Phil tapped the microphone three times with one finger, which was how every Tuesday at the Shuttle began, and said, "Testing. One, two. Mandy, am I on?"
Behind the bar Mandy went on drying a pint glass. "You're on, Phil."
"I'm on." He breathed into it to make sure, and the speaker above the dartboard made a noise like a lorry crossing a cattle grid. "Ladies and gents. Welcome to the Shuttle quiz. Phones away, pens at the ready, no conferring with other tables, I'm looking at you, Shuttlecocks. Six rounds. Picture round's on your table, music round after the break. Let's see who we've got." He held the clipboard at arm's length, then further, then gave up and put his glasses on. "Usual Suspects, welcome back, champions. Shuttlecocks. Quizteama Aguilera, that's very good, that. And Lez Quiz-er-ables."
Alex Harding put his pen down.
"Lay," he said, at a volume meant for the table. "It's lay."
"He knows," said Mark.
"If he knew he'd say it."
"He knows, and he says it wrong anyway, because he's seventy-one and he's earned it." Mark leaned his chair back on two legs until it made the noise every chair in the Shuttle made. "Leave the man alone. He taught PE for thirty-five year. He's seen things."
Phil was squinting at the clipboard. He wore, as he wore every week, a Leeds Rhinos home shirt from a season none of them had been alive for, tucked into belted jeans. "And they've put a little hat on their E again," he said into the microphone. "What's that, love? Is that a smudge?"
Jenna put her hand up. She did it the way she did it in seminars, flat and straight, as if hailing a bus she had every right to. "It's an acute accent, Phil."
"It's a quiz, love, not a French exam."
A laugh went round the pub. The Usual Suspects, five retired teachers at the big table by the fire, laughed the loudest. The woman with the long grey plait lifted her glass of white wine an inch towards Jenna, which might have been sympathy.
"Without the accent it's just a noise," said Jenna, to the table now.
"It's a noise either way," said Alex.
"Right," said Jenna. She turned in her chair to face him properly. She had a pencil through her hair, holding it up, and Alex was fairly sure she'd forgotten it was there, because she'd come straight from Special Collections and the pencil had come with her. "Right. So it's a noise to you. Fine. But the joke only works if the É's there, because the joke is Les Misérables, which has an accent, which is the entire —"
"Nobody can type it."
"I can type it."
"You can type it because you've got it saved on your phone."
"I've got it saved on my phone," said Jenna, "because I'm a person who cares about things."
"You've got it saved," said Sarah, from the end of the table, "because you made us change our name to it in October and you've had to type it every week since. She practised, Alex. I watched her. Hold alt and something."
"Thank you, Sarah."
"I'm on your side, bab. I'm just saying you practised."
Mark brought his chair down onto four legs. He cleared his throat, and set his elbows on the table, and bent his head over an imaginary clipboard, holding it at arm's length, then further. When he spoke, he spoke out of the very bottom of his chest, slowly, with every consonant given the attention due to a misbehaving Year 9.
"And what's this little hat, love," said Mark, as Phil. "Is that a smudge."
Sarah laughed so hard she had to put her lemonade down. It was a big laugh, much bigger than she was, the laugh of a woman twice her size at a wedding, and the Shuttlecocks looked over. Jenna was laughing too, against her will, with her hand over her mouth. Alex didn't laugh. He wrote Q1 on the answer sheet, in the margin, and underlined it, and the corner of his mouth went, and Mark saw it go and pointed at him across the table with the pen.
"He's cracking."
"I'm not."
"He's going. Look at him."
"Question one," said the real Phil, and the pub went quiet in the way it only did for questions, a quiet with fifty people's pens in it. "Listen carefully. Listen carefully. Which planet in our solar system has the most moons?"
Alex had written Saturn before Mark finished saying Jupiter, and Mark watched him do it with the look of a man who would bring it up later if it turned out wrong.
The sheet in his back pocket crackled when he moved. He'd folded it into four that morning in the hallway at Tanner Street, standing in his coat with the door still open, and put it there so it wouldn't be in his bag where anyone looking for a charger might find it. It was a letter from the Registry. It said that the University had received a report concerning work submitted by another student, and that he had been identified as a possible source of material contained in it, and it asked him to contact the Academic Integrity team within ten working days. He'd read it twice on the step and once on the bus up to campus and once in the Service Desk office, in the toilet, with the lid down. Then he'd done an eight-to-twelve shift, eleven password resets and a girl who couldn't find her Pharmacology module on Hollin because she was looking at last year's, and a monitoring alert about a service account he'd closed before his tea had gone cold. He'd been fine. He was fine now.
They dropped one in the first round, because the answer was Wakefield and Mark said Pontefract with such certainty that nobody had the heart. "That's Pontefract's fault, that," Mark said, when Phil read it out, which didn't mean anything and made Sarah laugh again.
Round two was History. Jenna leaned forward when Phil said it, as she did every week, and pulled the pencil out of her hair and pushed it back through without seeming to know she'd done it.
"Question one. In what year was the first national census taken in England and Wales?"
"Eighteen-oh-one," said Jenna instantly.
Alex wrote it down. "Biggest dataset in the country, and they started it to find out how many men they could put in the army."
"It's not a dataset."
He looked up.
"It's not a dataset," Jenna said again. "It's conversations. Some poor sod in a hat knocks on a door and asks a woman how many people live there, and she says a number. Maybe it's true. Maybe her sister's lodging with her and doesn't want the landlord knowing, or the lodger's Irish and doesn't fancy being written down. So she says a number, and he writes it down. That's not data, that's testimony. It's what one woman told one man on a doorstep in March when he wanted to get home for his tea."
"That's what data is."
"No, it's what data's made of. Which is my point."
"Everything's made of something. A number's still a number. If you've got enough doorsteps, the lodgers come out in the wash."
"The lodgers," said Jenna, "do not come out in the wash. The lodgers are the wash. That's who you lose. Every single time. You go, oh, it averages out, and what averages out is the Irish lad in the back bedroom, and two hundred years later someone like you looks at the spreadsheet and goes, well, nobody lived there."
"Somebody like me."
"Somebody exactly like you."
"Question two," said Phil.
"You can't do anything with a woman on a doorstep," said Alex. "You can do something with a number."
"You can listen to her. That's what historians do, Alex. You'd know that if you'd ever once done the reading in Philosophy of Science instead of just turning up and being clever at it."
"I do the reading."
"You skim the reading. I've seen you. You do it in the lecture. You read the first and last paragraph and the bit with a graph in."
"That's the efficient bit."
"Question three," said Phil, very loudly, and then, into the microphone, "Lez Quizerables, are you with us? Because I'm not saying question two again."
The pub laughed. Mark had his hand spread on the sheet and was looking at the two of them with the expression of a man whose dog had got into a fight in a park.
"What was question two?" said Alex.
"I don't know," said Mark. "I were watching you."
"Sarah?"
Sarah was looking at the door. She looked back. "Sorry. What?"
They didn't get question two. They found out at the end of the round that it had been about the Corn Laws and that Jenna knew it and would have got it in her sleep. She found that out at the same time as the rest of them, when Phil read the answers out, and she shut her eyes.
"That's on you," said Mark, pointing the pen at Alex.
"It's on both of us."
"It's on him," said Jenna, with her eyes still shut.
"See," said Mark. "That's an integral, that."
Alex didn't answer. The integral meant he'd been right and been a dick about it. It went back three years, to a stairwell in Lister Halls and a phone call to his mum, and he didn't like hearing it in front of Jenna, even though she couldn't know what it meant. He knew that was why Mark had said it. It was fair.
Round three was Sport, which was Mark's, and they went into the break a point behind. The woman with the grey plait came past their table on the way to the toilets and said, "Close tonight," pleasantly, the way you'd say it to children, and Mark said, "It is, Ruth, it is," because he knew all their names. He'd spent an evening at their table at Easter learning cribbage from a retired head of Geography, and come home saying they were the best people in Brackenford and it was a shame they had to be destroyed.
Sarah stood up. She put her coat on, the grey one with the hood, and pushed her chair in with one hand and said "sorry" to the chair when it caught the table leg.
"I'm going to head," she said.
"It's the break," said Mark.
"I know. I've got a Pharmaceutics test in the morning. Class test. I should do another hour."
"You'll miss the music round," said Jenna.
She said it lightly. She was looking at her drink. Alex noticed it the way he noticed numbers that didn't sum: because it was the kind of thing Jenna would ordinarily say with a lot more performance, an outraged hand on her heart, you'd abandon us in our hour of need. She said it to her drink, and then she looked up at Sarah, and Sarah looked back at her with her chin up a little.
"I'll live," said Sarah.
"You'll live," said Mark. "We won't. That's four points walking out the door. That's the eighties intros. Who's going to do the eighties intros?"
"You can do them."
"I'll say Simple Minds for all of them."
"Then say Simple Minds." Sarah reached into her coat pocket and dealt a mint imperial onto the table in front of each of them, one, two, three, like cards. "Go on. Win one. Just once, for me."
"For you," said Mark, and put his hand on his heart.
She went. The door let in a wet draught that smelt of chips, and through the window by their table Alex watched her pass under the streetlight and cross to the bus stop opposite, where the 7 went up to the top of campus, instead of turning up Wyke Road towards the Lanes and the flat she shared with Jenna. The library was at the top of the hill. So was the Pharmacy building. It made sense. Sarah revised the way other people smoked, in short furious breaks from everything else.
He looked at Jenna. Jenna was looking at the door after it had closed. Then she unwrapped her mint imperial and crunched it, which you weren't supposed to do with mint imperials, and said, "Whose round."
It was Mark's. Alex could have told her that without thinking: Mark this week, Jenna last week, himself the week before, plus Sarah's lemonade the week before that, because she'd left her purse at the flat. Mark went to the bar, and within thirty seconds the old man in the flat cap beside him was laughing. You could put Mark down in the middle of a field, Alex sometimes thought, and come back in twenty minutes to find he'd been asked to the field's birthday. He came back with the drinks and three bags of scampi fries, and the picture round was famous people's ears, and Jenna and Mark both said that one was Prince Charles at the same moment and shook hands on it.
Phil came back to the microphone after twelve minutes and four seconds, which Alex knew because he'd started the stopwatch when Phil sat down, without deciding to. It was a black resin Casio with a light that didn't work, the same model his granddad had worn, still fourteen ninety-nine in Argos. Timing things was something to do with his hands that wasn't biting his nails.
The music round was a disaster. Mark said Simple Minds for the first one, which was Duran Duran. He said Simple Minds for the second one, which was Simple Minds, and stood up and roared, and got shushed by the whole pub. They got four out of ten. The Usual Suspects got nine.
"She'd have had all them," said Mark sadly.
"She'd have had seven," said Alex.
"How d'you know?"
"She averages seven on music. Seven point three."
Mark turned in his chair and looked at him properly. "Do you know my average?"
"Do you want to know your average?"
"No," said Mark, and turned back. "Yes. No. Don't tell me."
They clawed it back in General Knowledge and went into the last round a point behind. Mark had his sleeves pushed up. Even Alex had sat forward. It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. They were never going to win; the Usual Suspects had a hundred and sixty years of University Challenge between them. It was still close, and close was a thing he could feel in his stomach, and that was rarer than he'd have admitted.
The last round was Science and Nature. They got eight out of ten. Phil collected the full answer sheets, six rounds stapled in the corner, and took them to the bar to mark under the lamp by the till with Mandy's red felt tip, because, he said, there was no point trusting a Shuttlecock with a final.
"We've got it," said Mark. "I can feel it in me water."
They waited. Mark folded a scampi-fry packet into a tiny triangle, and Jenna drew an owl on a beer mat, and Alex checked his phone and then his watch, which said the same thing. It was 22:21. Thirteen hours since he'd closed that ticket. Fourteen since he'd read the letter on the step. He'd been fine.
Phil marked quickly, licking his thumb between sheets, and then had to put the microphone down to find his glasses.
"Right. The results. Fourth, Quizteama Aguilera. Third, the Shuttlecocks." Some applause, mostly from the Shuttlecocks. "And in second place."
Mark gripped Alex's forearm.
"With fifty-four points," said Phil, "and for the eleventh week on the bounce, which I think is a record for this pub, lads, someone ring the Telegraph: Lez Quiz-er-ables!"
The pub cheered. It was a genuine cheer. The pub liked them. The pub liked watching them lose. Mark let go of Alex's arm and put his forehead down on the table, on the scampi-fry triangle, and lay there.
"Which means," said Phil, "with fifty-six, your winners for the umpteenth time, the Usual Suspects!"
The Usual Suspects raised their glasses. The woman with the plait, Ruth, looked over and lifted hers to Les Quizérables in particular, and Jenna raised her white wine back, and that was apparently something they did now.
"Eleven," said Mark into the table.
"Two points," said Alex. "Corn Laws and Duran Duran."
"Don't."
"That's two points exactly."
"Don't say it like that. Don't make it a sum. If you make it a sum I'll think about it all week." Mark sat up. There was a crumb on his cheek.
Phil came round with the marked sheets, the way he always did at the end, to hand them back so teams could see where they'd gone wrong and argue about it on the way home. He stopped at their table and put theirs down in front of Jenna with a flourish. "Eleven," he said, not into the microphone. "You're my favourites. Don't tell the Suspects."
"We won't tell the Suspects, Phil," said Mark.
"Good lads." He patted the sheet. Then he went on to the Shuttlecocks.
Jenna turned the stapled sheets over. Phil had marked each round with a red tick or a red cross and written the round totals in the margin, and on the back of the last sheet, underneath Science and Nature, he'd written the grand total and circled it twice: 54, and beside it, WELL DONE!!, and a smiley face with a quiff, which was his signature.
Under that there was another line.
Jenna stopped moving. Alex saw her stop. It was like watching someone in a corridor feel for a light switch in the wrong place.
He leaned across and turned the sheet to read it.
It was written in brown ink. Not a brown felt tip: ink, the thin kind that sat in the grain of the paper and had spread very slightly at the downstrokes. The handwriting was beautiful. That was the first thing he thought, and he was embarrassed by it later. Every letter joined to the next one in a long, even slope, the capitals looped and swelling, the thin strokes so thin they nearly weren't there. It looked like the writing on an old certificate in a frame. It looked like something you'd need a special pen and a year of practice for.
Candidates are reminded that attendance at the Preliminary is compulsory. 13th inst.
"What's that?" said Mark.
Nobody said anything.
Mark pulled the sheet towards him and read it aloud, slowly, the way he read out the instructions on flatpack. "Candidates are reminded. That attendance. At the preliminary." He looked up. "Preliminary what?"
"Phil," said Alex.
Phil was two tables over, telling the Shuttlecocks about the Corn Laws. He came back with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.
"What's up, lads, you're not contesting? I don't do appeals after half ten."
"Did you write this?"
Phil put his glasses on and bent over the sheet. He looked at it for a while. "Did I heck," he said. "I can't write like that. I were a PE teacher." He picked it up and held it closer to the light. "That's lovely, that. Who's done that? That's like a wedding invitation."
"It was under your marks," said Alex. "It wasn't there when we handed it in."
"Well, I've had it in my hand the whole time, son. Under the lamp there. Ask Mandy." He turned it over, as if the answer might be on the front. "Is it a joke? Is this one of yours?"
"It's not one of ours."
"Well, it's not one of mine." Phil put it down. He looked faintly put out, the way people do when there's a puzzle in their pub they haven't been told about. "Brown ink. Who uses brown ink? Mandy! Have you got a brown pen?"
"I've got a red pen and you've got it," said Mandy.
Phil spread his hands. "There you go. Mystery. You could do a round on it." He went off towards the bar, still shaking his head, saying to somebody, "Like a wedding invitation."
Mark was grinning now. Alex knew the grin. It was the one he did on the pitch when the other team's prop called him something about his hairline: delight that someone had started it.
"Harrison," he said.
"Harrison's not here."
"Exactly. That's how good it is." Mark tapped the sheet. "Josh Harrison. I'm telling you. He's been on at me since freshers about this pub. He thinks quiz is for virgins. He'll have got one of them in the second row to slip summat in when we weren't looking."
"Which Josh," said Alex. "Our Josh is in Stuttgart."
"Not our Josh. Harrison. Our Josh couldn't organise this if you gave him a year and a whiteboard." Mark leaned back, pleased with the theory, already liking how it sounded. "And his girlfriend does calligraphy. She does it for weddings. She's got an Etsy."
"Has she?"
"Probably. They all have." He picked the sheet up again and read the line again with relish. "Thirteenth inst. What's inst? Is that like an Instagram thing?"
"Instant," said Jenna.
They both looked at her. She hadn't moved. She was sitting very upright with her hands in her coat pockets, and the coat was the big charity-shop one with the elbows gone that she wore everywhere, and her hands in the pockets were moving slightly, as if she were holding something in there.
"Instant," she said again. "It means this month. It's what they put in old letters. Your letter of the fourth inst. The fourth of the current month." She looked at the sheet without touching it. "So it's the thirteenth of this month."
"Which is Friday," said Mark. "Friday the thirteenth. Oh, he's good. Oh, he's good. That's the giveaway, that. That's Harrison all over. He thinks he's in a film."
"How do you know that," said Alex, "about inst?"
Jenna shrugged. "I work in an archive. Every letter before about nineteen-fifty says inst. It's like knowing what kind regards means." She took one hand out of her pocket and picked up her wine and drank some of it and put it down. "Anyway. Congratulations. Eleven."
That was all. She didn't say anything else. Mark went on about Harrison, and Harrison's girlfriend, and what he was going to say to Harrison at training on Thursday, which was nothing, because the best thing was to say nothing and let him wonder; and he did the Phil voice again, I can't write like that, I were a PE teacher, and it was perfect, it was even better than the first one, and Jenna smiled at it. But she didn't laugh, and she didn't do a voice back, and she didn't bring up the É or the census or the ears, and she didn't look at the sheet again. Alex had sat across from her in that seminar room for seven weeks. He'd never once known her not to have the last word about a document.
He picked up the answer sheet. He looked at the line once more, under Phil's smiley face with the quiff. The ink had dried. It had a faint shine where the strokes were thickest.
Then he unstapled the last page from the others, folded it twice along Phil's crease, and put it in his wallet, behind his bank card, where he kept the receipts he meant to do something about.
"Souvenir?" said Mark.
"Evidence," said Alex.
"Of what?"
"Of Harrison," said Alex, and Mark laughed and slapped the table, and the triangle of scampi-fry packet jumped and fell on the floor.
* * *
They left at twenty to eleven, into a fine rain that wasn't falling so much as hanging about on Wyke Road waiting for someone to walk through it. Mark went ahead. He had his phone up to his mouth and was recording a voice note to the first-team group chat, walking backwards uphill so he could do it with his whole body.
"Harrison," he was saying. "Harrison, I know. I just want you to know that I know. That's all. Respect, honestly. Lovely handwriting. Tell your bird. That's all I'm saying." He stopped recording and turned round to Alex and Jenna with his arms wide. "That's me saying nothing."
"That's you saying a lot," said Jenna.
"That's me saying nothing strategically."
He turned back and went on up the hill, already recording another one. Alex fell into step with Jenna, because it would have been strange not to. They walked like that every Tuesday, the four of them in twos up Wyke Road, Mark and Sarah in front, the way they'd walked when they were going out and had gone on walking since April out of habit or stubbornness, and Alex and Jenna behind because they were what was left. Tonight it was three. It came out lopsided.
"Is Sarah all right?" he said.
Jenna looked at him sideways. "Why?"
"You went funny when she left."
"I didn't go anything." She put her hands in her coat pockets. "She's got a test. She gets stressed. You'd know that if you ever asked her anything that wasn't about the music round."
"I ask her things."
"Name one thing you've asked Sarah this term."
He thought about it, honestly, because she'd know if he didn't. "Whether she wanted a lemonade."
"There you go," said Jenna, and something in her shoulders let go, as if he'd proved a point that excused her from a different one.
"Can I see it again?" said Jenna.
"See what?"
"Alex."
He took out his wallet and took out the sheet and unfolded it and held it under the next streetlight. She didn't take it. She took something else out of her coat pocket first, and it was a pair of white cotton gloves, thin ones, slightly grey at the fingertips, and she put them on, one and then the other, tugging them down between her fingers. Then she took the sheet from him by its edges.
Alex looked at the gloves.
"Habit," said Jenna, without looking up. "Celia's got a thing about fingerprints. You'd do it too, if she'd shouted at you in front of a visiting professor from Leiden."
"It's a quiz sheet."
"It's a sheet of paper with ink on it." She tilted it. She held it so the streetlight came at it from the side, almost flat, and he saw the brown line come up off the page, the downstrokes very slightly raised and shining. She looked at it for longer than she'd looked at anything all evening. Then she took out her phone, still in the gloves, which didn't work on the screen, so she had to take one off with her teeth, and photographed it: once flat, once with the light raking across it, once very close on the 13th inst.
"Why are you doing that?"
"Because it's a good hand," she said. "It's a really good hand. Nobody writes like that any more. I want to show someone at work."
"Who?"
"Someone at work, Alex." She put the glove back on. "Can I have it?"
"No."
She looked up at that. "Why not?"
"Because it's ours."
"It's mine as much as it's yours. It's the team's. I'm the team captain."
"We don't have a captain."
"I wrote the name on the sheet. That's captaincy." She held it out to him, though. She held it out by the very corner, and he took it, and folded it back along Phil's crease and put it behind his bank card. She watched him do it. "You're being weird about a quiz sheet."
"You put gloves on for it."
"Habit," she said again, and walked on.
Ravelston Terrace went off to the left just before the steps, a row of narrow houses with shops underneath, and on the corner Shah's Pizza & Grill was still open, the fryer going, a lad in a red polo shirt leaning on the counter watching cricket on his phone. Jenna stopped under the sign. Above it, the two windows of her and Sarah's flat were dark. The kitchen light was off and Sarah's bedroom light was off, and the curtains in Sarah's window weren't drawn, which meant she wasn't in.
Jenna looked up at the windows. Alex watched her look.
"She'll be in the library," he said.
"I know where she'll be." She got her keys out. "Night, Harding."
"Night."
"Tell Mark to stop sending Harrison voice notes. He'll get himself sent off."
"He doesn't listen to me."
"He listens to nobody but you," said Jenna, and opened the street door beside the pizza shop with her shoulder, the way you had to, and went up the stairs inside without turning the light on.
Alex stood under the sign a moment longer than he needed to. The lad in the red polo shirt looked up from the cricket and nodded at him, and he nodded back. Then he went up the Spinner Street steps two at a time, as he always did, a hundred and twelve of them, which he'd counted in his first week and timed in his second and not been able to stop timing since. He didn't look at his watch at the top. He knew it would be under a minute.
Mark was waiting at the top, by the handrail, finishing a voice note. "And another thing," he was saying into it. "No. That's all. That's genuinely all." He put the phone away. "What were you doing?"
"Walking Jenna home."
"Walking Jenna home," said Mark, in a voice.
"Shut up."
"I never said owt."
"You said it in a voice."
"I've got a lot of voices," said Mark comfortably, and put his arm round Alex's neck, heavy as a sandbag, and walked him the last fifty yards along Tanner Street like that, not letting go when Alex shoved him, both of them nearly going over a recycling box outside number eight.
Number fourteen smelt of damp and the toast Alex had made that morning, and the boiler had gone off again, so the radiator in the hall was cold under Mark's coat when he threw it over the banister. Mark kicked the boiler on his way past the kitchen cupboard where it lived. It came on with a whump. He didn't stop walking. It was the most mechanically sympathetic thing Alex had ever seen anyone do.
The kitchen was small and yellow and had a table in it that Alex had covered in September with the bins rota. He'd printed it on A3 at work and laminated it at the Union shop and taped it flat to the tabletop with brown packing tape, because the fridge, as he'd explained at the time, was a low-visibility surface. It had a column for each week of term and a row for each bin and a key in the corner. Under BLACK BIN (GENERAL), for the next six weeks, it said Mark, because in September Mark had swapped all his recycling weeks for Alex's general weeks, in a deal Mark had agreed to over a Pot Noodle and still didn't understand.
Alex put two slices of bread in the toaster and stood with his back against the counter. It was ten past eleven. He ate toast at eleven most nights, standing up. He'd tried to stop, because it was a thing his dad did, and he'd failed.
"It's Tuesday," he said.
"It is Tuesday," said Mark. He had his head in the fridge. "Well spotted. Have we got any of that chilli?"
"Bottom shelf. Behind the milk."
"Brilliant." Mark sniffed the tub and put it in the microwave without looking at the dial. Mark heated everything and froze nothing and believed, Alex thought, that a microwave was an oven that just wanted you to be happy. "Eleven," Mark said, watching the tub go round. "Eleven weeks. I keep thinking about it. One week, right, one week, they'll have a funeral or summat. One of them'll get a hip."
"That's a horrible thing to want."
"I don't want it. I'm saying statistically. You're always on about statistically." He watched the tub. "Not a bad hip. Just one that keeps them in for a Tuesday."
The toast came up. Alex buttered it standing over the sink, so the crumbs went in the sink. "It's Tuesday," he said again.
Mark turned round. He looked at Alex, and then at the table, and then at the laminated rota with his name on it under BLACK BIN, and then back at Alex.
"I'll do it in a bit," he said.
"Fine."
"I said I'll do it."
"I said fine."
"You said fine like it's on the spreadsheet."
"It is on the spreadsheet. That's what the spreadsheet's for."
The microwave pinged. Mark took the tub out with his bare fingers and swore and put it down on the rota, which was what the lamination was for, Alex supposed. Mark found a fork in the drying rack and stood across the table from him and ate the chilli out of the tub, and for a minute neither of them talked, and it was fine, it was a normal Tuesday minute in a kitchen with somebody you'd known three years and four months.
Then Mark said, "Our Carol's doing a whip-round for me mam's boiler."
Alex chewed.
"It went Sunday," Mark said. "Properly went. Bloke come out Monday and said it's not worth fixing, it's older than me, the heat exchanger's shot. She's been boiling kettles to wash her hair." He prodded the chilli. "New combi's nineteen hundred fitted. That's the cheap one. I've put three hundred in from the summer. Our Carol's put it on the family group, and our Lee's put in, and me nan's put in out of her pension, which she shouldn't have." He paused. "Carol said to ask you. She said, ask that Alex, he's had enough of your mam's Sunday dinners. Forty quid, she said. I said I'd ask." He looked up. "I'm asking. You can say no. It's not a thing."
Alex thought about the account.
He had two. One was the current account his maintenance loan went into, which had eighty-four pounds and some pence in it and would have until January, and which he showed people if anyone ever asked, which nobody did. The other was a savings account with an app on his phone he kept in a folder called Utilities. It had two thousand three hundred and eleven pounds and sixty pence in it. He knew it to the penny because he knew everything to the penny. Every pound in it had come from a client. On the first of the month a hundred and fifty of them went to Kayleigh so that Tyler and Ruby had school shoes and a winter coat, and she thought it came from the Service Desk, because he'd told her the Service Desk paid more than it did. The last payment in had been a hundred and eighty pounds on the nineteenth of October from a girl called Bethany Cole, for two thousand words on how psychologists measure attachment in infants, and two of the sentences in it, he was almost certain, had been his.
Not his like the rest of it. His like his. He'd lifted them from his own first-year essay for a Statistics in Society option, about what you lose when you measure a person, because he'd been tired, and because they were the best two sentences he'd ever written, and nobody was ever going to read that essay again. That was what the letter in his back pocket was. That was what possible source meant.
He thought about Bev's boiler being paid for with forty pounds of Bethany Cole.
"Sorry, mate," he said. "Skint till the loan comes in."
He pulled his front pockets inside out to show him, like a cartoon, the white linings hanging down. A receipt fell out of one and he picked it up off the floor. He didn't pull out the back pocket.
"Told her," said Mark.
He said it easily. He went back to the chilli. There was a gap after it, not long, in which Alex had the feeling, without being able to say why, that he was supposed to say something else. He didn't know what. He put the receipt on the counter and turned it over and it was from the Co-op on Wyke Road, milk and bread and teabags, four pounds twelve, which he'd paid and which was his half. He'd been meaning to write it down.
"How's Chloe?" he said instead.
"Chloe's fifteen," said Mark. "She's a nightmare. She's started saying literally about things that are not literally anything." He scraped the tub. "She said I look tired."
"You do look tired."
"Everyone looks tired, it's November."
Mark's phone went on the table, buzzing across the laminate towards the edge, and he caught it without looking, the way he caught everything. "It's our Owen," he said, and answered it, and put it on speaker and laid it on the rota between them, because his fingers were chilli.
"Big man!"
Owen's voice came out of the phone at a volume the phone hadn't been designed for. Behind it, Alex could hear a television and somebody running a tap.
"All right, our kid," said Mark. "It's gone eleven. Why are you awake?"
"I'm eighteen. I'm always awake. Listen. Listen, listen. I've got the Bunker Thursday."
"I know you've got the Bunker Thursday. You've told me nine times."
"I'm telling you a tenth. Twenty minutes, ten o'clock, before the DJ from Leeds. Twenty minutes, Mark. That's like six tracks if I don't talk. And I've got a nine o'clock Friday, and Saturday I've got the studio from ten, and the bus from me mam's is a nightmare, you know what the 504 is like, it took an hour and ten this morning, there were a sheep." He stopped for air. "So can I stop at yours? Thursday to Saturday? I'll be no trouble. I'll be like a ghost."
"Why can't you stop at Lister?"
"Because Lister's got no ceiling, Mark. I told you. Our kitchen ceiling came down Sunday. There's a man from Estates says it'll be ten days. They've put us all back with our mams like we're in Year 7."
There was a voice behind Owen's, a woman's, further away, raised to get over the tap. "Is that Mark?"
"It's Mark."
"Tell Mark I want you in bed by one."
"Mam wants me in bed by one."
"I heard," said Mark.
"And tell him to keep an eye on you," said the voice, closer now, and then it was right there, Carol Marsden, Bev's sister, who Alex had met four times and who on each occasion had looked at him as though he were a slightly damp coat someone had left on a chair. "Mark, love. You'll keep an eye on him."
"I'll keep an eye on him, Auntie Carol."
"He's not to be out till all hours."
"He's doing a gig, Carol. That's what gigs are."
"Then he's not to be out till all hours after it." The tap went off. "Is that Alex there?"
"Hello, Mrs Marsden," said Alex.
"Hello, love," said Carol, in the voice she kept for Mark's friends. "Did Mark ask you about —"
"I asked him," said Mark.
"Oh. Right." A short pause, about a second long. Alex could have timed it. "Well. Never mind. Right. Owen, bed."
"It's eleven."
"Bed."
The voice went away. Owen came back closer to the phone. "So can I?"
"You can have Josh's room," said Mark. "Bring a sheet. Don't touch his stuff."
"Legend. You're a legend. Alex, are you coming to the Bunker? Thursday? Ten o'clock?"
Alex looked at the phone on the rota. "Depends."
"On what?"
"On if I've got a shift."
"You don't have shifts at ten at night."
"I could."
"He's coming," said Mark.
"He's coming," said Owen happily. "Big man, did you win? At the quiz? Mam said it's your quiz night."
"Second," said Mark.
"Again? How many's that?"
"Eleven," said Alex and Mark together, and Mark looked at Alex and Alex looked at the toast.
"That's sad," said Owen. "That's genuinely sad, that." He went quiet, which with Owen meant thinking. "Eh, Friday's Friday the thirteenth. We should do summat."
"We're doing nowt," said Mark. "Friday I'm watching a film and going to bed. Bring your own crisps."
"Boring."
"Goodnight, Owen."
"Love you, big man. Love you, Alex."
"Night, Owen," said Alex, and Owen made a kissing noise down the phone and rang off.
Mark wiped his fingers on his trackies and put the phone in his pocket. He didn't look at Alex. He didn't need to. Alex had already started.
"Josh's room isn't ours to lend."
"Josh is in Stuttgart."
"Josh's stuff isn't in Stuttgart. Josh's stuff's in Josh's room. His decks are in there. His mattress is in there."
"Owen's not going to do owt to his mattress."
"He's eighteen."
"So were you. So was I. I'm not saying he won't eat crisps in it, I'm saying he won't do owt to it." Mark put the tub in the sink. "Josh sublet it to that Spanish lad for a month last year and never told us. We found out because the lad left his shoes. You weren't bothered then."
"I was bothered then. I didn't say anything then."
"Well, don't say anything now, then."
"It's three nights, and he'll be in at three in the morning off a gig, and you'll be up for training at seven, and I'll be the one he wakes up, because my room's next to Josh's. And if anything goes wrong, Carol thinks it's —"
"He's my cousin."
"I know he's your cousin."
"Then that's it." Mark's voice had gone shorter. He didn't raise it; he never raised it with Alex. He just stopped putting extra words in. "He's my cousin, he's got nowhere to go, he's got a gig, it's three nights. That's it."
Alex opened his mouth. He had more. He had the deposit and the clause in the tenancy agreement about guests, and the fact that Owen had broken the bathroom lock in September by being enthusiastic at it, and the fact that it wasn't Mark's room to lend any more than it was his, and he had the order he'd put them in, which went from weakest to strongest.
"Steak-bake," said Mark.
Alex shut his mouth.
It was a stupid word, and had been for three years. It came from the talent show on the last night of the Promise residential, from a sketch about a Greggs the two of them had written in a stairwell in forty minutes and performed to a hundred sixth-formers, and which had gone so catastrophically wrong that neither of them had ever described it to another human being. When either of them said it, it meant: I was there for that, and so were you, and this isn't worth it. It wasn't a joke. It worked like a fuse.
"Fine," said Alex.
"Thank you."
"I'm still right."
"You're always still right." Mark came round the table and took the last bit of toast off Alex's plate and ate it in one go. "That's the integral, that."
* * *
At six minutes to midnight Alex took the black bin out himself.
Mark had gone up to shower, and the pipes were doing the noise they did, a long knocking from somewhere inside the wall like a man shut in there with a spanner. The bin was in the back yard by the gate. Alex wheeled it down the passage between their house and number twelve, and out onto Tanner Street, and the street was steep enough that the bin wanted to go on down it without him, so he turned it side-on to the slope and wedged its wheels against the kerb with the half-brick that lived by the step for the purpose. All along the street the bins were already out, black and green and blue, leaning at the same angle against the same hill like a queue of people who'd been waiting a long time for a bus. The fog had come down the valley while they'd been in the kitchen. The streetlights at the bottom of the hill had haloes. Across the road the lad at number nine had his window open and was playing something with no tune and a lot of bass.
He stood on the step for a minute, not because he wanted to, but because it was the first minute he'd been on his own since the toilet at work.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Above him the bathroom window was open an inch for the steam, and through it he heard Mark's phone go as well, on the cistern where Mark propped it to play music in the shower, the music cutting out for the notification and coming back.
Alex took his phone out. It was 23:58. The notification on the lock screen said Examinations Office, and under it, in bold, the first line of a subject: HOL000 Practical Assessment, Session 113.
He stood on the step and opened it.
From: Examinations Office
To: Alex Harding
Subject: HOL000 Practical Assessment, Session 113
Dear Candidate,
You are entered for the Preliminary sitting of HOL000 (Practical Assessment), Session 113.
Date: Friday 13 November 2026
Commencement: Midnight
Duration: Six hours
Venue: Holloway Building, Examination Hall
Attendance is compulsory. Candidates are reminded of their obligations under the University's Examination Regulations. Successful completion will be recorded on your academic transcript.
Examinations Office
University of Brackenford
He read it twice. The second time he read it the way he read rubrics, one clause at a time, looking for the place where the person who'd written it had been careless. Midnight, on a Friday, meant either the first minute of Friday or the last; most people meant the last and some systems meant the first, and you had to look at the context to know, and there was no context. Successful completion. Of what? Practical. Session 113. There was no module code beginning with HOL in Maths, or anywhere else that he knew of, and he'd processed enrolment tickets for every department in the university.
Above him, the shower went off. The pipes gave a last knock and stopped.
Then Mark laughed.
It came out of the bathroom window into the fog, a real laugh, a big helpless one, and a door banged and feet came down the stairs fast, and Mark appeared at the end of the hall in a towel and nothing else, wet, with his phone held up in front of him like a trophy.
"Have you seen this?" he said down the hall. "Professor. Have you seen this?"
"I'm looking at it."
"The Preliminary. It's the Preliminary! He's done the emails an' all!" Mark was delighted. He came down the hall and stood dripping on the mat in the cold from the open door, not caring. "Harrison's got into the uni email. That's commitment, that. That's dedication. I'm almost proud of him. Thirteenth inst! Friday the thirteenth! He's made it a whole thing."
"It's from the real exams address."
"Course it is. That's what makes it good."
"No, I mean." Alex came up the step into the hall and shut the door behind him. "It looks like it's from the real address."
"That's what I said." Mark was typing on his phone with his thumb, water dripping off his elbow onto the screen. "I'm putting it in the chat. I'm putting it in our chat, I'm not putting it in the rugby chat, I'm not giving him the satisfaction."
Alex's phone went in his hand. The group was called LES QUIZÉRABLES, with the É, because Jenna had renamed it in October and nobody else knew how to change it back. Mark's screenshot came up, and under it Mark had typed HARRISON STRIKES AGAIN 😂😂😂 preliminary mate, and then, immediately, did you lot all get it??
Sarah answered first. yes!! is this a phishing thing?? kath at work says never click the links x
Then did you click the links mark
there are no links, typed Mark. thats the beauty of it sar
Alex watched the chat. He watched the little line at the bottom of the screen that said who was in it, and the little ticks that said who had read what. Jenna had read it. Jenna was always first in the group chat. She replied to things while they were still being typed; she replied to things before they were sent, practically, with a gif of a woman in a period drama fainting. She'd read Mark's screenshot at 23:59. Nothing came back.
At 00:00 the phone's clock rolled over, and Alex's thumb, on his other hand, found the button on the side of his watch and pressed it, the way other people cracked their knuckles.
At 00:04 Jenna wrote: the rugby lads have discovered the exams office. god help us all
Mark laughed again and showed Alex the screen, which Alex had already seen. Then he went back upstairs to put some clothes on, leaving wet footprints on the stairs that would still be there in the morning, and Alex sat down at the kitchen table on the rota and opened his laptop.
He opened the email in the browser version of the university mail, and found the menu, and chose View message source, and the clean white email turned into what it actually was, a long grey page of machine text, the envelope instead of the letter.
He read the headers from the bottom up, as he'd been taught at the Service Desk, because that was the order things happened in. A phishing email had a story in its headers: a server in a country nobody was in, a relay with a name made of random letters, a moment where it crossed from outside to inside and got stamped external. This had none of that. It had been born inside the university and passed between two internal servers he knew by name, and the authentication checks at each step said pass, pass, pass, as boringly as on the email about the library's opening hours. Near the top, in among the lines nobody ever read, there was one that said which system had generated it. X-Mailer: Unity Notification Service. And under that, which account had asked Unity to send it.
X-Unity-Sender: HOLREG
Alex sat and looked at that.
He'd seen it before. He'd seen it this morning.
It had come into the Service Desk queue at nine fourteen, between a password reset and a girl who couldn't find Pharmacology, one of the automated tickets that the monitoring system raised on its own, twenty or thirty a day, most of them nothing. INC-0418822. Scheduled notification job flagged for review. Service account HOLREG has queued 13 notifications for 10/11/2026 23:58. Owning module has no active department. Please review. He'd clicked through. HOLREG was a legacy account, created in 2011, with no owner he could see. It belonged to some old import, some migration nobody had cleaned up, one of a hundred dead accounts that lived in Unity like coats in a lost-property box. Thirteen notifications from a dead account to nobody in particular. He'd typed Legacy service account, no active module; config noise, no action required in the resolution box and closed it, and gone back to his tea, which was still warm.
He'd closed it in about eleven seconds. He remembered being pleased with how fast.
Upstairs, Mark was singing something in the bedroom, badly, the way he sang in the car.
Alex took his glasses out of the laptop bag and put them on, and they made the screen sharp, and the line didn't change. X-Unity-Sender: HOLREG. Thirteen notifications. 23:58.
Mark came down in a T-shirt and his trackies and leaned in the kitchen doorway, rubbing his head with a towel. "You're still on that."
"It's internal," said Alex. "The headers. It wasn't spoofed. It came out of Unity."
"So Harrison knows someone in IT."
"Maybe."
"So it's someone at the uni."
"Maybe."
"So it's a better wind-up." Mark shrugged with the towel. "Brilliant. I'll give him that. Ten out of ten for effort." He watched Alex's face. "Al. It's a wind-up. They're sending us to the Holloway Building at midnight on Friday the thirteenth with a message in fancy writing. It's a ghost train. It's a ghost train they've built for us because we go to a pub quiz, and they think that's hilarious. Which, to be fair."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I said I know."
"You've got your work face on."
"I haven't got a work face."
"You've got your glasses on in the kitchen," said Mark. "That's your work face." He threw the towel over his shoulder. "I'm going to bed. I've got Geotechnics at nine and I've not done the reading."
"Read the first paragraph and the last paragraph and the bit with the graph in."
"Is that what you do?"
"Apparently."
Mark went. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and leaned back round the door frame with one hand on it.
"Ta for the bin," he said.
Alex didn't look up. "It was on the spreadsheet."
"I know it were," said Mark, and went up, and his door shut, and after a minute the house was quiet except for the boiler, which ticked.
* * *
At twenty to one Alex logged in to Unity.
He did it from his bedroom, on his bed, cross-legged, with the laptop on a pillow and the door shut. It was the smallest room in the house and the only one with a lock, and he'd taken it for the lock, though he'd told Mark it was because it was cheapest, which was also true. He connected to the Service Desk VPN the way he did for evening shifts from home: the app, the code from the token on his phone, the little green padlock. The desk gave him the lowest level of Unity access there was, enough to see a module record and whether its enrolments were showing, because three-quarters of October's tickets were students who couldn't see a module they were on. He could look. He couldn't change anything. And everything he looked at went into a log with his username next to it, which he knew because he'd once spent a whole training afternoon being shown that log by a man called Dennis who had been very proud of it.
He sat with the search box open for a while.
He thought about the log, and Dennis, and the fact that he had no ticket open that would explain why a second-year Maths student on the Service Desk needed to look at this module at twenty to one in the morning. He thought about the letter in his back pocket, which he'd taken out of his jeans and put on the bedside table and which was still folded in four. He thought that if somebody ever pulled the log it would be one line among thousands, and that nobody ever pulled the log.
He typed HOL000 and pressed enter.
It came up straight away, which surprised him. He'd half thought it wouldn't be there at all. It sat in the results like any other module, between nothing and nothing, one line in the old grey Unity font.
HOL000 — Practical Assessment (Legacy)
He clicked it.
The module record was mostly blank. Most module records were full of things, credits and levels and convenors and learning outcomes nobody read, and this one had boxes with nothing in them. Department: blank. Credits: 0. Level: blank. Module convenor: blank. Owner: HOLREG. Created: 14/03/2011, 09:02, by svc_archcat_import, which was not an account he'd ever seen and which, from its name, belonged to the Library's archive catalogue, not to anything that had to do with teaching. Status: Active. In the box for the academic year, where every other module in the university said 2026/27, this one said Session 113.
He did the subtraction without wanting to. If sessions were years, and this was the hundred and thirteenth, the first had been in 1913.
He knew something had happened in the Holloway Building a long time ago. Everybody did, vaguely, the way you knew there'd been a plague village somewhere near where you grew up. There was a plaque in it. There was a lecture about it every November that nobody went to. He couldn't have told you the year.
Enrolment: 13.
He clicked on the number. A table came up with thirteen rows, and in each row, where a name should have been, a student number, a programme, there were asterisks. Restricted record. Your role does not permit display of enrolled students for this module. Thirteen rows of stars. He counted them anyway, twice, top to bottom and bottom to top. Thirteen. In the column on the far right, the only one not masked, was the date each enrolment had been made. Eleven of them said 19/10/2026. One said 20/10/2025, a year earlier. One said 21/07/2026.
He looked at the odd ones for a while. Then he looked at the others. He didn't know what it meant. He wrote it down.
Assessment components: one visible. PRELIM. Type: Practical. Date: 13/11/2026. Time: 24:00. Duration: 6h. Venue: HOL-EXH, Holloway Building, Examination Hall. Twenty-four hundred. So the system meant the end of Friday. Beside the venue code, in the venue system's own small print, it said Building status: Closed (2009). Room booking: Active.
Notification history. He clicked that too.
It was a list of batch sends, newest first, each with a date and a template name and a count. The newest was tonight. 10/11/2026 23:58. Template: HOL-PRELIM. Recipients: 13. Status: Delivered. Below it were others, one after another, going back, page after page. He scrolled. They came in fives. A batch in November, a batch in January, one in February, one in April, one in June, and then November again. Every year. All sent at 23:58. At the bottom of the page it said Showing 1–25 of 78.
He did that sum as well. Seventy-eight batches, five a year, since a Monday morning in 2011 when someone in the Library had imported an archive catalogue into the student records system and this had come in with it, like a mouse in a delivery of hay. Two minutes to midnight, five times a year, to somebody, about something. And nobody on the Service Desk had ever done anything about it, or if they had, they'd closed the ticket in eleven seconds and been pleased with how fast.
He took screenshots. He took one of everything: the module record, the enrolment table with its thirteen rows of stars and its dates, the assessment component, the venue, each page of the notification history, all four of them, scrolling carefully so that each screenshot overlapped the last by a line and you could see nothing had been left out between them. He saved them in a folder on his laptop he called receipts. Then, because a screenshot was a file and a file was a thing that could be said to have been edited, he picked up his phone and photographed the screen as well, each page, with the edge of his bed and his own knee in the bottom of the shot, so that anyone looking would see a real screen in a real room.
He didn't know who anyone was. He did it anyway. It was what you did. You kept the receipt.
Then he sat with the cursor over the log-out button and didn't press it.
He could have searched for himself. It would have taken four seconds: his own student number, his own record, his own list of modules. He knew, too, that the log would show it, Harding A. viewed record Harding A., and that looking up your own record on a desk login was the first thing they told you in training never to do, and that the reason they told you was that people did it. He thought about Dennis showing them the log, the long scrolling column of usernames, and saying, It's not that we think you'll do anything. It's that we'll know.
He didn't need to look. He'd had the email. One of the thirteen rows of stars was his. He just didn't know which.
He logged out. The padlock went grey. It was 01:00.
* * *
He took the letter off the bedside table and unfolded it and flattened it on the duvet with the side of his hand. Then he took the quiz sheet out of his wallet, from behind his bank card, and unfolded that too, and put it next to the letter, and sat back against the headboard and looked at them.
The letter was on the University's good paper, the heavy cream kind with the crest at the top, the madder red and the indigo, the open book and the motto underneath it in a ribbon. Probatum est. It was from the Registry, Old Quad. It said Private and Confidential across the top in capitals and Academic Integrity, Case Reference AI/2026/0147 under that.
Dear Mr Harding,
The University has received a report concerning work submitted for assessment by another student. In the course of the University's enquiries, you have been identified as a possible source of material contained in that work. At this stage you are not the subject of any allegation. You are asked to contact the Academic Integrity team within ten working days of the date of this letter to arrange a meeting, at which you may be accompanied by a representative of the Students' Union.
Yours sincerely,
And then a signature that was not a signature but a stamp of one, a black loop and a line, and under it, typed, pp. Malcolm Furnival, Academic Registrar.
He knew what it meant. He'd known since the step that morning. Possible source meant that two sentences in Bethany Cole's essay matched two sentences in an essay with his name on it, which had sat in the plagiarism software's database since first year, and that somebody in the Registry had followed the match and found a Maths student, and wondered what a Maths student was doing in a Psychology essay. At this stage meant that they hadn't worked it out yet. Ten working days meant the twenty-fourth. He'd counted it on his fingers on the bus. Bethany Cole would get a letter too, a different one, and Bethany Cole had his number in her phone under, as far as he knew, Alex essay, and Bethany Cole was not, from the four times he'd met her, a person who held up well in meetings.
None of that was on the page. The page was polite. It said possible and at this stage and may be accompanied. It was written by someone who had written a lot of letters like it and knew exactly how much to say.
And next to it, the sheet. Phil's red ticks and crosses down the side. 54, circled twice. WELL DONE!! The smiley face with its quiff.
Candidates are reminded that attendance at the Preliminary is compulsory. 13th inst.
In the bedside light the brown ink had gone almost black. The hand sloped to the right, all the letters joined, nothing hurried. Whoever had written it hadn't been careless anywhere. There was nowhere to get a fingernail under it.
He looked from one to the other. One was typed, and one was written by hand, and one had come through the post and one through a pub; and they didn't look alike, and they didn't sound alike, and they were the same thing. They were both the voice of a place that had a file on you. You have been identified. Candidates are reminded. Neither of them said what they knew. Both of them knew it.
He took a receipt out of his wallet, one of the ones he meant to do something about: the Shuttle, Tuesday the third, two pints and a white wine, fourteen pounds sixty, his round. He turned it over and took the pen that lived on the bedside table, and on the back he wrote, in his own small square capitals, the way he made all his lists:
09:14 HOLREG ticket. 13 notifs. (closed)
22:2? quiz sheet. brown ink. 13th inst.
23:58 email. HOL000. Session 113.
00:40 Unity. 13 enrolled. 11 x 19/10/26. 1 x 2025. 1 x 21/07/26.
He looked at the list. It had too many thirteens in it, and he didn't like that, because the number thirteen didn't mean anything and he didn't trust lists where a number kept coming back for no reason. That was how people ended up seeing faces in toast. He drew a line under it, and under the line he wrote Harrison?, and looked at that, and put a line through it, and then, because it wasn't fair to cross out an idea you hadn't tested, he wrote it again underneath.
He folded the letter back into four. He folded the sheet back along Phil's crease, and put it back in his wallet behind his bank card. He put the receipt in the wallet with it. He closed the laptop. Its light went out, and the room was just the bedside lamp and the fog against the window and the boiler ticking through the wall.
He looked at his watch out of habit, to see what time it was, and it didn't tell him the time. It was on the stopwatch. The numbers were running. 1:10:00, it said, and then 1:10:01, and then 02.
He looked at it for a while, working backwards. Seventy minutes. He tried to remember pressing it and couldn't, and then he could, almost: the hall, the phone in his other hand, the clock on the screen rolling over to 00:00. He hadn't meant to. He'd started timing something at midnight without deciding what.
He didn't stop it. He lay down on top of the duvet in his clothes with the light still on, and listened to it not making any sound, and after a while he slept.