Before they have had a chance to throw off their awkwardness and begin a conversation, steps can be heard labouring up the staircase behind them. Grendel jumps to open the door, and in comes a woman in mud-smeared boots, carrying a bucket heavy with water so dirty it resembles mud. Her arms, too, are smeared with greenish-brown filth. She is a tall woman, so thin as to appear haggard, her fine bones framed by thinning grey hair. As she stares at them, unmoved by Grendel’s explanations, the bucket begins to boil, and dark claws break the surface, along with the spasmodic twitch of an armoured tail.

“What do you know,” says Thomas. “The angel has a wife. And she’s been fishing.”

She smiles at that, an unpractised, awkward, bashful smile, rinses a fistful of crayfish in a deep, lead-lined sink, and sets to cooking them for dinner.

That night, Grendel sits up with them and tells them he is sick.

ф

“It started when I was nine. I had smoked as an infant, though never very much. An easy child they called me, good-humoured and docile, perhaps a little dull. Then the Smoke ceased. I was sick, I remember, German measles, spots up and down my body and a terrible fever. When the sickness went, the Smoke went with it. I’ve never shown since.”

They are still sitting at the dinner table, each on a stool of a different height, their fingers vivid with the smell of crayfish. From time to time, Mrs. Grendel rises and busies herself at the stove, where she is boiling up the empty shells for stock. She is humming something, listening to her husband talk; contentment in the hum, but also worry about these strangers who have burst in upon her life. Grendel, for his part, speaks simply, trustingly, as eager to shed his story as a child is to slip out of its Sunday clothes. Thomas listens to him with the heightened intensity of fever. He sits far from Livia, out of her sight; has picked a fallen crayfish leg from off the floor, black and spindly, spikey at the joints; sits rolling it within his palm, digging its edges into his skin.

“Nobody really noticed it at first. I was placid before and was more placid after. It was my clothes that gave it away, my bed linen. No stains. Not by day and not by night, for weeks on end. But it was more than that. I didn’t fight anymore. Didn’t argue. I would watch my sisters do it, get into a proper scrap, clouds rising out of them like steam from a mangle, and feel left out. It was as though I was watching them walk on their hands, or speak a foreign tongue. As though sin were a knack, and I had lost it.