I start to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. But then he reaches forward to open the fire door and I see again the knife in a tan leather holster, strapped to his back. The world rocks around me, my mouth fills with cotton wool. Jonah catches me as I stagger backwards. His hand rests against my back.

“Don’t worry, lad,” he whispers. “Bit of a scare, that’s all.”

He leads me back to the bar and when we get there my heart stops. There’s three more of them, sitting on the leather furniture, waiting with Farah and Chiu. One of them, a small, plump, muscular man with feral eyes, is playing Uno with Chiu. I lock eyes with Farah and I can see the tension in her body, her calculating look. Chiu glances up, but then looks back to his cards. I can tell he’s scared, but he’s concentrating hard on the cards in order to keep himself under control.

Jonah claps his hands together. “Well, well! It’s a party!”

“This is Farah and Chiu,” one of the other men says – a tall, athletic man with long legs, bare arms and a narrow, mournful face. “We found them in the bar.”

“I can see that,” Jonah says, glancing at me like we’re sharing a joke. “Funny how you lot always search the bar first, isn’t it?”

The man playing cards rearranges the glasses in front of him self-consciously. “We didn’t know what to do with them, so we waited—”

“Right, right,” Jonah snaps. “Of course you did.” He turns to me. “Kyle, I want you to meet my friends. A more feckless bunch of layabouts you’ll never set eyes on.” He pauses again, like he’s waiting for us to laugh. “This black javelin of a man is Ose,” he continues after a moment. “And the chunky little Sherman tank here is Levi.”

Ose nods, holding my gaze, sizing me up.

“Wotcha,” Levi says, with only a cursory glance.

Jonah turns to the last man, sitting silently in the armchair with a glass of something golden in his hand. “The sickly-looking fellow here is Tongue.”

“Tongue, tongue,” Tongue says, nodding and jabbing his thumb to his chest.

“You’ll have to excuse Tongue,” Jonah adds. “He came to us as damaged goods and he says not a word except ‘tongue’.”

“Tongue,” Tongue agrees.

Chiu looks up from his cards, intrigued. “Broca’s region?” he says. “It’s part of the brain, I read about it. This happens if Broca’s region gets damaged.”

“Tongue! Tongue!” Tongue nods, with sudden enthusiasm.

Jonah laughs. “Well! That has made him happy. And you’ve taught us something that we managed not to learn in all the time we’ve been here.” He heads behind the bar and inspects the bottle that the others must have left out. He whistles softly. “Twenty-five-year Macallan? Lads, this is the good stuff.”

He takes down a glass and pours the liquid to the very top.

“Tongue,” Tongue agrees with satisfaction.

Jonah drops heavily on to the sofa next to Farah, sandwiching her between himself and Ose. There isn’t enough space but he doesn’t seem to care. Ose does his best to make room, although he, in turn, is limited by the arm of the sofa.

Jonah takes a large swig of the whisky, swills it in his mouth and then spits it back into his glass. “Gah!” he gasps. “No eating or drinking in this world, I guess you figured that out by now? I still miss it though. I drink the idea of whisky. I drink to remember.” A cold smile breaks across his face. “Get it? Drink to remember?” He looks at me impatiently. “Sit, sit down,” he says.

I slump into the remaining armchair, opposite Tongue.

“You OK, Kyle?” Farah says, guardedly.

“We’re fine,” Jonah answers for me. “Bit of a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

I catch the question in Farah’s look and turn away. I keep thinking about the way Jonah looked at me when he pressed the knife against my chest. No compassion, no regret.

Why did he change his mind?

“So … tell us about yourselves,” Jonah says with false joviality. “What brings you to this god-forsaken place?”

We exchange a look, me, Farah and Chiu. What can we do except play along?

“I fell off a roof,” Chiu says.

Jonah grins appreciatively. “Ha! Wonderful. What a way to go!”

Even Ose cracks a slight, reluctant smile.

“What about you?” Jonah asks Farah, like we’re playing a party game.

“A headache,” Farah says. “I guess I passed out in Casualty.”

Jonah looks intrigued. “So you might be with us a little while?” He gives Farah a Cheshire-cat grin. “A lot of people here are just passing through, some of them don’t even know they’re here. But you three are different, aren’t you?” He turns to me. A piercing, shrewd look. “And you, Kyle, what’s your story?”

“I don’t remember,” I say shortly.

“Come on, Kyle,” Jonah cajoles me, an edge in his voice. “We’re sharing here, right?”

“I have epilepsy,” I say. “I pass out a lot.”

I expect him to be irritated by my non-answer but he seems oddly satisfied. “That you do,” he muses. “That you do.”

“Tongue?” Tongue says, questioningly.

“Leave it,” Jonah warns. He smiles, falsely. “Let’s have another drink, shall we?”

It seems to go on for an age, Jonah filling the room with his one-sided banter, a kind of strained, scripted act. What does he want? I wonder. Where is this leading? He fetches the bottle and refills his glass.

“Want some?” he asks, holding up the glass for me. “Or Coke, or whatever. There’s no rules in this world, that’s the wonderful thing about it.”

Jonah tells us that he came off his motorbike. He doesn’t know what’s left of his body in the ordinary world, what fragment of wrecked brain matter is keeping him tethered to this world, but he’s been here for decades. Ose was hit by a car and Levi was a maintenance worker for the railways. Their brains in the ordinary world are still dying or wrecked beyond repair and clinging on to life. They have no way of knowing for sure but, somehow, they’ve reached the same conclusion as Chiu. In the ordinary world their brains are igniting in gamma activity, catapulting them here, keeping them here. Hours, days, years… It’s irrelevant, the time in one world is unaffected by the time in the other.

They tell us this in passing, as if the nature of this place was never in question.

“I woke up on the tracks in this world,” Levi says. “Not that I knew it was this world. I couldn’t figure out why the lads had left me. I was still walking the length of the tracks, going nowhere in particular, when Jonah found me and explained it all.”

“How long have you been here?” Farah says.

Levi shrugs. “More years than I can count.”

“There’s a machine that can help us,” Chiu says suddenly. “We read about a machine that can—” He stops when he catches a look from Farah.

Jonah’s eyes are vigilant and cunning. “A machine?”

“It’s nothing,” Farah says. “Just kid stuff.”