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landed on the curtain rail. She moved the chair so it was under the rail and then reached for the bird. She leaned against Danny’s shoulder. Just as she was getting close, the bird flew out the door and into the hall.
    Danny ran out and opened the front door. Rita got down slowly from the chair. It was difficult; she was off balance. It was hard to bend each leg without her knees locking. She could feel the pull of the cliffs, could see them deep-ridged and braced against the wind.
    ‘It went out,’ Danny said. There was a single snowflake melting in his hair.
    ‘We don’t want to get stuck here,’ Rita said.
    As they slid the board back over the fireplace, she knocked her hip against the stone and it made a hollow clack. Danny stood in the middle of the room, looking round once more. The snowflake had melted and disappeared.
    ‘Come on,’ she said.
    He closed the door and locked it.
    ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,’ the neighbour said when Danny gave him the keys.
    The engine didn’t turn over all the way the first time Rita tried. Her heart gave a heavy thump. It started the second time. They drove back down the narrow lane. The tyre marks they had made on their way had almost been cancelled out by the snow. They were quiet in the car. Rita was concentrating on the road and on using the pedals with her stiff legs. Snowflakes landed and piled up on the windscreen.
    The road they needed to turn on to was closed. There was a police sign across the middle. The yellow diversion signs pointed left.
    ‘Shit,’ Rita said.
    ‘Maybe there was an accident,’ Danny said. ‘There must have been an accident if it’s a police sign.’
    Rita turned left. She couldn’t envisage where the diversion would take them, or how long it would add to the journey back. There weren’t any other cars on the road. Everywhere was quiet and empty. Danny didn’t turn the music back on. The heater whirred out warm air. Rita tapped her hand against the steering-wheel and hunched forwards. She drove slowly with her lights on, tried not to think about the car stranded at the side of the road, a painful walk in God knows what direction.
    She followed two more diversion signs before they were back on the main road and she knew where they were.
    ‘Do you know what Jack said to me the other day?’ Danny said. He leaned back in his seat. ‘He said that he and Sally are going to get a cat.’
    ‘What kind of cat?’ Rita hadn’t seen Jack and Sally for a long time. They were more Danny’s friends.
    ‘I don’t know. One of those rescue ones, I think.’
    ‘I can’t imagine them with a cat.’
    ‘That’s what I thought,’ Danny said. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ He stretched his legs out. He seemed to take up the whole car. ‘I thought that rescue cats could have real problems anyway, that you could wake up and find all your clothes ripped up, or dead rabbits under your bed or something.’
    She drove slowly past banked-up snow. A few more flakes hit the windscreen. Danny started talking about work and his longer hours. Rita could tell he was tired because his right eye got slightly lazy, the iris edging outwards like an orbiting planet. Sometimes, when he was really tired, he saw things: a hand waving in front of him, hundreds of horses at the side of the road. It used to scare her, when they were driving back from somewhere at night and he would say, ‘Look at all the horses,’ and there would be nothing but an empty road. Now she found herself watching him, slipping back into watching him, and she had to stop herself; she made herself concentrate on driving, on moving her stiff legs. Her stomach was hardening from the inside outwards, in rings like an old tree growing and hardening.
    ‘Hey, remember that cat you found and wanted us to keep?’ Danny asked. ‘You made it a bed in a box and fed it bits of potato.’ He laughed. ‘I told you we had to find the owners.’
    ‘You hit it with your car,’ Rita