he leaves his hood down just so he can feel that haze against his face. As well as seeing farther than he’s used to, he can hear farther: the occasional sheep’s bleat or cow’s bawl, or farmer’s shout, comes to him from what seems like miles away, thinned and gentled by the distance. Sometimes he sees one of the farmers, going about his business away across the fields, or chugging down a narrow lane in a tractor so that Cal has to press back into the unruly hedge as he goes past lifting a hand in greeting. He’s passed strong-built women hauling heavy things around cluttered farmyards, red-cheeked toddlers staring at him through gates and sucking on the bars while the rangy dogs bark up a storm at him. Sometimes a bird calls a wild high streak above his head, or a pheasant explodes out of the undergrowth as he comes close. He gets back to the house feeling like he made the right call, throwing everything up in the air and coming here.
In between walks, with nothing else to call on his attention, Cal pretty much works on the house from morning till night. The first thing he did when he arrived was sweep away the thick cocoon of cobwebs and dust and dead bugs and what-have-you that was patiently working to fill every inch of the place. Next he put new glass in the windows, and replaced the toilet and the bath—both of which had been smashed up pretty good by someone with a lump hammer and a deep-seated grudge against bathroom fixtures—so he could stop shitting in a hole in the ground and washing out of a bucket. Cal is no plumber, but he’s always been handy and he has YouTube how-to videos, when the internet doesn’t crap out on him; it worked out OK.
After that he spent a while going through the left-behind stuff that littered the rooms, taking his time, giving each piece his full attention. Whoever lived here last was serious about religion: they had pictures of Saint Bernadette, a disappointed-looking Virgin Mary, and someone called Padre Pio, all in thin cheap frames and all left to yellow in corners by less devout heirs. They liked condensed milk, of which there were five cans in the kitchen cupboard, all of them fifteen years out of date. They had pink-printed china cups, rusted-out saucepans, rolled-up oilcloth tablecloths, a figurine of a kid in a red robe and crown with the head glued back on, and a shoebox holding a pair of old-fashioned men’s dress shoes, worn to creases and polished to a shine that still showed. Cal was a little surprised to find no evidence of teenage occupation, no empty beer cans or cigarette butts or used condoms, no graffiti. He figured this place must be too remote for them. At the time, that seemed like a good thing. Now he’s less sure. The possibility of teenagers checking on their old hangout is something he’d prefer to have on the menu.
The papers in the desk turned out to be nothing much: articles torn out of newspapers and magazines, folded into neat rectangles. Cal tried to find some unifying thread among the articles, but failed: they involved, among other things, the history of the Boy Scouts, how to grow sweet peas, tin whistle tunes, the Irish peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, and a recipe for something called Welsh rarebit. Cal kept them, seeing as they were in a way the thing that had brought him here. He tossed most of the other stuff, including the curtains, which now seems like a bad call. He’s considered digging them back out of the heap of trash bags that’s growing behind the shed, but some animal has probably either chewed them up or pissed on them by now.
He’s replaced gutters and downpipes, climbed up on his roof to evict a sturdy crop of yellow-flowered weeds from his chimney, sanded and polished the old oak floorboards, and these days he’s working on the walls. The last inhabitant had surprisingly unconventional tastes in decoration, that or a few buckets of cheap paint. Cal’s bedroom used to be a deep, rich indigo, till the damp mottled it with streaks of mold and pale patches of bare plaster. The smaller bedroom was a light minty green. The living-room part of the front room was rusty red-brown, slapped on top of layers of buckling wallpaper. It’s unclear what exactly was going on in the kitchen