During the incident, which is over in less than a minute, no one else has crossed the bridge. A dog trots by off its lead, but there is no sign of its owner.
          I continue to watch the road and the hump-back bridge, but there is no sign of Overcoat Man emerging from the bushes that border the path.
          I look at the backs of the houses in the next street. A light has come on in one of the flats. A man fills a kettle at a sink in a first-floor kitchen.
          I continue to stand at the window as the sky above the houses turns a deeper blue and the lights in the windows glow more brightly and the gardens below fall into deeper and deeper shadow.

Tuesday morning, just after 11 o’clock. I am sitting in my office at the university. None of my three colleagues is in. This is deliberate. We choose our office hours so that they do not overlap. It is not good to be talking to a student about his or her creative writing while a colleague sits listening – trying not to perhaps, but listening all the same – just the other side of the room divider. It is not good from the student’s point of view, as writing can be a personal thing, and nor is it good from your own, since your colleagues might find it impossible not to judge your performance as a teacher.
          On the desk in front of me is a PC, switched off. When I need a machine, I bring in my own. The PC is cumbersome, clunky, slow. I have moved the keyboard out of the way next to the printer, which is also redundant. These items of hardware occupy the left side of the desk. On the right-hand side are two books – Jane Solomon’s Hotel 167 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, both first novels, which I am intending to read in the next few days, the latter for the first time – and a small, neat pile of newspaper cuttings.
          There is nothing else on the desk, no clutter. I keep a tidy desk.
          The newspaper cuttings are all single pages from the Review section of a national broadsheet. They are part of a series called Writers’ Rooms in which a half-page photograph of an author’s office, study or workroom is accompanied by a sidebar of copy written by the featured writer. I take the top one off the pile.
          It is the turn of Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan. In the foreground is a comfortable-looking armchair, a newspaper draped over one arm. The position of the armchair traps an open door against the wall. Hanging on the door, on the side of the door that would be outside the room if the door were closed, is a blackboard. Both these details suggest the door is, in fact, never closed. Maybe any other members of the O’Hagan household are on instructions not to enter, since a comment – ‘The laptop is there for work but it’s not online because I hate the idea of some boring email popping up while I’m trying to fix a paragraph’ – suggests he does not like to be interrupted. On the blackboard is a chalked reminder: ‘Tuesday: Burns essays.’
          I assume it’s a reminder rather than a piece of narration.
          I picture him bent over a pile of manuscripts in a back garden somewhere in north London, striking a match.

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