Off Duty

July 2029. Ketchum, Oklahoma-Sequoyah, is four hundred and seventy-one people on an arm of Grand Lake in the Cherokee Nation, with a café on the highway and a resort across the cove, fourteen miles from Vinita. Frederick goes there with Theo, Marcus and Felix and two protection officers, to a rented farmhouse with no air conditioning and a retired schoolteacher's rules about the well, the screen door and the storm cellar, and on the back of the Programme the four of them write ten ordinary things he has never done. Take the bus. Buy a bike with his own money. Swim at the pool, in the queue. Get a job, a real one, with a form.

Off Duty is seven weeks and ten ticks: a county van you ring for the day before, a dead man's house carried into a pawn shop, a lifeguard of nineteen who blows her whistle at the King and later at the Prime Minister, a debt chalked on a café slate, a birdhouse made of a henhouse that comes third, a pig in a creek in the dark, a catfish put back on its eggs, a radio phone-in that the whole town rings to lie on, a Prime Minister at Blackjacks whom the Realm thinks is resigning and who has gone to look at a bridge, a storm cellar that must be opened to anybody, and a town that knows exactly who he is and decides, together, every day, without being asked, not to make it the most interesting thing about itself.