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please note, with his hands crossed while he himself lay on the piano stool, but actually inverted, with his knuckles.
    He puts the record on the felt, and brings down the needle.
    Well, that’s not Slim Gaillard. That much I do know.
    A woman’s voice, soft and old and filled with emotion. She is not English. French? Or something more exotic? He isn’t sure.
    “I’m so sorry, Daniel.”
    A bucket of ice water over his head and down his neck. Hairs on his arms like guilty nightwatchmen, all awake. Impossible, impossible. A dead woman’s voice.
The
dead woman. House of Spork’s very own family ghost, speaking to him. It has to be. Who else would apologise to Daniel Spork by phonograph recording, made in some tiny booth in Selfridges for a few Imperial pennies? Who else would Daniel conceal in this bizarre way, discarding brother Slim and moving the label to this record so that no one would ever know what he had?
    Frankie.
    “I’m so, so sorry. I could not stay. I have work. It is the greatest thing I have ever done. The most important. It will change the world. The truth, Daniel. I swear it: the truth shall set us free!” Rich, splendid, throaty. An Edith Piaf voice. An Eartha Kitt voice. A voice filled with all the passion and regret of a refugee, and all the certainty of a prophet.
    “You must never tell. They will stop me. The thing I must do now … it will uproot so many old and rotted trees, and there are men who have made their houses in them. There are men cut from their wood. All the bows and arrows in the world are made of this, and I will bring it down. I will make us better than we are. We must be better than this!”
    Joe waits for her to say “I love you,” but she doesn’t, and the other side of the record is blank, an endless white noise spatter, like rain on old cast-iron guttering.

III

Going postal;
amid the frills and bunting;
not your average music box.
    E die Banister is feeling like a cow. More, she is conscious of sin. Not in any fleshy way, alas, but in her heart. She has transgressed against Joshua Joseph Spork. She has, in fact, stitched him up like a kipper, albeit for the good of mankind and the betterment of the human race. She persuaded herself that it was not personal. That this was the best way. Now, gazing at the little toy soldier he repaired so deftly, and recalling the stifled disappointment on his face when he saw that that was all she proposed to show him, she feels wicked. She is increasingly certain that some part of her has borne a grudge for longer than J. Joseph Spork has been alive, and has chosen this method to revenge itself. Duty, love, idealism and spite all discharged at once. She contemplates her soul, and finds it wanting.
    “Bugger,” she tells Bastion. He looks back at her with rosy-coloured marbles, and snuffles. She believes she detects approbation, even reinforcement in his suffering face, but it could be wind. No doubt she will know shortly if it is.
    “Buggery bugger,” she says. She picks up the toy soldier and puts it back in the box without a glance. It’s too late to change horses. The deed is done. The wheels are in motion. Edie Banister, ninety years of age and a stalwart of the established order, has pushed the button on the revolution. She sighs again. It’s so odd to be a supervillain, and at her age, too.
    She has to admit privately that she may be mad. Although if so, it is a merciless, clear-sighted sort of madness and not at all what a lady might hope for. She has not lost her marbles or popped her garters, or any of the cosier sorts of madness she has observed in her contemporaries. She has, if anything, gone postal. She tries the expression on for size; it carries a sense of outrage, and fatigue.
    Yes. Edie Banister has gone postal. A very British sort of postal which does not involve shouting, but rather a sudden and total reverse of a lifetime’s perceptions. Although in truth, “sudden” is not entirely accurate. It happened