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Chapter One: The Condenser Guts

The air in the lower condenser gallery did not move. It sat.

It had sat there, by Kael's reckoning, for something close to three hundred years. The same hot breath, boiled and boiled again, thick with copper-scale and rendered lard and the sour animal stink of twenty thousand people sweating through wool that never got the chance to dry. You did not breathe the gallery air. You waded through it. On a bad shift it went down your throat like warm broth and sat in your chest and you coughed it back up grey.

Kael stood on the iron catwalk three floors above the boiler pit and dragged a sleeve across his face. The sleeve was as filthy as the face, so all it did was move the grease from one place to another. Below him the fire-tubes of the Number Four Evaporator groaned like slaughtered cattle as forty tons of raw brine came down onto the red plates inside. The brine screamed the way brine always screamed. It turned to steam. The steam went up the reclaim towers to be metered, and taxed, and sold back by the cup to the same people it had been sweated out of that morning.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The main suction piston came down in its cylinder, twice the height of a two-storey house, and the whole catwalk shuddered, and the rivets sang in their holes. Kael laid a hand flat on the rail. Not to steady himself. To read it. Four years down here had taught him to feel a machine the way you feel a bad-tempered animal, so that you knew what it meant to do a half-second before it did it. The rail was telling him the same thing the gauge had been telling him for an hour, which was that Number Four was building to a temper, and nobody with the authority to care about it did.

Chapter One: The Life That Happened

I died on a Tuesday, which seems about right. Nothing much has ever happened to me on a Tuesday, good or bad. It's the day of the week that exists mainly so Monday has something to lead into, and I've always felt it knew that about itself.

I was making toast. I mention this not because it matters but because I've noticed since that people like to know what you were doing, as if the activity might explain something. My grandmother died pegging out washing, and for years afterwards my mother couldn't look at a clothes peg without saying, "Well." The toast was white sliced, two pieces, because the brown had gone furry at one corner and I'd decided, standing at the bread bin in my dressing gown, that I could live without it. I had the butter out to soften. I'd put the kettle on and then turned it off again, because I wanted the tea made at the same moment the toast came up, and I knew from long experience that the kettle was quicker.

The pain started across my chest and went up into my left shoulder, as if someone had put a strap round me and was pulling it from behind. I've read the leaflets. I've sat in enough waiting rooms with nothing to look at but leaflets, and I knew perfectly well what a pain across the chest and down the left arm is supposed to mean. I remember thinking, quite clearly, that it was the shoulder rather than the arm, and that this was probably a technicality in my favour.

I sat down in the brown leather chair by the back door. It isn't a kitchen chair, strictly speaking. I bought it fifteen years ago from a shop in town that was closing down, and there was no room for it anywhere else, and Helen, who hadn't been my wife for some years at that point and so had no formal say in the matter, told me it looked like something from a dentist's waiting room in 1974. She wasn't wrong. It was very comfortable, though, and you could sit in it and look at the garden while the kettle boiled, which is more than you can say for most dentists' chairs.

I sat in it and waited for the pain to finish whatever it was doing. The toaster ticked. I thought about getting my phone, which was on the side by the bread bin, about four feet away, and decided I'd give it a minute. That was the last decision I made, and I'm aware it isn't a very good one. I'd like to say I thought about my children, or about Sarah. What I actually thought was that I'd let the toast go cold.

When the pain stopped, I felt better than I had for some time. I don't mean that the way people on the radio mean it when they've taken up swimming. I mean the stiffness had gone out of my knees, and the ache I'd had in my lower back since roughly the Millennium wasn't there any more, and I stood up out of the chair without putting my hands on the arms, which I hadn't managed in years. I went over to the toaster. The toast had popped up and was sitting there slightly overdone at the edges, which is what the toaster did on the second setting whatever the dial said.

I reached for it, and my hand went into it. Not through it; the toast simply didn't acknowledge me. I felt nothing at all, not the warmth or the crumbs. I took my hand away and looked at it. It looked like my hand. It had the scar across the knuckle from a tin of tomatoes in 1987.

I turned round, and I was sitting in the chair.