So one evening he closed the big barn doors when the birds were roosting, and the next morning he went out with his gun.

Don’t come, Mum. Don’t look. Don’t see this.

And he went in and closed the door behind him and shot a dozen birds in the fluttering space, and only then let the rest of the flock escape. The door thrown open, light flooding in, a rush of wings overhead. The dead birds heaped in a barrow, to be taken and buried or burned on the fire. Blood red on white feathers. His look hard on them, the hope in it that he had killed enough so that the others wouldn’t come back. If his mother had had her way, she would have given the whole farm over to her fancy birds, let the hedges grow and fall across the ditches, the bramble and blackthorn spread and tangle into thickets, those roses with the French names ramble out from the garden over everything.

One day in the winter that followed, he started on the cowshed. Only himself and his mother at home now since Jonny was away, and he found it hard, in the quiet of the house, to be idle. When there was no activity Jonny’s absence became all the more noticeable, and with it the implication of his own continued presence, his permanence in the place. This particular day it was raining heavily. The ground outside was too sodden to work and would likely be so for some days to come. Clearing the cowshed was something to do. No urgency to the job, only that the building was derelict. The cowshed like the old barn had stood empty for fifteen years, but there was nothing he needed it for. It was obsolete as well as derelict, though it had only been put up in the 1930s, the modern building seeming emptier than the old one could ever have been.