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than listened to. And Tim’s were pointless, shambolic episodes: fragments too scattered to shore up any ruin. But last night, and the night before, he’d dreamed about the woman.
    The first time had felt like an act of infidelity. Something very like guilt clouded him that morning; dogged him all day until he burned it off with alcohol, the way Emma used to sear their Christmas pudding – infidelity? It was Emma who’d betrayed him. He was still here. At which the usual bout of hatred and self-pity enveloped him: the usual old snake, swallowing its own tail. It took the second dream to make him think about the dream itself.
    Which had been almost eventless. They had not been in the hotel bar where they’d met, but in a cottage somewhere. She had her back to him, and he had been asking a question which had seemed, at the point of asking, to carry the weight of his entire life, but whose import he’d immediately forgotten. And when she turned, any answer she might have made became irrelevant, because all that mattered was the bruise, which was no longer a slight discoloration under one eye but a whole continent of purples, blacks and oranges; a bruise which blazoned not only the blow which had made it, but all the other blows suffered by the same body. That there had been others, he had no doubt. Perhaps it was that sense of certainty that woke him: it was an unfamiliar feeling these days. And dreaming the same dream twice was strange, too – but perhaps, in fact, he hadn’t. Perhaps the dream had arrived with familiarity hardwired into it: trailer and movie at once. Just another retail con trick; one with the promise of a history attached.
    . . . His mind drifted. Concentration was hard to come by these days. His mind, in fact, didn’t drift: it took a predetermined route he was helpless to forbid. It began at his feet, stepped into the main road, and instantly hurled away into the traffic like a paper bag in a slipstream; whistled past shops so they blurred into a single endless mall: one huge window, plastered with insincere offers. Then on to the ring road: past estates bridges garden centres; skirting small communities long islanded by traffic. Through green lights red lights amber; over roundabouts; shaving corners. On to the London road, and a sudden shift of gear before rocketing away to what waited: a long sloping curve towards the motorway . . . And here, at this junction, somewhere under the road’s ever-scribbled-on surface, there would be skidmarks still. Like the plastic slate he’d drawn on as a child, which could be wiped clean repeatedly but retained every mark on its backing board: an incoherent mess of squiggles, each of which had meant something once . . . The skidmarks he was thinking of were Emma’s. What they meant was, she had lost control. They meant she was never coming back.
    He did not know how many cars used that stretch of road every day: easily thousands, though; tens of thousands. And he did not know how many people died on the roads every year: but hundreds, tens of hundreds. That vaguely appreciated big number was not information consciously acquired; it was simply part of the condition of life. In a motorized society, there will be a certain amount of collateral damage. Tim had always known that, just as he had known that every time he picked up a newspaper, he’d find some version of that same story. But he hadn’t expected to find himself in it, and Emma gone.
    But death was the smart bomb. Death could unerringly pick an individual from a crowd and obliterate her so particularly, so precisely, it was amazing any memory of her survived. As for those closest, they were left wondering what happened; the smoking crater beside them all that remained of their recent companion. And those approaching sirens heralded emergency counsellors, come to cut the survivors from the wreckage of their emotions.
    Tim wished he had a cigarette after all. But the nearest pack would be across this