‘Cutting edge technology.’ Demus snorted.

‘I know this! Simon has one in his collection.’ Simon didn’t have a computer. Well, he had a ZX Spectrum. But he spent a lot of time on the ones at the university where his dad worked, and had a stash of manuals about main frames, the serious sort of computer that they used in academia and industry. He also had an assorted collection of related bits and pieces that his dad brought home. ‘It’s a new type of floppy disk.’ It was smaller than the ones for my Commodore and encased in plastic.

‘Not so floppy now.’ Mia grinned and stroked it.

‘It holds about a megabyte of information,’ Demus said. ‘We need to store terabytes. It would require millions of these. A big truckload. And writing to them would take decades. You just don’t have the technology required to record memories.’

‘Well, you’re screwed then,’ I said.

‘No. That’s why I made two headbands.’ Demus stood and began to pace. He had a noticeable limp. ‘I need to record Mia’s memories in your brain, Nick.’

‘No fucking way!’ Mia jumped to her feet.

‘They’ll be encoded. He won’t be able to access them.’ Demus raised both hands. ‘Secrets safe.’

I shook my head. ‘Don’t I . . . need the space they’ll take?’

‘You’ll be fine.’ Demus waved the objection away. ‘Just follow the instructions every five years. It takes an hour or two. And decades from now, it can all be downloaded into Mia’s brain, and she gets her life back. Easy.’

Something about his frown told me it wasn’t going to be that easy.

‘But . . .’ I invited.

‘But the headbands won’t work yet,’ Demus said. He limped away, turned round, limped back. ‘The electronics I need can’t be bought yet.’

The wind picked up and the rain turned from a mist to a steady patter. The chill cut through my coat and found my bones. I sat on the wet bench looking out over the wet fields at distant housing, a dripping forest behind me. Suddenly I was as miserable as I had ever been.

‘You couldn’t have found this out before you came back?’ Mia asked.

‘I could, and did. But the timing wasn’t mine to choose.’ Demus slumped back on the bench, beside me. He set a hand to my shoulder. ‘Chin up, kid.’ Perhaps my current low moment had punctuated his memories deeply enough that he still remembered it. ‘I need a better microchip than the ones on offer. A 32-bit processor at a minimum. A Motorola 68030 will serve. Just. But I can’t buy one. They do exist, however. Two years from now I’ll be able to order one.’

‘So why not just come back to when they can be bought?’ Mia persisted.

‘The answer to pretty much every why-question you have, all of which are perfectly reasonable, is simply this: I remember coming back to 1986. I remember that I didn’t show up in 1988 when all of this would have been much easier. When whatever tied a knot in our timeline happened, this is where the pieces fell. If I change anything, and I can, then it will no longer be the timeline I remember, and nothing I do can help the Mia I left behind.’ Demus sighed. ‘And the net result is that I need this chip, and currently the only examples of it are the prototypes held in research labs at several locations across the globe.’

‘Right, so you’re going to go all James Bond and steal the microchip from a high-security Tokyo laboratory?’ I laughed out loud. It was almost less feasible than time travel.

‘No. But now I get to answer the question you forgot to ask. The one about why I roped your friends into this. First, though, let me ask you a question of my own.’ Demus wiped the rain from his scalp. ‘What is it that John’s father does, exactly? You know. To make all that money?’

CHAPTER 14

‘John?’

‘Yes?’ He sounded odd, but it was a bad line, full of crackles and fizz.

‘Emergency!’

‘What?’

‘None of us know how to dance.’

‘You mean you and Simon don’t.’

‘When have you ever danced?’

‘At my cousin’s wedding last year. There was a disco at the reception. I’ll have you know that I’ve got moves.’

‘We’re coming over.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as I’ve tricked Simon into coming.’

A long silence filled with crackles and the ghosts of someone else’s conversation, then, ‘OK. At least it’ll be funny.’

I hung up and leaned against the counter. ‘It’s on.’

Simon’s phone was in the kitchen. It seemed wrong somehow. In my experience phones were in the hall, private things. But Simon’s mother apparently had no secrets, nothing to say on the phone that couldn’t be said within two yards of the kitchen table. Which was where both she and Simon’s little sister, Sian, sat watching me expectantly. Their cat, Baggage, had wound herself around my ankles and lay there shaken by loud purrs, as if she had realised some long-held ambition.

‘What are you going to tell him?’ Sian asked. ‘He won’t go there without a good reason. I mean a reason he thinks is good.’

‘I’ll tell him we need to do some planning for our next D&D session, and that John can’t come here because . . . he . . . he’s grounded until Friday.’

‘Nice.’ Simon’s mum nodded. Ever since the idea of getting Simon to a party had been mooted she’d been wholly on board. ‘I’ll give you a lift over there as soon as he gets home from school. I’ve always wanted to see this alleged mansion of John’s.’

Half an hour later we pulled up in John’s gravelled drive. We were buzzed through the automatic gates at the street, and the house had remained hidden behind leylandii trees until the sweep of the approach revealed it.

‘Fuck me sideways!’

‘Mum!’ Simon’s protest went unheeded.

‘It’s like a stately home. In Richmond.’ Simon’s mum gawped without shame. ‘Go on then. And Simon, if there’s even the slightest chance he’s gay, make sure you marry him!’

Simon shot out of the car faster than anyone of his girth should have been able to. I suspect most teenage boys could win the hundred metres in an attempt to outdistance parental embarrassment. I followed quickly, calling back my thanks for the lift.

I joined Simon on the steps beneath a porch supported on grand columns. The doorbell was an ivory disc at the centre of a ridged brass plate and the chime it caused sounded both deep and distant.

I always expected a butler to open John’s front door. A tall, immaculately tailored man with a pencil moustache straight out of the 1930s. John in a T-shirt, jeans, and socks was always something of a let-down. This time, though, it was Mia, barefoot, in a man’s shirt and black leggings, and the sight of her did something complicated to my insides.

‘Come on.’ She walked off down the broad, tiled hallway. The distant strains of a piano reached us.

We took our shoes off and hurried after her. We all had the afternoon off due to a frozen pitch cancelling games and I’d taken the morning off, too, so I could scheme with Simon’s mum. What Mia’s excuse for being here before four on a Wednesday was, I didn’t ask. John was in one of the living rooms, playing on their grand piano. He was sickeningly good at it, and the piece was unashamedly romantic.

‘Such a show-off!’ I came to stand next to him, watching his hands flow across the keys.

‘Jealously is an ugly thing, my boy.’ John finished with a flourish. ‘Simon! You came! I didn’t think you would.’

Simon put his bag on the polished mahogany expanse of the piano. ‘Why not? I don’t want to die in this wasteland any more than you do.’

‘Ah.’ John grinned at me. ‘You told him this was about D&D. Cunning.’

‘You’re here to dance, Simon.’ Mia reached for his hand.

‘You lied!’ Simon pulled back, scowling in my direction. ‘I’m going.’

‘You can’t. Not unless you want to walk the whole way.’ I claimed his bag from the piano. ‘Also, I have important news from Demus to discuss . . . after.’

John played a ‘Dun! Dun! Dun . . . !’ on the deep notes, then got up and walked across the room. ‘You’re here for the same reason Nick is. You’re going to your first Arnot party and you’re both afraid of dancing. And girls.’ He reached the hi-fi system, a monster of a thing that managed to convey the sense that it was both horribly expensive and at the same time very, very cool. A work of finest German engineering capable of delivering Motown’s hottest beats with clinical efficiency. ‘Fortunately, I have gathered together examples of both. Music . . .’ He hit the play button and the opening bars of ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ filled the room, Michael Jackson joining in quickly enough with his curious mixture of ooos and ahhhs, as if he were easing into a cold bath. ‘And the lovely Mia is here to represent the female half of the species.’

Mia made a mock curtsey.