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next day and then climbed into the car. I drove back towards the office and watched her in the rear view mirror until I turned a corner and she disappeared from view.

I had not needed to panic - Robert had survived the afternoon without incident and, more importantly, so had the office. I apologised to him for being away for so long and made up some lame, implausible excuse about being detained and having to explain the forms to Miss Hill. I could tell that he didn't believe me but I didn't care.

Although less than two official working hours remained in the day, time still managed to run at a snail's pace. I had often joked with friends about how time managed to slow down in the week and then double its speed at weekends or when I was enjoying myself. I decided that must have been the reason why the hour and a half I had spent with Samantha had felt like less than ten minutes.

Once again, with a complete disregard for company regulations, I was deserted and left alone in the office at five o'clock sharp and I felt (out of guilt rather than company loyalty) that I should stop for a while and try to catch up on some of the paperwork that I had avoided doing that afternoon. By the time I was reasonably up to date, it was close to half past six. I decided to leave, to go home and change and then make my way to my parents' house as arranged.

Throughout the whole of the rest of the afternoon, I was unable to get Samantha out of my mind for even the briefest of moments.

Chapter Nine

As I had planned earlier, I arrived at my parents' house washed, refreshed and feeling a little more relaxed than I had done earlier in the day. I parked the car and walked towards the little house which had been my home for many years. There were thousands of memories locked up in the tiny building and, as I approached, I prayed that the people close to me who still lived within its walls were safe and well. All the talk of energy waves and all of the confusion that I had witnessed over the last couple of days made me long to return to the security of the past and of my childhood. As I stood on the doorstep and opened the front door, a wave of tender sentimentality washed over me.

One of the most unusual and unexpected aspects of the heat and of the recent bizarre conditions was the distorting effect that they had on my body clock. Although it felt like summer, it was dark by five o'clock and it stayed that way until late in the morning. It was difficult sometimes to convince myself that it really was late October and, although the darkness made it feel as if it should be much later, by the time I went into the house it had only just turned seven-thirty.

Inside the building was dark and the living-room was illuminated only by the flickering blue light of the television set in the corner of the room and by a dull, yellow glow from the open kitchen doorway. When she heard the front door open. Mom came into the living-room and she smiled when she saw me.

'Hello, love. How are you?' she asked in her soothing, peaceful voice.

'I'm fine, Mom,' I replied as I walked across the room and followed her into the kitchen. 'Tired, but fine.'

Finally hearing Mom speak again helped me to calm down and to forget the troubles of the day. She had a relaxing, gentle quality to her voice which immediately took me back to my childhood days. When we were younger, Mom's incredible ability to remain restrained and rational had usually resulted in both my sister and myself ignoring her when she had needed to reprimand us (authority was always maintained by my father who, in such instances, always told us off with a well-aimed slap with the back of his hand). Today, however, Mom's tone lifted me and managed to restore a little piece of normality to the increasingly crazy and hectic world that I found myself living in.

'Where's Dad?' I asked as Mom filled the kettle from the tap.

'He's outside,' she replied, nodding her head through the window and towards a barely discernible shape sitting out on the back lawn. 'Poor thing,' she continued. 'This heat's really knocked him for