You try to keep Tilly up until her bedtime, but she’s far too tired, and so you give in mid-afternoon. It means she’ll be wide awake at midnight, but so, probably, will you. She wants the book, which you have forgotten to lose, but you barely begin it before she’s sucking the collar of your lumberjack shirt and has fallen asleep. You lie there for a while before attempting to ease her down, gazing at the cartoon people with their ugly, gargoyle faces. All the people were mean and bad, except that what he said is right – they 135weren’t, they couldn’t be, that isn’t the way you want to live this life, or whatever of it remains to you. They were only doing their best, you think, or the best they thought they could; and unlike stern, righteous, virtuous Noah, no one, ever, told them they were going to die, or be saved, or that any of it, in the end, ever mattered.

136

Devotions

The threat of snow has you on the road the night before you’d intended to leave. The cottage hunkers down against a steep rise, accessible only across two sheep-strewn fields, and any downfall will leave it cut off.

That morning, a barn owl swooped at you from an abandoned dwelling on the dale, its pale round face and curved wingspan, before soaring upwards and away, leaving your hearts skittering. You peered in through the empty gaps where windows should be, lifting the older boys on your shoulders so they could see in too. The floorboards were rotting but the outer structure was solid, the old cast-iron gutters still sound, and for a moment you imagined living there, stepping out of this house into the morning light, the ancient hawthorns bent into supplicating shapes by the wind streaming cold and pure.

The barn owl’s cry, you read in a book back at the cottage, once heralded imminent death; this inhabitant of profane and lonely places. A screeching owl in daylight was indeed a harbinger of snow; or else a witch come to suck a baby’s blood. But it had seemed, at the time, less a 137warning than some strange blessing.

You loaded the car and set the satnav: the thin, twisting roads through the dales that would become carriageways then motorways, as if impelled by the journey’s own momentum. Driving up, on Boxing Day, you’d been amused by the road signs heralding The North, as if it were a place rather than a concept, something not relative, but real. You missed your own North, then, and your once-ritual walk round the deserted, expectant city-centre streets on Christmas Eve morning; the lingering skies of a city salved from sleech, and ruled by water. At the unlikeliest times you felt the tug of it, like the twitch of a dowsing rod. You’d never imagined you’d be calling London’s grimy East End home.