Chapter 1
The caterpillar appears on a Tuesday morning at thirteen minutes past eight, clinging to one of the few remaining green leaves on Graham Paint’s dying houseplants - although it takes a further nine minutes for it to unleash a quantum event which shatters the universe apart.
It appears to Graham, that is. In fact it has been lurking in his kitchen for a while, waiting for him to pad downstairs on the cream berber carpeting which flows through his semi like a great flood of muesli.
The caterpillar is big and sap green, with a very silly face drawn on its pulsating bottom. Its head is hidden away at the pointy end. But on its great verdant bum it has two eyes drawn with what looks like black felt-tipped pen. The eyes are coloured in with bright orange, while the pupils, again outlined in black, have pale blue centres. They are unfeasibly badly drawn. Why? you might ask. Do caterpillar predators have absolutely no artistic taste, no sense of irony, no grasp of when someone is totally taking the piss?
Clearly not. If natural selection can create creationists, then it can manage a caterpillar with a face on its arse.
The houseplants are Kerri’s responsibility. ‘Responsibility!!’ Graham might have thought, if the caterpillar hadn’t distracted him. That’s a laugh, he would have muttered mirthlessly to himself under his breath. But he doesn’t think any of this, because of the laughable green caricature clinging to his plants. Graham guesses that evolution has given it a rear end which, to a bird, looks like the head of a snake. So that’s what birds think snakes look like.
Catapulting it out the window into the bushes on the end of a spoon would be temporarily satisfying, but ultimately not as rewarding as identifying it, classifying it, and learning of its habits and lifestyle. Pate, his colleague at work, is bound to know about caterpillars. Pate knows all about this sort of stuff, and also about everything else (except fashion sense and avoiding being irritating).
But first, Graham needs to get himself to the office.
And already, with all this staring at a drawing of a bird’s worst nightmare created by Richard Dawkins or God or somebody, Graham will be at least two minutes, possibly three, late for work.
He picks up a big matchbox, empties the matches into the drawer which houses the string, pencils, playing cards, old spectacles, and bits of things which belong to things and scoops up the badly drawn caterpillar into the box. He will show it to Pate and relieve his itchy curiosity with the backscratcher of knowledge.
Graham thinks that Pate can provide him with answers. But the familiar pattern of his day has been disturbed in ways he cannot begin to understand. By putting the caterpillar in a matchbox, he has just changed his life forever. Or till it ends. Whichever comes first.
Graham puts the matchbox down on the granite worktop and switches on the kettle. He’s not going to let a caterpillar disturb his morning routine. But a quick mental calculation tells him he’s going to have to dress twelve percent faster than usual. Even Kerri’s puzzling absence makes little difference, other than the lack of chainsaw noise in the bedroom as he rushes upstairs to grab a tie. Sometimes at this point there’s a sudden choking sound as his wardrobe rummaging wakes her and she tries to inhale her own brains. This is generally followed by a plaintive wheedle...
“Grey?”
She calls him this, thinking it endearing. (Wrongly).
“Graaaey?”
Grey Paint. Sounds attractive. Fortunately this morning there’s no bleat from the bed, and no need to explain that he doesn’t have time to make her a cup of tea. He scans the ties. That one won’t go with his shirt, that would clash horribly, that’s gross, that screams 1978. He holds up ‘won’t go’ and ‘1978’, and puts ‘1978’ back.
