When Niall wakes up again, the house seems to be floating on water. Varnished pine planks edge the walls like a fence. It was a previous owner’s idea, a woman from the Lowlands, before his uncle bought the house. He remembers his wife Christine’s face the first day they moved in. She called it ‘perfect’. Perfect seemed something simple to attain back then. Niall didn’t think it was perfect, though, and didn’t like the walls, but within a few years of living here they became invisible to him. He sees them now anew, and closes his eyes. He tries to lie still against the nauseous fog rolling in. He will not be working today. A song is turning around in his head, a music without words that he cannot place.

One day he will make big changes. He likes to sit with a tin of beer in the evenings and tell Lauren he’s going to paint the walls another colour or reclad them or build an extension. He asks her what she wants him to build and she will say a turret, a swimming pool, a library with a hidden door, a dog bedroom for Jameson. Once she asked him to build a slide from her window into the garden. He said he would build her a tree house, but he never has. Now he buries thoughts of the workshop and carpentry, sandpaper, drills, hammers. He buries all thoughts and all potential for thoughts. He has become quite skilled at this over the years.

The lady from the Lowlands made one alteration he approved of: she changed the name of the house to Dunscaith. Before that it was home to Alan Mackie’s uncle and known as Trapper’s Cottage.

Alan’s uncle, the trapper, had been a drinker. Alan says that the outhouse that’s now Niall’s workshop was once full of traps and carcases of poached animals and barrels of home brew. Alan says his uncle’s fingernails were always black from dried blood and earth. One night the trapper took an axe to the bare staircase and hacked it to pieces, which he then burned on the fire.

But the circumstances of the trapper’s death are unclear. One evening, in the pub, Niall asked Alan what happened to him but Alan just drank the last of his ale and set the empty glass on the small round table and wiped his mouth. A silence passed between the two men. Then Alan got out of his chair and started putting his coat on. He said, just before he left for the night, that some stories are better left buried. Niall thought of bodies in the ground.