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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.