It got a lot better the next day.

Stop, Jim.  I know what you're going to say.  I've jumped straight from arriving at the Parry's house in that funny car of theirs at nine in the morning to playing a game called Resident Evil with their son John at half past two the following day, without mentioning anything that happened in between.

There's a reason for that, and it's this.  Nothing happened in between.  That's right – nothing.  Unless you call sitting around in a house, keeping away from the windows and being unable to go out (although the weather was warm and bright) something worth using lots of chewy words (at a penny each) to describe.

All right, I'll try to tell you what was going on.  I ought to warn you that I didn't understand all of it myself (I've said that before, haven't I) so how I'm going to explain it to you, I don't know.

It was all down to the phones (like John's earring).  We didn't have them.  Naturally.  What they were was like the telephones you sometimes see in big offices, or law courts – you know, there's an earpiece you hold to your ear and a trumpet you talk into and wires that connect you to the somebody you're speaking to and he's got the same sort of thing at his end so you can both talk and listen at the same time.  There were telephones at the Boreal office in Cropredy.

These phones that John and his friends and, so far as I could tell, everybody in that world had were like that – you could talk to other people with them, I mean – but they were more like part of the people than something they used.  The way John explained it, your phone was keyed to your DNA (whatever that was, and we didn't have any – not the right sort anyway) so it only worked for you, and nobody else could use it.  Even if I'd clipped John's phone to my ear (and I'd have died of shame if I'd been seen wearing an earring) it wouldn't have let me talk to anyone else.

That wasn't so bad.  I mean; who else did I want to talk to?  The trouble was that if you didn't have a phone you weren't a person.  No, really.  You couldn't buy anything, because the phones had, in some way I never comprehended, your money inside them. There were no coins, so the Parrys couldn't lend us any money.  It got worse.  We couldn't go out of the house, because there were anbaric monitors looking for criminals in the streets.  If we'd been found wandering about without phones we'd have been arrested.  The way they put it, only robbers and looters and people up to no good went about without their phones.

Just to add to the fun, the house didn't want us to be in it at all.  The mechanisms in the house would only work for you if you were one of the people who lived there.  Those phones, again.  This was supposed to stop their stuff being pinched, or squatters moving in.  If you didn't have a phone, or it didn't think you ought to be living in it, the house refused to look after you. What's that you say, Jim?  What about visitors?  Apparently you had to tell the house that it was all right for them to be there, and it checked their – wait for it – phones and added them to its list of approved residents.

John said later that we were lucky the house hadn't tried to kill us.  'The daemons confuse it, so we had the security turned right down.'

None of this would have mattered so much if the Parrys had been in the house with us, but they weren't.  It was Monday morning – Will Parry was a doctor and he had a practise to go to,  John was at school and Judy was working somewhere in town.  She was a nurse at a place called Frenchay Hospital.

So, although the house was full of amazing things, we couldn't use them.  We couldn't even open the cold cupboard to get something to eat.  If Mrs Parry hadn't left us out some bread (funny pappy white stuff), we'd have starved.

We kept away from the windows and talked about things.  There wasn't much conversation, I'm afraid.  Lyra was in a world of her own.  Dazed would be the right word for it.  She and Pan occupied the couch and seemed to be in a trance most of the time.  Arthur and Sal were very restless – walking up and down the sitting room, muttering to themselves.  They had been badly affected by the sight of the boy who was intercised.  We all were; but I think Arthur blamed himself for not preventing it.  He kept that horrible cloth cap on, even indoors.  Perhaps he was losing his hair?  I never saw him without something on his head.

As for Viola and me, we (at John's suggestion, before he dashed off – late – for school) read a book called The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.  Not all of it – it was enormous, like a Bible.  They let me take it home with me and keep it.  I'll show it to you one day, Jim.  'Everything's in that book,' John said.  'Everything that anyone's ever done, or thought, or felt, is in that book.'

It was full of plays and poems, written in a language that was sometimes strange and old-fashioned (but never hard to read).  To be honest; when I think of what's in that book and look at this rubbish I'm writing here, I feel like throwing my pen away and giving up.  But I'll never give up the book.

Never mind; and we had a good laugh when we got to the play called As You Like It (thanks, John).  And an even bigger laugh from Twelfth Night.

After we'd suffered six hours of imprisonment in the Parry's house, John turned up, home from school.  The house cheered up straight away (it was as if the house was a person, and missing its friends).  Lots of little red and green lights turned on and, in some way that's completely beyond me, the sitting room walls disappeared and we found ourselves standing high up on the side of a mountain, with a view across a green meadowed valley, with a village nestling in the bottom to white peaks soaring high into the sky in the hazed distance.  'My favourite view,' said John, making us cups of Indian tea and offering us a plate of little chocolate and orange cakes before settling down to do his homework (no change there, then.  Some things are the same wherever you go, and that includes school homework).

You guessed it. He did his homework with his phone.

That evening, after Will and Judy had returned from their work, I thought we would have some sort of meeting and work out what we were going to do next.  But no.  We were waiting for this Mary person that Will had mentioned before.  We ate and sat and watched a moving photogram that they called the TV.  I hated it.  Not the TV – that was fun, although as usual I didn't understand much of it – but the atmosphere.  Judy seized a place on the couch next to Will and sat very close to him, with Kirjava on her lap.  She didn't actually glare at Lyra, or snap at her, but you could see that she was defending Will from her; I suppose you'd have to say.  Lyra sat on a chair by herself, stroking Pantalaimon incessantly and looking blank.  Arthur and Sal just carried on muttering.

By the time it got to nine o'clock I'd had about enough of this, and so had John.  We went upstairs to his room and played games and talked about our different worlds and our different (but in many ways very similar) lives.

And that's where I left you.  Someone downstairs must have said something that broke the ice – or perhaps they opened a bottle of wine – because they eventually started talking. Maybe Judy Parry relaxed after a while.  I hope so.  I liked her, but I hardly ever saw her looking happy.  No; but when you think of it there must have been something about her that had made Will want to marry her.  I just never saw it.

Will and Judy had made arrangements to stay away from work on Tuesday (there hadn't been enough time on Monday, John said).  John did something to his phone (he held it under hot water, I think) to convince it that he had a fever and to get him excused school for the day.  So we all went for a picnic.

It was on a place called the Downs, overlooking a deep river gorge, where a spidery suspension bridge (very old, John said) leapt from our side of the river to the other.  The car drove us up there (it only took fifteen minutes) dropped us off with our things, and drove itself back home again.  Will or Judy would call for it when it was needed.

It was such a relief to be out in the open air again!  The sky was a wide blue-and-white dome stretched over our heads; from Cymru over to the west to Aquae Sulis to the east.   A gentle breeze kept the leaves on the trees moving and ourselves from getting too hot.

Again, I'd been expecting that we would all sit down on the grass and make this big plan to sort out the Boreals and shut down their horrible operations.  But nothing like that happened.  Instead, we strolled about in twos and threes, safe from observation by the monitors, and talked to each other as and when we met.  Arthur and I spent some time on the edge of the gorge, looking down to the Avon river, far below.

'The Kennet and Avon.  It's a fine canal, but hard work to navigate,' he said.  We talked about Bolvangar – I wanted to – and I learned more about what had happened there.  He looked at me with his intensely blue eyes. 'We changed there.   We was changed.'

'Is it true that you're an oracle?  That you have power over Dust?'  Lyra had told me that Arthur was the greatest seer among the gyptian folk, but that there was more to it than that.

'Yes, it's true.  As for the Dust – nobody has power over it.  But we sees it, and we talks to it sometimes and we can see it in people, too.'

'Dust is in people?'

'Yes, else they wouldn't be people.'

'Can you see it in me?'

'It's tricky, out here in the sunshine, but yes, we can.'

'And Lyra?'

'Of course.'  He paused.  'Peter…' Sal looked at me, from her place on Arthur's shoulder.  'It's hard for her.  Don't make it worse.'

'What do you mean?'

'You know.  We sees that in you, too.'

'But…'

'We knows.  We sees it.

'You has a choice, Peter.'  Arthur's face was as kindly and concerned as I'd ever seen it.  'We knows what you is feeling for Lyra.  We knows how terrible Judy is feeling.  We sees that too.

'It's never going to be easy for Lyra and Will.  It's not fair; but there it is.  You knows.'

I looked away.  'Yes.'

'The kindest thing is to let them have their time together now.  It'll only be for another day or so.  Then we'll all have go back.'

'Go back?  Why?'

'It's this world.  It's wrong for you and me and her.   We feels it.  We can't live long here.

'I can't feel anything.'

'But you're not us.'

'No, but…' I could feel the tears starting in my eyes.  'When you say I've got a choice, you mean I mustn't tell her how I…' I must have looked desperate, for Arthur reached over to me and held me in both arms.

'No. Don't make her have to send you away.  It would hurt her – and you – too much.'

I gazed to westwards, over the gorge.  The sounds of cars and boats two hundred feet below were carried up towards us by the gentle wind, scented by its passage over the open country beyond.

'You must be Arthur and Peter.'  A grey-haired woman, solid and friendly-faced was coming across the grass towards us, holding a small wickerwork box.  John Parry was with her.

'This is Aunt Mary,' he said, producing a gingham cloth and spreading out on the ground.  Arthur held out his hand and bowed slightly.  'Doctor Malone, we is honoured.'  Her alpine chough daemon fluttered his wings.

'Call me Mary, please.'

'Aunt Mary was involved with Dad and Lyra in the old days,' John said.  'She's really clever.  Ask her anything you like.'

'Was clever.  I'm superannuated now!'  Mary laughed, a robust chortle (that's a word John taught me).  I liked her straight away.  She produced pies, salad and beer from the box and we tucked in.  We talked between mouthfuls.

'I'm sure,' said Mary, ' from what Lyra's told me today that the vehicle you came here in was powered by Dust.  Peter, you're mechanically-minded.  Can you tell me how the car was put together?'

'It was dark most of the time, but...' and I described the car's unusual instruments, and the glass cylinders I'd seen in the boot.  'It flashed yellow-gold when the boy was…'

'Sorry, Peter.  It's painful, I know.  I think the glass cylinders are a Rusakov Accumulator.  They collected the Dust that was released when that poor child was intercised.'

I remembered the crash when the car fell.  'I think they may have been broken when we came here.  Why did the car drop so far when it entered this world?  Shouldn't the ground have been in the same place here as there?'

'The worlds were never perfectly aligned, Peter.  It could have been worse.  Suppose you'd come out underground!'

We'd have been buried alive.  I shuddered.

'We need to get you two and Lyra back home.  There's another thing.  The woman who shot at you.  Miss Morley.'  Mary looked grim.  'I've met her. She's a…'

'She's from this world!' I almost shouted it.  'That's why she had a fake daemon!'

'Oh yes, Peter.  She's stuck over there, and it serves her right.  She's a nasty piece of work.  All the same, we ought to try to get her back here.  The Latrom Corporation will be looking for her.'

'The Latrom Corporation?'

'They're the twin of the Boreal Foundation in your world.  They're not as powerful as the Boreals, but they have connections and they'll be on our trail soon.  We're sure that the Boreals in your world can communicate with the Latroms over here.  There's a device called the lodestone resonator that they can use.  It's not as effective as Will's and Lyra's dream-state, but it's quite good enough.  Miss Morley will alert them to our presence here, you can be sure of that.'

'Why don't we stay here?  Leave her stuck there?'

'Too many reasons, Peter.  You'll die in two years or so if you stay here.  This world is too alien to your daemon.  Since the Culham Incident and the destruction of the Subtle Knife, which altered, or, I think, restored, the physical makeup of the universes, it's become easier, I think, to travel between the worlds.  The barriers are a little lower.  I don't think the Boreal's vehicle would have worked before Culham, for example.

'The worlds have converged a little, but not enough to make it possible for people from one world to live a full life in another.  There's still considerable transvergence between them.'

'The Subtle Knife?  What's that?'  It took a while for Mary to explain that one to me.  There was a lot of history involved.  I'll tell you all about it some other time, Jim.  It certainly explained Will Parry's missing fingers.

I saw them briefly; heads together, hands interlinked, bodies pressed close to one another, walking slowly through the trees near the gorge's edge.  I blinked, and caught a brief vision of Dust, streaming down from the sky and enveloping them in golden swirls of light. 'Come away,' whispered Viola, so we did.

Later I found Judy Parry sitting red-eyed on a tartan rug some distance off and sat next to her in silence for a while.  She didn't come with us when we left Bristol for Cropredy that evening.