Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.

‘The world is at war. We are running out of everything, and everyone thinks they’re owed what’s left. But as long as the Ministry exists, as long as the Ministry comes to exist in the shape it does in my era, then we have the technological advantage. That isn’t nothing, having weapons other people don’t, the kinds of soldiers other people don’t.

‘You want to ask me about the future.’ ‘Well. Yes.’ ‘What do you want to know?’ ‘What’s it like?’ ‘What an anodyne question.

‘What about all the stuff you said about not changing history?’ ‘People aren’t history,’ said Adela scornfully. ‘Good grief, why didn’t I listen to anything anyone told me when I was young? As long as the Ministry rises to power, then history happened the way we said it did.’

‘There is no “you and I”,’ he said sharply. ‘There was you, and there was a hobby that you had.

When I’d first interviewed for the bridge role, Adela had said to me, ‘Your mother was a refugee’. But my mother never described herself as a refugee. It was a narrative imposition, along with ‘stateless’ and ‘survivor’. My sister and I grew up, as many children of immigrants do, half parented and half parenting. Our mother needed our help to navig

you mean?’ Adela combed her fingers through her hair. The big kink at the side of her head began to flatten, in an oily, exhausted way. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘you will have to stop asking stupid questions for the sake of conversational presenteeism. It endears you to no one. You know exactly what I meant.’

I had a feeling like I’d always assumed I was a real girl, but someone had flicked me in the eye and it had produced no pain, only a glassy click: I was just a doll, with no more inner intelligence than a bottle of water.

They haul the boats. They start by burying the dead in shallow graves, then, further on, piling rocks over the bodies in makeshift cairns, but soon there are too many dead. They leave the bodies where they drop. They haul. They abandon empty cans, trinkets, clothing. They leave bizarre oases of clutter, civilisation in its larval form. The notion o