She went to the back room and opened the door to the sudden sharp scent of her work – paint and oil. Her colour wheel – yellow at the top these days, before it moved into green at two o’clock and blue at four – hung on the wall…

She had an image in her mind, of their house on a hill – a pure, clean white gazebo, neatly supported by four perfect pillars – and they’d emerged, spotless and tidy, to drive the world crazy with the exuberance of their songs…

She looked down at the floor and saw stripes of prismatic colour that had caught the late-morning light, the day’s first bright sighting always delighting and surprising her.

A lustrous brown? It didn’t make sense. Brown was the colour of figs, of Tootsie Rolls. And if a lustrous brown could be created, someone would have done it by now. Joshua Reynolds. Hadn’t he made a lustrous brown from asphaltum – ‘Jews’ pitch’ – bitumen from the bottom of the Dead Sea? And what about the Pre-Raphaelites’ mummy brown – made from ground-up Egyptian mummies?

Was she imagining it? No. She didn’t know where it had come from, but it was there: a hint of something that looked almost metallic, that was the colour of gold. Gold! Metal, to make the mix sparkle? Like metal-flake paint on cars or like that drum kit I saw?

And she could see the patch of green – the newly named Moon Park, once just ‘the park’, where the hippies had played chess and bongos and someone had put up that sign that said Welcome, Flower Followers. Was that only last summer? Now the tables were gone and it was just grass…

It was radiant... yet grainy, like the pink of the grit on the paths of the park...

‘I’m burning the midnight oil to get the moonstick finished. Enough prototypes. I’ve probably done 50,000 drawings of the damn thing.’

When he got outside the revolving doors, Banno set off on a post-work walk, crossing Copernicus Broadway into the quiet streets – the UNADOPTED streets, said the sign – where the pavements seemed to be a second thought, each one soon petering out into a mown green verge.

He saw a handwritten sign above a door: WE ONLY PLAY ORIGINALS. The letters were written in psychedelic shapes filled with a paisley-patterned jumble of colour, like on the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension album cover.

A bus shelter appeared, a few hundred yards away. Pollution-ville, Banno thought… He got to that key last stretch of pavement where some people might run, so as not to miss the bus. Bus riders are punctual; they have no choice.

Banno saw that the passenger poles were white. He was pretty sure they’d always been yellow. The white made the bus feel brighter, fresher.