The Telling

of the door. This house. It certainly looked like it; but there was no mention of it, no evidence in the caption. George Williams, the caption read. Last of the Lune Valley Basket-weavers .
    I gave up on the local history book and picked up the History of the Chartist Movement. It was a sour thing: a contemporary account by a member of the organization, full of grievances and the sense of failure. It was a facsimile edition, reproducing the nineteenth-century type, which was cramped and difficult to read. There was mention of a trial at Lancaster, which wasn’t far, it was where I’d left the motorway, but there was no mention of Reading Rooms, and Lancaster wasn’t close enough to seem relevant. I slapped the book shut and set it down.
    I felt it. A teetering, pregnant silence as if a breath had been drawn, and someone was about to speak. I looked up, glanced around the room. The daffodils on the windowsill, the grey paths across the floor, the silky ashes in the grate; it was all absolutely ordinary. The view from the window, grey sky and green fields. As I turned my head to look, I felt slow, as if moving through water. The air was thickening; if I lifted up a finger, and ran it through the air in front of me, it would leave a ripple. But it was too much to move a finger. I couldn’t move a finger. Each breath was a conscious effort.
    I must have sat like that for just a minute, maybe less, waiting. Nothing happened. No one spoke. My skin teased itself into goose bumps.
    And then I sneezed, and a sheep coughed in the field, a great barking, rasping cough, as if it were taking the piss out of me.
    Idiot.
    What would Mark say? I swung my legs off the sofa, got up and went over to the window. He’d have me down the road in an instant, have me in the queue to see the peeled man. I looked out at the garden, the intensity of its green, its lushness. I saw what I had seen before, but failed to take account of until that moment. Down at the end of the garden: the electricity substation.
    Double idiot.
    On the corner of Kirkside Road, our road, there’s an olive-green metal cabinet, pressed up against the low wall, the privet hedge behind swelling up and around it. I don’t know exactly what it is: electric wiring or telephone cables, perhaps. Occasionally I’ve seen a guy there in overalls, he’d have the doors open, the cabinet spilling wires. Sometimes, passing by, I’ve heard the electricity hum inside, like a dozen violins playing the same chord. The substation must have been similar, only bigger, grander, more expansive. An orchestral strings section thrumming out a single chord. Electricity: that’s what the hum was, that was the strangeness in the air. Nothing more than that.
    *
     

    I took myself out for a walk, the way I might have taken Cate out for a walk. I had to organize myself into jumper, jacket, boots, and practically drag myself out of the door. I’d get some fresh air and some exercise, and then I’d get stuck in to the work: unwrap everything, take everything out of the boxes, bags, suitcases, heap it into piles, begin triage. I could get it done in a day or two, once I’d got started.
    I stalled at the top step. I felt so obvious, so conspicuous, the street a clean sweep in both directions. To my left, the ground rose, the street ducking out of sight down the other side, towards the church. The road was a cul-de-sac; I knew from the directions . To the right, the street flattened for a while, and then curved and climbed towards the crossroads where it was lost from sight behind the bulk of a converted barn. There was about a quarter of a mile between my cottage and the barn, and in all that space there were only four houses, standing in wide pools of garden. In between, fields reached right up to the edge of the street; sheep grazed and lambs stood around in gangs, like teenagers. There were no pavements, no white or yellow lines, no hard boundaries at all. Grass nibbled and cracked at the edge of the tarmac. Hedges were bony and holed, fence posts had been strung with invisible wire. The only solid lines were the dry-stone walls edging some of the gardens and fields, so ancient that they seemed more like an accident of geology than anything man-made. It made me feel exposed, and somehow porous, as if I were too vulnerable to face the air. At home, I’d head for the park, the canal, the open spaces, but where do you go when everywhere is open space?
    The nearest house was a cottage