She wished she didn’t resemble her father. She wished she wasn’t tall as he’d been. She wished she didn’t have his springy hair and large beaky nose and pointy chin. She didn’t want Creed to open his door and think of her father and think that after all these years she’d come to him on some kind of religious mission. She didn’t want him to be surly and unwelcoming. She didn’t want him to slam the door in her face or bellow at her through one of his narrow windows and tell her to be gone. She didn’t want him to pull his gun on her. She wished she’d come up here that other day, with the dominoes. She wished this wasn’t her first time. She wished that the ice had been broken between them before now – that she could at least have become an ordinary neighbour to him. Come on, Michael, it’s just us now. Sit with me. Everyone else has gone. The old have died, the young are all in the towns. My brother Frank, remember? My sister Pam? They’re in Carlisle. Pam’s a nurse. Frank’s at one of the big hotels. The Glaisters have all gone. Partingtons too, and Capsticks and Pickthalls and Hawksmiths, all upped and gone.

She wondered what Creed made of it all, this emptying out. She wondered what he felt when he turned up at the slaughterhouse with his new season’s lambs, or went into the places he visited for his supplies. She wondered if the people there exchanged secret glances and if he was made to feel uncomfortable. She wondered if he felt like she did and if in spite of everything that had happened in his life, he was always glad to come home.

There was more wind up here.

It cooled her face and made a rushing sound through the stiff grass and the bracken, a sound her father always used to say was the same sound he’d grown up with, the sound of the sea. When he said that, her sister Pam used to beg him to take them all on holiday somewhere to the coast, to Morecambe or Blackpool, somewhere sandy and warm where they could stretch out on towels and go bathing and eat ice-cream and see the lights and a show, and every year that they didn’t go she told Ruth that the first bloody chance she got, she was off out of here, away from this boring fucking dump of a valley, these pre-historic hills and struggling miserable little farms.