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sky notion. Made me feel light on my soles, adrift. A sky’s the sort of thing you want nice and solid. Climb up your ziggurat of an evening, give her a rap. Yessir, screwed on tight. For a second there, I lost that sense of it. I had a sense instead of being in a shoebox tableau with the lid suddenly pulled off and everything floating free. Trees, earth, grownups floating. Stream floating up in gouts and droplets. Everything around me spreading thin like smoke, parting like the fabric of smoke and atomizing in twilit space. A bizarre glitch in the general proceedings.
    I tried to steady myself with a wet-dog shake. Tried to anchor myself again on Dad and Mrs Sole. She was appealing to him now, eyes upturned into a stray gleam of sunlight. He was running one hand through his thinning hair, the other on his hip, pushing his jacket back to show his paunch.
    â€˜Is that your Dad?’ Without warning, the girl was standing next to me. Holding her basket placidly in front of her jumper. And oddly, it was a look at her that righted things for me. The sight of her worried brown nugget of a face brought me down with a clunk.
    â€˜Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Is that your Mom? Mrs Sole?’
    She nodded. ‘She’s your Dad’s client. He’s nice, your Dad.’
    There was a delay before I heard this. I was still busy looking at her. Feeling earth, trees, water, feet sucked back into place. I looked at her so long I had to say something finally. ‘My name’s Harry, by the way,’ I said.
    And flash, there was her smile, ordinary, like her giggle, like any girl’s.
    â€˜Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Agnes.’
    My father saw the two of us coming toward him and spoke up quickly, ‘Okay, Harry? Ready to go?’ Cut Mrs Sole off in mid-sentence. She whipped around quickly with a bright smile for us.
    â€˜All done?’ she asked her daughter.
    â€˜Yes,’ Agnes said.
    Mrs Sole waggled her fingers at me. ‘Well, then, bye, Harry. Nice to meet you.’ And at Dad, ‘Thanks, Michael, we’ll talk about it again.’
    â€˜Right-ho,’ said Dad.
    And he and I stood side by side a moment, as mother and daughter walked away from us along the shadowy bank.
    â€˜Agnes is a nice girl, isn’t she?’ my father asked, as we climbed out of the trees and started across the grass to the street. The light had gone here now too. It was dusk.
    â€˜I guess so,’ I said. ‘The figures she makes are pretty good.’
    â€˜Her mother, you know, is a client of mine. We’re discussing some business. A piece of property back there …’
    â€˜Yeah, you told me already.’
    â€˜Oh. Did I? Right.’
    He was quiet after that. I was glad. I wanted quiet. There was something going on, in me, as I walked beside him. I wanted to check it out. I felt peculiarly alert; I guess that’s what it was. Historians may disagree whether this was technically the first of my legendary Walks Home From Agnes’s, celebrated in song and/or story from generation to generation. I mean, I only walked over the lawn to my father’s car that day. But the formative principle was there, no question. That weird, cool feeling of transparency, the light wandering through me; of permeability, me waxing subatomic and the whole scene buzzing in and out of the interstices. Which just comes down, really, to an odd, inhabitive awareness of the assembling crickets and their calls and to the worsted texture of the graying day, to blade of grass on sneaker tip, and to the one-dimensional look that houses get just at that hour, as if they were cardboard cutouts raised against the sky. And the sky, just at that hour … What a bizarro girl, I thought suddenly, and I suddenly goose-pimpled under my jacket sleeves – because the sky at nightfall, I discovered then, actually does lose its solidity. It becomes granular and vertiginous and deep.
    I was glad, I