When the blankets moved, Esther let out a sound she did not recognise as her own. Turning to sprint, she forgot to duck. Her hair snagged on something in the barbed lattice overhead. She cried out again, in terror and then pain as she tore her hair free to plunge towards the mouth of the brambled tunnel by which she had arrived. Somewhere in the distance she was aware of the faint, piercing ring of an electric doorbell that could have been hers. Once. Twice. Then something seemed to grab her leg. She tried to scream again, but the need to breathe prevented her, as did the realisation that the thing against her leg wasn’t grabbing but rubbing, while emitting a purr like a rumbly engine.

‘Jesus, Chico, Jesus.’ Esther placed a trembling hand on the animal’s broad back, close to tears as her shock played out. She threw a glance back at the shed, its door still a few inches ajar, just as she had first seen it. Someone had been using the space inside, sitting, smoking, feeding the cat, but they were gone.

EXCURSIONS

21

Lucas had made a point of booking a seat in the quiet carriage. So he could work, he told himself, while aware that what he really wanted was to avoid the risk of proximity to other people, talking and laughing into each other’s faces and phones; leading a mostly carefree existence, which had been his privilege too, not so long ago.

As it turned out, the train was mercifully empty for a Monday morning. As he settled with his laptop on his tray table, sipping from the latte he had bought at the station, the autumnal browns and auburns of the landscape streaming past the window, an echo of his old self hummed. He was still on paracetamol and his calf ropey, but his throat was definitely less sore; and to be doing something at last, instead of sitting like a doomed man waiting for execution, also felt pretty bloody good. He had told Moira’s father as much in their email exchange, reiterating how grateful he was for the invitation to talk man to man, father to father, about the entire misunderstanding that had arisen with his daughter. Ever since, how this chance of a proper conversation might go had been playing with mounting clarity and hope in Lucas’s head: the opportunity to explain and reassure, the parallels that could be drawn and shared as parents, maybe even confiding some of his own current agonies and difficulties with regard to Dylan.