Mrs. East was standing by her garden gate. A pack of B&H king size sat atop the low brick wall and as I came nearer she picked it up and shook it at me. I took one and she lit it with the lighter made out of a bullet casing that her husband had brought back from Germany after the war.

“How’s you then?”

I shrugged. Mrs. East’s hair hadn’t gone white or even gray. Peter once suggested she blacked it with shoe polish. After we’d put the slowworm through her letterbox, terrified that we’d killed her, we’d plucked and left a rose on her doorstep each day for a week. From her own front garden. While we intoned the Lord’s Prayer. We only stopped when we heard her cackling through the door.

“Have you seen her?”

“Not today. You had your tea? There’ll be cauliflower cheese in a little while. Countdown’s on in ten minutes.”

“Richard Whiteley’s a tool.”

Mrs. East let out a plume of smoke and cocked an eyebrow. It was not how I had envisioned the day panning out, but it was better than going home, and in the event, I wouldn’t have changed things, since not only did I beat Mrs. East for the first time ever, but the word I got, ABALONE, was a seven, a personal best.

Mrs. East saw me out. At the gate, she stopped a few feet ahead of me and pointed skyward. A hawk was hovering over the field opposite the cottages. The sun was setting, and in its rays Mrs. East’s ears were translucent, pink as seashells and tracked through by tiny veins. I looked up. The sky was whitening, the bird barely moving. For the briefest of moments, I felt myself disappear, had the disconcerting sensation that I was both the hawk and whatever creeping thing it was tracking, and then the feeling was gone and what remained was a sickening jolt of déjà vu and in the red phone box, the telephone started ringing as I had somehow known it would.

CHAPTER 5

TOWER

Two days after Patricia’s phone call, I arrived at work to find, on my desk, a copy of a best-selling book. It was a memoir of a middle-class white woman who finds happiness by going on a long holiday, dabbling in soft-core spirituality, and getting a man. Oliver. Six months back I’d made the mistake of getting drunk with Oliver. I’d only meant to have one or two, but the brakes had utterly failed, and at some point into the third bottle of wine I had said something to him about wanting to change.

“Change what?”

“My life.”