Maxwell's Demon. Steven Hall

       You have no new messages.

      o

      The whisky rolled around the tumbler, and I stared out of the window at the old church spire rising from the oranges and yellows of the tree canopy on the far side of the park.

      It’s strange to get an honest peek inside yourself, to have some event come along and – for the briefest of moments – knock the lid off and allow the light to shine down inside. A few hours ago, I’d heard a muffled voice coming from the answerphone in the other room, and not only was I instantly convinced that this voice was my dead father’s, but also, that he’d been trying to tell me something. It only took a single word for me to jump to this impossible conclusion. Tom. A word that, in the cold light of day, was probably another word altogether – something half-heard and through two walls, a hallway and a living-room door. Nevertheless, I’d been so certain in the heat of the moment that I’d gone racing across the flat, chasing after that voice with my trousers around my ankles.

      When you get right down to it, what do we really know about ourselves? All those years apart from my father, the resentment, the distance, the funeral in Spain that I didn’t attend and the graveside I’ve never seen, even though I kept telling myself I’d visit one day, even though I’d always known that I wouldn’t. All of that water rolling on under the bridge, water that only rolls down and past and away and never, never comes back and yet, despite all of it, some dark part of my brain had been biding its time, waiting for him to pull off that old magic trick – to reassemble himself from a scattering of words and old recordings and come back home to me, just like he did when I was a child.

      Google confirmed what the operator said about crossed lines – they do happen from time to time. It’s something to do with all the old analogue cable still out there in the network. Old wires wear thin during the long years in ragged winds, or go brittle in the sun, or rot away in leaky junction boxes. This means you can be minding your own business and the phone will ring – you’ll pick it up, and there’ll be two strangers talking about a garage door, or booking the car in for a service, or about someone called Alison’s new boyfriend. These calls are not really calls, they’re pseudo calls, un-calls, and they do all sorts of weird things to answerphones and caller data records. It’s odd, it’s unusual, but it’s nothing more dramatic than that. Bugs in the system are inevitable, because all systems are corrupting systems to a greater or lesser degree. As Max Cleaver, the detective hero of Cupid’s Engine, puts it: The only thing necessary for the triumph of chaos is for the repairmen to do nothing.

      It seemed poetic to me that an analogue fault would be at the heart of things though, my father being such a resolutely analogue creature himself. An analogue ghost down an analogue wire. Except, of course, there was no ghost. Dr Stanley Quinn had no time for zeros and ones. He trusted in ink and he trusted in paper. He always carried a pen and he never traded his typewriter for a computer, not even when lightweight laptops became something that everybody just had. I remember him telling the Paris Review that he’d ‘never liked the damn things and wasn’t about to start at his age’ (I would read interviews with my father from time to time; they’d sneak into the house amongst the papers and magazine subscriptions, another inky aspect of a man who was never, ever in just the one place).

      I rubbed my eyes, drained my glass, and I headed to the kitchen to fix myself another drink.

      o

      By the time I went to bed that night, I felt altogether better about things.

      If there’d been anyone around to tell the story of the phone call to, I probably would have done it with a can-you-believe-it smile and a slightly red face. That is, if I’d said anything at all. I definitely wouldn’t be telling Imogen, I decided, not least because I had no interest in a rousing rendition of ‘Cabin Fever’ every time I picked up the phone.

      And this is how it is sometimes, isn’t it? When the pendulum swings especially high in one direction, its momentum carries it back to swing high the other way. Love becomes hate, shame becomes anger, shocked disbelief becomes – some sort of embarrassed, comic incredulity.

      I decided, on the whole, not to worry about it.

       Tomorrow’s another day.

      I heaved the duvet up to my chin and went back to reading Cupid’s Engine, and soon enough, the novel’s current began pulling and tugging at me, demanding my full attention. I was only too happy to let go of things and be carried away by it, racing off downstream, disappearing into the distance like a small boat on the rapids.

      o

      Cupid’s Engine begins with a tall, scruffy man in a white fedora and crumpled linen suit. He’s propping himself up in a doorway, covered in blood. Although we don’t know it yet, this man’s name is Maurice Umber. He has a bloody knife in his right hand, and a telephone receiver pressed to his left ear.

      ‘Police,’ he mumbles into the phone. ‘You’re going to have to send somebody.’

      As my eyes tracked towards the end of that first paragraph, a wholly unexpected wave of emotion rose up inside me: a sudden, overpowering force of words and worlds revisited, a return to another time. The depth and strength of it – it felt like a tight hug with someone you never thought you’d see again, or like throwing on your old self like a faded old hoody; not lost after all, only misplaced for a few years in the bottom of the