"It's all right, Ariel," says Lura, but she doesn't look happy about it.
"Yeah," says Burlem. "You're fucked in the outside world, just like me."
Lura shakes her head. "How long is this going to go on?" she says softly. Then she looks at me. "You're more than welcome to stay as long as you like," she says. "We've got a room for you." Then she looks at Burlem. "But we're going to have to stop this before we wake up and find that there are ten of us, and then twenty, and then that the whole bloody world knows about the Troposphere."
"It's OK," Burlem says. "Ariel won't have told anyone else."
"No. I haven't," I say. But I don't mention that I've left the book—intact again—in the priory. I think that will make more sense as part of my whole story.
I sit back in the sofa and start telling them about the day the university started falling down, and the secondhand bookshop and everything that happened after that. And as I speak I finally realize that I didn't imagine any of this: As much as anything can be said to be real, this is real.
Telling the story takes hours. At first Burlem keeps interrupting to ask me things, but after about half an hour of intense conversation about the university, and then even more speculation about how Burlem's books ended up in the secondhand shop (his ex-wife, he thinks, claiming the house), Lura steps in and forbids any more questions until after I've finished. At some point she gets an A4 notebook and starts writing things down in it. I get the impression that although Burlem has obviously spent more time in the Troposphere, she's the one who possibly understands how it all works. Which means I'm going to have plenty of questions for her, too. She scribbles most furiously (and has to shut Burlem up again, too) when I talk about Apollo Smintheus, and also when I get to the detail about the underground network, and how I travelled on a train of fear to get back to myself before I made the mistake that was surely going to kill me. At the point when I explain that I was able to change things in people's minds, they both seem to freeze and exchange a look, but neither of them says anything to me about it, and Lura doesn't write anything down.
At about eleven o'clock I'm almost done. My throat hurts from all the talking and the cigarettes I've smoked. My mouth feels dry; that hangover mouth you get when you've only had a couple of hours sleep. We've drunk about four pots of tea since I got here, but I haven't actually eaten anything since lunchtime and my stomach is audibly growling, although I don't feel hungry.
"We need to eat," says Lura, after my stomach makes the noise again.
"I'll phone for a curry," says Burlem.
But he waits until I finish my story before he does. The story isn't complete. I've left out the detail about fucking Patrick in the Little Chef toilets, obviously. But I haven't made it clear that the book is in the priory, either. So I'm not surprised when the first question Burlem asks is about the book.
"Where is it now?" he says. "You've got it with you, presumably."
I shake my head. "I did what you did," I say.
"What I did?"
"Yeah. I left it behind, thinking it would be safer than carrying it with me."
"Fuck" is all Burlem says before he goes to collect the food.
While he's gone I am left on my own with Lura and the dog, who has now woken up properly, stretched, slurped some water, and then come to sit on the sofa next to me. Lura hasn't said anything at all since Burlem left, and I feel I have to say something.
"What's his name?" I ask.
But I know already: Planck; presumably after the quantum physicist.
"He's called Planck," she says. Then she sighs and shakes her head. "You've had some lucky escapes," she says. "I can't believe..."
"What?"
"Oh, nothing. There's even more to the Troposphere than I thought. Although it all makes sense, of course."
"Sense?" I laugh. "Please tell me how it makes sense."
"Oh, we will," she says. "But not now. It's late."
There's a silence for a few seconds. I'm not sure Lura likes me. I scratch the dog between his ears and try to think of something simple I can say that doesn't simply amount to "Tell me whatever it is I don't know—that no one knows—about how the world works, now! Tell me what could possibly make sense of the experiences I've had, because I haven't got a clue."
"How did you come to be here?" I ask her in the end. "How did you make it so they couldn't find you?" I remember that when Burlem cut me off by walking into the church, he was still in the railway tunnel. I have no idea how he came to be here, with Lura, and how they remained undetected for so long. "How did Saul even get out of the tunnel?" I ask.
"He shifted the pile of rubble," she says. "Brick by brick. From the sound of what you've said that tunnel was unstable anyway, and I'm surprised it took another year to collapse after he disturbed it."
"Oh—you think he made it collapse, then? How weird," I say, thinking that the tunnel collapsing was the reason for everything starting: that if the tunnel hadn't collapsed then I wouldn't have got the book, or found the page. Or maybe I would; maybe I would have found those things eventually, anyway.
And I realize that someone will find the book in the priory eventually, as well.
"Anyway," she says, "he got out of the tunnel and got on a bus to anywhere. He just travelled randomly until he was far enough away to get his thoughts together. He went up to Scotland and lived in a bed-and-breakfast for a while, during which time he explored the Troposphere—and was very lucky not to get killed. He sent me a mobile phone and asked me to go into a church on a certain date, at a certain time, and said that he would phone me." She smiles. "It was a bit like being in a film. He was completely paranoid and didn't trust me at all at first, and we kept having to have these coded conversations with me standing in a church talking on a mobile phone—which did not go down well with church people at all. But we got through it. I'm retired now, as you probably know, so I wasn't tied to London when all this happened. We came down here temporarily at first and then ended up staying. It's actually my brother's place, but we have an arrangement." She shrugs. "He needed a place in London, and we've sorted out all the paperwork so we are officially renting this place from someone else entirely, under assumed names. It's complicated, but we thought it was quite solid."
"I have to ask," I say. "What is the logic behind the church detaiclass="underline" You know, that no one can jump into your mind if you're in a church?"
"You don't know?"
"I know hardly anything beyond what I've worked out, and what Apollo Smintheus has told me." I shrug. "I can make a guess, but..."
"What's your guess?"
"That all the prayer in a church—all the extra-charged thought and hope—somehow scrambles the signal, if that makes any sense. You know, like interference."
She smiles. "That's good. That's exactly what I think as well." Now the smile goes. "I'm assuming you know about my book?"
"No." I shake my head. But the way she says it—I realize that this is why she has a problem with me. She thinks I know her as intimately as Burlem does because I've been in his mind. She thinks there's a possibility that I know everything about her. For the second time I get the feeling that she's the wife and I'm the mistress, and she knows her husband hasn't just been screwing me; he's been telling me things about her as well. I remember when I used to have affairs with married men whose wives didn't know, and wouldn't have approved, and those marriages were always in crisis. Inevitably the guy would tell me things about his wife that I didn't want to know—and didn't feel I had any right to know. The special dinner she arranged to try and get their marriage back on track (and during which he called me on his mobile, from the toilet); the special dress she bought to try and get him interested in her again (and which he told me made her look old and fat). I shudder to remember these exchanges. I don't think I've ever felt so bad in my life as when I heard those things, and I stopped sleeping with men like that because I didn't want to be a party to anything so sad.