The Mirror World of Melody Black by Gavin Extence

darting back and forth between several more important matters, like a skittish rabbit in a meadow, and consequently I didn’t realize that I’d dispensed all twelve rashers of bacon onto the grillpan until it was too late and they were already cooking. In hindsight, I was impressed that I’d managed to get twelve rashers of bacon onto our grillpan; they were tessellated in a perfect rectangle, like a finished jigsaw. Yet when Beck came through from the hallway, he looked with a degree of suspicion at the generous plate I presented to him.
    â€˜Er, what’s this?’ He was still sleepy, so I was willing to forgive the pure idiocy of the question; in a way, it was quite endearing.
    â€˜It’s breakfast,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t sleep and it’s a beautiful morning, so I went to the shops. Surprise!’
    â€˜Yes, it is . . .’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘You couldn’t sleep so you decided to cook breakfast?’
    â€˜Yes: bacon and eggs.’ I gestured to the plate with my spare hand. ‘Mostly bacon, actually. It was buy one get one free. Do you think you can manage seven rashers? I don’t think I can handle more than five.’
    â€˜Er, yeah, okay. I mean that’s a lot of meat to digest on a Thursday morning, but I’ll give it a go.’
    â€˜That’s the spirit. I’m fairly sure the British Empire was built on bacon and eggs for breakfast.’
    â€˜Oh. I thought it was built on conquest and the ruthless exploitation of indigenous populations and their resources.’
    I laughed. It was a very girlish laugh. ‘Yes, that too. But you can’t brutalize the world on an empty stomach. Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, Lord Nelson’ – I was plucking names out of the air – ‘they were all bacon-’n’-eggs men. Especially on a Thursday. Historical fact.’
    â€˜I’ll take your word for it.’ Beck pointed at the plate. ‘But this is less breakfast and more food art.’
    I shrugged. I had plated the food like a cartwheel, with a pool of scrambled egg at the hub and symmetrical spokes of bacon fanning out in an extravagant circle. There was a single leaf of parsley crowning the axle and seven blobs of ketchup marking the circumference, as if it were an unfinished dot-to-dot picture.
    â€˜I couldn’t just heap up seven rashers of bacon in a tower,’ I explained. ‘It would have looked ridiculous. Do you want coffee, too? I’ve just made a fresh pot. It speeds up the metabolism, so it will help you digest your food.’
    Beck gave me a quizzical look, but I’d been on enough crash diets to know what I was talking about here.
    Paddington, 9.54. I bought a first-class return to Oxford because it was too hot a day to suffer second class; it was also too hot a day to be worrying about money. I was sick of watching every penny. Anyway, I reasoned this trip would pay for itself, several times over. Plus I’d probably need the free Wi-Fi and a table, and plenty of coffee to keep me sharp. You could never rely on the buffet trolley in standard, which always felt like a dreadful lottery. No, first class was justified on so many levels. And since this was a work trip, I could take the £65 out of my taxable income, so there was another incentive. My father would be proud.
    Paddington, like so many of those grand old Victorian stations, was slightly shit in various ways. Peeling paint, blackened glass and brickwork, dirty, dusty, draughty, fumy. Nowhere to smoke. I hadn’t been through the overground part of the station for several years, but it was just as I remembered it: basically, a vast glorified barn with one end offering up a tantalizing semi-circle of daylight and open space. Frankly, I don’t know what Isambard Kingdom Brunel was thinking. I couldn’t wait to be away, but since the train wasn’t yet boarding, I went on a hunt for the bronze statue of