Samantha Harvey

Sometimes he wakes up and is deeply surprised by the fact that he is still living, as if there has been a terrible mix-up of fates. When alone in the dark he has the sensation that his entire body is swelling out — without trying to understand or even interpret the sensation, he lets it take hold, and becomes something of an addict of darkness.

In the peat moor house he must have been nine or ten years old and his mother was here, there, over there, always present. He would sit with her, maybe they had a candle or a gas lamp, or maybe nothing. She would tell him things of which he now has a warped recollection, some facts exaggerated and some whittled away.

He supposes she told him things because she was lonely or sick to the teeth with the reality of that flat expanse of peat — a dreamland of cocoa-coloured space and wild flowers in the summer, but a black wet trauma in the winter. And one thing Jake remembers well enough from her German-accented anecdotes is the story of Luigi Lucheni. Lucheni, Sara told him, had been wandering around Europe looking for someone famous to kill, so that he could make history. Immediately, Jake intuited, Lucheni is the kind of man I want to be.