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wasn’t something he liked being told about, but it was better than a detailed analysis of her latest diet.
    â€˜We really need to find out how they’re getting through,’ Jill was saying. ‘Until we know a lot more about that, it’s really just guesswork and how quickly we can react once an infestation’s been reported to us. There’s theories, of course, but none of them seem to hold up once you try applying them in practice. For example, there was this article in New Thaumaturgical Quarterly about quantum fluctuations in the Earth’s metadimensional field—’
    â€˜Is that right?’ Chris said hopelessly. ‘I didn’t even know we had a—’
    â€˜Which,’ Jill ground on, ‘may give rise to anomalous cross-field events which the demons could’ve evolved to exploit, sort of like cracks, or bubbles. But it’s all a bit vague and theoretical, if you ask me. I still prefer the hypothesis put forward by Kanamoto and Van Spee in 1846, which seeks to explain demon incursions in terms of artificially induced Otherspace interfaces, presupposing a negatively charged ionic curtain existing somewhere in the D6 void—’
    In other words, white noise, which Chris had long since learned to tune out; it was soothing, when you were sitting in a pleasant pub holding a full glass, and basically he just liked hearing the sound of her voice: eager, earnest, clever, friendly, safe; not asking him to understand, let alone agree or form an opinion. It wasn’t like when Karen talked at him, when there was always a very real threat that there’d be a test afterwards, or a sudden silence which he was supposed to fill with exactly the right form of sympathetic reassurance. Most of all, he liked being talked at by Jill because she never ever talked about Us; though the downside of that was that there wasn’t an Us for them to talk about. But, he felt sure, even if there had been (if only - ), she’d never have dreamed of talking about it. He couldn’t imagine her doing such a thing. To the best of his knowledge, in all the years he’d known her she’d never been half of any kind of an Us. She belonged to too many people, he supposed, too many friends all relying on her to listen and understand. A greater Us, of which she was the coordinator and historian. For a moment he felt a stab of jealousy, but it didn’t take long for it to pass.
    Closing time swooped down too soon; Chris said goodnight and walked home. It was only as he unlocked the door, shoving the thing he’d been carrying in his right hand under his arm so he could get out his keys, that he realised he’d picked up her bag by mistake. Ever since he’d known Jill, she’d always had a carrier bag; Tesco or Safeway in the early days, upgraded to M&S once she left school and started earning; these days, now that she was affluent and successful, it’d be something black or burgundy with gold lettering on it, but still a plastic carrier, her trade mark. What she carried in her carriers had always been something of a mystery, since she packed her vital instruments - purse, phone, glamour-repair kit and the like - in a conventional handbag, usually of great elegance and splendour. But she also had the knack of frustrating curiosity without even seeming to try; the carrier always came to rest between her feet, or wedged between her thigh and the side of the chair, safe from surreptitious investigation. But not, apparently, this time.
    Chris paused, standing in the hall by the cheap Ikea phone table, and tried to reconstruct the sequence of events. Jill had stood up; the carrier had been in her hand, but she’d rested it on the table while she’d put on her coat; he’d picked it up to give it to her, but then she’d dropped her handbag, and by the time she’d retrieved that they’d been talking about something - Izzy Bowden’s divorce, he