This bathroom, shared with a dozen others. Now, three years on, she’d pause in this bathroom. To retrieve that spike of energy when, finally, after interviews and tests, she secured her right to live in this building. To know its ways. To share this bathroom.

L-shaped, the shower far back in the alcove. The slant to the drain steep enough to alert bare toes. The basin’s obese taps with Hot and Cold in foxed enamel. Their bolts and washers industrial and gleaming. The toilet on a cement plinth canted her legs beneath her, turned to the window of whispering leaves sliced by the velocity of light. The bathroom floor the granite slabs of a hypocaust. The dark grey tiles held rich, unscratched reflections of a young girl in school bathrooms, struggling for curvature and expansion. Ready for new things. The piss-drip stick in her hand.

Her parents waited till summer to move to the country. An exam year ahead, they’d minimise disruption. Her only home the tall house in the city, its stairs a delicious challenge when she was small. To mountaineer on strengthening limbs. To slide down, against the glorious terror of breakage. But, sixteen that summer, her parents moved her to the country. The country where she went to school was wickedly productive. The farm boys a poignant nuisance, when she crept through the late, leggy light of June. Regretting, in tight bed linen, she wasn’t more stern and brave. Some of her friends were brave, with vampire stains beneath high-tugged collars. To be brave was everything.

But this countryside was scruffy and unfinished. Tussock grass. A silted river. Mismatched, ponderous herds and wind-sheared trees. The house east-facing. In the last days of her old room, her mother told her this move was needed. “It’s a good opportunity.” Opportunity, her mother’s touchwood. “More room. Some land. And money to spare.”

“Why does that matter?” Emily knew it mattered. At school, girls of the middle sort, like her, needed cash to make wishes solid. For daring underwear, for shiny things, for jugs of snakebite. The rich girls, born rich, just needed a smile. “Doesn’t Daddy make shitloads of money?”

“I’m sure they don’t teach that language at school. Daddy’s alright. But this house is old. We should move before it needs fixing.”

But the house in the country was broken, its roof full of starlings, its fishponds choked. The lights flickered. Cold air lay, vindictive, on stone floors. That first night of summer should have been restless exuberance. But she lost her city friends. Her bed didn’t fit the odd-shaped attic. The ceiling slanted. The window rattled. Like a child’s idea of an attic from timid stories. Not the expressive den of a rangy young woman.

“Isn’t it marvellous?” Mother’s bright smile spoiled breakfast. “Daddy can spend the holiday with us.”

“I was talking to some chaps in the village.” That’s how her father spoke: from a height no one could reach. “They keep boats on the river. We could get a boat. Take a few days sailing.”

In the summer city – a paradise that seemed long ago – she heard her father thud his way to the shower at five a.m. Sooner, some mornings, when he had an early flight. He’d leave before her hands reluctantly finished her body. He’d come home late for dinner. When he took time off, his business went everywhere with them. When she was away at school, in the oestrogen-breathing dawn, she’d check off the times of his routines. As she pummelled herself in the cruel, unwalled showers she’d imagine him, pressed and ready, in some meeting. The man people wanted to see. Her mother never expressed any wish this man should spend more time with them. She had her events and good causes. Her boards and trusts and appointments. Now she said it was marvellous he’d be under her feet. “You can’t sail a boat.” Emily said that for spite. Of course he could.

“It’s different on a river.” He allowed her that much. “Constant. You can’t let her drift.”

“Well, I think it’s a wonderful idea.” Mother beamed into the distance, where wonder coalesced.

There was nothing to do. At school, slipping the gate, escaping the wall, was adventure. And the farm boys with their ready grip and the old men’s hairy-eared stories and the woman in the village pub with the baby Emily cooed and fussed. A robust, bronze-capped little girl, who punched her fat fists with whooping delight. Emily read to the child – daft little stories about how happy a bus could be, taking people to the shops – thinking she was part of the little girl’s future, helping her understand the world before she even knew.

But this village her parents moved to was empty half the time. Just occasional sports car strangers for nights and weekends. A restaurant with such seamy pretensions she knew the bar wouldn’t serve her. Sheds that sold fake old things to families like hers. When she was little, her father’s rare summer days from work meant trips to museums, days at the sea, running and climbing. Part of her didn’t feel too old for those things. But Father stayed in his study all day, while Mother took calls, chaired meetings, gave the bounty of her experience to grateful, shaggy-haired women who ran shelters on thready goodwill. “It’s terribly important,” Mother would say, “to secure sufficient means for the animals.”

There was nothing to do. Knowing her mother’s petty bounds, Emily dressed it sweetly. This wasn’t escaping her parents’ cloying presence. It was instructive. “I should explore, to appreciate the environment.” Emily took bird books, plant books – made sure her mother saw them. “I really should brush up my botany.”

“Keep your phone location switched on, dear. So I know where you are.”

Emily made sure to smile. “I’m just in the woods.”

On the dry, upland shelf above the house, dense machines took down the winter barley. Bright stubble tore at her shoes. Its sour crackle made her a giant, trampling the land. Across the ragged hedges, spring barley was coming ripe. Its fronds burst with seeds. Its waist-embracing softness bowed to the course she cut like a swimmer. Her father had called the barley a splendid sight. “All that whisky.” His grasp encircled the field. “That’s a business to be in.” An older girl, a prefect, gave her whisky. Emily said she liked it, not to be a baby. The girl said Emily’s hair was caramel silk. She said Emily should visit her room. The barley stung with a fresh breeze turned from the hills. The hills were the best of the place. Distant, dark blue, keeping clouds where storms might seed.

Emily followed the hedge to a gap wide enough to force through. It wasn’t hurting the hedge. The hedge was already hurt. Its briars broken to clean, white wounds. Its leaves stamped in the stones. She checked the plant book. To name what she saw. To keep mum happy.

“Christ.”

A flash of sun. Too bright. Too close. Whisky and soft, damp hair.

“Who the fuck are you?” Though the knife hung loose in his fingers, the strings of his wrist surged with effort. “You nearly had it. Who are you?”

Around her school some countryside was off bounds. Steel fences, warning signs, enclosed a rough dereliction. But never a man with a knife. The city relished its trove of blades. But not in their quiet street. It interested her how angry she felt. This fellow had brought her off balance. With his dense smell and sun-blackened skin. His hair was thick and his beard was wire. His clothes looked stitched to his frame. Like the roadmen beyond the school wall who did odd jobs for a night on the straw. “Our property is just over there.”

The knife was tight lightning as his fingers strove. “You nearly had it. What you doing here?”

It was odd he should ask, when she already answered. “Our property is just over there. I’m walking. I’m down from school.”

“Christ.” Blunt fingers raked his hair. “Come with me.”

“The farm boys say that.”

“What farm boys?”

“At school. They always want girls to go with them.”

“I’m not a farm boy.”

His den among the oaks lay busy with texture. A green tarp strung from thigh-thick boughs. Sacks for blankets, stamped ‘BARLEY’ in fractured capitals. Wire snares jewelled with rabbit guts. A tin kettle on two trowels dug into the blackened earth of a spent fire. “Are you a gypsy? We had some, near school. The police moved them away.”

“I’m not really the type.”

She sat where the knife told her. “It won’t be nice here when it rains.”

He seemed offended. “You might like it here…”

“I don’t. The city was better. Why are you here?”

He drank and gave her the bottle. Drink matted his beard.

She pretended to like the whisky, because he seemed anxious. Its sandpaper grain burned all the way down.

“I had a disagreement with some people. They wanted me to do something.”

People wanted her to do things. They fretted when she declined their tasks. This colonisation of her time was because society didn’t see her as a person. Merely a daughter, a pupil, a construct. At work, her mother and father told people what to do. But those people could walk away. “You walked away?”

“It was for the best.” He watched the knife move hand to hand. “You live over the way?”

“I didn’t want to come here.” Whisky dirtied her anger. The fields and woods were hateful. The ground was wrong in its yielding. “They wanted it, to show off.”

“Your parents?”

She blinked. Who else?

“I’m just here for now. I’m waiting for things to occur.” His eyes followed the words through the trees. “I get hungry, waiting. I get thirsty. You can get me food and booze. Get me a phone.”

She snorted, like the hard girls. “How do I get you a phone?”

“Your parents got a house. You can get a phone.”

That was dumb. “Why should I?”

The knife sniffed her. “You’re not hard to find.”

“That a threat?”

“You catch on.”

“You’re not hard to find either.”

His offered hand sweaty with malt. “Then we understand each other.”

A wasted week. With her father there, it wasn’t a holiday. “When’s he going back to work?”

“He’s at work. In his study.” Mother’s gross smile. “He’s making calls.”

She messaged school friends. But summer was two weeks in. They were touring Europe. And on safari. And sailing the coast. And staying at their aunt’s two-acre house. She messaged city friends. They were sketching in galleries. And cataloguing dinosaur bones. And learning to throw clay. And working for actual money as an intern at their mother’s agency. So Emily said she was ill, despising their loving concern.

She scouted the larder, guessing what the man liked. He drank whisky, so he ate meat. He liked what he could tear and shatter. He built a fire, so he liked it tender. Boiled in its own blood. She waited till mother and father were talking with the door closed. A closed door sometimes meant they were having their tedious sex, her mother chirping and yowling. Why couldn’t they divorce like normal people. Then she’d have stories.

The man among dappled ferns seemed asleep. Magpies screeched, driving their anger through the treetops. Flies skated his rising breath.

“You’re not very prepared.” She dumped the bags. “I could be anyone.”

“I saw you before you climbed the rocks.”

“Liar. You had your eyes shut.”

“What’s that?” Up on his elbows, grabby.

“A phone, obviously. It’s an old one of dad’s.”

“Used?” His lips twisted. “I can’t have used.”

“Ungrateful. I downloaded a sim. It’s a fresh number.”

“Give it.”

“And all this food. You could say Thank You Emily.”

“They call you that?”

“I suppose you have some terribly earthy name.”

“Carter.”

Some small Christmas, in the gathered must of summer, as he emptied the bags, turned each cut of meat, each savoury can, around and around. Sniffed the meat. Listened to the cans’ sloppy rattle. He held the broad-stomached bottle in both hands. “Port?”

“It was all I could filch. Daddy hoards the whisky in his study.”

Carter pulled the stubby cork and lined his gullet. Exquisite pain creased his sun-bruised skin. “Christ. My teeth are melting.”

His few possessions circled him, everything in reach. She let her finger enjoy the sting of a snare. “Is this what you do? Sit and drink?”

“For now.”

“Have you been to toilet behind this tree?”

“It’s the butler’s day off.” Scarred fingers explored the phone. “I need you to keep this charged for me. I won’t use it much. But I need to be ready, when things turn.”

He was right about the port. Sweet lava scoured her throat. “Mummy keeps this for occasions. But she doesn’t have occasions.”

“Do people say you got a pound of plums in your mouth?”

“No, no one says that. Some girls at school think I’m a bit of an oik.” The middle sort, a girl whose parents had to work. Who asked permission to take holiday. Proper rich girls had parents who just existed. Who moved because nothing could stop them. “These people you disagreed with.”

In the grubby damage of his face, his eyes caught fire. “People?”

“You said that’s why you’re here. Because people wanted you to do something.”

“They’re persistent. I’m not worried.”

“Are you staying all summer?”

Mother flittered about, folding and refolding towels. She did these ridiculous things. Emily despised it. Mother ran a charity. She’d done media. She made slick, begging videos so people would fund the badgers or otters, those rodent creatures. She chaired meetings, hosted dinners and, still, would fold and refold towels. Emily wanted to pinch her. “Where have you been, dear?”

“Walking. There’s not much else to do.”

“You could help in the garden.” She started to square pillowcases, running a thumb on their valanced edges, a witless expertise. “Daddy’s pulling a tree stump.”

Hot with the day, tipsy from port, her mouth numbed by breath mints, Emily couldn’t comprehend what her father might be doing. “Shouldn’t he be at work?”

“It’s quieter in summer.” Her mother stacked linen, nudging corners level. “He thought he’d tackle that stump.”

The garden was leggy shrubs, failing trees, the filthy ponds and starchy lawn, wasted with heat. A walnut tree had died some season past, its stump tilted from the ground, its roots clawed the soil like some hope of life might endure. Its essence gone, its trunk chained and burned, those roots still grappled against her father’s trenching. The shovel’s bright blade drove at fibrous arteries, spitting shattered matter, revealing shiny scars. Only a novice would have a clean shovel. Someone unused to outdoor work.

Her father stopped when he saw her. Seemed glad of a reason to stop. The stump was beyond any feeling, its flows stilled, its hallways a habitat for thick-armoured beetles that climbed, resentful, through the thirsty grass. “Reinforcements.” He spoke to her that queer way. Surely he didn’t at work. “Come to take a turn at the coalface?”

When she was little, he made life grand with his silly voices. Then she bled and grew and despised him. “Why aren’t you at work?”

“Summer, old thing.” He sliced the shop-fresh shovel through the workings of evolution.

Beneath her hand the wood broke, rough and indifferent. “Do the markets close in summer?”

“People are away. Things slow down.” Thick-ridged bark plated his hands, making him what he destroyed. “It’s a good opportunity to take some time. With this new place.”

“It’s horrible. Why did we come here?” At school it was important to be sophisticated. Sophistication was key. It marked a girl out from the little kids with their squealing obsessions and sweaty training bras. It showed a girl was ready. But Emily couldn’t stop. She watched herself slip back to putrid adolescence. “There’s no one here. There’s nothing to do. It’s prison.”

“Give it a chance, love.”

“If I don’t want to?”

His hand left sawdust islands on her shoulder. The damp warmth of his fingers no more meaningful nor enduring than the momentary weight of a neighbour’s dog, resting its head on one’s arm. “I know it’s a wrench.” Reciting a script, his eyes on the wretched blue sky. “But change brings good, you know. It brings adventures.” As though she had no concept of adventure. “You want to try new things, don’t you?”

A juvenile need to slap his hand, kick his shin, suppressed by some sense of her significance on the skin of the world. “There’s nothing here.”

“I bet there’s masses, once you look. Shall we take a tour tomorrow?”

She shut off the valve that choked her with feeling. “I’m busy tomorrow.”

Noise from city streets came brashly, without malice. Police helicopters, impatient drivers, sudden music, the click of high heels, a challenge to time wasted in sleep. Here, each pebble finding the chimney walls was an army, upending the night. In this gross attic room, she panted and hissed for exhaustion, busy hands never still. Spent and sleepless, she let the window take her. Profound, moonless dark laid the world in suspension. Her hazy eyes took minutes to piece the sky from the ground, trees from despairing silhouettes of empty, part-time homes. Minutes before she saw the man on the lawn, a still, chilly shadow, at ease yet utterly reckless. In plain sight, the sky on his shoulders. She watched him watch the house. She didn’t care what he saw.

Her mother truffled for clues, dismantling the larder with purposeless care. “I know they delivered those tins of stew.”

Limp, soggy breakfast grains repelled her. “Why would you get stew in tins?”

“For stock, dear. For bad weather days.” The face she used when begging donations. “And there’s a chicken gone from the fridge.”

Emily stabbed the gritty milk in the bowl. “There wasn’t a chicken in the fridge.”

“There was, dear. I ordered it the other day.”

“You’re mistaken.”

She pushed Carter to walk with her. “It’s no use sitting moping all day.”

He stretched his solid limbs. “Am I that pitiful, then?”

“I’d say pitiable, rather than pitiful.”

He tugged his beard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I still feel insulted.”

She got him to the far edge of the wood, where trees gave way to smeared, reaching pasture. A rubble of old stones shouldered each other at the crown of the field.

Carter shaped the view with his fingers. “That’s a cairn. Someone’s buried there.”

The stones had curious lightness, nuzzled, shadowless, under the careless sun. “What do you even know about it?”

A move through the air, like a knife, though his hands were empty. “I know plenty, girl. I had time to learn things up.”

“Before you came here?”

“I had a lot of time.”

They slipped between the smooth sarsens, into stale shade. “Where’s this someone buried, then?”

“Down there, under the heel stone.”

“You think it’s a king or something?”

“Probably not.”

Their bodies took all the space. The chamber airless with skeletal leaves and animal bones. “You could have washed. You smell vile.”

“We don’t all have the facilities. And I’ve got used to it.”

She folded around his shaggy limbs. There was no choice where to leave herself. That was how it should be.

“You were up late last night.”

“Shitty countryside. It’s too quiet.”

“I got foxes and owls. It’s a regular zoo.” He tested her legs, inspecting a thoroughbred. “Little rock star, aren’t you? Not bothered about anything.”

The heat of their skin a thirsty compulsion. “Were you spying on me?”

“There’s better things than playing with yourself.”

“That’s gross.”

“Have you tried it?”

“No.”

“Then that’s not an informed opinion.”

She left her parents’ house as one species and came back another. Change hurt, as girls said it did. But pain brought relief from not knowing.

A police car in the drive, windows down, a thin wisp of voices signalled from some distant place. They’d be in the sitting room. Her mother would want to show off her furniture. Her father would earnestly check his phone, pretending he was busy. Now, her eyes were clear. Now she saw what was done.

The kitchen door, left unlocked in this placid country. She got a sense of restless bodies. Of uniforms, not wanting to linger.

“In the lane?” A young man’s voice, the local accent.

“A rough sort. That’s unusual here. It’s very quiet.” Her mother’s voice from interviews about animals. How this or that animal deserved its place in the world. “That’s why we moved here. It makes such a change.”

“Yes.” Another voice, older, fractured. “A lot of people think that.”

“Would you say there’s much risk?” Her father was for the calculations. He wanted risk portion controlled.

“What I say.” The older voice seemed weary. “Take sensible precautions. Keep your eyes open. No cause for alarm. Just stay watchful.”

Emily scooted through the kitchen, up the path, back to the road. To be a casual arrival as her mother opened the front door. The policemen stared – the younger, his nose and cheeks lightly sunburned, the older, with worn-through beard and hands of leather – their curiosity too familiar. She shaped her face to hateful, childish concern. “Is anything wrong, mum?”

“It’s all fine.” Her mother looked satisfied, as though somehow she’d grown a loving daughter. “These gentlemen were sharing some advice.”

Emily went inside, the men’s attention on her back.

“Had a good day, old thing?” Her father’s shirt was untucked. His jeans sagged at the knees. In his suits he was almost someone. Now he was drab and old. “Where did you get to?”

“There are stones, far side of the wood. A burial place or something. It’s not on the map.”

“You could research it. Make it a summer project.”

Her mother came in from the hall, twisting her hands.

“Why were the police here?”

On the charity’s channels, her mother talked about shit dumped in rivers. Grubbed hedgerows. Fly tipping. These risks to innocent, clueless creatures. Concerned, careful, keen to be understood. “Did you see anyone strange, while you were out?”

Holidaymakers. Sneaky couples. Families with grumpy children. Farmers and outdoor men. The man whose mother had kept the shop. Who told Emily the old woman died when the business failed. “Whom should I have seen?”

Her parents wanted a thing of this. Building themselves a drama. Her father awkwardly mobile. Her mother’s cheeks peony pink. “There have been reports. And I saw a stranger.”

It stirred. That sensation of blood. “What’s odd about someone you don’t know?”

“They’re a tight bunch. Country folk.” Her father could pastiche worldliness. No doubt that helped his negotiations. “Crafty bugger, by all accounts. Creeping around back gardens. They don’t want people having a go.”

“Why would anyone come here?”

“It’s a good place to hide.”

“You could die and no one would notice.”

“Emily.” Her mother’s mild and pliant steel. “This isn’t a joke, darling. I don’t like you disappearing for hours at a time. It’s not like you know people here.”

“And whose fault’s that?”

She went to bed early, claiming a headache. Her mother gave her tablets. The practical measure of care. With the sun finally gone from the sky, night could gather. She kept the windows wide, the fine scent of phlox and dogwood from keen-edged beds. Across the fields, Cygnus and Aquila took flight. Their cold, steady yearning admonished Earthly haste. She couldn’t rest. Confinement was intolerable. She could call him. He had the means, thanks to her. But the stupid sound of a plastic box shattering the dark woods shouldn’t be her fault. She dressed and went out, her parents behind their closed door, the house in grainy suspension.

She knew the way through the woods. The trees, the rock heaps, the landscape of her desires. Sure-footed, undaunted by scars and hollows, the smell of old leaves, the tragic yowl of a vixen far off. The endless time these rocks had lain. The centuries ringed around each tree. The sublime country, swamped with barley. For men to drink their whisky. To draw heroic lives.

Shapeless, breathing canvas. Powerful and serene, Emily owned this touch, this taste. Devastating and quiescent, she knew to leap back when she kicked his leg. Up with harsh glaring, his stinking clothes, the knife at her face.

“You fucking idiot.” He kicked a tree. “I would have split you.”

She held his shoulders. “Not another word.”

In easy moments after, she unpeeled the leaves from her body. How simple it was, to lay naked. “Why were you in prison, Carter?”

“Who says I was in prison?”

“The police were at the house. Mother had ten kinds of fits.”

“What did they want?”

“To wake the village. They’re warning the neighbourhood of a prowling stranger.”

“You say anything?” The knife circled her stomach.

“Well obviously they’d use me as bait, wouldn’t they? And that little blade doesn’t scare me.” The words made it true.

“I’m popular.” His fingers through his beard an immense sound in the dark. “I know too many people. The police begged my help. I didn’t like their offer. I made tracks. Then other people got involved. Determined people. The police must step careful.”

“If you’re valuable to them, why don’t you go back?”

“That’s what they want. I go back, my value reduces. I’m negotiating.”

Excitement – sharp and hungry. “Did you kill someone?”

“If I did, it wasn’t careless. Now what do I do about you?”

Verdant air stung her mouth. “How do you mean?”

“Before, you were willing hands. Now, you know secrets.”

Unselfconscious, unafraid, she took him. “Now, I have value to you.”

The vixen cry – profound and sacred. Emily howled, panted, her body a property of the night.

When she closed the door, the house drew around her. Its tepid air prevailed on her skin. With dark, with silence, she allowed herself breath. If her parents noticed she’d gone, every light would burn, her mother would make noise, there’d be unsatisfactory panic. But everything lay as it had: the gathered, unfinished objects her parents called home.

Light licked the frame of their bedroom door. They were talking. In bed, talking. They knew nothing. Her mother’s watery sex noise meant nothing next to the heavenly woods, to the night in her flesh, to that pinnacle where Emily surveyed the world. She knew everything.

Next morning, her mother went mad. The kitchen’s absolute disarray. The larder, freezer, cupboards and fridge emptied and stacked all around. Mother clambered through stocks and provisions, her laptop bricked with some bogus chart.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Even that didn’t break the woman’s trance.

“Mum. What is this?”

Her mother’s eyes, vivid as a horse in lather. “I know what I ordered. I have the receipts. There’s cheese gone. And bread. A side of bacon. All the cooked ham. There’s wine missing. Good vintages. Where are the Laxton’s?”

“The what?”

“Those special apples Daddy likes.”

“What are you talking about?”

That dozy, doe-eyed, mother-look. “Our food is gone.”

Cans in gleaming towers drove a skyline across the kitchen. Bags of frozen greenery puddled with heat. “Then what’s this stuff?”

Mother pinched her laptop screen. The chart roiled and gaped. “All this is missing. It was delivered and is missing.”

She must stop this woman’s silly performance.

Father came in, the dressing gown he wore in the day loose belted and raffish. “Having a stocktake?” Cheeks puffed. Expecting a joke.

“She thinks we’ve been robbed.”

The woman began to recite her laborious inventory. Emily left them to it, their voices like spiders on thread.

The thirsty lawn had yellowed. Her father’s abandoned work on the stump a scar of indifferent earth. She saw the worms in their subterranean cities, the sky suddenly fallen among their dark ways. Did they yearn for when the tree stood straight and their world was complete? Or, in mindless enthusiasm, did they accept whatever occurred as fair and right?

In some absurd placation, her father took Mother to town, to replace what the silly woman insisted was missing. Emily wouldn’t go. She loathed the local town. The girls had horrid expressions. The boys had bad skin. With her father dressed for driving, Emily saw he was heavier, the weight of occasions penned behind his belt. In his suits he seemed to be, if not thin, at least proportioned. Now he sagged, distended, as though muscles, once released, could no longer grip. Some girls at school had the most fearsome pashes on each other’s fathers. Now she was glad her friends were too busy to visit.

This loathsome house, more loathsome alone. It resisted her. It moved her on precut lines. Each splinter and scrap the choices her parents made for her. Why let them have power to bring her here? She was spacious enough for rebellion. “Carter.” His name, spat in the dust, her keepsake against narrow lives. He opened her, enlarged her with knowing. Whatever he’d done, he repaid.

Her father so dull, so meretricious, his study didn’t even have a lock. Every house, Emily knew, should have a locked room. A door that people felt uncomfortable to pass. A vault where dust accreted year on year. But her parents’ lives were laughably shallow.

She wanted her father’s study dressed in books, a map of the world, decanters and glasses unwashed. She wanted cargo of travel: petrified coral, a blowpipe, a big-bellied goddess stolen from some filthy trench. But the pure world of numbers, in her father’s hands, produced vulgar trophies. The planes that slashed the blazing sky. The hidden exchange of device to device. The barley in its legions claiming the land. These mementoes of investment were his reliquary. His few books: economics texts and regulatory manuals. His papers were household receipts. A stack of printouts of mother’s insane calculations: the sausage plaits and fruit pies she said she lost. A woman mourning store-bought pastry.

Settled beneath this dross, pages of figures, ringed and ragged in her father’s unattractive hand. The numbers were large but not majestic. Numbers of the middling sort, in harness to tepid value. The arithmetic was implacable. Savage fire cleansed her gut.

Carter’s filthy, clever fingers stained the precious paper with the reality of life under the trees. “Income and expenditure.”

“Well, I know that.”

“Tetchy.” Carter pinched her arm. “Your dad got quite a wedge.”

She knew Carter would understand. A man of the world, he’d recognise profit and loss. “That’s what they got for our old house. And that’s what they paid for this dump. I heard them talk about it.”

Carter swilled brandy in tin mugs. “I’m not sure everyone would call your house a dump. It seems well appointed.”

“Trust me, it’s vile. It was this.” She leaned to touch the calculations, touching his shoulder. His easy strength pulsed through her skin.

“He got bonuses? Stock options?”

“We had good holidays when I was little. That would be a whopping bonus.”

Carter hadn’t washed, for all the river was right there. He hadn’t shaved, though she brought him blades. Her father’s old jeans and dinner shirt cockily loose on his lean frame. She snuggled into him. His grip drew her tight. “You say he doesn’t go out much?”

“He only got dressed today to take her shopping.”

“He keeps regular hours?”

“He pisses around in the garden. Last week I caught him failing to chop out a tree stump.”

Carter laughed. A heavenly sound. “Pretty conclusive, isn’t it?”

She unbuttoned her shirt. “Come on.”

At dinner, she dug in on them. “I’m thinking of staying with Charlotte for a week or two.” They didn’t know Charlotte, the prefect who told Emily her eyes were drowning pools. Who gave her whisky and wistful invitations. “Are you going back to work next week?” She gave her father a pleasant, direct look, wiser than all his lies.

Something started in the back of his throat. Some collision of sound.

Her mother made flustering noise about plans being fluid. “I have board business to attend to. Daddy will stay until I get back. That prowler.”

“Prowler?” Emily’s pout was perfect.

“That chap the police warned about.” Her father’s attempts always fell short. “Don’t want you here alone.”

“You left me alone in the city. And I’m staying with Charlotte.” Risk prickled her skin. She wasn’t sure where Charlotte lived. And the girl might have plans for the holidays. Some neat-packaged secret.

“Daddy will stay until I get back.” Laughable, how her mother failed to close.

“You can be flexible?” Emily got in his eyes, her caustic gaze demanded purity.

“Oh yes.” He sank his wine.

Her mother cared for the animals. She cared the charity did well. She spoke about it with tiring conviction in those videos Emily’s friends inexplicably liked. Her mother was impressive in the vacuum of sincerity. Emily hated her more. With her mother away, she had no constraints and no freedom. Father continued his charade, all day in his study, typing and scrolling. She despised him but that was no more than despising bad weather. Her mother brought the joy of hate. That was what Emily missed. On her parents’ bed, she gave way to thoughts of Carter. She could visit him anytime and that was annoying. He shouldn’t be so available to her. She thought about messaging Charlotte. About the reality of asking to stay with a young woman she hardly knew. What were Charlotte’s parents? She never spoke about them. Perhaps she was an orphan, at school all summer, with the groundsmen and the bachelors of literature with nowhere else to go. More like she was on the Côte d’Azur with some bright little scholarship girl who knew the value of pliance. In the garden, shading her eyes from the savagery of mid-August, shrivelled leaves and cracked earth gave no satisfaction. Her body ached and shifted. Nothing was enough. Turning back to the house, her father lay stretched across the study window. He was sleeping.

The barley at its height before the harvest. Its dusty yellow-green, fearful in busy confinement. The terror of the coming blade in every twitch and murmur. Emily felt its insistence. That disdainful caress. She could scarcely move across the dense field, its whiplash intrigues lifting her feet from the earth. She kicked the stalks. They bruised her. Crop-stung flesh chafed by glassy cotton. She scattered bearded husks. The windless sky a dome of heat. The light a prison.

Approaching the pasture lands from the valley, the cairn’s skewed uprights, its chambered eye, watched her struggle across the fence, hot wire on reddened skin. The shadow of its moss-dark stones bathed her. The scars and erosions of centuries balmed her skin. Air in the chamber heavy with decomposition. Some predator had been there, the remains of its kill distorting the flattened shapes she and Carter left in the sand. Rapid and dextrous, Emily undressed, squaring her clothes on the heel stone. She stepped to the entrance and stepped outside. Heat seared, where her flesh took the rigor of the barley. Fresh-bloomed bruises purple and gold in the sun. Four, five, six steps from the cairn. The farmer’s men, way below, staked oblongs through the foaming spikelets, determining the first cut. They would see her, if they looked up. If they stood with shaded eyes. A ghost from the burial, in borrowed flesh. Eight, nine steps from the cairn, where there could be no hiding. Then the sun struck a dazzling signal from a window, and she scampered to the chamber, shaking and spent.

“You can’t stay here. Not in winter.” Cooking smoke made the woodland homely. That taste belied her words. “There’s rain. And snow. You’ll freeze out here.” She set the pan aside, the oil congealing. Her mother never used that pan anyway. “And I have to go.”

“You see?” Carter tore his sandwich. Meat hung from the wound. “People try telling me what to do. But I keep them guessing. Police say they’ll trace me. Where are they? I told them: we meet on my terms. If I can stick it, I’m sure you can. Don’t say you’re shy about using that filthy mouth.”

“I have to go back to school. What do I do otherwise? Stay with that pair?”

“Stay with me.”

“Out here?”

“You’re here every chance you get.”

“And what about when the real police get here? Not these country plods. The proper police. How would you explain me?”

 “You’re my emotional support animal.”

“Get off those greasy hands. This shirt’s linen.” She tugged his hair. “School starts in a couple of weeks. I don’t have the choice.” She thought about this. Through aching nights and tepid, waiting mornings. What if they lived as gypsies, wild lovers? What if they ran and stole and lied, just enough for a life? The police would come. Serious, city police. They’d tire of negotiations. Carter, so cocksure, didn’t grasp his value was waning. That each day he became more troublesome and less useful. She saw a detective, someone of substance, receive reports at a desk with a view of high buildings. She felt this detective’s frustration that more wasn’t done. They’d decide enough was enough. And Emily liked school. She hated the teachers, the lessons and rules, but so did everyone. With girls of the middling sort and up, she had a sense of belonging that didn’t come with leaves in her hair. Autumn would come. Then winter. Rain would wash all this away. “They know where you are,” she told his pale eyes. “Isn’t that enough?”

Her mother had all the saucepans on the table. Shiny things she bought for show. “Have you seen my heavy pan? The one from Paris. It’s missing.”

“What pan?” Emily could stand no more of this woman.

Her father in the sitting room had whisky, though it was an hour till dinner. In his dressing gown, surveying the blistered garden.

“Have you been here all day?”

“There are jackdaws in the copse.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They call their name: ‘jack jack’ like striking metal. They speak.”

“What?”

“They mimic.” His eyes gone in whisky. His hand across the window sketched a bird in flight. “They spend all day together. Feeding. Talking. They nest and breed. Next year, they do it again. On and on. They accept it.”

The bottle was near empty. When Carter emptied a bottle, when she helped with that, they sang and told jokes and took expeditions to this place or that. It always ended in sex. Always tugging her down. She’d miss that. But as she learned to live with it, she’d learn to live without. “Are you going to piss away the rest of your life?”

He got slow, worn, abraded. Remarkable, how his sheen of efficiency tarnished. When she was new at school and older girls had her in a corner, at least she could answer what her parents did. It wasn’t as good as owning ships or land or sleeping on heaps of money. But it fitted some frame of reference. Now, this father-man was a casualty, a demonstration of what might happen. Now he was greedy for sympathy. “I took advice.” He moved hazily, as if the glaring sun were cloying water. “It could have been worse. Some of the chaps – good chaps, good in tight moments – some went with just a few months and no options. I negotiated a price. I told them, ‘That’s my offer. My best offer.’ They were receptive.” Whisky slopped on the boards. “All this, plus the proceeds on the old place. Tax efficient, you see? A fair outcome. Very fair outcome.”

“You’re pathetic.” It wasn’t enough. “You’re shit.”

The last time with Carter he mostly behaved. She didn’t tell the truth about where she went to school, but he had enough to meet her in the holidays. “Christmas. By then, you need to be out of here. The police won’t wait forever.”

“I only stayed to keep you company.”

“You have, you know.” She kissed him. “This summer would be vile without you.”

“Your dad’s gone mental you say?”

“He’s a stupid boozer. It flays him. He can’t just be drunk. He has to be shit. And she’s so bright and coping I could puke on her. So you see.” The soft voice, when she was with him. “I couldn’t stay. They’d make me mad as they are.”

Carter had his knife. That keen, sly blade. He laid it against her throat. Its woodland glimmer set green fire through her skin. “You don’t ever forget you’re my girl. Wherever you go, don’t forget.”

“You want my hair in a locket? A drop of blood in a ring?”

“At sundown, when heat recedes, when air sharpens, I want you to know you’re mine.”

“Forever.”

She never cried. But cold lethargy kept her sleepless, among night shadows.

The excitement of school a cherished illusion. The station drive. The upland country, more stubborn than southern fields. The sheep-scattered hills, the blue-specked woods sheltering mischief. Arrival at granite walls. The sudden rush of routine after formless days. The hugs, the stories, the jealousies welcomed back into sunburned hearts. The new bugs, fresh from day prep and cosy little town schools, squealing and anxious, awkward, not-yet women. The senior girls, waiting their time. Now Emily was top of school. There were doors she could use, hallways she no longer had to take furtively. A new badge to sew on her blazer. A room with a lock. But Charlotte had left for a year in Italy before university. There was some vague story: some parent had made a complaint. Emily went to bed early. Next morning she only just made the bathroom, her vomit a vivid surprise on the porcelain bowl.

The school nurse wouldn’t touch her, not even with gloves. “You need to see the doctor.”

“It was that bloody mince in the peppers. Been in the kitchen all summer.”

The nurse typed her notes. “No one else is sick.”

Dr. Peters was an attractive woman who tucked her trousers into her chunky green boots. Lines and pits on her brow like manuscript paper. Her hair grey as cobwebs and sleek as a cat. She scrolled Emily’s notes. “You’re in good physical shape.”

“I’ve got a stomach bug. It’s nearly gone.”

“No, dear. It won’t be gone for some months.”

The horror of her mother driving all the way to collect her eclipsed by the horror of the drive south. Mother was a terrible driver. Cautious, obliging, defensive. The journey took twice as long. And so stupidly caring. “I’m sure we can get this cleared up. Have you back at school in no time.”

She tried the door. It was still locked. “Cleared up? What does that mean?”

“Well.” Her mother’s idiot grimace. “Cleared up.”

Her father’s attempt at a beard abandoned, his face unfinished, his paunch no longer flattered by a loose shirt. Age and weight and greying stubble – he gave willingly to decay. They sat Emily down for serious talk. Her mother’s words, their sternness diminished by that foolish scarf with its print of limp-tailed otters. Her charity’s merchandise, for women like her. Mother asked Emily what she thought should be done.

In stealthy morning hours, Emily had thought around it. Three options: keep for herself, keep and donate, don’t keep. To keep for herself would give her a weapon. A reason to do or not do. Keep and donate was a timebomb. Years ahead, when she was someone different, a stranger would call, make demands. Don’t keep set her free as something different, a new category of person who experienced this thing. She already thought around it. She didn’t need talk. Worse, her parents were sickeningly pleasant. Her mother spoke in headlines: the pressures on young women. Her father, perhaps recalling some adolescent assault, speculated that boys could be reckless, prone not to think far. They didn’t even consider Emily made it happen. How she’d strip with casual haste in forest clearings. They believed this was brought upon her, as though she had no fire of her own.

“No one’s forcing you to name names,” mother said. “But it would be easier.”

The woman’s vapid face had no structure to land on. “Names? What are you talking about?”

“This boy. Was it a boy round here?”

“Must be,” her father rumbled. “With the dates.”

“I don’t need to listen to this.”

“Emily.” Her father’s shaggy presence had sorrowful certainty. “We need to resolve this.”

So she was a problem. “I want to go back to school.”

Her mother’s head made needless movement. “You’ll need to stay here for a while.”

“You decided.” Emily’s hands were fists. “You made the choice for me.”

“It’s for the best, old thing.” Her father’s touch batted away. “You’re very young still. It’s no fun, you know. At your age. You’ve got so much ahead.”

“You do want to go to university.” Her mother failed to sound endearing.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You’re young.” That gushy, no-substance encouragement. “You don’t want to hold yourself back.”

“Honestly.” Her father never looked less honest. “Years from now, you’ll see the sense.”

When finally they let her be, she waited for deep night. The sensations of summer long gone. The cold sky clear, unyielding. Pegasus rode above her. The great square of its flanks led her to Sagittarius, the archer’s bow searching beyond the horizon. Jupiter commanded the ravaged fields. Stripped of barley, torn remains of husks and stalks pressed beneath wheel tracks. Each living thing shredded, sacrificed to the harvest. Limbs torn from limbs. Skulls shattered. The irresistible acquisition.

The woods opened for her, knowing her scent. The path across rocks, among splintered leaves, that, once, she trod with excitement. An owl set up, its ghostly voice anticipating savagery. Cold on her skin and this strange cargo, unannounced and weightless as flight.

The shelter was gone. The tarp, the wires, the pit where she cooked, the den where she lay. A clearing, just that, beneath a night sky knotted through indifferent boughs. Bitter disappointment burned her throat. She meant to find him. Surprise him. Promise more than he’d ever know. The one person who understood was gone. How could he dismantle this place that was theirs? How could he think her so feeble. A man would know she’d return.

Wrong to light her phone in the wood. Wrong to destroy the night with this glaring device. But she had to find him. She hit the number. And again. Three, four times. Call disconnected.

The clinic was cheerful with flowers and sunny prints of the Dordogne. They thought she might want to talk things through but there was nothing to say. They knocked her out and gave her the vacuum and laid her in bed to come round. What Emily remembered was falling, a whirlpool opened inside her. Turbulence where she couldn’t stand or stay. Detached, dismembered, drawn. She woke in sweat, afternoon sun throwing fire across the tiles. Lighting the floor’s thin patterns. Stray hairs the cleaners missed. When girls had got dressed and brushed their hair and stepped into their shoes to leave.

Her mother thought she wanted to sleep on the backseat. Tedious suburbs split by scrubland fields where kids played football, their silent agitation cased behind glass. On the motorway, everyone was going somewhere. For good or bad but always for something. She wondered how close Carter was at each moment. He never messaged or called.

A long week later they let her go back to school. She told them she couldn’t lose time. Top of the school, she had exams this year. She had decisions on where to go next. The nurse knew what happened. It went on her record. But she told her friends she’d gone for a small correction. A little interior fixup. They remembered she’d been sick at the start of summer. That’s what Emily told everyone. To avoid sympathy. To avoid encouragement. To not be That Girl. She worked hard. Did well in her mocks. They made her a prefect. A little bug caught a hot pash on her and she let the girl braid her hair. She called Carter’s number less often. She stopped calling at all.

Curious, to be brought to the Head. Emily was never in trouble. Ms. Sproson carried responsibility visibly, in the slant of her shoulders, her restless hands, the way her eyes constantly questioned. And someone else in the room. A woman police, her cap awkward on an unruly French twist.

Ms. Sproson’s torso reached for breath. “Please do sit down, Emily. I’m sorry to call you like this.”

Emily touched her prefect badge. “Is there a problem, Ms. Sproson?” The bright, enquiring voice, for each new challenge.

Ms. Sproson watched the police struggling with her fingers. “This is Sergeant Travers.”

“Dani. Dani Travers. I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

Of course. The police didn’t come for good things.

Sergeant Dani Travers couldn’t be comfortable. She fidgeted. She tugged her jacket. She’d get detention for that in great hall. “I’m sorry Emily.”

Of course.

Her mother was wholly useless. She ran to neighbours, making fuss. The crusted old frauds who retired to the village. The families on scratchy vacations. Her ludicrous mother knocked on their doors, dragged them into the twilight, their dinners left to harden on old pine. They only did what she should have done – called an ambulance. By the time it nosed through the country lanes, Emily could guess night had risen from ditches and scarred fields. A lot of noise and effort and evenings spoiled for nothing. Her father was dead.

By the time she got to the station, and a train south, and across the city, and another train, and a taxi to the house, his body was tight in a box. Disappointing. She wanted to visit the hospital and see him on the slab. She’d never seen a dead body. She was behind her friends, whose families had glorious, crowded, open casket misery-fests, with canapés and indiscretions. And Ms. Haxby, the gym teacher everyone pashed on, who was said to have been acquitted of a crime of jealousy. And that girl who saw a thief shot in Antibes and never stopped telling the story. It was babyish, to see mere living people.

Her mother’s ridiculous sister had come to support them, whatever that meant. Aunt Caroline was older than mother, with less money, more bones and spiteful diction. The mother of cousins Emily loathed and avoided, Aunt Caroline majored on her logistic excellence. “You need the paperwork complete,” she scolded. “It’s no use leaving it until you feel better. You must secure your position.”

Emily’s mother floundered in an ugly black dress and stained makeup. “I’m sure he left everything tidy.”

“Can you be sure?” Aunt Caroline nagged. “He had got a little… disorganised. You said as much. Will his insurance pay out? This house looks like it eats money. Oh.” Her lively gaze shot to the door. “Emily, dear. It’s you. This must be a shock.”

“Hello, Aunt Caroline. Is everything in hand?”

“We’re reviewing what needs to be done. Do they let you have your hair like that in school?”

Emily’s father died from the sickness of alcohol. It was odd because he was experienced at it. But, convulsed as a crab, the vomit on his blue skin was indisputable. Aunt Caroline thought it worth asking the doctors if something else could go on the ticket – something cardiac, to please the insurers. Emily’s mother, more jellyfish than usual, wimbled about the house, idly sifting documents she couldn’t read, folding and refolding towels, bursting into ungainly tears at the sight of her husband’s clothes. It was unusual to share Aunt Caroline’s frustration, but as the two of them watched mother stumble around in untidy mourning, aunt and niece had the same urge to slap the woman’s face.

Shifty locals done up as undertakers arranged the funeral. But the funeral was late. The police came back. A louche, silver-tipped rogue, Detective Inspector Wilson, with bods in baggy white suits to break apart father’s study. “Toxicology.”

Mother looked stupidly baffled.

“A potential anomaly.”

Emily made him coffee. Got him alone in the kitchen. “Do you suspect something?” Her bright, hockey field vowels pitched at his wary face.

“Your father was quite the drinker.” His voice a tangle of gravel. “Serious drinkers can drink too much. One shot too many.” His gaze nostalgic. “And he was overweight and not in good shape.”

“He let himself go terribly.”

Detective Inspector Wilson scowled at the limewash walls. “I don’t suppose your mother approves of smoking.”

“You can smoke in the garden.”

Her father had cut the wisteria climbing the back of the house, but it returned stronger. Some flowers remained, this late in the year, ragged and sun-scarred, a few last petals shifted against burnt bricks. Ridged, fibrous leaves like tiger skin. She twisted her fingers through muscular stems, relishing their compulsion.

Wilson gave her a cigarette. “Your mother’s in shock.”

“She’s weak.” Smoke laced her lungs with bitter memory. Nights in the wood, skin on skin, whisky and nicotine.

“Lucky your aunt’s here to help.”

“She’s a pain in the arse.”

The detective inspector watched smoke curl from his fingers. “There were reports last summer. Some stranger, bothering back garden doors.”

“Well obviously. People here are stupidly rich.”

“We had an alert from the city. A person of interest. Wanted in connection with some caper. Did you see anything suspicious? Eight, ten weeks ago. Before you went back to school.”

“It’s quiet here. Nothing happens.”

“You know that’s not true.” Jackdaws called from the copse, a shout of steel on stone. His weary eyes tracked their commotion. “To kill an alcoholic, the best way is alcohol. A drunk dies in his own piss, who suspects it? But toxicology. Little lines that don’t fit.”

“Do you suspect something?” Her earnestness pressed against him.

“I’d be nothing if I didn’t.”

“Do you want to stay for dinner? I can cook something.”

Brief, careful, his hand on her arm. “I’m sure you can.”

The funeral was vile. Family swarmed the house. People she’d not seen in years and hated. Aunt Caroline guarded mother like a relic, granting admittance, interfering in condolence. Aunt Caroline’s children and other cousins tried to drag Emily into their vacuous interests. Their apps and gossip and feeble obsessions. Day school types, they knew nothing of nights between granite walls on the moors. They knew nothing of the Eagle, the Archer, high over the wan sea of barley. Among uncles whose embrace she avoided, she heard talk of how well father left mother fixed. With the right words on the right papers, the insurance would pay cleanly. And the stock was sound. And the pension stacked away, from years at the bank. The bank sent a wreath and a letter commending his work. A pre-emptive eulogy, in case mother might sue. Of course she’d do no such thing. She could barely work the kettle. Her paralysis of grief an annoying distraction. People expected Emily to be sad, and a day so dull put her squarely in a foul temper. The detective inspector stopped by, on his way to somewhere more important and they smoked in the crematorium garden, mixing their ash in the urns.

“It was nothing conclusive.” He watched the wind sift reddening leaves. “We ran the tests twice. Sometimes you have to let go.”

“It would have been exciting. If you’d found something.” She liked his cigarettes.

“It’s better, when it’s exciting.” He stroked the trees of the cloistered walkway. “You knew he was living on savings?”

“It was plain his job went tits up. You know they tried to hide it from me. Pretend it wasn’t happening.”

A pleasant thought struck him. He chuckled. “Your father’s cash was depleted. You think your mother might have been tempted to… borrow from that charity, to bridge her losses?”

“I’d put nothing past her. I’m back to school tomorrow. I’ve had it with this mob.”

“Very wise.” He flicked his cigarette in the pool of remembrance.

The noise of the crowd mere picnic wasps, a world away, beyond the yew hedge.

She couldn’t keep this quiet. Ms. Sproson told the school. Something to do with being kind to girls who suffered loss. So everyone knew about Emily’s dad, and she had to put up with their hugs and fuss and endless stories of people they lost, that Emily didn’t give toss for. But eventually it faded, because the cool thing about tragedy was someone else always had some.

She went back for Christmas and that was dire. Her mother kept things exactly from the day the police finished their subtle destruction. Piles of papers undusted. Furniture left fallow. His last bottles on the tray, as though their drained bodies embraced him just hours before. Pitiful and horrid: no decorations, not even proper lunch. Things from packets. At Christmas. “You should sell up,” she told the woman. “I’ll be at university soon. You won’t need such space.”

Her mother claimed to consider it. The charity had been generous, with all the time off. She could move closer to the office. Save on travel. Be more active in the cause.

“That’s right.” Emily made herself eager. “New beginnings. While you still look young.”

She made sure to have plans the next summer, cultivating girls with footloose affluence. She was in a schloss in the Black Forest, contemplating a trek along the Nagold, when her exam results came through. Classics and English at Oriel, there for the having. The family hosting her crowd was delighted to celebrate the success of this bundle of girls. And in her vivid heart, Emily celebrated the dawn of independence.

All her friends took gap years, sailing the Pacific and saving Africans. Emily didn’t. She was at Oxford as soon as they’d let her, in a room on a courtyard of dusty grass. She took pictures of the turrets, the arched windows, the elderly men who swept the paths with stately precision. Not to share or make stupid claims. To remind herself, in years ahead, how she felt now this moment had come. She had all the books before term started. Her Latin was the middling sort. She crammed to be just good enough. And the poets claimed her. ‘Led her away into a forest wilde, / And turning wrathfull fyre to lustfull heat, / With beastly sin thought her to have defilde, / And made the vassal of his pleasures wilde.’ Though Spenser might quail at her virtue, the words burned the evening air, a fire of all she lost and could not regain. There would only be one time she was new and brave and wrathful. Each time after was nostalgia.

And a month into term, reconciled to the apprehension of hard work, checking the news because that was expected, she saw a minor criminal, a petty fugitive called Carter, dead, by gunshots separated, in what police labelled a warning. This body, it seemed, had informed. Trusted with secrets, spilled like birthday champagne. A detective inspector said Carter gave plenty to work with. Names and occasions. Methods and rendezvous. He helped put a few away, before he was put down.

Years of school made sharing a bathroom, a dinner, a backstory, familiar comfort. Lodged with boys and girls who were able for this work, Emily fitted the space she let them perceive contained her. She manoeuvred a good discussion at table about the ethics of the informant-type, and the ethics of the informant’s victim who might resent his loose tongue. Students drew examples from the classics and pedestrian moderns. Betrayal was fruitful narrative and, sometimes, essential.

She went to bed, watching the dark for a face, a gesture, a fabled time when her skin first lit with brilliance. Down among the barley, where warm winds clutched the sky. She felt it proper to weep and allowed a few tears. Silently, cordially, giving a moment to grief. Not in an ugly way people might hear. Amid decorous, face-saving silence. He assumed her and she went back for more every chance she got. Her child would have been two now. Rising three. Now she could choose about everything, away from those who betrayed her.

She read hard. She wrote late in the evening. Her essays chasing a fervid brilliance she could barely explain. She went to parties and drank. Word hounds called her mercurial, because her heart beat faster than anyone’s.

In the holidays she visited her mother. She stayed a week. To keep her interests visible. The woman would leave the money to badgers otherwise. Emily dropped her ride two miles shy of the village. A fair day, brisk, fat-bellied clouds walling the sky. She walked by houses where rich old couples used to live. Widowed now. Separated. Sold up or dead. The holiday lets, sedate at this time of year. A handful of middle-aged types recovering from something. Emily was tall. She worked on her arms lifting books. She’d taken to wearing suits. In the village lane she looked investigatory, with purpose beyond mundane tasks. Her bag slung at her back like a soldier.

Roses by the path were leggy. Hollyhocks high as the door. She had a key but didn’t want to embarrass her mother in some fever of cord-tying or hair-brushing. It took a long while for the woman to answer the door. The gloom of the hallway strung her mother’s shoulders like a cape. Her mother had lost weight, her eyes an affronted gaze from sunken sockets. No hug. No word of admiration. Emily might have been there to collect a debt.

Dust laced everything in easeful forgetting. Never wantonly domestic, her mother had kept things neat for her charity reels and neighbourhood drinks. But now everything looked left alone. Arthritic attachments with no more hope of moving. Her mother seemed vague, resentful.

Emily thought to placate her. “It’s marvellous to see how much of the hedgerows have been restored. Farmers are finally starting to take notice.”

“They poison the seed.” Her mother’s fingers, stained and busy. “They won’t trust the land. They sow sickness.”

“Yes,” said Emily. “The hedgerows do give a corridor for small mammals. And much-needed shelter to ground-nesting birds.”

“They bring foreign crops. Foreign trees. They dose the soil so foreign things grow. I see them all night, their lights on the hill, sowing disaster. What people eat they become. We’re made fools.”

“And those glorious meadowsweets down the lane. White flowers. White to purple. ‘Meadwort’ Chaucer called it. They used it to flavour the cup.”

“By the food we eat,” her mother said. “We’re replaced from within.”

Emily had to sleep in her old attic room. There was nowhere else. She didn’t unpack. The wardrobe was mildewed. Things she left behind – books, games, scraps of adolescence – lay scattered from her frenzy of selection, the night she went up to Oxford. Things any reasonable mother would bin or foist at orphans. Still as she left them. She had to change the bedding, but nothing was fresh and everything sour. Her mother seemed not to move anything, as if days could remain, like insects in amber, forever displayed in an instant of fleeting life. Emily felt sick at the thought. The past preserved. The mistaken moments curated for study. She piled everything under stinky sheets. She’d burn it, if she could.

Her father’s things were just as they were – the papers, the bottles, untouched for so long fine thready fungus bound them. Disgust so sharp it pricked her fingers. She’d put a match to all this. She’d make it insurance.

Her mother no longer appeared in videos for the wildlife charity. She was a sort of emerita, writing blog pieces they would definitely publish, soon as the backlog was cleared. Living on savings. Pissing away Emily’s money. Dinner was a few raw vegetables and bread mother tore with her hands.

“I’ll cook something,” Emily offered. It seemed unlikely. The stove splashed with burned-on spills, knitted with dust. Buttons and dials dead as an antique city. “Don’t you cook at all?”

“Nothing’s clean. I told them. I called up after them.”

“Who?” Emily’s patience was vapor. “What the fuck are you on about?”

“The men at the barley. Real barley sows itself. It’s self-reliant. Not like these, where the seed sticks tight. Medicine for the stomach. To cool a fever. To dress wounds.”

“I know this.”

“But these miles of barley cure nothing. It goes to the bottle. To poison and numb. While around us the land is stolen.”

“I fucking know the ‘Iliad’. We throw barley in sacrifice. ‘Once the men had prayed and flung the barley, / first they lifted back the heads of the victims, slit their throats, and skinned them…’ Sacrifice to stem the plague. This comedy of innocence to soothe the gods.  The lustral preparation. Iphigenia throwing barley on the foreigners she kills.”

“Foreign men among the barley.”

“It’s her job, her office to Artemis.” She breathed rank air. “Sacrifice was Iphigenia’s job.”

The garden lay ruined. Neighbours, in fear for their lawns, trimmed and tidied a sanitary strip by each fence. But the rest was fallen to wild grass, to nettles and choking vines. Eyes watched within each knot of green. Cautious. Scenting the stranger. There’d be no relief in dark hours. No comfort. Rats in the kitchen. Lice in the wood. Prophetic stars in ordered alignment, describing endless ritual through the sky. One day they’d be gone. Explode to dust. There’d be new constellations. She walked the dark fields for hours. The whip-sting of resurrection, the barley new risen, an admirable wound. Through the wood Emily went without fear. Her sacrificed child the debt full paid. She yearned, empty.

At breakfast of stale bread and green jam, she said again, “You should sell this place. It’s too big. And it hasn’t been lucky.”

“Lucky?” Her mother spat when she chewed. She didn’t wipe her mouth. “With daddy’s job, we were so lucky.”

Emily thought of her, on the train back. Watching twilight creep round the rooms. Sitting in filth and oblivion. Each day the same. Each day poorer. It wasn’t Emily’s concern.

She met Luke. He delivered vegetables to the college. He delivered all over the city, in a purring electric truck. Luke had tattoos of fighting scenes and scars from childhood rituals of transformation. He brought fruit to Emily’s staircase: trembling blood oranges, a marbled mango, slices of wise papaya to sharpen her sight. He kissed her wrists. He called her a flame and, he, the helpless moth. He craved obeisance to her strength. Emily granted his wish. She doubted his claims. She made him wait. He called her beauty without mercy. Their embrace shook the walls.

Through months of dactylics and deliveries, heuristics and horticulture, Emily found her appetite changed. Insistence nagged her belt. Friction stretched her shirt. Her cultivated, flat-fronted appeal distorted. In the grey-tiled bathroom. Ready for new things. The piss-drip stick in her hand. Luke was delighted. Emily would stay on track to join the faculty. His fresh-grown things would nourish body and mind. They could share chores between them. It was simple. It would be fun.

Alone with midnight struck, she made her decision. Luke was soft. A dreamer. Yet dreams were hard currency. She would progress and rise. She was capable. Things could be done. That was the winding thread. Things could be done. She held her stomach. She felt its ellipse. Something hanging on. Moving in its own time. She didn’t ask for this, but she didn’t ask for anything.

Luke was achingly sweet. But she had to see her mother by herself. She told him her mother wasn’t well. Aged too fast. Forgetful. Maybe later, the three of them could visit. That wouldn’t happen but it sounded okay, and Luke went to work happy. Simplicity was useful.

No point calling to make arrangements. The woman couldn’t find the phone. Couldn’t find her ears in that rat’s nest hair. Couldn’t find simple manners. The journey south was interminable. Longer than in her school days, further north. The home counties, the pleasant south east, parcelled and prorated. Industrial fields between dismal towns, their only purpose storage. A painter’s sky hung across the window. Faded blue, impressed by strokes of steely clouds. She tried to parse the sky in Latin, in Greek. The Greeks needed no word for blue. They spoke of light and dark. Dull and brilliant. Sensation, better than sense.

From below the Chilterns a man joined the train. He sat opposite Emily. He watched the clouds ride their journey. He showed her hilltops detached through inverted air. The hanged land above the sky. He spoke of the fata morgana. She spoke of Longfellow. ‘But when I would enter the gate / Of that golden atmosphere, / It is gone, and I wonder and wait / For the vision to reappear.’ He asked if she was a poet. She said, “I only spectate.” They arranged to meet when she travelled back through London. They would meet often, through the blossoming months. It was her reward.

The village was tired. Its wretched lanes muddied from machinery. Front yards blown with scraps, levelled from a prowling wind. A loose gate rattled. A fence creaked, pleading against hard air. Crows called overhead: the stranger, the stranger. She wouldn’t bring to this place her baby tied in a sling. Or walking, clutching her hand, stretching away to be brave but still needing to anchor. She wouldn’t harm her child by bringing them here. This was the last time.

Day was fading when she reached the house. Its windows a paste of grime. Its lintels fallen. Box consumed the front gate, the hedge dislodging, displacing hinges, splitting slats with evergreen ruin. The stink was animal shit. Rotting plants. Sour earth. Rubbish laced with mould. If rich neighbours and trippers stayed around, they’d make noise, shoot messages, call for sanitisation. But houses were dark.

She let herself in, the front door unwilling, its warped wood hugging the step. Crumpled letters jammed behind. Physical communication – the last, desperate measure. Envelopes gleamed with slug trails. Whatever professed urgency proved a lie.

Her mother made such fuss of the kitchen, when they came here. How the kitchen should be: rustic, modern, authentic, convenient. How it should show her in a good light, if benefactors of the charity should visit. That charity which closed because of some scandal, its funds depleted, its trustees swept aside. Mould streaked the walls, spores in dizzying spirals. The stovetop was cracked, its clever dials and wiring severed and dead. The kettle was burned out beneath a scorched towel. The fridge crackled, its rusted castors in pools of muddy water. Greenery made a garden of the sink. Long scratches scored the table, from a knife or claws.

Something died in father’s study. A rat, perhaps, rotted in the skirting. A stench of defeat from the toughest creature. She took a whisky bottle, the illusion of his fingers shaped in dust. With careful precision, she smashed it against his desk, that clean sound of splintered glass slicing the dirt.

A noise next door. A cry.

Only one light in the house. In the sitting room, where mother crouched, surrounded by filth. The smell of the woman, her loss of sense a despicable betrayal.

The woman reacted slowly. Swollen, bloodied eyes blind with matted hair. Hands and arms in ribbon lines from scratching. A good, smart dress streaked and disassembled. She struggled to stand, clutching the threads of what had been that coveted armchair. Shapes moved around the corners. Indifferent, with their own business.

The woman moved toward her, arms reaching for balance.

Emily stepped back. “I’m keeping it. You can’t change my mind.”

Her mother shook her head, chasing an itch. “We made the right decisions. Daddy said. All the right decisions.”

“You killed them all. Him, my baby, that lovely man. Murdering bitch.”

“The poison seed.” Sudden, spasmodic ferocity drove the woman. “They sour the earth. They bring their greedy harvest.” She pointed at Emily’s stomach “The selfish seed.”

In debates on the germinal litter of Western culture, Emily spoke with clear precision, her pedagogic voice already formed. That voice surprised the room. Busy creatures paused. Decay hesitated. Unfamiliar exposure brought a blush to seeping walls. “Picturesque nonsense. You killed them. You are guilty. You have no claim.”

The woman’s spasms made her a captive to fire.

Emily circled the heel of her hand on her stomach. “You speak of decisions. My child’s father is black. My baby is black. You can do nothing about this. You can do us no harm. I exceed you.”

Something reached that remnant brain. Some galvanising challenge. The woman flung her taloned hands toward Emily, lesions on her arms split wide, spilling wine-dark blood.

Her grip went to Emily’s throat. Emily caught her shoulders. Threw her back as if batting a wasp from her window. The woman’s snarl showed teeth in ruins, marble stumps displaced by basalt earth. That kick took her down to the hearth. That original feature she craved and shined, when they were new in the house and she was the country wife. The fertile hearth, cradling the comfort of fire. But cold in this house. Nurturing nothing.

Emily’s mother once fussed her skin. Creams and confections, to smooth her for debates and meetings and saving the beasts of the land. The hidden creatures no one cared for. Now, her skin was porous. Sludgy mucous dredged from wounds never closed. By the light of that single bulb, bruises flowed from Emily’s fingers. This rag-dolly head with its stuffing of straw. She raised it above the hearth, above ancient granite that might have capped a temple or sealed a tomb. Her shoulders tensed, ready.

“Who are you?” Mother’s face lacked fear or anger. She looked cheaply confused.

Emily laid the woman’s head on the stones. The woman accepted this, squinting at the ceiling through baffled hair.

Two miles in dark cold, the stink of that house in her throat. The woman, lost to savage forgetting; one day someone would find her. Tall Emily walked strongly, her hands delighted to touch her stomach, to know its cargo. She was the vessel for this. She exceeded them all.

A moonless sky, washed with stars. To the south, Arcturus burned in the asterism defining the Herdsman. The Northern Crown at his flank. The crown bestowed by Dionysus on Ariadne. Spinstress Ariadne, who betrayed all for her lover and was betrayed in her turn. To be a goddess set in stars. When the time came to choose her doctoral thesis, the work to secure her ambition, Ariadne, her love, her desolation, was the proper theme for a young mother.

Bitter wind bent the barley before the imperious sky. A dark cold night. No one alive – not truly alive – but her. The barley sighed around her legs, some memory of her – cut and regrown – in its grassy heart. From her jacket, she took the half bottle of whisky and kitchen matches. One taste of whisky, to remember past pleasures, the rest scattered on the spikes. A match and two and three made candles of barley stalks. They burned a lonely light, setting her face in deep shadow. One by one, their neighbours caught the dance. Benevolent breeze moved fingers of flame here to there. A witch fire – cackling, greedy for more to devour. A brawling, devoted fire, it cleaved to whatever it touched. Across the night-dead country the fire’s excited chatter laid a fairground. Acid smoke bloomed, dense and curative. An offering to her future, wreathed across the sky.

Emily stepped from the field, a warm benediction in cold country. As by sudden decision, the crop was alight. The fire’s early hesitation became conquest. She stepped to the verge. To the road. Merry heat scintillated her skin. The sacrifice blazed. Mice ran. Birds squalled at this lethal sunrise.

Emily, sure in her power, strode to the town. Something moved in her stomach. A strong, intimate pleasure. She pushed inward. Something pushed back. Somebody loved her.