Do you remember the last great seismological crisis, the earthquakes of '89? The year, unprecedented in the history of our occupation, when the earth buckled and gaped, when buildings shattered and fell? Those were page 9 dangerous and disturbing times! Bewilderment was general and extreme. The rivers rose and shrank accordingly. The mysterious comings and goings of the ocean swallowed chunks of land we'd been familiar with all our lives, or, even more strangely, threw up others where no land had been before, and this newborn land was still moistly pale, strewn with evidence of its former life as ocean floor: a litter of weed, small shells and slowly expiring sea creatures. The capital sustained some of the worst damage. I was there at the time; it seemed that every day brought a new tremor. The Quay and The Terrace were canyons, filled with shattered glass. The Houses of Parliament remained standing, but tilted dangerously to one side, so that they resembled a crazed, antipodean version of Pisa's more celebrated leaning tower.

At that time, sects sprang up amongst the homeless, who roamed what remained of the streets and made a living by begging; they claimed that responsibility for the quakes was ours, and that the earth, like an angry beast of burden, had finally risen up in protest against our mistreatment of it, the constant prodding and digging, burning and scarification.

At the same time, a strange exhilaration seemed to have sprung up amongst the ruins. The normal, numbing routines of work and travel had been disrupted. We were like pedestrians, released by a changing light from the weary confinement of the kerb, who seem suddenly to have woken from a dream and been propelled forward into the empty street. Those of us who had survived became accomplices in an almost festive elation, flip side to our coin of despair. Discernable emotions could be read on the face of every passer-by. Strangers grew chatty and intimate, liable to tell their life stories to anyone they met.

When I went home to visit my parents, they seemed, in comparison, tight-lipped and solemn. My father's face, bent over the food to bless it, seemed to have grown cadaverous, his prominent nose a bony ridge from which an imaginary explorer could have surveyed a landscape of planes and furrows. At first, excitement made me loquacious. But their silence reproved me. I remember thinking, with a kind of despair, that if I reached my hands down their throats, still I would never be able to find their hearts.

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