36

Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three.

I stumble about the house in a melancholic stupor that stops me from feeling the breeze of daily commotion as it passes. Mum runs between the trailer and the bedroom, trays of food wobbling like the jowls of a huge, slobbery bloodhound. I stand still at the foot of Dad’s ladder, still unconquered. I was silly to even attempt to scale it, I think, my legs as they are.

She doesn’t notice me scrabbling through the airing cupboard, where I discover my trophy from sports day all those years before. It wears a cape of cobwebs and nestles in the damp bedding of old blankets and children’s toys. I am, for ten quiet minutes, an archaeologist of my own childhood. I brush clean the dinosaur bones of the times it wasn’t like this. I piece together the broken pottery of the long days our family would spend together and wonder just how it had been smashed into so many tiny fragments as to have become unrecognisable. This was, perhaps, a job for a better archaeologist than me.

I hear Dad clambering about the attic still, the tools in his work belt angrily striking at his hips clank clank. And as I lift my crisp white butcher’s overall from the radiator and violate it with cruel, urgent creases, I walk to the window.

Lou. I’d not imagined it.

Lou. Right now.

Lou. On the lawn.

Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall. I see Lou.