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of the garden: the electricity substation.
    Double idiot.
    On the corner of Kirkside Road, our road, there’s an olive-green metal cabinet, pressed up against the low wall, the privet hedge behind swelling up and around it. I don’t know exactly what it is: electric wiring or telephone cables, perhaps. Occasionally I’ve seen a guy there in overalls, he’d have the doors open, the cabinet spilling wires. Sometimes, passing by, I’ve heard the electricity hum inside, like a dozen violins playing the same chord. The substation must have been similar, only bigger, grander, more expansive. An orchestral strings section thrumming out a single chord. Electricity: that’s what the hum was, that was the strangeness in the air. Nothing more than that.
    *
     

    I took myself out for a walk, the way I might have taken Cate out for a walk. I had to organize myself into jumper, jacket, boots, and practically drag myself out of the door. I’d get some fresh air and some exercise, and then I’d get stuck in to the work: unwrap everything, take everything out of the boxes, bags, suitcases, heap it into piles, begin triage. I could get it done in a day or two, once I’d got started.
    I stalled at the top step. I felt so obvious, so conspicuous, the street a clean sweep in both directions. To my left, the ground rose, the street ducking out of sight down the other side, towards the church. The road was a cul-de-sac; I knew from the directions . To the right, the street flattened for a while, and then curved and climbed towards the crossroads where it was lost from sight behind the bulk of a converted barn. There was about a quarter of a mile between my cottage and the barn, and in all that space there were only four houses, standing in wide pools of garden. In between, fields reached right up to the edge of the street; sheep grazed and lambs stood around in gangs, like teenagers. There were no pavements, no white or yellow lines, no hard boundaries at all. Grass nibbled and cracked at the edge of the tarmac. Hedges were bony and holed, fence posts had been strung with invisible wire. The only solid lines were the dry-stone walls edging some of the gardens and fields, so ancient that they seemed more like an accident of geology than anything man-made. It made me feel exposed, and somehow porous, as if I were too vulnerable to face the air. At home, I’d head for the park, the canal, the open spaces, but where do you go when everywhere is open space?
    The nearest house was a cottage just across the street, a little further down the hill: low sleepy-looking windows and an ancient front door, a flagged front path with daffodils growing in the borders. There was something weird about the light: the daffodils’ colour seemed almost phosphorescent. To the right of the cottage there was a gate; a track of bare stones and mud was worn into the grass beyond. A yellow arrow glowed on the gatepost , pointing upwards and away across the field: a footpath, a direction to follow. Somewhere to go.
    The gate had fallen off its hinges and been tied in place with wire and twine. I dragged it open far enough to slip past, and then I was out in this great green field, the track sloping away in front of me, the valley opening out ahead; copses, hedges, grass, the woods and hills rising up beyond, and on one of them, a solitary cottage silhouetted against the pale sky. I made my way down the track. To my left there was an ancient hedge, half dead, half wildly sprouting, patched with wire. The leaves weren’t out yet, but everything was green: green algae on tree trunks, slim green saplings, green reeds in the ditch, rich green moss in mounds on the bank. It felt like my eyes were being bathed, as if they were being re-educated in colour. After a lifetime of London’s yellow-brick and red-brick, tarmac and concrete, its odd pool and splash of green, my eyes were now learning to work in negative.
    At the bottom of the hill there was a small wood. I could