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It seemed to her as if the whole town stood there for a moment, wondering if the world would end, or only take some simple, beautiful, amazing direction.

A fierce struggle broke out. Someone was pushed to the ground; someone else fell on top of them. Before long they were clawing inexpertly at one another’s cheeks, which stretched like plasticine and came away in lumps.

Since his last visit to the medium a council emergency number had appeared on the noticeboard by the gate. What kind of an emergency, Shaw wondered briefly, occurs in a graveyard? The sudden need to bury someone?

‘We’re the future now. Now everyone will stand a chance.’
‘Who’s the past?’ Victoria said. ‘What do you mean?’
She shut the door and shouted through it, ‘Can you hear yourself? This is just some rubbish religion!’
‘You’ll keep seeing the visions,’ Tommie advised her from the other side.

Time held all this loosely but carefully in its hand. She was to understand, Victoria knew, that she was seeing a future. People had found fresh ways to live. Or perhaps it wasn’t, as far as the Gorge was concerned, a future at all, only an intersection of possibilities, unconformable layers of time, myths from a geography long forgotten or not yet invented.

‘The bloody Severn,’ as Pearl put it: ‘your waterway of commerce, romance and mystery.’

That lunchtime, for a change, he walked downstream to Strand-on-the-Green and ate a hamburger sitting outside a pub called the City Barge while middle-aged women in yoga pants by Liquido and Spiritual Gangster exercised their miniature dogs between him and the river. Shaw felt as if he was sick of all that side of things

Compulsive and intriguing, despite having no real idea what’s going on

What she wanted was for him to take his tea and congratulate her, as he always did: 'Purr-fect! Not a drop spilled!'

She didn't want a book, especially not The Water Babies so she stood there offering it back to him, unsure what to say next but finally managing: 'I've already got this, thanks.’