It began at a strange time for everybody, in fact. The news had just emerged about the Kuiper Anomaly, the strange new light beyond the sky. London is the place to be when a story like that breaks, the kind of massive, life-changing news that you want to share with your friends, at the office watercoolers or in the pubs and coffee bars, and chew over the latest wrinkles.

But I had to go home, to Manchester. It was duty. I had lost my father. I was forty-five.

My father’s house, the family home where I had grown up, was one of a short street of identical suburban properties: a neat little semidetached, with scraps of lawn at the front and back. Standing in the drive on a dazzling, bright September morning, I tried to keep control of my emotions, tried to think like a stranger.

When they were built in the fifties, not long before my birth, these little houses must have seemed desirable compared to the back-to-back terraces of the inner city, and a hell of a lot better than the tower blocks that would follow in a few years’ time. But now, in the first decade of the new century, the brickwork looked hasty and cheap, the little flower beds were subsiding, and some of the exterior work, like the plaster-covered breeze blocks that lined the driveways, was crumbling. Not much of the street’s original character remained. There were plastic-framed double-glazed windows, rebuilt roofs and chimney stacks, flat-roofed bedrooms built over the garages, even a couple of small conservatories tacked on the front of the houses opposite my father’s, to catch the southern light. After nearly fifty years the houses had mutated, evolved, become divergent.