The podcast ended. Something strange had happened to me. I felt odd, kind of spread out. My cells were busy – it was like I could feel them working. My skin tingled in the cold air, and suddenly all the lines I had drawn, between myself and everyone and everything else, even between myself and my womb, felt wobbly.

I took out my earphones and tucked them away in my pocket. I rode on, listening carefully to the sounds of night insects and moving air. Noticing the way I heard them, the way my ears and brain worked seamlessly together to process the sound.

It definitely took more than an hour, maybe even an hour and a half, but by the time I wobbled towards the intersection and saw the two houses sitting there coated in a dusting of moonlight, my body felt alert, even to its own ache. I was enjoying it. I was enjoying my body for the first time in a while. I felt vitalised by the world around me.

I was coming at the houses from the south, a new angle for me, and as I pedalled slowly closer on the bike, admiring the look of the old house in the moonlight, something about it struck me as strange. And then I saw why.

There was an extra room. Strangely built, lopsided and flimsy-looking against the solid bulk of the house, hugging the back of the top floor. I stopped and sat there on Basil’s bike, looking at it. It was perched on top of a protruding bit of the storey underneath, with a small window of dark glass. Sitting on the bike there, with the moon shining so bright, it occurred to me that I would be all lit up in the blank landscape – that if someone was standing up there looking out of that dark window, it would seem as if they were an audience in a darkened auditorium, and that I was standing on a spotlit stage in front of them. And while I reminded myself that it was only a dark piece of glass that watched me, I felt the small hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

I kicked off the ground again and rode along the shoulder of the road. At the corner I glanced back, but the angle on the window had changed so now it was just a thin pane of reflected moonlight.

Bette and Hessel’s little house was nearly completely dark; only a soft lamplight came from one of the back rooms. I turned the bike onto the gravel driveway, but as I neared the house I stopped short. I could hear something, a sound like whale-song – sustained, pitiful, and yet somehow melodic, virtuosic. It was coming from inside.

I wheeled the bike to the yard fence and left it there, stepping from the crunching gravel to the quiet grass, and then through the back door and into the dark kitchen. And then I heard it clearly. It was Bette’s voice, in a tremulous wail, rising and falling. I followed it down the hallway to a door, slightly ajar, with lamplight casting a meagre shard across the carpet. I pushed the door open a little and it made a swooshing noise on the carpet as it went, and the keening stopped.