He sees it first in the way people walk.

Not dramatically. Nobody is running. Nobody is shouting in the street. It is smaller than that, and worse for being smaller: the man at the water point fills his container and does not stay to talk the way he usually does. Two children who normally take the long way past the garden’s outer fence, dragging a stick along the chain-link for the sound of it, go the short way instead, heads down, not dragging anything.

He notices the notice itself on his way to the market — not the board by the water point, but a second copy someone has pinned to the wall by the tram stop, already curling at one corner in the wind. He does not stop to read it again. He knows what it says.

At the market, the stalls are open as always, but Mrs. Okafor at the seed table is folding cloth she doesn’t need to fold.

“You heard,” she says. Not a question.

“I heard.”

“My daughter says it doesn’t mean anything yet. Ninety days, she says. Ninety days is a long time.” She doesn’t look up from the cloth. “I told her I’ve seen how ninety days goes in this sector before.”

He has no comfort that would survive contact with what she already knows. He buys onions he doesn’t need — a small kindness disguised as commerce, the only kind he’s ever been good at — and she takes the coins without meeting his eyes, which is its own answer.

He walks back through streets that look exactly as they did yesterday and feel entirely different. This is what he remembers from the reports he used to read, in the other life: the gap between the data and the day. The model would have recorded nothing yet. No behavioural shift meets its threshold for flagging. But he can see it in every person he passes — the particular carefulness of people deciding, individually and without discussing it, not to be surprised.

He gets back to the garden and stands at the gate for a while before going in.

The sweet peas don’t know any of this. They have reached the top string on the third support and are beginning, cautiously, to spread sideways along it, looking for the next thing to hold.

He thinks: they will flower whether the notice means something or nothing.

He thinks: that used to comfort him more than it does today.

He goes in. He works the brassica rows until the light changes, and does not let himself count how many times he stops without meaning to.