After The Hands

He woke on the arm of the sofa, which was where he always woke, and the house was the same as it had been the day before and the day before that: clean, and cold, and full of the wrong kind of quiet.

The clock on the kitchen wall marked the seconds with a small plastic click. The blinds were half-drawn. A strip of grey light lay across the laminate floor like something spilled and left. The Cat stretched, one rear leg, then the other, and sat for a moment with his eyes half-closed, reading the air. Cleaning fluid. The faint, souring ghost of milk from a glass left unwashed on the counter. Beneath both, something that had once been warm and human and was now little more than a trace, heat leaving a stone, day by day, until the stone is the same temperature as the air around it.

He dropped from the sofa arm and stood in the middle of the room.

The cushions still held their arrangement. The remote control lay at its usual angle on the arm of the chair. A coat hung from the hook by the door, a navy wool coat, its collar turned up, as though its owner had simply stepped out and would be back by tea. All of it exactly as it had been left, and all of it increasingly wrong, the way a thing becomes wrong when it is held too still for too long. The sofa cushion nearest the window still bore the shallow depression of a body, a particular body, its particular weight, and the Cat moved around it rather than across it, as he had been doing for some weeks now.

On the kitchen table, a paperback lay open and face-down, its spine creasing further with each passing day. Beside it, a pair of reading glasses, folded. On the counter, a tea-stained coaster, and on it the ring left by a mug that was no longer there. He crossed to his bowl. The bowl was empty. It had been empty for longer than he could accurately remember.

From the corner of the room, the bell rang.

The Budgie was on his second perch, moving between them in a sequence the Cat had observed many times. The bell was brass, barely larger than a thimble, fixed to the bars of the cage. Three rapid strikes, a pause. Three strikes, a pause. His head tilted after each sequence, then righted itself. The sequence began again.

The Cat watched for a time. Then he turned away.

The cat-flap was in the kitchen door, a square of dull plastic that swung in the draught. Above it, a lever-style handle in brushed chrome caught the grey light from the window. He pushed through the flap and the cold air took him across the face and he was outside, and the suburb stretched away in every direction under a sky the colour of old pewter.

---

The wall ran the length of the terrace. From the top of it you could see both rows of front gardens, the gravel drives, the wheelie bins not collected in some weeks now, the cars parked at angles with their passenger windows beginning to fur over with condensation from the inside. A child's bicycle on its side. A terracotta pot cracked by frost. On one driveway, a bag of kibble, the large kind, twenty kilograms, had been dragged from the porch and worried open at the corner. A small cone of brown pellets spilled from the tear. The gravel around it was scattered and disturbed. The bag had given what it could give without hands, and then given nothing.

It was like this everywhere, once you moved through it: the height of a door handle, the seal on a bag, the ring-pull on a tin. The suburb had been built for a particular kind of body, and that body was gone.

He stopped.

In the drive of the house at the end of the row, the Golden Retriever sat on the gravel.

He was not sleeping. His eyes were open and fixed on the gap between the gateposts. His fur was wet through. A blocked gutter above the garage had been dripping for days, and the water ran down the drainpipe and fell onto the top of his head, plastering the fur flat between his ears and running in thin channels down his muzzle. The gravel beneath him was dark and sodden. He did not shift his weight. He did not shake the water from his coat. A fly landed on the bridge of his nose and he did not blink.

The Cat sat on the wall and looked at him.

The gap between the gateposts framed an empty road. A crisp packet moved along the gutter in the wind and stopped against the kerb and stayed there. The dripping gutter marked the time, irregular, arhythmic, indifferent. The Retriever's chest rose and fell. His eye held the road and the road held nothing and the nothing held everything, and the three of them sat in that arrangement for a long time: the dog, the road, and the absence that the road was full of.

The Cat looked away. He jumped down from the wall on the far side and moved along the pavement.

---

The fence at the back of the third garden had been rotting for years. One panel had given in the autumn storms, leaving a gap just wide enough if you were willing to scrape your ribs on the wood. He dropped through into the garden on the other side and barely landed before the soil hit him in the face.

The Rabbit was in the far corner, destroying things.

The lawn had been a lawn once. Now it was a system of trenches and craters, the turf turned back in thick dark rolls, the soil black and wet and piled into irregular ramparts. A length of Union Jack bunting, strung for a summer several seasons past, was half-down, the Rabbit hauling at the remainder in short, vicious jerks, the plastic snapping in her teeth. Her hind legs pounded the earth between each bout. The thud moved through the ground and up into the Cat's paws. The air here was different from the air of the house: no detergent, no sour milk, no trace of anything human. Wet earth and cold mud, and the electric charge in the air that came before more rain.

He sat on a low brick ledge and watched.

The Rabbit worked without pattern, a trench begun and abandoned, a length of bunting dragged and released, a corner of turf seized and torn back. Her fur was plastered with mud. Then the bursts grew shorter. The pauses grew longer. At last she sat in the middle of her excavations with a length of wet bunting in her mouth, sides heaving, and the garden settled around her into its new shape: clods of earth, shredded plastic, the craters. A raindrop hit the soil. Then another. The Cat dropped from the ledge and pushed back through the gap in the fence.

---

The rain came on properly in the early afternoon, steady and windless, darkening everything. He found shelter in the narrow strip between a garden shed and a trellis thick with dead clematis, and crouched in the dry earth.

He looked under the edge of the shed and found them: the Guinea Pigs, pressed together in the corner of their hutch, a single mass of damp fur rising and falling in one slow rhythm. Three, perhaps four, their outlines blurred against one another. The hutch smelled of wet hay and something older beneath it, something giving way.

He lay down with his chin on his paws.

The silence in the hutch was different from the silence in the house. In the house the silence was taut, held over something. Here it had no tension, no shape. Just the smell of rot and damp and the soft collective breathing of the animals, and the rain on the shed roof, and nothing else. After a time he stood up and moved out into the rain.

---

The Great Bypass ran along the northern edge of the estate, and at the back of the last row of gardens the housing simply stopped, a hawthorn hedge, gone leggy and unpruned, marking the boundary between the suburb and the scrubby embankment that sloped down toward the road. In one place the hedge had died back entirely, leaving a gap of bare soil and broken branch-stubs.

Here at the edge, the suburb showed its seams. A red telephone box at the corner of the service road with moss beginning at the base of its panels. A satellite dish on the end wall of the last house, its cable already threaded with ivy. Small things. Barely begun.

The Hens were moving through the gap in the hedge.

Six of them, picking their way through the dead hawthorn in a loose, unhurried file. They did not hurry. They did not hesitate. Their claws found the dry leaves on the far side and the sound changed, from tarmac to leaf, and one by one they entered the treeline and the undergrowth closed behind them.

The Cat sat at the edge of the tarmac.

He looked back at the suburb. The row of semi-detached houses, the slate roofs dark with rain. A streetlamp coming on in the early dusk, its orange light falling across an empty pavement. The wheelie bins. The rotting fence. The driveway at the end of the row where the Retriever still sat in the rain, his eye on the empty gate. And somewhere behind the walls of his own house: the clock still clicking, the Budgie still ringing the bell in its sequence, the paperback creasing further on the kitchen table, and on the counter the tea-stained coaster with the ring of a mug pressed into it, the last mark of a hand.

He went through the gap in the hedge.

The leaves were cold under his paws. The trees were very tall. The light between them was thin and clean, nothing like the light in the house. The sound of the suburb fell away: the clock, the bell, the dripping gutter. The Hens were out of sight but he could hear them somewhere ahead, and he followed the sound of them deeper into the green, and the trees closed around him, and behind him the ivy moved along the walls and the moss crept up the red telephone box, and the suburb sat in the rain, and the clocks ticked on inside it, and the coaster stayed where it was.