guest bedroom was large, with a high ceiling and a view of shorn fields, lumpy in the moonlight. The curtains, sprigged with the sort of daisy pattern Evelyn had longed for as a child, didn’t quite reach the bottom of the window. She held the window wide open and stuck her head out and inhaled the piny air. Stars swarmed overhead. She shut the window latch and shook out the duvet, dust motes floating in the air, the satin fabric smelling coldly of naphthalene. The bedside light was broken so she read with the main light on, moths tapping against the window glass, a couple fizzing on the light bulb. Her father’s room was across the landing and there was the unpausing sound of his footsteps up the stairs and going into his own room and shutting the door. She unhooked her bra and pulled it out the side of her sleeve and curled up with the asthma inhaler gripped in her hand, wearing the leather jacket, her T-shirt, jeans, and socks.
After the gig, in his bedroom, Daniel pulled the sheets up over Dorothy’s bare back and all the way over her head so that they were in a tent and she moved herself down his body, her ears still ringing.
The dog woke Evelyn with his barking. It was still dark, although the sky was tinged yellow right along the edge of the horizon. She kicked her feet into their trainers and opened the door carefully, the round metal handle stiff and creaky on the angled shaft. There was no noise now and it was possible the dog’s barking happened in a dream. She made her way down the stairs, through the kitchen and its smell of cold pizza, and out the unlocked back door, breathing in the watery clean air as she crossed the yard to the kennel. Pinkish-grey clouds floated on the felt-like sky. The dog was standing awake, a chain running from the kennel to his collar. The moon cast light and shadows over the links. His shaggy smell rose up as she unhooked the collar clip. He passed Evelyn and turned back to look at her, and she followed him round to the front of the house and up the long rutted drive towards the main road. Old pine trees stood at intervals like giants either side, the ground beneath them scattered with needles and cones, darker shapes on the dark earth. The house was dark at their backs, and she tripped once or twice on the large pits in the unsealed drive, but the dog trotted alongside, nimble and even. She ran the last stretch to the road and followed the dog in the direction he took, forward in the half-light.
A few hundred metres down the road a gravelled lay-by housed some crumpled DB cans and she dragged the dog away from sniffing at a spent condom. Bird calls spiralled in the dense trees. The breeze was almost warm, holding a suggestion of rain. Eve began to make a little shrine of stones. Against their tiny scale she felt like the Incredible Hulk, bursting to escape her body, her father’s house, the countryside. Her stomach burned with envy of Dorothy’s ability to be not here with the loneliest man in the Western world but back in her own life, her studies and her teaching and her sunny flat and her thing, the secret she held onto. Fucking Daniel. Eve refused to be the one to bring it up. To ask the question would only make real the ice field between them, the blank that she was left standing in, alone. This was the worst of it – this plunging sense that everyone else had got something she had not. The dog nosed around in the weeds between the gravel and the trees, wagging its stiff rope of tail.
The hum of an engine broke the night. The dog and Evelyn looked up at the bend in the road, anticipating, and it was several seconds before light beamed round the corner then a car emerged and cruised past. It slowed and she stood up. The car reversed back. A growl came from deep in the dog’s throat.
‘You all right?’ The driver was a lady in her thirties or forties, wearing a woolly hat and a checked shirt, open over what might be a petticoat. The engine cut out and a baby cried. The woman reached an arm towards the back seat where a child of a few