A day later, in his window seat on the plane, he would find himself trying to pick out the exact hillside they’d been on, imagining the hole in the tree, somewhere down there, where he’d left his old boots, but it was no use: the altitude was too great by then. He could, however, still see the moor: a mass of fuzzy, raging green breaking up the politer patchwork around it. That was about an hour before he remembered the tape from the studio, saw it in his mind’s eye still sitting on the low shelf beside the bed in the cabin where he’d left it, but by then he was in the middle of a larger letting-go. He wrote a note in his diary about a finch he had seen on the landslip writhing on the ground when they’d climbed back up to the car, the deep sadness he had felt about it, and a question – ‘Does it get any easier?’ – underneath it, then rustled once more in the bottom of his rucksack, which was just small enough to count as hand luggage. He was surprised to find a magazine in there. It was the one she’d hit him around the head with, an issue of Homes & Gardens from May. One of the main articles had the headline ‘Buying Carpets’. He read it for a while but it failed to hold his attention.

STOPCOCK (2019)

JULY