He flicked the ring pull on the can and sucked away the froth, then pulled a lichen-covered garden seat from under an untamed honeysuckle at the bottom of the garden and positioned it in the sun, giving the seat a perfunctory sweep with his hand before sitting down. He opened the magazine at a page that showed the unappetizing image of a lamb stew with kidney beans floating like drowned beetles on its grease-bubbled surface. He turned back to the front cover and swore quietly to himself, realizing that he had picked up his mother’s Woman’s Weekly by mistake. He took a long pull from his beer can and spun the magazine onto the seat beside him. It fell to the ground and lay with its pages flapping over in the breeze.

Dan sat with eyes closed and head tilted back until he sensed the sun’s warming rays leave his face. He watched as its fiery tip sank behind the rooftops of the houses at the end of the street, taking with it what little heat had been afforded the day. Feeling a shiver run through his body, he decided that it was time to head indoors.

As he leaned forward to pick up the magazine, he noticed a spider crawling its way across the page, perfectly dissecting the face of a woman with high cheekbones and bright blue eyes that caught the blinding glint of a camera flash. As it continued on its way, the spider was momentarily lost against a background of spiky brown hair before appearing once more on the cold grey of the rain-clouded sky. And then, with a few tentative steps, it descended from the magazine and scuttled away across the bricked patio to the sanctuary of the weed-infested flower border.

Dan picked up the magazine and studied the photograph. The woman was standing with her arms around the shoulders of two small children whose impish grins would seem to indicate that her loving envelopment was probably more a necessary entrapment for the benefit of the photographer. Behind the three figures, dark, colourless hills ran down into the dull, glassy waters of some kind of lake or reservoir. Against this background, the multicoloured plaid trousers that the woman and two children were wearing contrasted brightly.

Dan stood up from the bench, beer can in hand, and made his way across to the French doors that led into the house. As he walked, he read the headline that was written below the photograph. “Too Good Boss Decides to Sell Business.”