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hen or rabbit, a jar of pickles, was passed across the bar and handed on wordlessly to me, with just a jerk of the head towards the kitchen. For a man so forthright with his opinions, Uncle George was unusually reticent when it came to the intricacies of usury.
    And that’s how things went on, day after day, with little differentiation. Mornings were spent in the brewhouse, afternoons preparing a meal from the previous night’s offerings, then in the evenings I worked on the bar. My nights I passed up in the attic, lying awake on a thin mattress, listening to the rain on the roof, or the wind rattling a loose slate, or the call of a nightbird. I’d find myself thinking of my father, of his presence at my shoulder as I sat on the hearth and he passed down cigarette after cigarette for me to light at the fire. I’d remember my grandmother in the doorway, her arm stretched out to block my way, not looking me in the eye. The grey hollow feeling would threaten to swallow me entirely.
    I didn’t have much sense of passing time. There were no landmarks. The boredom of my situation was so intense that if I had allowed myself to think about it, I would almost certainly have cried. So I refused even to consider thinking: I must have drifted into a kind of stupor, and completed my daily and weekly rounds of tasks in a daze, though I can’t really give a clear account of it, having not paid very much attention at the time. Season must have shifted into season,must have shifted back. I grew to fit my father’s clogs: I outgrew my shorts. Uncle George provided me with a pair of blue worktrousers. I barely registered these concrete changes. I barely registered anything at all.
    This state must have gone on for some considerable time; it could have gone on forever, if I hadn’t been shaken out of it. It was a shock, or rather a series of shocks, that did it. Apparently as usual, I held out my jug to catch the water as it fell from the conduit’s lip into the stone trough, and I found myself slowly waking, becoming aware of the continued lightness of the vessel in my hand. I can see myself slowly turning to look, slowly lifting the pitcher to my face, my eyes focusing on the concentric circles of the glazed brown base, a mere smear of water. That was the first shock. The second came when I turned back, ever so slightly quicker, still half expecting to see the fall of clear water, and saw instead soft stalactites of moss, a single gathering drip. Then the third shock—to find myself standing there, an empty jug in my hand, the sun beating down on my neck and shoulders and on the crown of my head, with no sense of how long I’d been there, or where I’d been before, or how I’d got into that state in the first place.
    And as I stood there a cog in my brain began slowly to revolve. Its teeth locked with another, which turned a clogged-up axle, which gradually coiled a spring, which sprung, nudged a lever, and the penny dropped. My pool.
    I should have already known what I would find, of course, and shouldn’t really have needed to go and look. That slowly dripping stalactite of moss should have been evidence enough. But because my brain was still just crunching through its disused gears, its lubricants cold and thick with disuse, and agood proportion of my mental cogs and wheels had yet even to become engaged, I was halfway down to the riverbank before I even noticed that the jug was still dangling from my hand, and the strings of my apron were fluttering loose. I tugged the apron off, stuffed it into the pitcher, set them in the bottom of the hedge and marched on.
    If I hadn’t quite managed to accept the significance of the dry stone conduit, I should have realized when I saw the whitened rocks in the riverbed, the baked and cracked mud at the banks. But even the dusty scrape of my clogs on the beck’s dry bed was insufficient to prepare me for what waited up above, underneath the