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one that she had, blue with white stripes. For a second, she thought it was hers.
    ‘The tiles in there remind me of something,’ Danny said, coming out. He took a few steps down the hall and then went back and looked in again. ‘The colour.’
    Rita paced outside the bathroom. ‘It might snow harder soon,’ she said.
    ‘It’s not meant to,’ Danny said. ‘I heard it was going to stop.’
    In the first bedroom, there was a pair of slippers under the bed. Danny looked around the room, but his eyes kept shifting towards the slippers. There was a hush to the house which was more than the hush of an empty house – it was the hush of somewhere almost empty. There was a sweet smell in the air, as if someone had just moved through it wearing perfume, or someone had just taken away a vase of flowers. It felt like, at any moment, they would meet someone coming round a corner or see a hand opening a door.
    ‘You like built-in wardrobes,’ Danny said. ‘They’re practical, right?’
    Rita was over by the door but she came back to look. ‘That one smells of camphor.’
    ‘Camphor? How do you know what camphor smells like? No one knows what camphor smells like.’ He leaned right in, half expecting heavy fur coats, the smell of snow in the distance, such a strong image he often mistook it for his own memory.
    ‘It smells like camphor,’ Rita said, knowing that part of him was pushing through fur coats. She circled the joints of her knees, trying to keep them moving. They were aching and stiff. She had to concentrate hard on where she was, because more and more often she found herself back up at the cliffs with the other standing stones, watching the buzzard, watching the clouds fill up with snow. Her knees felt like they had a blood-pressure band around them, slowly getting tighter and tighter.
    ‘This wardrobe is probably about as big as our old bathroom.’ He closed it.
    ‘Bigger, probably,’ Rita said. It was so cold in the house. She pulled her coat tighter.
    ‘There’s a leak in it somewhere.’
    ‘Wardrobes don’t leak.’
    ‘In the old bathroom,’ Danny said. ‘In the corner.’
    She remembered fixing a leak in the old bathroom. She had plastered over the crack but the plaster had probably weakened by now. She would have to show Danny what to do about it, or maybe just tell him to ring the landlord.
    ‘You should look at the other rooms,’ she said. She waited out in the hall. After a while, she heard the scratching sound start up again downstairs, louder this time. It sounded like something shuffling backwards and forwards across a room.
    She went downstairs and into the living room. She waited a while. The noise was coming from the fireplace. She knelt down and tried to move the board. It was wedged in tightly. She heard Danny come down the stairs and into the room. ‘I need you to help me move this.’
    ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
    ‘Moving the board.’
    He came over and leaned down and hooked his fingers over the top. Rita dug a finger into a gap in the side and they pulled. The board came loose and swung open, grating against the stone.
    The fireplace was dark. They stared in. It was dark but they could see something moving. There was a scuffling noise and something burst out of it, skimming their faces.
    ‘Jesus Christ!’ Danny yelled, and they both jerked back. The bird flew in circles close to the ceiling. It looked like a sparrow but it was hard to tell because it was covered in soot. It started bumping against the ceiling, sending down small showers of soot on to the carpet. Danny backed away from it. The bird was panicking and it made the room seem smaller and closer. Its wings brushed against the plaster.
    Rita walked slowly around the edge of the room and opened the window as wide as it would go. Cold air and a few flakes of snow came in. It was snowing harder now. There were soot marks on the ceiling and wall. Rita tried to usher the bird out. It flew towards the window then