After Apple-Picking - the first three chapters (my neck is sore so I cannot finish this, so it is going here for now) 

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“You don’t know how happy you are,” is what my sister Hillary told me, and it is true I did not know I was happy ten days earlier when the cat was missing, the light was about to move out of the room I needed to shoot in, I couldn’t reach the wire to hang up one of the floor-to-ceiling photographs I needed to hang, I was still waiting for Molly to collect the other one, and no one was anywhere, Rob wasn’t answering my texts and Molly doesn’t have a phone.  It used to be the children who got panicky if I wasn’t there to be called on but at some point I had become the one who gets panicky when the children aren’t home.  The calmest I have been in years was during the autumn Covid lockdown when both of them were here all the time.  Now Fred has returned to living in the large and mouldy house he shares with three flatmates, and I hardly see much more of Molly who is taking every subject the university offers even though she is far too busy with community activism to get to any of her classes.  So I’m left with only my own two hands which aren’t enough for almost anything I want to do and I’ve had too many years of basically being a six-handed person to adjust back to two hands.  This particular afternoon, for instance, how was I going to hold the cat cage open while also holding a cat? 
 
Then Fred’s friend Jay’s battered looking red car pulled in to the drive and though it wasn’t Molly’s friend’s boyfriend’s van, as I was expecting, I could see the rolled-up photographs sticking out of one of the back-seat windows, which was a relief though an alarming way for the photographs to travel particularly since it was Fred, rather than Jay, driving the car.  Molly bounded out of the car’s front seat, and I flinched to see her trying to open the back door with the photographs still leaning of the window, but by the time I raced out to try and direct operations Fred had got the photographs out through the other side of the car with the help of Molly’s friend Stella.  I took the other end of the roll from Stella who was still somewhat crumpled up in the car where she’d been sitting squashed by the photographs, and backed carefully towards the house, shouting at Molly to shut the gate in case the cat had got into the garden, not that the gate would be likely to contain him if he had, and realising I’d left the front door of the house open so shouting at Molly to also keep an eye on the front door.
 
“I’m keeping an eye on the front door,” said Fred.  “I’m walking towards it.”
 
“And if you see him let me know!” I shouted to Molly.
 
“Through it,” Fred updated me.
 
“But don’t shout or you’ll frighten him!” I shouted at Molly, and told Fred to kick the door shut behind him, since I was pretty sure the cat was inside, really. 
 
“Through to the living room,” I instructed Fred, “Don’t trip on Molly’s books.” 
 
Instead he tripped on the cat who came rushing out of the room where I hadn’t looked for him because the door of it was shut, which should have meant he couldn’t get in to it but instead meant he hadn’t been able to get out and was now so desperate to escape that he tripped up Fred who fell right on top of the roll of photographs.
 
“Fred!” I wailed, as the front door opened, and “Shut the door! Don’t come in!” to Molly, who came in and tripped on the cat, and to Stella, who backed away as the cat fled out the front door and fell backwards down the steps.
 
“Well, that’s three months work ruined,” I said. 
 
“It’s only my wrist broken,” Fred said, “the photographs are fine.”
 
“I don’t think so,” I said.  “Get off them?”
 
They were surprisingly unscathed.  Fred actually had managed to take most of his weight on his wrist, and only dented the outside later of photographs very slightly.  Luckily that was one of the ones for Molly and Stella’s production, not my one for the rest home. 
 
“Come and have a look,” I called to Molly and Stella. 
 
“What about the cat?” asked Fred.
 
“Can you catch the cat?” I called to Molly and Stella, pulling the photographs through to the living room.
 
There were four of them, the three backdrops for the play and the street view we were going to hang at the end of the rest home corridor, which I wanted to pose the cat in front of, to take another photo of it with the cat in.  It was an extremely costly detail to add, and now I’d lost the cat.  But the photo had worked out beautifully, with a very slightly uncanny glow to the colours, the pink of the rhododendrum where Diana had lived particularly vivid, and the leaves lit up and shiny. 
 
Fred isn’t particularly tall, but he is taller enough than I am that when on tiptoes on a dining room chair he can reach the wire I had hanging across the top of the wall, to peg up the photographs.  I got him to peg both up, the one I’d tried to peg up in the morning and the one I’d sent Molly to fetch.  Masking tape at the bottom secured them flat enough to the wall for me to be able to work with them, and I checked the distance through the viewfinder of my camera one more time.  I shot a couple with Fred in, just because I love taking photographs of Fred, one with him looking seriously towards me and one camping it up for the camera, a ringlet falling across his face.  Now all I needed was the cat. 
 
I was hoping Molly might have found him, but she was still sitting with Stella on the front steps.  She’d evidently gone inside at one point because there was a wet cloth on the ground, a packet of bandaids and a snowstorm of bandaid wrappers which I would have thought were against her anti-packaging principles but I resisted making any sort of quip about dock leaves when I saw how tear-stained Stella’s face was. 
 
“You’re not seriously hurt?” I asked. 
 
“I’m heart-broken,” Stella said, setting off a whole new course of tears. 
 
“James?” 
 
“Ugh!” she replied through her tears, which I thought was a good sign, really.  James did quite often break up with her.  They’d been together since they were thirteen, from the first day of high school, which I knew not because Stella and Molly were particular friends back then but because the longstandingness of this relationship was legendary.  James and Stella were so legendary a couple I suspected they had got a bit trapped in their own legendariness, though James, at least, wasn’t so trapped he wasn’t able to break up with her from time to time. 
 
“Come inside.  I’ll warm up some rolls or something, and make tea.”
 
“It’s more a gin sort of break up,” said Molly.
 
“The gin got drunk the last gin sort of break up.” 
 
“Hillary’s?”
 
“The last gin sort of break up before that.  Hillary brought her own.”
 
“Isn’t there any of hers left then?” 
 
“Definitely not and you’re not to hunt for it.” 
 
Fred was already heating scones I’d forgotten were left over from yesterday, in the microwave which would leave them a little limp but still nicer than cold.  They were date scones but I would hold off having the argument about eating jam with them (Molly was already getting the jam out of the fridge).  I got out the big, solid cream-coloured tea-pot, figuring this was, if not a gin sort of break up, at least serious enough for the largest tea-pot. Stella really was miserable, she had a kind of dazed, blank look about her, and when I put a cup of tea infront of her, she clung to it with both her hands, staring into the tea cup, without drinking it.  Before Rob, the longest I’d ever been with anyone was six months, and I remembered the feeling of ongoing panic I’d felt when we broke up, and Stella had been with James for so long it was part of who she was. And perhaps I was wrong to think of that as a problem, the way everyone said having children too young was a  problem but I thought it was a good idea so that the whole undoing of yourself could happen without too much of yourself to undo and you could be your reconstructed self in the life you were going to make next, such as this life of sitting drinking tea with a girl too miserable even to drink tea. 
 
“So, what happened?” I asked, putting an unwanted scone  on her plate (without jam). 
 
“He is too busy to play Romeo,” she said.
 
“Metaphorically? Or literally?”
 
“Both!  And the play is in two weeks!”
 
“And when I think of everything we have been doing for him!” said Molly.  “The times we stayed up fitting in bits of wood that didn’t fit in, the article Stella wrote, all the photography!” 
 
Though the photography was me, of course, I didn’t add. 
 
“Yes, but it was all for nothing,” Stella said.
 
“He can’t blame you for the pandemic!”
 
“He doesn’t!  He doesn’t!” she wept, still defending him.  “It’s true, though, he is really busy.  His whole marketing thing has to be rewritten for uni but also, his whole – his whole – ”
 
“He has to rethink his marketing plans,” Molly explained.
 
“He was, he was...” Stella wept, “on the verge of success!”
 
I did know some of this already, having been quite invested in James’s furniture designs, and as excited as anyone when they were going to be taken up by a New York design store.  Store isn’t quite the word for Freemans, not a gallery, but not just a store.  It really meant something, to have furniture showing at Freemans.  More orders would have surely followed, and there was going to be a big publicity push, all cancelled. 
 
“I still don’t see why he has to break up with you,” I said. 
 
“He didn’t!” Stella wept, “I broke up with him!”
 
“Oh!” I said.  “Well, then, can’t you un-break up with him?”


“Mum!” said Molly and Fred at the same time, both of them glaring at me. 
 
“That makes it much harder,” Fred said, at the same time as Molly said, “She doesn’t want to.”
 
“I’m not going to,” Stella said, “even if I do want to.”
 
“Which you don’t,” Molly said.
 
“I can’t.  It’s over.  It really is, this time.  It just....is,” Stella said, and the finality of it was somehow underlined by her stopping crying, and starting to drink her tea.
 
“So we might not even need the backdrops,” said Molly.
 
“Of course you’ll need the backdrops,” I said.
 
“We don’t have a Romeo!”
 
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” sighed Fred, as anyone would, though not as well as Fred.
 
“I don’t even care about the play anymore,” Stella said.  “I hate the play.”
 
“Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.  (Or a Capulet),” Fred said, kindly. “What's Montague? (Or Capulet?) It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man. (Or girl.)”
 
“O, be some other name! What's in a name?” continued Stella, sounding very prettily like Juliet despite her new-found hatred of the play. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”
 
“So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title,” concluded Fred, with a flourish.
 
“How come you know that?” Stella asked.
 
“Fred was the lead in the school production of Romeo and Juliet when he was in Year 10!” Molly said, still proud and a little astonished at the heights Fred had once reached.
 
“Were you Romeo?” Stella asked, looking, I thought, very slightly hopeful.
 
“No, Juliet,” said Fred.  “But I did know most of Romeo’s lines as well, I had to, I was constantly having to prompt Jane.”
 
“How long would it take you to learn them again?”  Stella asked, definitely looking hopeful.
 
But the negotiations were interrupted by a terrible yowling outside.
 
“Oh, help, it’s Jessica!” I cried.  “We have to do something!” 
 
Jessica is our own cat, a magnificent cat in her own way, but she has no tolerance at all for other cats. 
 
“We can’t possibly lose Diana’s cat!” I said.  “Not before I’ve photographed him!”
 
“Mum!” (Just Molly this time.)
 
“Or afterwards! But quick, do something!”
 
But be quick and do what I would have had no idea if Molly hadn’t taken command.  The two cats, Jessica and George, were facing each other, bristling, on the largest branch of the kaka beak tree, which ran exactly above the fence, so that George was equally likely to leap onto the road side as the garden side.  Molly positioned Stella inside the garden where the cat might head if he leapt inwards, she herself took a position just outside the fence in case he leapt outwards, having instructed Fred to remove Jessica from the tree while I was supposed to gently creep up on George and, ideally, fold him tenderly into my arms.  But while I was creeping he leapt from the tree onto the fence, and when Fred ran towards the fence he leapt outwards, as Molly had predicted, and if Molly hadn’t been ready for him that would probably have been the last time we ever saw him.  
 
I would have liked to have seen the catch, which must have been extraordinary, but by the time we got out the gate we found Molly lying on the ground, both arms around the cat, tensed with his ears flattened and ready to spring away if she released her hold a fraction.  She was completely unable to move.  Somehow, between us, we got Molly, and the cat, up off the ground and into the house, and we shut all the doors between the kitchen and the outdoors before Stella dared to hold open the cat cage, and Molly wrestled the cat in. 
 
“Well done,” I said, as she peered in to the cage.  “But put the lid down, please.”
 
“Are those my Greek notes?” she asked. 
 
“Oh, maybe,” I said.  I had lined the cat cage with something, I remembered, quite possibly the notes from Molly’s late night studying, which reminded me:  “Don’t you have an exam this afternoon?”
 
Molly didn’t move.  She was staring at her notes.
 
“Molly?  Is it this afternoon?”
 
“I’ve missed my exam!”
 
“Well, no you haven’t.  What time was it?”
 
“Oh my god it was 2 o’clock!” said Stella.  “I’m so sorry!”
 
“It’s not your fault,” said Molly, still not getting up from the cat cage, or rather from the side of her notes.
 
“It’s not even three yet!  Fred, you can take Molly to her exam can’t you?”
 
“It’s too late!”
 
“Isn’t it a three hour exam?”
 
“Yes, but...”
 
“Have you ever needed three hours for an exam?” I asked her.
 
“Yes!”
 
“You haven’t!  You always finish early!”
 
“I need my notes,” she said, eyeing the cage.
 
“You do not need your notes.  You are not opening the cage.  You know you know everything, you knew everything before you even started studying last night, Fred, where are the keys?”
 
He jangled them at me.
 
“Quick, then, velocius quam asparagi conquantur,” I said, which is Latin for quicker than you can cook asparagus, a thing we say in our family.  “But you’ll come back afterwards?”
 
“Is Dad coming back?” Molly asked.
 
“Molly,” Fred said, in a chastising tone.
 
He didn’t really need the chastising tone, but it is true it used to drive me wild when Molly always used to ask when Dad was coming home, every time he went away, or even when he was just at work.  I think she liked to ask as often as she did to work me up, which is partly what used to work me up.  The children liked to think I was jealous of Rob, and would say “now I really love Dad best!” whenever I snapped at them for asking yet again when he was coming home, but I don’t think I was.  I’ve got a notebook in a drawer from the time Molly took up spying which I treasure for its three entries:
 
Fred.  Brown hair.  Good at drawing. 
 
Dad.  Eating toast. 9.7.06. Newpaper reading 1.25 pm.  Short dark hair.  Brown and red stripey t-shirt. Patch of hair on his lip under his nose he missed shaving.  Smells salty.  Blows his nose a lot.  Saw me (good at hearing) (or seeing)  Crinkled black socks. “Not going to say anything.”
 
Mum.  Is a photographrer.
 
“Dad will be back,” was all I said, checking facebook again for a message from him. Whether he would actually be back I had no idea because the only messages, dozens of them, were all from my sister.  She’d been sending messages all day but I’d only looked at the occasional last line of one, because if I opened them Hillary would see I had seen them and hadn’t replied which would lead to a further barrage of messages and probably an actual phone call.  There seemed to be the combination of “what do I do” questions and “so how can that be my fault?” questions that generally heralded another relationship breakdown and a desperate need for long talks about the impossibility of her doing anything at all, long talks during which I was not allowed to say anything because anything I said made her furious, except that it also made her furious if I didn’t say anything.  I love my sister but I really did not want to talk to her.  “I just do feel quite desperate,” she had written, followed by “I haven’t heard otherwise,” followed by, “So shall I call you?” “Don’t call now, crisis here as usual, can you call later on?” I wrote back. 
 
“Are you coming, Stella?” Fred was asking.
 
Stella looked uncertain.  There was no time for her to decide.
 
“She can stay here,” I said.  “You’ll come back afterwards, won’t you?  You can pick Molly up afterwards, can’t you Fred?”
 
“I can take a bus,” Molly said.
 
“But you’ll need to come back for Stella,” I said.
 
“I can go with Fred,” Stella said.  “We could take the backdrops to the hall, maybe try out some lines?”
 
“There’s no time for the backdrops!” I said. 
 
“But we could try out some lines,” Fred said.
 
“Go then!” I said.  “Go, go!  But come back afterwards, I’m cooking for all of you.”
 
I shooed them out the door and stood in the doorway just making sure they did drive away, then went back inside thinking I should actually do something.  I wandered into the living room to check on the light. I would ordinarily use artificial light, and I probably would in the end for this too, but there was a moment in the day when the whole room had a kind of golden glow, and yesterday a shaft of sunlight just touched the edge of George’s fur lighting him up in the most miraculous way the second before he jumped off the box and ran away the first time.  I’d missed that moment today, and in any case George was in no state to pose and I would be too nervous to try without a back-up crew to catch him should he run away again.  The photograph was actually perfect without the cat in it.  I rolled out the backdrops for the play and they, too, were perfect, with the same slightly unreal looking colours. 
 
I would go through Hillary’s messages properly when I got back from the supermarket, I decided, but before I could go to the supermarket I needed to find one of the masks Molly had made and sold to me (fundraising for the hall) or, failing that, the disposable ones I’d bought months ago from the supermarket and which must be somewhere in the house.  This turned out to involve cleaning out all the bathroom cupboards – it was amazing how many empty packets and curled up tubes we kept in there – and going through all the sock drawers trying to match single socks and, finally, though how I got there I don’t know, taking all the books out of the bookcase in the hall and polishing the book shelf shelves.  Then suddenly it was late and there wasn’t even time to go to the supermarket, or not unless I really rushed, and there would be no time when I got back.  I checked facebook again just to see if there was anything from Rob or Fred and to make sure Hillary hadn’t reached too high a pitch of desperation. Nothing from Rob or Fred, and from Hillary just “I can call later on, just tell me if its okay,” which didn’t sound too desperate at all.  “Things on tonight so perhaps call tomorrow?” I replied, searching for my wallet and some bags. “Ok so that’s ok then?” Hillary had replied when I looked again, and I threw in a quick “Yes! That would be great!” before I dashed out the door, leaving behind my polished bookshelves.
 
When I got back from the supermarket – I was going to roast everything that had ever lived below ground – the red car was just pulling in.  Fred had not only brought Molly and Stella back but also Jay, who was in fact driving their own car this time.  Everyone seemed to be extremely buoyant, Fred and Jay both so much so that I almost wondered, as I had used to wonder a long time ago, whether he and Jay might be more than friends, except that Fred has never seemed to need to be more than friends with anyone.  Molly’s exam had obviously gone well (of course it had gone well) and even Stella was looking less devastated than she had earlier. 
 
“Is Dad back?” Molly asked, partly asking, partly teasing.
 
“You can check for messages,” I said, handing her the phone.
 
Molly resists the attention economy by not having a phone of her own but she doesn’t have a problem checking my phone, and for someone resisting the attention economy, I can’t think of anyone who pays more attention, to world politics, local politics, and everyone around her, while also attending to the most arcane details of ancient Roman and Greek languages and culture. 
 
“A lot of messages from Hillary,” Molly observed.  Then the phone actually rang and Molly inconsiderately answered it, which didn’t worry me nearly as much as it should have because she almost simulataneously said, “Dad!”  I was therefore taken off guard when she handed the phone over to me and I found myself talking to Hillary, while Molly raced to the gate to greet Rob who got to hear all the details of the exam while I was stuck on the phone.  I was only half listening to Hillary as she listed everything that was terrible about her life, while half listening to Stella and Fred and Jay and finding them beers and putting the kettle on and unpacking the groceries.  It would all have been much easier if I’d just put the phone down while I did all that but I kept it dutifully to my ear.
 
“Mum!” said Molly, “has the cat been in the cage all afternoon?”
 
Jessica came in after Molly – “shut the door,” I called to Rob – and seeing George in the cage froze, hissed and frothed up her fur. 
 
“He doesn’t even have any water!” Molly said.
 
“He’s been asleep all afternoon!” I said.
 
“What?” said Hillary.
 
“The cat,” I said.
 
“Are you even listening?” she said.
 
“No,” I said. 
 
“Okay well I’ll see you on the fourteenth,” she said.  “I’ll just message you the flight number.  I can’t talk to you on the phone!”
 
And she hung up.
 
“Bread!” said Rob, pulling a loaf of bread out of a paper bag and holding on tight to it when Fred tried to take it.  “And did you get a chance to draft my application?”  
 
“She said flight number!” I said.
 
“What’s a dish I can give him some water in?” said Molly.  “And has he been fed?” 
 
“He honestly has been asleep,” I told her.
 
He was backing up into the corner of the cage now, fluffing up his own fur at Jessica and looking deeply anxious.  “I think we need to remove Jessica.”
 
“Or move George. He can’t stay in the cage, Mum.”
 
Flight number? 
 
“Could we put him in the laundry?  Rob, do you know where the litter tray is?  Or a box would do.  Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner, Jay?  Molly, can you hold the door open?  Is there a cushion or something that won’t smell of Jessica?” 
 
“All of the cushions smell of Jessica,” Molly said.
 
“Your pillows don’t.”
 
“He can’t have my pillows!”
 
“Just one!  We can change the pillow case afterwards!  Well, mine then, but then I’ll need to borrow one of yours.”
 
“What about a towel?” said Rob.
 
This was a good idea.  We made him two bed options, using many towels, one on top of the washing machine because cats like heights, and one under the sink, in case George didn’t, and Molly got him a dish of cat biscuits while I filled a bowl with water for him.  All this time George remained backed into the corner of his cage, showing no interest in coming out.
 
“Should we lift him out of the cage?” I wondered.
 
“He’s quite agile,” Molly said.  “He’ll be able to get out when he wants to.”
 
So we left him in his cage, locked in the laundry, surrounded by all the amenities he would have access to should he decide to come out. 
 
Jay was heading off, but they promised to come back to pick up Fred and anyone else who needed a lift later on, and I tried to persuade them to come back early enough that they could have something to eat with us, since there was going to be plenty.  I chopped vegetables while Rob told us about his problems sourcing beds, and drank wine while I fried haloumi cheese, and listened again to Stella’s explanation of why James couldn’t play Romeo, in which she didn’t even mention the fact that they had broken up, and toasted pumpkin seeds for the pumpkin salad while Molly gave a moving account  of a penguin trying to get out to sea on a piece of floating ice while being menaced by a seal. 
 
“Flight number?”  I thought, as I cleared some books and scissors, envelopes and vegetable bags, a milk bottle, Rob’s keys and Fred’s scarf off the table.
 
“The seal steered the ice floe further and further away from the other penguins until finally it had got the penguin where it wanted it, and came up for the kill,” Molly said, “and the penguin, which had been standing helplessly on the ice floe suddenly just turned round and glared at the seal and shouted at it, raark, raark, and the seal looked surprised” – I tried to imagine a surprised looking seal, and couldn’t quite – “and said ruh! ruh! back at the penguin, and the penguin stared it right in the eyes and said, raark! at it again, and the seal backed off a bit and said, ruh! and then they stared at each other for a bit, and then the seal made a move forwards again and the penguin said raark! and the seal said ruh! and then it turned round and slid back into the water and swam away.” 
 
“I suppose you can’t really eat someone you’ve had a conversation with,” I said. 
 
“Raark, raark!” said Fred, waving a potato at me.
 
“We’ll plant that one,” I said.  “But don’t make the salad talk, Fred, please.”
 
“I feel like the seal was probably telling the penguin about all the other murders it had committed,” Stella rather surprisingly chipped in.
 
There was only a moment’s pause and then Fred enthusiastically said, “I know!  They always do that!” making me wonder where Fred got his knowledge of marine biology from. 
 
(I knew where Molly got hers, from watching David Attenborough, which she’s been doing for years.  When she was quite small she would use her David Attenborough voice to explain to herself our more puzzling behaviours, which sometimes did seem to access a more sophisticated knowledge of what was going on than she might otherwise have been able to articulate to herself.  It could be quite unnerving.)
 
“It could have just eaten the penguin, but no...” Stella said.
 
“...fifteen minutes to go,” Fred continued, “and instead of ending it early, it has to fill in the time till the credits explaining every plot detail...”
 
But then they had to work out what the penguin could possibly have been saying to turn the seal around, while I finally forced myself to look back over Hillary’s messages.  She had, in fact, been in quite a desperate mood while I’d been ignoring her messages all morning, which culminated in this exchange between us:
 
H: so I just  need to get away!
H: I’m going to book flights.
H: Is it okay if I stay with you a couple of weeks?
H: I could stay in Fred’s room.
H: I am going out of my mind!  I really need to hear from you!
H: Bridgid?
H: ok I am just going to book flights if I don’t hear otherwise from you.
H: I just do feel quite desperate.
H: I haven’t heard otherwise....
H: Shall I call you?
B: Don’t call now, crisis going on as usual, can you call later on?
H: I need to decide now!
H: I can call later on, just tell me if its okay.
B: I’ve just got a bit on today, perhaps call tomorrow?
H: Ok, so that’s okay then?
B: Yes!  That would be great! 
 
“Hillary is coming to stay and I told her it would be great!” I interrupted everyone.
 
There was a moment’s silence, then Molly tentatively asked why I’d said it would be great, while Rob asked if the vegetables were ready to come out of the oven.
 
“Rob!” I said.  “Hillary! Is! Coming! To! Stay!”
 
“I’ll get them out,” he said.  “Is there anything you need to do to them?” 
 
“Aarrghhhh!”
 
“When exactly is she coming to stay?” Molly asked.
 
“She’s not coming to stay!” I said, getting up to toss the vegetables and everything together in a bowl.
 
Another message from Hillary came in, the promised flight details.
 
“The fourteenth?  No!  No she is not!  That’s the night before the zoom interview!”
 
This meant I would be up all night talking and drinking and the next morning no matter how late she had stayed up, Hillary would get up just when I was on the laptop doing my interview and would drift in wearing some sort of silky something and would linger, and with her listening in the background I would be far too embarrassed to say anything at all.  It was impossible.  It was inconceivable.  It was absolutely typical. 
 
“Fred, you have to have an emergency and need to move back home,” I said.  “Your room cannot be empty.”
 
“But you hate her staying in the studio,” Rob pointed out.
 
“She can’t stay in the studio!  I’ll tell her I’m using it!  I’ll need it for the, I’ll have a deadline!”
 
“That won’t stop her,” Molly said.
 
“I’ll bomb it!” I said.
 
“You won’t bomb it and Fred’s not moving home and you’ll love having her and you’ll drink too much and I will do all the cooking and washing up,” said Rob.
 
“She can have my room if she likes, because I’m moving out,” said Molly.
 
“You’re not!  You’re not allowed to, and you don’t even have to!  Of course Fred will move home!”
 
“You can’t just use us as human shields,” said Molly.
 
“Who else can I use?” I cried, utterly exasperated. 
 
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
 
“Come in!” I shouted, but it was Jay, so they were already coming in, with a couple of friends even. 
 
Jay was looking completely marvellous, having changed out of the vinyl trousers, t-shirt  and biker boots they were wearing earlier into a very short dress with pink and gold sequins, over blue tights, and with gold tinsel wrapped around their coppery hair, making it sort of surge up in wonderful waves. 
 
“You look amazing!” I said.  “All of you!”
 
No one looked as amazing as Jay, but it was true their friends did also look pretty amazing, one in a very low cut red dress with flounces galore and the other in a red satin dressing-gown with some kind of glitter paste making their beard sparkle. 
 
“Poetry reading?” I guessed.
 
“Yes but we need someone to read Rebecca’s poem, she’s desperately ill with a slight cold,” Jay said.  “This is Tui, by the way, and Ez.”  (“Hello” said Tui shyly. “Yo,” said Ez.)  “Fred?  Could you?  Please?  Tui and Ez will be your back-up dancers.”
 
Molly was fetching chairs, Rob found extra plates, Fred was offering food and beer or wine.  Jay was practically dancing on their feet, wanting to go, or at least to settle the question of Fred’s involvement, but Ez, who was already sitting in Molly’s seat before she had even got chairs for the others, took a plate from Rob and heaped it up at once with an amount of food I would have thought would take an hour to get through.  Tui perched on the edge of a chair Molly offered her and sipped at a glass of wine. 
 
“Do I have to know it off by heart?” Fred asked.  “I can’t stand on the stage reading off a bit of paper.”
 
“You can, you can!” Jay said.  “With Tui and Ez doing the dancing you totally can!  And you know the poem, it is the one about the boy in the milking shed!”
 
“My favourite,” Fred said, in a swoony voice.  Then he snapped back into his hardest negotiating tones, directed, however, not at Jay but at me.
 
“I will totally have to wear the paisley shirt, though,” he said.
 
“You can’t!” I said.  “I’m not lending it till...”
 
“...after the zoom thing,” Fred chimed in.  “No, but please, Mum, you actually will have to.”
 
Fred loves my paisley shirt, which he has worn about a dozen times for every time I have ever worn it.  He probably loves it for the diaphonous texture of the material and for its wonderful combination of golds and greens and bronze, and I love it because it is like a pyjama shirt, with piping even, while being an actual shirt you can wear in the world, but in any case, we both love it, and he knew, he knew, I had to wear it for my zoom interview. 
 
“What’s wrong with the shirt you are wearing now?” I said.  “It’s perfect!  It’s magnificent!  It’s – piratical!”
 
It was a magnificent shirt – a white blouse that puffed out marvellously with big sleeves and narrow cuffs.  How Fred finds these things I have no idea.
 
“Impossible,” he said.  “I’ve been Romeo in it all afternoon.  I couldn’t be Rebecca in it now.”
 
I do not need to recount the whole argument, since I am sure it is obvious how it was going to end.  Everything ended as it always ends, with all the children leaving, Fred wearing my paisley shirt, and Rob and I washing everything up, putting left-overs into empty cream cheese cartons.  At last I left Rob at the kitchen table doing paperwork into the night, while I went to bed after a long soak in the bath.  I hadn’t in fact started the application I’d promised to write for Rob, but I doubted it was the application keeping him up and in any case it wasn’t going to keep me up. 
 
It was some time in the very middle of the night when I was woken up by the quietest sound of padding paws.  I lay very still as the padding came closer and closer and just murmured the quietest murmur of encouragement I could, and then there was the thump of a cat landing on the bed.
 
“That’s not Jessica, is it?” Rob said, waking up too.
 
“No,” I said, “go back to sleep.”
 
“It is,” said Rob, but sleepily enough that I wasn’t worried.
 
In fact I’d been telling the complete truth when I said it wasn’t Jessica, who wasn’t allowed on the bed but had already crept under the covers before Rob had come to bed and was curled up now against my stomach. 
 
“Shhh,” I said to her, as she stiffened under my hand and made the smallest of growls. 
 
But she knew better than to make much noise when infiltrating the bed, and a little stroking persuaded a reluctant purr from her, soon joined by a louder purr from further down the bed as George settled himself at my feet. 
 
I moved one foot over to touch Rob’s, who gave it a small answering nudge as he started snoring. If George had got out of the laundry, I thought, that must mean the laundry door was open, and that must mean Molly had come home in the night, coming in as she does through the laundry at the back of the house.
 
I felt very happy to be lying awake in the night, with both the cats on the bed, Rob asleep and Molly home.  I thought, I ought to think about my After Apple-Picking series.  I ought to have some ideas for what I will say in the zoom interview.  Instead, I thought about a translation question Molly had been puzzling over, how the word aeneous could have meant bronze-coloured as in “brassy or golden green.”   Rob had pointed out that the copper in bronze turns green when it oxidises, but this didn’t seem much of an answer to me.  It’s the wrong shade of green entirely, a blue-green, not a golden green.  If Homer could describe the sky as bronze and the sea as wine-dark, was he even talking about colour the way we saw colour?  It is as if one culture hearing an orchestra was listening only to the pitch of the notes, and another culture was listening to the sounds the different instruments were making, so a description of the sound an oboe makes is met with the bewildered response that it sounds like a description of C# yet surely the note is more of an A.  I suddenly felt tremendously excited at the idea of seeing the world in terms of texture instead of colour, not texture as in fabric but texture in terms of the way light reflects off objects, a world of various degrees of shimmer and shine, depth and detail.
 
I tried to work out how I could photograph such a vision of the world.  Not in black and white, I thought, but I needed to capture the reflection of light without the focus being on colour.  Perhaps muted colours, or different colours to the actual colours, or a combination of both muted and different, subtly different, like the difference between golden-green and the green of oxidation, and then to capture the different textures I would make an enormous photograph collaged out of the same photograph taken over and over using different film stocks, and printed on all different types of paper textures, very neatly and precisely joined.  I would include a description from Homer that had been taken as a description of colour, and was really a description of light-texture, as part of the title of every image, and I was so eager to get started I almost considered getting up right away and waking Molly to ask for her Homer so I could begin reading.  But that would have risked disturbing the cats, so I just lay there stroking Jessica, thinking about how good my first cup of coffee was going to be in the morning.
 
 

 
2.
 
 
Three days after Fred had got roped in to play Romeo in Stella’s play, and after almost a whole weekend working on Rob’s grant application, I was sitting at our table with Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey open next to an exercise book I was filling with increasingly random notes, mostly by now drawings of birds and Molly and, actually, quite a lot of just cross-hatching that was doing nothing except for blanking out large swathes of the lined pages including lines I’d written notes on.  I also had a biography of Robert Frost there on the table as if I would somehow know it by osmosis if it was on the same table as the Odyssey, and a selection of his poems I was also not reading.  I had never read the Odyssey before and was more interested in the way the story is told than I was in the story itself.  It begins with a prayer to the Muse, telling the whole story in a few lines in passing, as part of a prayer or invocation calling on her power to find the story’s beginning.  But when the story does begin, it still begins not at the beginning but with the story half way through and all the Gods arguing about what should happen next.  Before Odysseus even comes into the story we are taken on his son’s search for him, and his story is told to his son by second hand accounts, before we get to Odysseus arriving at the court of King Alcinous, where he begins to tell at last the story of his travels up to this point.  These are the stories I remember from primary school, like the story of Odysseus escaping the cave of Cyclops by hiding himself and all his men under the bodies of the sheep, and they are introduced as stories told by “Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies.” 
 
I started wondering whether I could use a structure like this to write about the After Apple-Picking series for the article I was supposed to be writing.  I could start in the present wondering how to tell the story, double back to Fred and his friends in the photos, and then have the wily photographer, lord of lies, tell a story about the origins of the series which may or may not be true.  Then, at the end of the article, I would circle back to the time of the photography, and onwards to a present conclusion, some kind of a homecoming.  There was a reason for wanting to circle around the truth, and a reason why I was worrying about the zoom interview.  On the wall across from where I sat was one of the photographs I’d made for the Apple Picking series, my favourite one and the one Jay and Fred had also both chosen to have copies made of for themselves.  It took up a large part of the wall, framed in dark, shiny wood.  Fred, Jay, Molly, Stella and five of their friends were walking away towards the edge of the image through thick green grass that reached up past their knees, leaving a path of crushed grass behind them.  To the left of the image was the tree the path led away from, an old apple tree, and you could just make out a few wrinkled apples on the ground, apples which had genuinely been there exactly where they are in the photo.  I had taken dozens of images, most of them showing only the backs of everyone’s heads.  I had started shooting very early in the morning, when there was a slight mist, and one of the images I very nearly used had exactly the kind of elves departing from the Lord of the Rings feeling I had imagined.  But when the shoot was nearly finished, and I was just about to pack up and go, a kaka suddenly cried out and flew past the tree, and everyone had turned to look, their mouths all opening wide at the same time.  This is the image that hangs on our wall, Fred and Jay lit up with the sun catching their hair as if it were on fire, their mouths wide open, and the kaka, also caught in the sun, dazzling, a burst of green and copper like the copper of Jay’s hair. 
 
I had almost selected this photograph for the exhibition, the first exhibition of the photos that was held one year ago.  The week the images were being selected for the catalogue, this is one of the ones I sent, then I changed my mind and sent the earlier one, the elvish one, then I wrote a midnight email changing my mind back again.  The next day I spent going back and forth, asking everyone what they thought, listening to nobody, going back to the original proofs, and finally making a new enlargement of the image with the kaka.  The print I made now cropped the kaka out and took in the branch to the very left of the tree, which I had cropped out of the image I had originally sent.  On this branch was a small brown bird, with a spotty breast, and its mouth wide open in song, exactly echoing the wide open mouths of everyone standing there in a line, gazing towards the sky where the kaka was no longer in the frame.  This one was the one Molly said I should send, so I sent yet another email, asking to rescind all the earlier emails with all the other versions of the image, and replace it with this one which I was now calling “The Choir.”  And this was one of the ones that had been reproduced in a brilliant article on the exhibition, pointing to all the Robert Frost references throughout the series, including the reference in this photograph to his poem “The Oven Bird.” 
 
After that, the game was on for critics to find the references everyone else had missed, and to puzzle over the images where the Frost reference was not apparent.  It was this critical interest that led to the series being selected for the exhibition it is now a part of, along with a selection by the London photographer, Niwa Adaje, whose work I’ve admired for years, wonderfully grainy black and white images of people caught in conversation, often reflected in a window or a mirror, or just leaving the frame of a photograph, or just entering the frame or entering a room, talking backwards over a shoulder, always animated, always almost about to move out of sight; and, even more dauntingly, a selection by the extraordinary young Belgian photographer Lisa Janssen, of her extreme close-ups of bees’ bodies, the undercarriage of a caterpillar, a moth’s wing and other very tiny things that, enlarged to almost wall size, become surreal abstractions.  Niwa Adaje was the established older photographer, Lisa Janssen the young, emerging photographer, and I was supposed to be the mid-career photographer.  The trouble with that is I am only mid-career by having grown older while I kept taking photographs but without any real success or critical interest in my work until now.  I hadn’t ever really emerged from obscurity, I wasn’t nearly as well known as Lisa Janssen.  The other trouble was that I hadn’t actually intended any of the Robert Frost references except for the After Apple Picking poem which was the only idea I had for the whole series.  The spotty bird in the Choir photograph wasn’t an oven bird, just a thrush, which would have been a kaka if I’d sent the other version.  The wall in the tennis court photo was just there in the background, along with the election signs from the election three years ago I hadn’t particularly noticed.  I’d just liked the way the apples from an apple tree had rolled alongside the tennis balls at the edge of the court, I hadn’t been referencing “Mending Walls” at all, and I hadn’t even noticed the spider in the photograph I called “Design School,” and I’d called it “Design School” not because I knew anything about the Frost poem “Design” but because it was taken at the back of the Design School.  
 
I wasn’t in complete despair.  The oven bird poem was in fact all about the mid-summer loss of meaning that I’d been thinking about when I began the series.  I was sure I could write something about it, but I was just more interested in thinking about how the Greeks thought about colour, and looking for the colour references in the Odyssey, and now I was interested, too, in the circling way the story was told, and soon, in any case, Molly and I would have to get moving if we were going to get to the Home where we were going to be visiting Diana, that’s if Molly got out of bed.  I was not in a hurry to get Molly up because part of the point of taking her to see Diana was to give her a quiet space in her day, even though it also meant adding something else to her day.   I figured if I didn’t add something to her day someone else would, early voting had started for the election and so she had spent the whole weekend helping round up votes for the Green party, she was working harder on Stella’s play than she had on her own assignments, and then last night she had stayed out late hand-binding copies of another friend’s climate change anthology.  When she came in, she looked so tired I told her not to worry about getting up in the morning, I could go to see Diana by myself, but she said she couldn’t not come.
 
“I didn’t come last time I was going to!  When Stella had the meeting with the drama club and the Hall owner’s lawyers, and James needed help with the thing for the printers, which we shouldn’t even have said we would do for him.  I should have gone with you then.”
 
“Well, there will be other times.”
 
“There won’t!  Not till after the election, and not till after the play, and not when it is school holidays and Vanya wants me to babysit practically every day!”
 
“You don’t have to babysit for Vanya! Just say no!”
 
“No, she needs me,” Molly said, wanly, reaching over to stroke Jessica where she was curled on my lap. 
 
“You need you!”
 
“I don’t mind.  It’s more money,” she said, going to put the kettle on, Jessica leaping off my lap in the hope of a late dinner, or early breakfast. 
 
Molly got out a cup for herself, and the little coffee plunger.
 
“You’re not making coffee?  You’ll never sleep.”
 
“I’m so tired I need coffee to fall asleep,” Molly said, heating milk in the microwave for the coffee she started drinking on her way to her room, Jessica following. 
 
And now it was the next morning, and Jessica was following Molly back out of her bedroom, causing George, who’d been settled on my lap, to leap down in a panic and make a frantic dash out of the kitchen.  Only, to get out of the kitchen, instead of running away from Jessica he hurtled past her, tripping up Molly who crashed into a chair which fell over onto the floor, Molly falling down after it. 
 
“When is that cat going to go?” Molly asked, picking herself up gingerly, inspecting her knees and elbow. 
 
She seemed basically undamaged, but I was very pleased to be able to say Margaret was coming to get him that afternoon.  In fact, it was because of Molly we had the cat, though I don’t think she thought we’d have him for more than an hour or so.  When we visited Diana, we nearly always took her round to a little courtyard where she likes to sit, round the back of the building where few of the other residents seem to go, and she would always think she saw her cat George, just as we turned the corner coming into the courtyard.  We’ve never been able to work out what it is she is seeing to make her think of George at this exact point, but it worried Molly to think of her missing him.  Molly’s campaign for the Home to allow pets has been one of the few campaigns she has run that she hasn’t had any success with, well, along with climate justice, I suppose, given that the world is continuing to heat up and nothing very much is being done about it.  So it was Molly’s idea to include George in the wall-height photograph of Diana’s childhood street we’d already been planning to paste up inside the Home.  I’d finally managed to take a copy of it with George in, posed on the third rung of a ladder that was actually leaning against a chest of drawers just out of the frame of the photograph, but looked as if it was leaning into the sky.  George was licking a paw and gazing towards the camera with a distracted but contented gaze, looking pleased with himself, as if he’d done rather well to end up where he was, posing for me on a ladder.  He had probably been feeling pleased to be up on a ladder in a room with the door shut, where he could relax for a few minutes without worrying about Jessica.  Every day since then had involved a complicated series of stratagems to keep the cats apart while giving them both turns in the kitchen and on the beds, where they are not allowed to go but where Molly and I like to have them.  Four more hours of these manoeuvres, and then he would be back with Margaret. 
 
But first, there was Diana to visit, and after the fluster of finding our masks and wallets and snapper cards, the dash to the bus stop for the bus that would be cancelled, the eventual slow ride across town and the search, when we got to the Home, for Diana who was not in her room, in the library or in the living room, it was very peaceful when we finally were able to sit out in the courtyard with her, having found her gazing at one of the paintings in the corridor, trying to remember who might have given it to her.  We made ourselves at home in the courtyard, a large pot of tea and a pile of books between us.  Diana rarely drank the tea we poured her, and she couldn’t really read the books, either, forgetting the beginning of a sentence before she got to the end of it, but it was reassuring to her having them there, and even more reassuring for her to have Molly sitting there beside her as she fell in and out of sleep.  I was lying stretched out of the grass and I had a book in front of me too, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, a book in short chapters I could leave off reading whenever Diana woke. I wasn’t exactly reading it though, more just grazing the page as I thought about how I was going to photograph the world in terms of how the Greeks might have seen colour, practising seeing the world in terms of different light-textures.  The ivy running over the bricks edging the courtyard was so matte it was almost powdery looking, while the grass where it grew long out beyond the courtyard, on the verge, shimmered as it blew about under the sun, and the leaves of the ngaio tree positively glittered. 
 
“Bridgid,” Diana whispered to Molly, having opened her eyes at some point while I was gazing at plant textures, “Is that a snake?”
 
“I don’t think so,” Molly said.  “Where did you see one?”
 
“Right there!” Diana said, pointing to me.  “Can’t you see it?”
 
“No, no, this is me,” I said.  “Bridgid!  I mean, I’m Bridgid.”
 
“Oh,” said Diana, politely, to me, then turning back to Molly asked her, “Shall I give it some biscuit?”
 
“I don’t think snakes eat biscuits,” Molly said.
 
“I’m not a snake,” I said, but when Diana threw me a piece of biscuit I didn’t mind picking it up and eating it.  They were ginger oat biscuits which we’d brought, chosen because I like them.
 
“Thank you,” I said.
 
“It’s very polite,” Diana said to Molly, throwing me another piece.  
 
I sat up, because I wanted some more tea, now that I had pieces of biscuits thrown at me, but I was a bit anxious about how Diana would take this unexpected move. 
 
“It’s me,” I reminded her, reaching for the tea pot.  “Would you like more tea?”
 
“Oh!” she said, laughing.  “I thought you were a snake!”
 
“No, not a snake.”
 
“You know,” Diana said, to Molly, as if she had only just noticed this, “you look so like your mother.”
 
She nearly always says this, but she doesn’t mean Molly looks like me.  She is thinking of my own mother, whom Molly looks much more like than I ever did, both of them very lovely and both with the same self-contained air.  Diana had fallen in love with my mother when my mother had gone back to university as an adult student, when Hillary and I were still at school.  Diana had been my mother’s lecturer, and my mother had very nearly left my father for her, not that Hillary and I knew this at the time.  We only knew, if we knew anything at all, that our mother was distracted and unhappy all through our high school years.  I don’t remember ever meeting Diana at the time but after my mother died, she told me she was sure I knew about the affair.  She said that I hardly spoke to her when she came to babysit one evening, and I forbade her to come into my bedroom because I said she would disturb the cat.  I actually would have honestly just been worried about Fluffy, who was very shy of strangers, and whose presence in my bed at night was both necessary to my happiness and not to be depended on. 
 
“Well,” Diana said, after an hour in the courtyard, “I suppose I must be getting on!  It was so good of you to come and see me.”
 
She got shakily to her feet, brushed imaginary crumbs off her skirt, and pushed her hands through her hair to set it into place.
 
“Oh, I’ve missed you,” she said to Molly.  “Your mother was so proud of you, you know.”
 
She says this often, and it always makes me feel so awash with feeling I do not know what I feel.  I passed Diana her cane, and helped Molly gather up tea things and books.  I knew Diana would be feeling uncertain about where she was supposed to be going, and would be feeling anxious for us to leave before she gave her uncertainty away. 
 
“We’ll just carry your books to your room for you,” I said, and she looked relieved and agreed that would be helpful.
 
“I’m very well prepared,” she reassured me.  “I do just like to go over everything again before I talk, just to be quite sure.”
 
We settled her in her room, and then took Dorothy out in her wheelchair for what she called a turn, meaning we wheeled her usually just down to the end of the road and back.  Dorothy was one of the other residents.  She had tried to make friends with Diana when Diana first moved in, but had found it easier to make friends with Molly.  Before very long Molly had started up a crochet class in the local community hall, Dorothy being the instructor and Molly’s friends all learning to crochet.  (I have several crocheted fruit bowls I am very fond of.)  In fact come to think of it that might have been the start of Molly’s involvement with the hall, which she and Stella were now trying to save with Stella’s production of Romeo and Juliet.  In any case, we had only got a little way down the street with Dorothy, who was thoroughly enjoying Molly’s account of my snake impersonation, when we heard a marvellous commotion going on down in the bush, where it slopes down steeply into a gully by the side of the road.  We pushed the chair up to the low wooden fence at the top of the gully, and peered down.  Crashing about in the tradescantia, tripping over roots and caught up in vines, were two rather unflamboyant figures who nevertheless looked very familiar.  They were tugging away at some large, muddy object that was clearly much too heavy to move. 
 
“Fred?” I called.  “Jay?” 
 
“Oh, hullo!” said Jay, enthusiastically.
 
“Could you help, do you think?” Fred asked. 
 
I clambered over the fence and found myself going rather fast down the slope.  It wasn’t at all easy to stop, Fred had to grab my arm as I passed, causing me to swing wildly about in a half circle. 
 
“Steep,” Jay said.  They seemed to have adopted a Sargeson-like mode of talking to match their outfit of camouflage trousers and plaid shirt, a beanie pulled down over their hair. 
 
“Is this your scavenging costume?” I asked.  “Do you honestly have an outfit for absolutely everything?” 
 
Jay flashed me a pleased smile.  “Yep!” they said.  “Although this is really an urban hiking outfit,” they elaborated, giving up on the terse talking, “the scavenging just happened when we came across the birdbath.”
 
“Is that what it is,” I said, while also wondering what the difference between an urban hiking outfit and a country hiking outfit would be.  (Tweed?)
 
“I am also quite appropriately dressed,” Fred pointed out.  (Worn jeans, flanelette shirt with a muted, vaguely floral print, worn over, we would later discover, a T-shirt with pictures of little pineapples on it.)
 
“I noticed,” I said. “I wasn’t quite sure you were you.”
 
“Lucky we are,” Fred said.  “So, my idea is, if we can heave the birdbath over onto its side, I think we could roll it up to the road, if we all got behind it.” 
 
“Stand clear!” Jay shouted, as they toppled the bird bath.  It landed with a thud, and lay on the ground looking profoundly immobile.  
 
“If you stand there, Mum,” Fred said, “move over, Jay, and I’ll take the bath bit...Now, ready?  One, two, three – roll!” 
 
We all gave the bath an almighty heave and rolled it up a few centimetres, stopped pushing, and it rolled back down. 
 
“This might take a while,” I said.
 
“Proves we can do it, though!” Fred said.  “Again?”
 
We proceeded in this way for about forever, till my arms were shaking and my knees just suddenly unlocked, and I found myself kneeling on the ground.  I dropped my head onto my arms and shut my eyes for a moment.  It was very spangly in there in my head, behind my eye lids. 
 
“Mum?” said Fred.
 
“No,” I said.  “I don’t think I’m here.”
 
“Do you need a rest?”
 
“For the rest of my life,” I said.
 
“Molly!” 
 
Molly wanted to wait till I had clambered up the bank so that someone would be there with Dorothy, but Dorothy had caught Fred and Jay’s sense of urgency and persuaded Molly to leave her in her wheelchair and offer Fred and Jay her immediate assistance.  I would join her when I could, but I was going to lie down on the birdbath for as long as I was allowed to, and then, when Molly joined Fred and Jay and made me move off it, I allowed myself just to roll over into the damp tradescantia where I could gaze at the sky while the tradescantia began to grow over the top of me.  I listened to Molly, Fred and Jay heaving and gasping and laughing and sliding back down from time to time, Dorothy shouting out encouraging words from her perch above them.  Before too long, others had come to watch, a father with his two small children and an elderly man with a small, excited, fluffy white dog.  It began to seem as if they might actually get the birdbath up.  Everyone’s strength was flagging now, but the father of the two children came down to help heave the bird bath up the last bit.  The children were told to stay up on the road with the dog, but one of them came down into the bush to see if I was alive, which I was able to say I was.  “What are you doing?” the child wanted to know.  “Looking at the sky.”  “Why?”  “I don’t know.  Because it’s up there.”  “Can I?”  “Can you look at the sky?”  “Yes.”  “Yes?”  So we lay there together until the birdbath was finally got up onto the road, and the child and I were both being summoned by our families. 
 
“Isn’t it a beauty?” Fred said, clearing off the tradescantia that had grown over the bath bowl, smoothing off the dirt with the side of his hand, revealing the shiny patterned tiles underneath. 
 
“But, Fred,” I said, waving to the child who’d been sky-gazing with me, “Where is it going to go?  You don’t exactly have a garden, just steps.”
 
“It’s for the play!”
 
“The famous birdbath scene?” 
 
“The balcony scene!  I need to get closer to Stella, so we’ve got me on one of the benches from the hall.  We were going to try and find some sort of Renaissance looking park bench or something, but this will be much better.”
 
I felt slightly dubious, picturing Fred as Romeo trying to climb gracefully up onto a birdbath on stage, but only asked Jay where the car was. 
 
“The car?” they said.  “Back at the flat. I told you, we were urban hiking.” 
 
(Unspoken but evident in their tone of voice was the question, does this look like a driving outfit?)
 
“But how will you get the birdbath back to the flat?”
 
“I thought we’d take it home, I mean to yours,” Fred said, “We don’t have a hose at the flat.”
 
“But how will you get it back to ours?”
 
“I suppose we can leave it here while we go back for the car,” Fred said.  “It’s not as if anyone could carry it away.”
 
“Oh, gracious no, you can’t leave it here!” Dorothy said.  “It will be gone in a trice!”
 
This didn’t seem terribly likely to me, but it would be very disappointing after all the heaving we had done to get it out of the bush if someone, in a car, did decide to take the birdbath.   Fred and Molly each volunteered to sit with the bird bath while Jay got the car, then Dorothy astonished us all by standing up.
 
“Could you get it into the wheelchair?” she said.
 
“But, what will you do?” Molly asked.
 
“We haven’t come so very far!  I am quite sure I can make it back, if you’d like to use the chair.”
 
Fred took off his shirt and draped it over the chair to protect it from the remaining leaves and mud on the bird bath, and with some difficulty, he and Jay managed to get the bird bath up onto the seat of the chair, where it reclined elegantly against the chair rest, and with Dorothy leaning on Molly’s arm, we set off very slowly back towards the home.  They went so slowly I was able to run ahead and slow them down even further by taking photographs of them on my phone, causing them to pause and pose, though I did tell them not to.
 
“I really wish I’d got photographs of you in the bush,” I said.  “With my real camera.  You wouldn’t want to reenact the scene, would you?”
 
“Put the birdbath back?” Fred said, incredulously.
 
“We could take it back when the play is over,” Jay said. “It will have to go somewhere.”
 
“Stella might want to keep it,” Fred said.  “As a memento.”
 
“Is Stella the girl who helped me set up my instagram account?” asked Dorothy. 
 
“Probably,” said Fred.  “Short brown curly hair, big brown eyes, freckles across her nose?”
 
“Stella’s the one doing Romeo and Juliet,” said Molly.  “You know, the play we’re putting on?  To save the hall?  Fred’s taken over as Romeo.”
 
“Oh, I know all about the play,” said Dorothy.  “So you’re going to be Romeo, are you?  You’ll be a lovely Romeo.”
 
“Did Stella set you up an Instagram account?” Fred asked.  “That is so like Stella.”
 
“We went through all my photos,” Dorothy said.  “I think there is a birdbath in one of them. It is of me when I was a child, visiting my grandparents.  I am in an orange dress on their front lawn.  I’m pretty sure there is a bird bath.  We’ll have to have a look when we get back.” 
 
Fred was touchingly enthusiastic about the idea, making up for Molly and I needing to take off, Molly to her babysitting job and me back to the house to find the cat before Margaret came for him.  There was even still the hope that I would write the Apple-Picking essay, which would also be good preparation for the zoom interview.  The bus stop wasn’t far away down the street, in the opposite direction from the birdbath gully, and Molly’s bus was already due, according to the asterisk flashing on the bus stop sign.  She pulled out her mask and put it on, got her snapper card out ready and stood at the curb, arm outstretched.
 
“Make sure you eat something,” I said.  “Don’t forget you haven’t had lunch.”
 
“Vanya will have something for lunch,” she said, as the bus pulled in.
 
“Make sure she does!  And don’t let her give you any more hours!” I said.
 
“I want the hours!” she said, waving as she got on the bus. 
 
I checked to see when my bus was coming – 12 minutes.  I could have stayed and helped unload the birdbath.  But then I wouldn’t have reminded Molly to eat, and I couldn’t count on Vanya to think to make sure Molly had eaten, she was as irresponsible now as she was when....When she and Hillary were causing constant trouble at school!  When they were Vanya-and-Hillary!  The last passenger was just getting on the bus, but I had suddenly realised Vanya was the solution to the Hillary problem.  Wouldn’t she want to have Hillary stay at her house, at least for the first couple of nights of Hillary’s visit, at least until after the zoom interview?  Hillary could baby-sit!
 
I ran up to the bus before the driver had pulled out from the curb, rummaged in my bag for my wallet, rummaged deeper in my bag for my mask, pulled it over my face as I took a leap up onto the bus, tripped on the step of the bus and landed on my hands and knees inside the bus as it started moving, a rain of coins from my wallet rattling down over the steps and onto a road, and my red handkerchief blowing away down the footpath as the bus doors closed. 
 
“You all good?” the bus driver asked, although obviously I wasn’t, and although obviously I wasn’t I said, “yes!” and added a little cheerful laugh as I staggered shakily to my feet. 
 
I waved my snapper card at the snapper card reader, which didn’t notice, turned the snapper card over, waved it again, turned it over, moved it closer, moved it further away, and managed eventually to coax a beep out of the machine.  I don’t know what it is I do wrong and how everyone else knows how to get it right first time. I hobbled past everyone trying to walk ordinarily, and found Molly was sitting near the back of the bus. 
 
“What are you doing?” she said.
 
“I thought I’d see Vanya,” I said, suddenly thinking this might not have been such a good idea.  “I thought, I wondered if she knew Hillary was coming...”
 
Molly didn’t say anything.  I looked at my hands – red, sore, but not actually bleeding – and pulled up my cords to look at my leg which actually was bleeding slightly, and was definitely seriously bruised.
 
“Look,” I said, pitifully, to Molly, who dutifully looked.
 
“Ow,” she said.
 
I missed my old car, Suzette.  I had upholstered her seats in blanket fabric, probably now removed by the new owner.   Underneath the blankets, the seats were plaid.  I didn’t like to think of Suzette being driven around with her plaid showing, someone else contributing her CO2 emissions to the climate change disaster instead of me.  We had replaced her with an electric bicycle, which Rob used but said I could use any time I wanted to.  I mostly walked because look what happened when I caught the bus.
 
“My handkerchief blew away,” I told Molly, and as I told her, tears actually came to my eyes and I felt a lump in my throat.  “My red one with the white spots.”  
 
“Vanya won’t exactly hang around when I come, anyway,” Molly said. “She’s always in a hurry, and she’s had to take the whole morning off.”
 
“Well, I could have a quick word,” I said.  “I could find out if she even knows Hillary is coming.”
 
Molly looked out the window, and after a while leaned her forehead against it.  Probably her eyes were closed.  She’d been campaigning for weeks for the Green party, asking how the Greens could be fighting to get over 5% of the vote when the world was on the brink of an environmental disaster, a question I had no answer to, only terror.  We sat in silence the rest of the way, me looking in the other direction from Molly so as not to disturb her more than I already was. And then, when we got to the stop closest to Vanya’s house, I made her even more late, not that she was very late, by insisting on doubling back to a fairly fancy dairy, more of a delicatessen, where I could buy a little loaf of sourdough bread, an avocado and tomatoes, to take for the lunch I imagined us having when we arrived.  But Molly was perfectly right, when we got to Vanya’s house she was already gathering up her bags to leave.
 
“What are you doing?” she asked me.
 
“I brought you some things for lunch,” I said, in a placatory way I instantly regretted.
 
“How kind!” she said, in the same tone she’d have said, how odd, and she took the paper bag the things were packed into without even looking into it and brushed past me on her way out.
 
I followed her to her car.  “Did you know Hillary’s coming?” I asked, as she unlocked the door and flung in my bag of groceries along with her own shoulder bag.
 
“Tell Molly if I’m back late, to give the children something for tea,” she said.  “There’s cheerios in the fridge!”
 
And she disappeared into the car, slammed the door and drove off, leaving me to get another lunch for Molly and for Vanya’s children, and then to begin the long walk home, which would still have been quicker than catching the two buses I would have had to have caught and which would probably have resulted in further injuries or at least further embarrassment trying to get my snapper card to work, except that on the way I passed a used car lot in which I couldn’t help but notice a little navy blue fiat with a white and a green stripe running from its nose to its boot, right over its roof.  I didn’t go so far as to test drive it, but it did take some time to find someone who would tell me what it cost, which turned out to be a complex question that was only answered in exchange for a lot of conversation about what I was looking for in a car.  When I said I was looking for a navy blue car with stripes the salesperson laughed at me, but the fact was, there wasn’t really anything else I was looking for in a car.  I wasn’t looking for a car at all.  Suzette was irreplaceable, and cars are inexcusable.  All the same, I thought about the navy fiat the rest of the way home.  I missed having a car, and if I had had a car I would have got to our house long before Margaret did instead of turning up to find her sitting on the porch chair which is really only there to look welcoming, not because anyone ever ordinarily sits in it, and chatting away to James, whose van was pulled up in our driveway behind Margaret’s car. 
 
“I’m so sorry!” I said to Margaret.  “How late am I?”
 
“Very,” she said, “but James has been entertaining me for the last quarter of an hour or so.”
 
“I heard you might have a room available,” James explained.
 
“Oh!  Well, not exactly,” I said.  “Fred’s room is empty, but it’s Fred’s room.  I was just thinking, for a couple of weeks...”
 
“That would actually suit me perfectly,” James said.  “I need to move at the end of the week, and I had been going to ask Stella if I could stay at hers, but...things are a bit awkward between us at the moment.”
 
“She told me you’ve broken up,” I said. 
 
“Yes, well, we often break up!” James said. “As you know!”
 
“I’ll have to ask Fred,” I said.  “If a ginger cat rushes out, catch it,” I added, opening the door. 
 
But there was no sign of George as we peered round the door into the house, or when we opened the door the rest of the way and went in, Margaret and I to the kitchen and James to have a quick look at Fred’s room, where I hoped George wasn’t hiding.  And there was no sign of George when Margaret and I searched for him after James had left, calling his name and calling “puss,” looking under beds as well as on them, in rooms where the doors were closed as well as rooms he could actually have got in to, and in the garden where he might have escaped to get away from Jessica although the garden, even more than the house, was her fiercely patrolled domain. 
 
“He did have a panicky morning,” I said.  “He was running away from Jessica and managed to trip up Molly who crashed into a chair which fell down almost on top of him.”
 
“That sounds like George,” Margaret said.  “I really won’t mind another day not tripping over that cat.” 
 
“Are we giving up?” I asked.
 
“Well I think we have to,” Margaret said, sounding quite cheerful about it. 
 
I didn’t in the end talk to Fred when he came round with the birdbath, about James staying in his room, because Fred didn’t come round with the birdbath.  After James had taken some measurements in Fred’s room, and Margaret and I had hunted all over the house for the cat before giving up, I was left alone in the house, finally able to settle down and work on this article I had been trying to write for months.  The zoom interview, too, was looming closer and closer and still I had no idea what I was going to say.  All my bits of paper with notes or, mostly, doodles, were still spread out over the table and the Frost biography was still lying there spread open to keep the page where I’d got up to, which was only a few pages in.  He’d already got to London, because the biography started a little ahead of itself, after several pages of self-justification on the part of the biographer that I’d skimmed through, because who wants the biographer to explain himself?  Not a lot was happening in London, either, and the poems he was writing seemed pretty uninteresting so far.  I decided I’d better do a bit of an inventory of the kitchen cupboards.  I texted Rob to see if he’d be home for dinner but got no reply.  I texted Fred to ask when he was bringing the birdbath round and if he and Jay would stay for dinner, but he was leaving the birdbath at the Home for now where apparently a bird had already perched on it. 
 
I read Frost’s oven bird poem again.  It was, in fact, exactly about what I’d wanted the photographs to be about.  The bird sings, at the height of summer, about the loss of spring’s petal-fall, and the coming on of “that other fall we name the fall,” asking, essentially, “what to make of a diminished thing.”  I’d started the series three years ago, after replying to a philosopher’s twitter poll asking whether meaning drained out of life as you got older. Almost everyone over 35 replied that it did not, and even most of the younger respondents thought it did not, but I had clicked at once on the yes, life does lose meaning response, before stopping to wonder why.  “Does meaning drain out of a sonnet after the volta?” Hillary asked, over the telephone, that evening.  “Or a novel, does it lose meaning in the last half?”  A temporary win, but I rang back the next day to point out that most of those sonnets that are so meaningful after their voltas were written by young people.  “And all those meaningful novels are also about young people and as soon as they get married, the novels end.”  “Bridgid,” Hillary said.  “Have you read any novels lately?”  “Yes!”  I said.  “Well, Knausgaard.  Sort of novels.  And his life is draining of meaning by the day, and he still has young children.”  “Is this about Fred moving out?” Hillary said. 
 
Shooting the After Apple-Picking series meant I got to see quite a bit of Fred, actually, and Molly, and their friends, whose lives were exremely full of meaning and who still found the time to pose for me in front of apples in various locations, wandering away from design schools with their completed portfolios, or away from tennis courts as the wire around the courts fell down behind them.  That was another problem I would need to make up something to account for if I was going to write about the series (when I wrote about the series, that is), why it was Fred and Molly I was photographing walking away from everything, when the series was supposed to be about the draining out of meaning from life in middle age, after the apple harvest of life.  I had drawn a little picture of a worm poking its head out of apple, and now I drew another worm slithering off into the distance.  Rob texted to say to eat without him, since he would be home late.  Yay, I thought bleakly, baked beans on toast, which is what I often eat if no one else is home for dinner.  It was always considered cheating even when I was a child, the dinner you were allowed to eat when you didn’t have to eat dinner, but now it had taken on a further aspect of wrongdoing because I got the beans out of a can instead of soaking beans Rob brought home from the whole food suppliers.  But had anyone thought to soak me some beans last night in case they might not be here for dinner tonight? 
 
It was early for dinner but I was lonely without the cats, and opening cans seems to prompt some sort of evolutionary thought of jellymeat even in cats like Jessica who had only ever been fed on cat biscuits and scraps from the local fish shop .  But neither cat came running this evening.  I didn’t find either of them until just before I went to bed that night, when I decided to go get the cat cage from the laundry.  I thought I should have it handy, in the kitchen, and if I put George in it when he came for his breakfast in the morning I could call on Fred and Jay to come round with Jay’s car and take the cat over to Margaret’s.  So, I went to get the cat cage out of the laundry, turned the laundry light on, and George and Jessica both looked up at me guiltily from where they were curled up together in George’s cage, George with a paw wrapped over Jessica’s shoulder, Jessica’s tail curled over George’s legs.  Then George decided Jessica’s face could do with another wash, and Jessica thought perhaps she might lick his ruff under his neck.  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” I said to them over my shoulder, as I reached to turn out the light and caught my reflection in the laundry window looking exactly like a Niwa Adaje photograph. 
 
As I lay awake later without a cat in the bed, I thought how little I had got done in a day with so much time alone in the house.  And the only idea I’d almost had, about giving the article the structure of the Odyssey, with one flashback introducing a further flashback, was, I realised now, only a good idea for the article I would no doubt one day have to write about the next series of photographs, the series of photographs about how the Greeks thought about colour, with quotes from the Odyssey as the photograph titles.  For writing about the After Apple-Picking series, it would only make sense to take my structure from the structure of the poem itself, which began as a poem about ordinary tiredness, the tiredness after a day’s work, and went on and on in more and more elaborate detail about the intensity of the tiredness, how the work of picking the apples was imprinted on the body, and not only on the body, because this tiredness, by the end of the poem, was not just a physical tiredness but a metaphysical tiredness, the tiredness that comes with judging fallen apples as of no worth, an anxiety about judgement that becomes, as it surely must have been all along, an anxiety about mortality, about the sleep that to answer such tiredness can hardly be just a human sleep... How would I take my article into the extremities of metaphysical doubt, I wondered, beginning to drift off into a sleep with a woodchuck retreating behind every corner, reflected in melting window panes.  Perhaps this is what would make sense, I thought, almost waking myself up in my enthusiasm, of the problem of Fred, Molly and their friends being too young to be already overtired with life’s harvest.  Perhaps, I thought, forgetting in my dreaming state that I’d already taken the photographs, I needed to photograph younger and younger children, leaving the school gates, leaving their playpens, disillusioned with the alphabet, with their toys... “You’re not making sense,” Fred cried, stamping his foot, causing the snow to fall from the branches above us, but Molly was entranced.  “Look, Mum, it’s a library!” she said, reading out the snow to us as it continued to fall, falling harder and harder, large soft furry flakes of snow batting at my face... But that was Jessica, who woke me up just enough to persuade me to let her in under the covers, creeping in so softly I was asleep again before she had even started to purr.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
3.
 
 
I woke up the next morning to messages from James, wanting to know if I’d talked to Fred, from my father, with advice about how to negotiate a car purchase, and from Hillary, asking if she needed to bring a hair dryer. 
 
“My father thinks I should buy a yellow Honda,” I told Rob over breakfast.
 
“You’re not going to, though,” Rob said, and ate his last bite of toast.  It wasn’t exactly a question.
 
“Of course I’m not,” I said. 
 
I had already sent my father back a message ruling out yellow cars.
 
“Now he’s sending me pictures of red Hondas!” I said.
 
“Are you going to vote this morning?” Rob asked.  He was taking his plate and cup over to the sink, while I was slicing up an apple to keep breakfast going a little longer.  “Or do you want to come with me this afternoon?”
 
“Aren’t we going to vote on election day?” I asked.
 
“If we want Molly asking us every day for the next ten days if we’ve voted yet.  She’s already reminded me three times this morning.”
 
“Is she up already?”
 
“Up and out the door almost an hour ago.  I have to go too.  We still don’t have beds.” 
 
I told Rob I would wait and vote with him, and I sent my father another message asking why I’d buy a red Honda which cost more than a navy Fiat with stripes.  All I’d asked him was how much I should offer for the Fiat.  When I’d bought Suzette I’d just paid what the price was, and my father had said I should never buy another car without consulting him.  I hadn’t wanted his opinion about which car I should buy, which seemed to be any car in the world that wasn’t the navy Fiat. 
 
“Cost more initially maybe.  Not in the long run,” was his reply.
 
The long run I was hoping would take care of itself.  It would have to.  I only had enough money in the short run because before the pandemic struck we had taken out a further wallop of mortgage to fix the roof, which leaked profusely from several places and, Rob said, was probably about to dissolve entirely if we didn’t do anything soon.  Then with the pandemic Rob’s job was made part-time, which at first I thought meant he would only work half as many hours and would finally have time to fix, if not the roof, everything else that was broken and that I didn’t know how to fix.  But it only meant he got paid half as much.  There’s still just as much to do, Rob said, when I asked about the hours, and it wasn’t as if they were going to employ anyone else to do it.  So instead of fixing the roof, we were using the mortgate to pay the mortgage with.  It was getting closer and closer to running out but before it did there was still just enough to buy a navy Fiat, if I hurried.
 
“If you want to dry your hair?” I wrote to Hillary. 
 
Another message from James: “Might bring some things around later today if that’s all good.”
 
“Haven’t talked to Fred yet,” I replied.
 
“He’s rehearsing with Stella if that’s helpful,” James instantly replied back.
 
I began to feel barraged, even before the phone rang out loud.  Hillary.  I could think of no real reason not to answer the phone.
 
“Hello,” I said.
 
“Do you not have a hair-dryer?  Doesn’t Molly have a hair-dryer?”
 
“You can’t use Molly’s hair-dryer!  And of course she doesn’t have one.  She is hardly going to destroy the planet just to get her hair dry faster.”
 
“Don’t you have one?”
 
“Oh, probably.  Use mine if you like.”
 
“But do you actually have one or are you just saying that and I’ll get there and there will be no hair-dryer?”
 
“Bring your own, then!”
 
“But DO YOU HAVE ONE?”
 
“I think so!  But you should bring yours, in case you want to stay at Vanya’s, I was thinking, for a couple of nights or so?  I just saw her yesterday, did she even know you were coming?” 
 
“You shouldn’t have told her!”
 
“Why?  Don’t you want to see her?”
 
“Yes and now she’ll think I don’t!  I was going to tell her, I don’t know why you always have to try and organise my life for me.”
 
I would let that pass.
 
“Well, anyway, I think the first few nights at hers would make the most sense?  If you want to put that to her?  And, actually, she almost certainly would have a hair-dryer.”
 
“Bridgid!  I’m not going to go to Vanya’s to dry my hair!  I am just going to bring my hair-dryer, it’s no big deal!”
 
And with that, she hung up, leaving me almost inclined to ring back.  I decided instead to tackle the problem from the other side, and go talk to Fred about James moving into his room.  I was quite interested to see how the rehearsing was getting on and to see how my backdrops worked in the hall.  I hadn’t yet seen how they would hang, after planning out all the scene changes with Stella much earlier on in her semester.  Really, only one of the scenes was her required coursework for her Shakespeare in production paper, and she only needed to involve one other cast member.  Even when he had allowed himself, reluctantly, to be persuaded to play Romeo for her, James had argued it was ridiculous of her to put on the whole play for a 20% assignment.  There had to be a more efficient way of saving the hall, too, than to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet.  A five minute skit would do it!  He had pulled out a pad of paper from his briefcase (it kind of really was a briefcase) to draw up, right then and there, on the counter of the hall’s kitchen, a chart of the amounts of time the single project would take in comparison to the possible amounts of time two smaller productions would take to prove that one combined effort was not more efficient than two.  Stella had laughed, agreed, told him he was underestimating the time the play would take and over-estimated the time it would take to produce a five minute skit, and continued to plan her Romeo and Juliet production to save the hall.
 
The hall was a building I particularly liked, partly for the colours it was painted, a combination of dark slightly olive green for the walls with a perfect dark brick red and a satisfying stone white for the trimmings, two brick-red doors opening into the hall at the front at the top of a row of broad steps, a side door round on the west side opening into an alcove behind the stage.  Inside, the hall was mostly just one big open space, with high windows and a high ceiling, a stage at one end, a kitchen off to the side, and, behind the stage, a series of little rooms mostly filled with all kinds of junk from all the groups that used the hall.  Molly and Fred had practically grown up in the hall, where we’d gone to fundraising concerts and bought things at fundraising sales, where they’d come along to yoga classes and taken classes in ballet and ball skills, and where, later, Molly had taught English as a second (though often third or fourth) language, and Dorothy had taught the art of crochet.  It was everything a community centre is except it was not technically a community centre.  For the last couple of years it had belonged to a property development company who had bought it even though the local amateur drama club had the right to lease it in perpetuity, so long as they were using it to put on three or more productions every year.  The developers had found the legal protection for the drama club rather more binding than they had expected, and the drama club had proved more resistant to their consultation, explanations, demands, bribes, entreaties and threats than would have seemed at all likely given there was not, in fact, an actual drama club in existence and hadn’t been for decades.  Instead, there was Stella, and all the various groups using the hall who might not much be into drama but didn’t want the hall replaced with a row of expensive townhouses.  They’d put on one production at the start of the year before the lockdown, and after the lockdown had lifted, Stella had persuaded the ballet class to partner with the non-existent drama club to put on their mid-year show as a drama club production.  Romeo and Juliet would be the third show, which would save the hall from being torn down for one more year. 
 
I could hear the noise of the rehearsal from quite a way down the street.  A lot of shouting, a lot of clanging, which was because they were using swing-ball poles to sword-fight with.  It made for very exciting fighting, since there were not only the poles to contend with but the balls swinging unpredictably out on their elastic strings.  I was surprised to see Jay wielding one of the poles, wearing a short jumpsuit which looked much more inspired by the idea of a game of swingball, or even lawn tennis, than by a Renaissance sword-fighting scene.  Ez, Tui and Rebecca were there, too, along with a couple of others I didn’t know.  Fred’s role as Romeo seemed to be giving Jay some influence on the cast list. 
 
“Fred’s inside!” called Jay, still managing to parry a feint from Ez.  “Clubs, bills and partisans!” they added, mysteriously. 
 
I stepped in to the lovely, vast, wooden spaces of the hall.  The benches were all stacked on the sides, but there was no one using the floor space and the stage also was empty.  One of my backdrops was there, though, and I was pleased at how the perspective looked from the back of the hall.  I crossed the hall and climbed up on to the stage to look closer.  They had pegged the photograph to a wire crossing the back of the stage, and taped it at the bottom with a small piece of masking tape at each side.  It was very well done. 
 
I found Fred and Stella in the kitchen, eating crumpets and crossing out lines in the script with a pencil, their heads bent closely together over the pages.  Stella was neatly ruling out lines one by one, while Fred was drawing vast crosses over whole pages.  Stella held his arm off as he tried to add more lines across the page she was working on.
 
“No one will know it is over if you cut out the whole scene,” she said.
 
“When he’s just said he’s died?” said Fred.  “How more over can you get?”
 
“Much more over!  There’s all the explanations –” 
 
“But the audience knows it all already!”
 
“But the Montagues and Capulets don’t!  They have to repent and make peace, that’s the whole point!”
 
“Mum, what do you think?” Fred asked, registering my entrance. 
 
“Died does sound quite over,” I said. 
 
“Crumpet?” asked Fred.
 
“I brought avocados,” I said.  “Would they go on crumpets, or is that a food clash?”
 
“Crumpets aren’t really food,” said Fred, “So they can’t clash.”
 
“They’ll be food when they’ve got avocados on them,” said Stella, adding avocado to hers at once, and putting more crumpets in the toaster. 
 
She crossed out a few more lines while Fred was distracted, and erased some others.
 
“Did someone say avocados?” Ez asked, swinging his swingball alarmingly as he crossed the hall towards the kitchen, Jay and the others from the fight scene following. The kitchen isn’t particularly large and some complicated choreography was required to give everyone access to the toaster, mostly managed by Jay, whose instructions to Tui to move into that gap, to Fred to take two steps to the left, and to Ez to take his plate to the counter were followed to remarkable effect. 
 
“I hope you’ve got Jay choreographing the fight scene,” I said.
 
“I’m choreographing the whole play!” Jay said.
 
“They’ve expanded the fight scene to three times the length I was going to have it,” Stella said.  “It’s why I need to find other places to cut.”
 
“That whole last scene is boring,” Fred said.
 
“That Friar’s speech? Dusty,” Ez agreed.
 
I looked over Stella’s cuts while everyone focused on their access to the avocados.  She had whittled away at the Friar’s speech terrifically skillfully, retaining the most informative lines and finding seamless transitions between one part of the speech and the next, occasionally inserting a necessary word or two to join two parts together.  She’d cut a lot of everyone else’s speeches down, too, and cut a few short speeches altogether.  Even so, the whole scene still seemed rather complicated.
 
“Do you need the Friar to explain things at all?” I asked.  “Or can you cut to the Montagues and Capulets reading Romeo’s letter and repenting?”
 
“I have already cut the Friar’s speech right back,” Stella said.
 
“Yes, but it is still like the seal talking to the penguin on the ice floe,” Fred said, and Stella laughed and agreed it kind of was.
 
“Only after the death instead of before it,” Fred continued, waving a crumpet in the air.  A bead of honey flew across the room as he exclaimed, “I’m dead already!”
 
“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean it has to be over for everyone else,” said Jay.  “You can’t cut the Friar saying ‘I’ll be brief,’ and then going on for lines and lines, it is the funniest part of the play!  I say, let him drone on and on while we all swoop in and out yelling Romeo! Juliet! Paris!  We can take cloaks and coats and things off and on in the wings and be twenty people each and sow magnificent confusion with a kind of synchronised elegance...”
 
“Jay wouldn’t even bother with the Romeo and Juliet carry-on if they had their way,” Fred said.
 
“I would!  I would!” said Jay, hopping up and down in their enthusiasm.  “We want their heterosexual romance as a counterpoint to the wildly gay carryings-on all around them, and they can have all the poetry!  But the rest of it can be told through movement. I’m thinking, at the end, we’ll mirror the opening fight scene but turn it to dance, with all the same moves, but transformed into grief but also with the two sides becoming one – yes!  Yes!” 
 
“Yes, but.  You’re playing it as a comedy, and it’s a tragedy,” Stella said. 
 
“Have you read this play?” Jay said.  “It starts with two groups of lads biting their thumbs at each other!”
 
That reminded me of my mission.  “That reminds me,” I said.  “So, James dropped by yesterday.  He’s moving out of his flat at the end of the week...”
 
“Oh, yes,” Stella said, blushing.  “I might have said to James...”
 
Stella was looking apologetic as if I was confronting her over it, rather than telling Fred, who also seemed to assume it was nothing to do with him and had turned away. 
 
“He was wondering about moving into your room for a bit, Fred,” I said.  “Fred?”
 
Fred was wetting a cloth, and dabbing at the cuff of his shirt. 
 
“I think I’ve got honey on my sleeve,” he said. 
 
“You’ve got honey on your eyebrow!” Jay said.  “On both your eyebrows!  Lean over?”
 
Fred leaned towards Jay, who, instead of wiping the honey off, smoothed it with their finger, and stood back to admire.
 
“Gleaming!” they said.
 
“Yes but Fred,” I said, “do you mind?”
 
“Mind what?  Honey eyebrows?  I can’t really see the effect without a mirror, but they do feel sort of – furnished.”
 
“Furnished?” said Tui.
 
“I was going to say burnished,” said Fred, “but it came out furnished.  Kind of a combination of burnished and furry.” 
 
Before I could steer the converation back to the matter of James moving into Fred’s room, Molly arrived at the hall with Ari, another friend of hers even more active than she is in Green politics, and Lola and Arkady, Vanya’s children.  
 
“Typical rehearsal!” Molly said.  “In the kitchen as usual!”
 
“Do you quarrel, sir?” Fred cried.
 
“Shall I bite my thumb at them?” suggested Jay.
 
Ez picked up a swingball and leapt into position at the kitchen door.
 
“Honey or avocado on your crumpet?” asked Stella.
 
Molly went for honey, Ari for avocado.  Arkady and Lola both wanted avocado, without the crumpets. I was pleased I’d brought several avocados.
 
“We’re here to round up voters,” said Ari.
 
“To inform you of your nearest voting station,” said Molly.
 
Arkady offered to use a swing-ball pole to help with the mustering, and told Lola she was allowed to nip at everyone’s heels.  Not a lot of nipping was really needed.  Molly and Ari were pretty easily able to persuade everyone to go on a group mission to the school down the road where they could cast their votes, yes, even without their easy-vote papers, yes, even if they weren’t enrolled, yes, even if they didn’t have ID with them.  Even those who had vaguely thought of waiting till election day were persuaded to put in an early vote, so as to be part of this jubilant mission.  They fueled themselves up for the five minute walk with more crumpets, tea, glasses of water, trips to the bathroom.  Ez stepped out to see if it was raining.  He stood outside for a long time waiting to see if a drop of rain would fall.  Jay put a green coat on over the jumpsuit and, with the addition of a felt hat, instantly achieved an updated suffragette look.  And Fred, of course, had his burnished eyebrows to meet the occasion.
 
“Mum?  Are you coming?” Molly said, as Arkady and Lola shepherded everyone towards the door. 
 
“I’m voting later with Dad,” I said, leaving behind the kitchen in all its disarray and stepping outside with the others.  “But, Fred?  I need to know, are you okay with James borrowing your bedroom?”
 
“James is moving into Fred’s room?” said Molly.
 
“Only temporarily,” I said.
 
“What, temporarily when Hillary wanted it?” said Molly.  “You’re using James as your human shield?”
 
“No one else volunteered,” I said.
 
“Otherwise he would have asked to stay at ours,” said Stella. 
 
“Of course he can’t stay at yours!” said Molly.  “You’ve broken up.”
 
Fred, meanwhile, was busy adjusting Jay’s hat which he felt needed a more buoyant tilt to it. 
 
“I was going for a more portentous angle,” said Jay, doubtfully, bending down to check their reflection in the window of a car.
 
“Fred?” I said.  “Is it alright with you if James borrows your room?  Just for a bit?”
 
“You don’t have to keep calling it my room,” said Fred.  “Let it out to anyone you like.”
 
“And Fred?” I said.
 
“What?” said Fred, acting very interrupted for someone who had already got Jay’s hat perfectly tilted and was now just walking down a street.
 
“Can I have my shirt back?”
 
“Oh!” said Fred.  “Sure!  I’ll bring it round next time I come.”
 
“Are you coming round with the birdbath?”
 
“The birdbath?” said Fred.  “Why would I be coming round with the birdbath?”
 
“When are we getting the birdbath?” said Jay. 
 
That started a complicated conversation between them about when they would get the birdbath, inbetween Fred actually going to work (I was relieved to hear he was in fact fitting his job in along with everything else) and all of Jay’s other obligations, to which I hoped to add another because, without a car, I would need Jay to help get George over to Margaret’s, if I wasn’t going to ask Margaret to drive all the way over again for a cat who may or may not appear.  All in all, the five minute walk down to the school didn’t seem nearly long enough for all the logistics that had to be covered.  The question of the birdbath still hadn’t been resolved by the time I left them queuing up to vote, but they agreed to come over later that afternoon with the shirt and in Jay’s car, so we could take the cat round to Margaret’s at last. 
 
It was a reasonably long walk on from the school back to our house, and by the time I got there the crumpet had worn off and I was hungry again, and I was beginning to feel another day had somehow slipped out from under me without me making any more progress towards doing anything at all, especially if I was going to go and vote with Rob later in the afternoon.  (What would I wear?)  I decided I must roast some asparagus for a belated lunch, along with some carrots, that I could have with leftover hummus that needed eating.  I have a guilty habit of wanting to roast everything, I do not like my food boiled or even steamed nearly as much as roasted.  Since it was only for me, I felt I had to justify the electricity involved in heating the oven by also making and toasting a batch of muesli, which we didn’t need nearly so much without Fred in the house, but perhaps James would eat some, I thought, unenthusiastically.  When everything was in the oven, I texted James to say it was fine by Fred for him to use the room.  Then I went to have a look in the room to see what would need doing before he came.  I supposed I would have to make the bed for him. 
 
“Oh, hello George,” I said as he darted out from behind the bed, and raced across the room past my legs towards the cupboard.  “I have a cage I might put you in, in a minute.” 
 
The bed seemed to be made up already, but were the sheets clean or not?  I had no idea.  Probably? 
 
There were quite a few of Fred’s things still on the surfaces of everything, but the drawers were mostly empty except, for some reason, the second drawer down which was still filled with his socks.  Had he decided to start a new life with all new socks?  Was there a reason why he was keeping the old ones?  Should I use the rest of the drawers to put away all his other things, I wondered, registering a scuffling noise, or should I empty the sock drawer and put everything into boxes, so James would have drawers to use?  But if he was only staying a week or two....
 
As for George, he was not looking at all like a cat who would happily curl up in a cat cage and go to sleep.  He seemed to be trying out a new form of acrobatics, leaping over a pair of basketball shoes, pouncing on a canvas bag, and racing from one end of the cupboard to the other and out again. 
 
“You couldn’t just chase your tail?” I said.
 
George disappeared into the cupboard again, and from out the other side of the cupboard burst a small grey rat.  It ran past me and under the bed.  George chased it back out and had it cornered behind a book in the corner of the room, and for a moment they stared at each other then the rat launched itself towards George who fled out of the room, as the rat ran right past me and under the chest of drawers. 
 
“George!” I said, embarrassed for him. 
 
But did I want to call him back in, and watch him chase the poor rat for longer?  Should I call in Jessica, who could be trusted to despatch the rat swiftly?  Last time we had a rat in the house, years ago, Molly and I were circling around the kitchen for hours with various containers we were trying to corner it into till Jessica just sauntered in, hardly seeming to even hurry, casually headed over towards the rat and killed it before we, or the rat, had quite registered what was happening.  She’d stepped away from the dead rat to have a drink from her water bowl, given herself a good wash, then had politely picked up the body and taken it outside, the tail danging down from her mouth. 
 
That had been a large, stiff-bristled rat.  This one wasn’t much more than a baby, with soft grey fur and dark frightened eyes, peering out from under the drawers, its nose twitching at the air.  I found a cardboard tube in the cupboard, pulled out a poster from it, and put the tube down alongside the chest of drawers.  Then I pulled out the chest of drawers and waved the rat towards the tube, which it ran right past, choosing to make a dash for its old refuge, the cupboard, which I hadn’t thought to close.  At least the rat was now safely in the cupboard.  I slid the doors to the cupboard closed while I prepared my next trap.  I got a box and put it at the end of the cardboard tube, slid one door of the cupboard open just enough to fit the end of the tube into it, then carefully opened the other door to the cupboard.  The rat sat in a sandal, trembling all over, staring up at me.  I edged my hand towards it, half wondering whether I was actually going to scoop it up in my bare hands.  At the last minute it made a leap towards the other end of the cupboard, and ran into the tube.  I quickly backed out of the cupboard, clamped the box over the end of the tube, lifted the tube up carefully, carefully, and the rat shot back out the other side of it into the cupboard again.  I repeated this process a few times with variations – one time it hid behind the back of the tube, another time it ran right over the top of the tube and back under the bed – then decided on a more subtle method.  I took the box into the kitchen, put some peanut butter on a cracker in the corner of the box, added a little dish of water and a slice of apple I hoped would be refreshing after the peanut butter, added some mexican daisies from the garden I thought the rat might like to hide under, and then left the whole box in the cupboard, hoping the rat would find it and move in. 
 
When Jay came round later with the car, George was still nowhere to be found.  We searched everywhere, called, opened cans, but neither of the cats turned up.  Stella and Fred had come along for the ride, though, and were persuaded to stay for dinner, which I made in ambitiously large quantities that turned out to be justified when Molly brought Ari back with her, even though Rob texted to say he wouldn’t be in till late.  Ari was buoyed up on a day’s good election work, he and Molly having shepherded dozens – “hundreds!” – of voters to polling places.  Ari put their success down to Arkady and Lola.  “Lola’s nipping at the heels?” I said, dubiously.  “More the running up to anyone and talking at them till it seemed easier to vote than to shake her off,”  Ari said.  “Though we don’t know they are all voting Green,” cautioned Molly. 
 
By the time James rolled up, the conversation had turned back towards the play he had opted out of.  This conversation was taking its own political turn, as Fred and Stella argued over the politics of presenting an historical understanding of Renaissance gender and sexual identities in contrast with the possibilities for reinventing and reframing the scripted action in the light of contemporary identities.  I loved watching them argue, Stella intense and inward-focused, gazing to the side or at the ceiling as she searched for words to put her thoughts in order, Fred open and alight, looking straight across the table.
 
“I don’t think it is conservative to present earlier ways sexuality has been imagined,” said Stella.  “It isn’t that I want to conserve – I mean...” She paused, and everyone waited while she searched for the words.  “I don’t think presenting them conserves them,” she continued, with a new certainty, looking around the table now as she spoke. “I feel like, if we can keep hold of how historically contingent our ideas of gender and sexuality are, if we can show quite different oppositions in play, I feel like this can be liberating.  As well as interesting!”
 
“But how is heterosexual romance ever going to be interesting?” asked Fred.  “I mean, I’m interested!  Obviously!” – and their eyes met for a brief, electric instance, before Stella looked away again. “But, Romeo and Juliet is hardly the only heterosexual romance ever to be shown!”
 
“It’s the context,” said Stella, “the contrast between Romeo and Juliet’s romance and the fighting that it’s in opposition to –”
 
“Exactly!” Jay chimed in.  “Which is why the fighting gets to be so gay!”
 
“But the point is the toxic masculinity that Romeo doesn’t take any part in,” said Stella.  “Why would you want to align queerness with aggression?  Isn’t it more interestng that ideas of heterosexuality pull in such opposite directions?”
 
This gave Jay pause for thought.  “Interesting, maybe,” they said, reluctantly, “but...but not nearly as pretty!”
 
“Oi,” said Ez.  “Got to line up your aesthetics with your politics, bro!”
 
 “My life’s work,” sighed Fred. 
 
“Oh, and mine!” sighed Jay.
 
They both looked so pleased with themselves and with each other that when James came in, I was wondering why I’d seen the glance between Fred and Stella as electric.  When I thought about it, what could I have possibly seen, except for them looking briefly at each other?  That electric jolt of feeling can only be felt by the people involved, which then made me wonder about whether that isn’t also always an illusion.  That is, it might be a real enough sensation for the person feeling it, but when you felt it, what you were felt you were feeling was a shared feeling, the jolt came from the connection you felt, but how could you feel a connection?  You could only feel your own feelings, you couldn’t really ever feel what the other person was feeling.  An electric charge with no connection at all was no charge at all, it was like one hand clapping, except that since it was entirely internal, it was always one hand clapping even if it were for both people at the same time...
 
And there was James, standing awkwardly at the door, apologising for not having known Stella would be there.  He was carrying one of his fold-out slatted beds in each hand, folded down the way they fold down into a small rectangular puzzle. 
 
“I should have checked in with you,” James was saying to Stella. 
 
“You don’t have to check in with me!” said Stella.  “I should check in with you, you’re the one living here.”
 
“Well, going to be,” said James, at the same time as Molly said, “Temporarily.” 
 
“Would you like something to eat?” I asked.
 
“I’ll take something to my room,” James said.  “I’ve got some things in the car to bring in first, and I thought these could go in the living room?”
 
“They’re not very big,” I said.  “Couldn’t they fit in Fred’s room?”
 
“There’s twenty of these, though, and a dozen of the chairs, and then all the extra pieces and things,” said James.  “I can leave some in the van, but I kind of need the van space.”
 
He came in and out a few times with his furniture pieces, while we all tried to keep the conversation going.  Stella had not eaten much while she had been so intent on talking to Fred, and now she moved things around on her plate, spearing a leaf or two and putting her fork down again to drink some wine I hoped it had been advisable to give her.  Ez commented on the greatness of my very ordinary risotto, and Ari offered an anecdote from the morning’s round-up of voters, and then the phone rang and it was my father wanting to know what I’d decided about the car.  I didn’t particularly want to talk about car buying in front of Fred and Molly, though obviously they’d find out eventually if I did buy a car, and Jay had a car, as of course did James, so it couldn’t be as indefensible as all that.
 
“Anyway, I’m not actually going to buy one,” I found myself saying. 
 
“I could come down and help you look for one,” my father replied.  “Now that we can move around the country again.”
 
“Yes, but James is staying,” I said. 
 
“James?” asked my father.
 
“A friend of – Molly’s,” I said, not looking towards the table to see if anyone was following the conversation and what reaction this would have got if anyone was.  “And Hillary is coming,” I added, though the whole point of James staying of course was to dislodge Hillary who would have a far better time at Vanya’s.
 
“Hillary’s going to be staying with you?” said my father.  “Two birds with one flight!”
 
And he rung off before I could offer any more dissuasion, only telling me first to check my emails for further examples of good car deals he had forwarded me. 
 
Molly, meanwhile, was keeping everyone occupied with another natural history anecdote, this one about albatrosses, who apparently don’t recognise their own chicks but only their own nests, and so the situation was looking perilous for the chick of her story, who had wandered off from its nest and couldn’t quite manage to clamber back.
 
“That’s so sad,” said Stella, making an effort to re-enter the conversation.
 
“If I were an albatross, I wouldn’t lose my chick,” Fred said.  “I’d make it a little nest to wear as a hat, so I would always recognise my chick by its outfit.” 
 
At this, Stella laughed so suddenly she snorted a little wine from her nose, and when James re-entered the room she was leaning against Molly who was also shaking with laughter.
 
“It wouldn’t be just your chick, though,” Jay pointed out.
 
“My partner would share my taste,” Fred said confidently, as Stella’s laughter subsided.  She was looking, still flushed and smiling, towards the door where James was hovering.
 
“I’ve got sheets and stuff in the van,” he said, “but they need washing.  Do I need sheets for the bed?”
 
At this point, I remembered about the rat.  I’d been hoping Rob would come home and deal with it, and James agreed it would definitely be best to wait for Rob, he was totally happy to sleep in the studio.  This is the old laundry room, a free-standing shed just outside, behind the actual laundry, half of which is converted into a make-shift dark-room I hardly ever use since nearly all my real work is processed commercially, and half of which is a kind of study-space I also don’t use, with a narrow built-in bed that no one ever uses except Hillary.  The only time I am desperate to use it myself is when Hillary is staying with us.  “This is great!” James kept saying, as I helped him make up the studio bed, so enthusiastically I wasn’t sure I’d be able to coax him back inside into Fred’s room even after the rat was gone.  “What’s the wi-fi password?” 
 
By the time we got back to the kitchen, everyone had got up from the table and they were even washing the dishes.  Fred was shovelling the leftover risotto into an ice-cream carton.  “I might take that to the studio,” James said, reaching for it.  He helped himself to cutlery from the drawer, and turned to thank me on his way out.  Then he hesitated, turning back towards the room, and said, to the room in general, “see you, then.”  There was an awkward silence, followed by some lack-lustre replying as he exited, and then conversation started up again, soon enough reaching quite a pitch.  I left them to it, and went to check on my rat-trap, but the peanut butter remained untouched, so I backed quietly out of the room again and closed the door. 
 
My next encounter with the rat came later.  By then Rob had come home and been filled in on everyone’s whereabouts, Fred and the others had left, Molly was in her room, James in the studio, and the rat might possibly be in the little house I’d made it, I told Rob, or, more likely, was making its own nest somewhere else in Fred’s room.  Rob said he’d have a look in the morning, he had work to do, and although I couldn’t understand how he could possibly have more work to do, I completely understood him not wanting to deal with the rat that very instant.  I went to bed, as usual before Rob, and fell almost instantly asleep.  I don’t know how much later it was but I was still alone in the bed when I was woken up by a scrabbling sound.  I lay listening and after a while I located the scrabbling to the corner of the room where an oil heater stands under the bay windows.  I lay very still.  The noise stopped, started again, and then turned into a scurrying and scratching that sounded very much like a small rat running up the curtains.  Somehow it must have found its way out of the cupboard in Fred’s room and into the bedroom, and now it seemed to be trying to find its way outside, which seemed like the best possible idea for it to have.  I crept over to the windows, cautiously eased the curtain open very, very slightly, and raised the middle window up.  Then I closed the curtain again, and went back to bed.  After a short silence there was a little skittering sound, then silence again, then a small thump, which I hoped was the rat landing on the windowsill, from where it would only be a short distance to go before it found the open window.  I lay listening, hopeful, and the next thing I knew I was being woken up again as Rob came to bed.  He almost instantly started to gently snore, and I lay there, suspecting I could still hear a skittering sound but not too worried, until some time later I was woken from a deeper sleep still by Rob sitting bolt upright in the bed.
 
“Bridgid!” he said. “I think the rat has got into the bedroom!”
 
“I know,” I said.
 
“It’s climbing the curtains!” he said.
 
I reassured him that I’d opened the window, and the rat would eventually find its way out.
 
“Rats don’t go out, they come in!” he said. 
 
I waited to see if Rob would lie back down.  He stayed sitting up.  I tried to rearrange the quilt so it would still keep me warm while he sat listening to the rat.
 
“We can’t sleep with a rat in the room!” he said.
 
I assured him it was perfectly possible, I’d been sleeping perfectly well until he sat up. 
 
“I’m going to go sleep in Fred’s room,” he said.
 
“Good!” I said.
 
I burrowed deeper into the bed and tried to go back to sleep.  I heard another small thumping sound, a silence, then the skittering of feet across the floor.  I tried to think of it as a soothing sound, and failed.  I lay and listened for a long time, then I sat up and turned on the light.  The rat was running along beside the base of the bookcase.  It froze, stared at me, then turned and ran back to the oil heater. 
 
I sat reading my book for a while, while the rat went back to its exploring.  When the rat approached the bed, I decided I might prefer to sleep somewhere else.  I took my book, pillow and quilt and made my way to the living room, which was almost completely jammed full of James’s designs.  I threaded my way past folded beds, reclining chairs and folded tables to the sofa, where I finally made myself as comfortable as I could.  I was far too awake to go straight to sleep, so I continued reading my book till at last I found I was reading with my eyes closed and the story was taking itself off in improbable directions.  I threaded my way past all James’s designs to the light switch, turned out the light, and, with far more difficulty in the dark, managed to navigate my way back to the sofa.  Only it wasn’t very dark.  Various lights from all the electronics connected to the television blinked on and off and a streetlight shone through the window from outside.  I had to keep reminding myself to close my eyes which kept opening themselves.  And after a while, I thought I heard a skittering sound on the floor again.  
 
“George?” I said, hopefully, as if George could have suddenly developed a tiny, skittering way of prancing about on just his claws.  “Jessica?”
 
I lay listening.  At first I was quite sure it sounded like a rat’s skittering feet, then I thought maybe it did sound more like the quiet padding of a cat’s paws.  When George leapt onto the sofa, I don’t know whether he was more pleased to find me there, or I was more pleased to find he was George, not a rat.  He pressed himself against my face, turned around a few times in front of my face, tried to sleep on the edge of the sofa in front of my face, then finally moved down to a more reasonable position and curled up so that we might both be able to get some sleep.  He kept up a loud purr, but even his purr didn’t quite drown out the sound of renewed skittering.  Through the purring, I followed the sound of skittering, as the rat moved around the room, scrabbling its way up and down James’s designs, getting closer and closer to the sofa.  George didn’t seem interested but I was riveted.  For a suspenseful moment, there was complete silence,  then the rat leapt up onto the sofa, its feet scrabbling at the cushions as it scrambled its way up.  George stopped purring and lifted his head.  More scrabbling as the rat clambered about the sofa, and I was up, not even caring that George was dislodged from his spot, pulling out the quilt from under him and giving it as good a shake as I could.  I stumbled out of the room, closely followed by George, banging my shin on one of James’s contraptions, kicking my foot against another, knocking over one of his folded tables onto the floor, slamming the door shut behind me and tripping over George in the hallway. 
 
For a while I tried to sleep on the kitchen floor, wrapped in the quilt.  The floor was very hard and seemed to get harder as I lay on it.  I could hear George just outside the kitchen giving himself the most thorough cleaning any cat had ever given itself.  The licking went on and on, with little grunts as he tugged at bits of fur in out of the way places.  I had left the book I was reading in the living room, and in any case was far too tired to read, but it was getting very boring lying there on the floor, not sleeping.  I decided to think of this as meditation and determined to think of nothing but my breathing.  This is too easy, I thought, for a while, as nothing happened except for my breath going in and out, until some time later I realised I’d started thinking about an article I’d read about how tiring psychoanalysts are finding it to see themselves as well as their patients when they analyse them over the internet, and how this suggests we all go around most of the time as if we are invisible, and how this isn't so different from the way little children think they can hide by closing their eyes, and then at some point after that I’d started thinking about whether the coronavirus can be said to have a colour, given that it is only ever recorded in black and white because it is only ever recorded in the dark, and though nothing has a colour in the dark, not the insides of our bodies or the chairs around the table in the dining room at night, you only need to cut open the body or turn the dining room light on to see them in colour, but if the coronavirus only exists in the dark, what does it mean to wonder what colour it would have if we could see it in the light, given that even if it were in the light we would be seeing it at so different a scale that we would not be seeing it with eyes that are like our eyes at all, which is what gives things the colour that we think of the things themselves as having.  And that started me thinking again about my project to see the world not in colour but in light-texture, and to wonder if it made any sense to think in terms of light-textures in the dark, or whether, in fact, in the dark it only made sense to think in terms of light-textures and not in terms of colour, and then I started thinking of how I would photograph a series of photographs of light-textures in the dark, except that first I had to bring my focus back to my After Apple-Picking project, which I’d lost a whole day on yesterday writing Rob’s grant application, which started me thinking about how he always called what I did “drafting” it not “writing” it as if he were doing all the real work.  I’d just started wondering what work he’d actually been doing, while I was writing his application, and to keep him up so late tonight, when I noticed I had forgotten all about not having any thoughts.
 
I tried again to focus on my breathing, but found myself focusing instead on the sound coming from Fred’s room of Rob snoring, and the sound, which had seemed comforting when I’d first moved into the kitchen, now began to make me feel cross.  I rolled over again on the hard floor, holding the quilt to my ears.  The rustle of the quilt against my ears sounded unnervingly like a rat, and I could still hear the snoring.  I rolled over in the other direction.  I wondered if it counted as meditation to focus on someone else’s breathing, since I could no longer not focus on Rob’s snoring.  I decided even if it did, I would prefer not to meditate on his snoring.  I struggled to my feet and stumbled out to Fred’s room wrapped in the quilt, slammed open Fred’s bedroom door and turned the light on for no particular reason except I was so tired of stumbling around in the dark.
 
“I’m coming in!” I announced.  “There’s a rat in the living room, I can’t sleep in our room, I can’t sleep in the kitchen, George is useless, and I’m tired!  I’m so tired!”
 
Rob looked up at me, blinking against the light.  “You woke me up,” he said.
 
“Well I’ve been awake for hours!  Move over!”
 
Fred’s bed is the king single that we’d bought for him when he was thirteen, but if Rob had scrunched up against the wall there would have been room for me. Instead, he rolled over away from the wall, taking up more room than ever, and pulled Fred’s quilt tightly around himself.
 
“The rat can’t be in the living room,” he said, sleepily.  “It’s in the little house you made it.”
 
He closed his eyes, and started snoring again. 
 
My own eyes by now were screaming with tiredness, the inside of my head was jagged with static, if I didn’t sleep I would sifting sand out of my eyes and ears.  I barricaded myself in the bathroom with a towel rolled up against the door to keep out all and any rats, and tried sleeping on cushions in the bathtub, but the cushions kept sliding out from under me just as I would be falling asleep, and the hard ceramic base of the bath would press icily against me again and I’d be awake, my neck increasingly sore, my legs aching from curling up against the bathtub walls.  By now the first of the tui were beginning their morning calls, before it was even quite light. Finally, I decided I would go back to sleep in our own bed, in our own bedroom, and if the rat would like to join me in the bed, I didn’t think I could possibly care anymore.  George, who had been waiting patiently in the hallway for me to come to this conclusion, padded after me and fell asleep at once at my feet.  I lay wide awake, my eyes burning with tiredness, my ears still alert for any sound of skitterings, for about thirty long seconds before I fell asleep at last.
 
“Good morning!” James said, through a mouthful of muesli, when I stumbled into the kitchen an hour or two later.  “Did you sleep well?” 
 
There was no trace of the rat, or rats, although I spent the morning moving every single piece of furniture, including all of James’s designs, taking the cushions off every sofa and chair.
 
“There must have been at least two rats,” I said to Rob that evening, “because there was definitely one in the living room and even if it followed me into the living room from the bedroom, you said you had a rat in Fred’s room with you, in the little house I made it.”
 
Though when I’d lifted the box up warily and peered in to it, expecting to wake up a sleeping rat, the box had been as rat free as the rest of the house, the peanut butter untouched, the apple slice unnibbled.
 
“I think that was a dream,” Rob said.