‘I don’t remember,’ said Dan. ‘I’ll lock up, you go to bed.’

She went. Some of the doors off the dark corridor were open. She walked into their room, and switched on her bedside lamp.

They lay waiting for sleep. An owl hooted, somewhere in the mass of trees. There was a distant, answering call. Above them, the atticspace was still.

‘Owls eat snakes, don’t they?’ said Dan.

‘Think so. Mice, definitely.’

‘You need to sleep,’ he said. ‘I’ll count you down.’

She settled into the crook of his arm.

‘A hundred,’ he whispered. ‘Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven … ninety-six …’

He lost the count at sixty, and stopped.

‘He feels so far away tonight,’ she said in the darkness, but there was silence. ‘Even more far away than dead.’

She lay awake, listening to the owls. She thought of the tiny mice in the imagined safety of the grass, snatched up by beaks bigger than themselves. How alien the air must be, after the solid ground. It must feel like death, even before death came.

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