When he was five he lost his birthday balloon. The knot on the weight slipped, and it drifted up over their street. He thought it would disappear into the clouds, but it didn’t: it hung in the still air all afternoon, as he remembered it. That night, his mum told him a story about all the adventures his balloon had been on, and how everything it saw as it flew meant something wonderful that would happen that year. In truth, it came down a few miles away and a cow choked to death on it. That, it turned out, really was an omen of the year to come.

With a firm and concerted effort he was able to fall in love with a piece of paper. Unmarked, off white, recycled. He loved the grain, the little flecks of darker material, the way the light wept through. He wanted it with him always, of course. If he could not take the whole sheet, he wished he could tear off a corner, slip it in his pocket, and feel it between thumb and forefinger in difficult moments. But he knew this was an unhealthy way to be with his love, and that it would wear the paper down to dust. So he kept it safe at home, and in time the fear of fire or flood that clung to him whenever he was out diminished. Still, at times he pondered: might an outsider, looking in, not think he had bought himself only difficulty, with all that effort? Some might, perhaps. But only those who had never been in love.

Now that everyone hates me I can do what I like. Nothing to lose. I can lie and cheat and steal and they’ll all shrug their shoulders and say it’s just what they expected. But they won’t. I’m going to be good and kind and wise in weird, quiet ways. It won’t change their minds and it won’t make me the bigger person. But I’ll enjoy watching them twist their little heads trying to work out why those things I do are terrible.

In the dream, he arrived at work and found he was only in his underwear. Everybody was so kind. They checked he was OK; they cleared a meeting room so he could have privacy. By half past nine they had cobbled together an outfit for him from spares and gym bags. They gave him the day off, and drove him home, and made sure he got a GP appointment. He was disappointed to wake up.

Some days she felt she would like to transform into a snail, with a shell on her back and a green, greasy body that nobody wanted to touch. Her mother used to throw snails over the fence into the neighbours’ garden. She would have liked that, too. Everybody kept away from snails, but when they heard that crunch underfoot, they felt the guilt of it. That would be best of all.

He slipped on a banana skin in 2009 and never stopped. One foot planted on the peel, the other waving around, trying to keep him balanced. He had skidded in and out of jobs and marriages (well, not out of the second one, yet). He had slid through places he never dreamed of visiting. One of these days, he hoped, he would come to a stop.

It had always bothered me: why, on that beach when I was seven years old, did that man come and kick down my sandcastles? What did a grown man want from such pointless, bullying destruction? The thought came up in any moment of peace, like an aching joint you feel when you try to go to sleep. So when I invented the time-machine, I went straight back to that beach and kicked the castles down myself. I didn’t like to see my little face crumple, but at least now, I know why I did it.

I had been staring at the wall for half an hour, finding faces and animals and horrors in the wallpaper, finding the places where it repeated and being unable to forget them. The wall now looked like great clumsy tiling, the same sheep and rabbits and demons again and again. I wanted to rip it all down, or splatter it with paint, or simply set the entire waiting room alight. When my name was finally called, they would have to treat me for the wallpaper-induced migraine first. I was so glad I had left my phone at home.

Rain stopped play. Smith, who would have suffered a career-ending knee injury that afternoon, played on for many successful years. Two old friends who had arranged to meet never found another date that worked. The couple who would have split up on the drive home kept on resentfully for a decade longer. The hot dog van outside the ground, always on a knife-edge, went out of business; many cases of food poisoning were averted. A seven-car pileup never piled up. Danny Crawford did not miss his wife’s early labour. A dozen unfaithful partners each had to cancel their rendezvous. A snail was stepped on; another was not. The dry earth was watered.

The little screw always fell out. Whenever I screwed it back in, it loosed itself again, like there was nothing in the the screw-post for it to bite into. It found its freedom and rattled around in the case until I fished it out and put it back. Eventually, I gave up on it. Its absence didn’t seem to do any harm. But I folded it up in a little piece of paper and taped it to the side, just in case.

I decided I would walk around the field: a bit of fresh air and movement, while I worked out what to do about it all. I thought and thought, until my troubled soles had dug out a great furrow that I walked along the bottom of. Until I had uncovered tree roots nad ancient coins and creatures hiding from the winter. By the time I had worked it all out, the hole was too deep to climb out of. All I could do was keep walking around in circles.

It would be the greatest heist of the century. Everything was prepared. He had a collapsible bag stowed in his pants. He had deleted his Facebook account. He had studied the map on the museum’s website. He didn’t need to get away with it forever: just long enough to make the delivery. He would be remembered through history as the man who returned the Parthenon Marbles. Only they turned out to be bigger than he expected.

I have thirty-nine photos of the empty bird feeder, one or two of them with a little brown blur in the corner where something has just flown away. You can flick through them and watch the seeds disappear and the fat balls crumble. I swipe from one to the next and imagine the bird visiting in between, taking its share. Imagine, not remember: I never quite saw them properly. I was too busy taking pictures.

He liked Shredded Wheat because it reminded him of the great hay bales he used to see through the windows of his parents’s car. But he didn’t eat Shredded Wheat anymore, because it was Nestlé. So instead, he crept into the field after sundown and started on the nearest bale, first as it came, and then with the honey and nuts he brought in his gym bag. He ate until sunrise. By then he was seven times the size, swollen with hay, ready to burst. He knew he would not get over the stile for a week. He lay down and waited to be weatherproofed in black plastic. He thought of his mother-in-law’s wickerwork trivets, and how much they reminded him of Shreddies.