grow gradually larger and more distinct. About halfway over, they will start laughing about something else altogether. So they’ll never glance back at this point to see what is plunging through the air behind them: the heaviest of all possible shapes in freefall through the sky, the buildings, towards the singularity of its shadow. They may feel a displacement of the air – even, in distant days, a cold wind – but they will never feel the soft impact of its landing.