Except she wasn’t out in Manchester, was she? She was here. This was the danger: wanting to be both at once. Those were the plates moving apart, the gap she could plummet down. She half-expected the earth to start quaking, to split around the root of the damson tree and show her the dark earth, the torn and dangling worms, all the coffins smashed and leaking and the mantle boiling through … But the ground was steady, and the grass beneath the tree was tough and scratchy with thistle. The seat of her jeans clung to it: it wouldn’t let her slump to the ground. She remembered how Callum’s felted figurines had clung to the hillsides they stood upon, the minute resistance she’d felt as she pulled one away, the almost imperceptible sound of fibres tearing – though if you turned the figure over and examined its base, you’d see no obvious damage.

As you work it, the felt shrinks. Its edges turn wavy, ragged; it ripples and the dips fill up with foam. You think it’s ruined, and sometimes it is; but sometimes it’s only approaching its new form. You pour on more water to rinse the fulling suds away, and then, when it’s relatively clean, you stretch it out to dry on a great frame called a tenter, from which we get the phrase ‘to be on tenterhooks’, meaning ‘to be suspended’.

NO TWO WERE E’ER WED

He had to get down and lift the flounced valance and push his hand between the mattress and the boxspring, groping around, his wrist compressed. There was nothing – then a corner. An edge. He pinched and dragged it out. It was not quite as blue as he remembered. The elasticated strap around its middle stood out brightly, but the cloth binding was muted, greyish, the texture faintly ridged. The scarlet ribbon poking from the shut pages was forked at the end like a tongue.

Somehow David had known Claire would not have taken the notebook to her Spanish lesson. You don’t sling your fetish object in a rucksack under a table to get kicked all night: you keep it somewhere safe. How hard could it be to find? But once he’d searched the bedside table drawers, turning up only her gelatinous purple vibrator, dull with dust, and her Nancy Friday paperback of women’s fantasies, and then discovered, down the back of the desk, a splayed copy of Hume’s On Suicide, he had begun to realise how mysterious the bedroom was. New hiding places kept occurring to him as he sat on the bed and looked around. Was it buried in the laundry basket? Behind the storage heater? Taped to the back of the mirror? Even once he’d hit on the space beneath the mattress, other possibilities kept occurring to him. There might be a horde of notebooks surrounding him even now.