Read The Telling for Free Online

windowsill. The air was fresh with their scent. I sat, legs stretched out along the worn blue sofa, and in the back of my mind was the thought that I should be scouring a Yellow Pages, calling charities to see which of them would collect a second-hand sofa, a pair of grotty single beds, and somewhere beneath my breastbone was an ache of Sunday evening homework-guilt: I should be getting on with this. I should be sorting things out. Instead, I was leafing through the local history book for a mention of this place. Not even reading, really: looking at the photographs.
    Farm workers, straight out of D. H. Lawrence; all beards and rolled shirtsleeves, squinting in the sun; a flat expanse of field behind them, and a heap of bleaching hay:
Haytiming, Caton, 1911
. Just up the road from here. A massive horse with a floppy fringe, a boy in knee britches and bare feet at its halter, standing next to a moustached man in a stained apron, hands-on-hips; behind them, a dark low lintel and the white flare of a captured flame:
The forge at Bentham, 1908
. The next image was a sketch, not a photograph. In pen-and-ink. A woman sat on a stool by an open hearth. In her lap was a bristling palisade of sticks, like an unfinished bird’s nest.
Basket-making
, the caption read,
Lancashire, 1840
s.
    I heard a dog bark. A motorbike burned up a distant road, and was gone. The quiet settled again, and seemed even deeper. I turned back through the chapters to take a glance at the essay on basket-making. After a while, I flicked back to look at the drawing again and came upon a photograph that I hadn’t seen before. An old man, his head as bald as an egg, squinted in the light, the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. He was sitting on some stone steps, a half-made basket clasped between his knees. He sat on the third step up, and there were six. Handrail to the left, a glimpse of flower-border and the bottom 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 itthrough 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