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Thanks, Anna said.

I like it, the child said. I don’t dislike it.

A long time ago I was Scottish, Anna said.

Been there, the child said. Done that. I mean, I liked it there, man. I didn’t dislike it. Therefore, I’d go again. There was a great number of trees in it.

She handed Anna something. It was a piece of pencil, the pencil Genevieve Lee had broken in two, back in the lounge. The child held up the other piece.

Thanks, Anna said. But you got the end with the point. That’s not fair.

Yeah, but you are an adult and can afford to buy a sharpener at, like, a stationer’s, or in a supermarket, the child said skipping ahead and talking to the rhythm of her own skipping. Or just take, a sharpener, and put it in, your pocket if, you wanted it, and therefore then, you wouldn’t have, to pay at all, because you know, pencils should always, come with sharpeners, because what use, is pencils without, a sharpener? We should all, be able to, help ourselves to, free sharpeners.

Now that’s what I call anarchy, Anna said.

And that’s when she remembered.

(Europe. Land of InterRail. Place known as Abroad. Visited by Cliff Richard and some boys and girls twenty years ago on their double decker bus, though right now, at the very start of the 1980s, Cliff Richard is singing about a girl who’s missing, has maybe been murdered, used to room on the second floor, left no forwarding address, left nothing but a name on a payphone wall.

Europe. Place of the Grand Tour for fifty British teenagers from up and down the country—of which Anna is the one from furthest north and the only Scottish one—who’ve each won a place in a publicity event organized by a British bank by writing a short story or an essay of not more than 2000 words about Britain In The Year 2000, which is twenty years from now.

1980. Year that Anna Hardie, a prizewinning writer about what life will be like in twenty years’ time, unbends the leg of a paperclip and threads it through one of her ears in Versailles, France, infecting the ear, giving herself a slight fever and having to start a course of antibiotics three days and a couple of countries later, in Brunnen, Switzerland, where the views of the mountains and the lakes, and of the mountains in the lakes, are stunning.

But first: London, Paris, Versailles. The fifty prizewinning writers about the future are on their fourth day. On day two every-one woke up to find that he or she was now one of

the party-people, or

the weirdo swots, or

the total outsiders.

Already Anna has been goosed, for the first time in her life, by a seventeen-year-old weirdo swot (who, in twenty years’ time, will have become an internationally renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics). At the time of it happening she has no idea that this is what’s happening; the inexplicable pain between her buttock and her thigh and the red-haired blushing boy-man with bad eczema behind her seem in no way related, though later in the fortnight she will see him stand close to the back of one of the other girls and see the other girl leap in the air away from him, and then she will understand. Already the nastier of the party-people have got another of the weirdo swots drunk by spiking his drink at supper in the Paris hotel, have held him down drunk in one of the bedrooms and have shaved off one half of his little RAF-war-hero moustache. He is wandering lopsidedly about in the summer haze at Versailles Palace today, a single-winged recording angel. Why would he not just shave the whole thing off? she wonders. Is it so that the people who did it to him will be made to face their meanness every time they see him? Or because he doesn’t want to lose the half he’s got so he can reconstruct the other exactly? Anna doesn’t know. She hasn’t spoken to him. (She has hardly spoken to anyone.) She knows his name is Peter, and that he had announced to everybody at the Medieval Banquet on day one in London that he was especially looking forward to Versailles, to seeing the historic mirror room where the peace treaty