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people saying goodbye, Nora zips her cello into its case. She can think of nothing to say to anyone here so she leaves the room and waits for Eve in the hallway, where posters, faded and small, hang too high on the wall. The front door is bolted and locked with a security keypad for which Nora does not know the code. From beyond a swinging door behind the unmanned reception desk, someone shrieks, whether in laughter or fear it’s impossible to tell. To live in a place like this, Ada would require sedation.
     
    At Creek House, Harry’s red van is parked in the drive with the doors open, the ladder with a rag tied to the end poking out and his window-washing buckets and equipment lying on the gravel. Harry is bent over the bird bath with his shirtsleeves rolled up.
    Harry, as Ada says, is a man of few words. The sort who turns his hand to anything: household repairs and gardening; window-cleaning. Someone in the village saw him with a canvas and easel painting in the ruin of the warehouse down behind the boatyard, Nora has heard, but his chipped knuckles and broad palms like a cowman’s look all wrong for a painter.
    In the bird bath are a few centimetres of dirty rainwater. Nora’s body casts a shadow as she stands over Harry, but he doesn’t look up or say anything.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘A moth.’
    Nora looks again, and sees the shiver of the water’s surface. The creature’s body presses a barely perceptible dip in the skin of surface tension as trembling ripples spread from the wings’ vibration. The wings are patterned in different shades of brown, fine lines and swirls like calligraphy inked with a nib.
    ‘It’s drowning.’ Harry pitches forwards, reaching with a finger.
    Nora grabs his forearm. ‘Don’t! They die if you touch them.’
    ‘Dead for sure otherwise,’ he says.
    She remembers something about fatal damage done if the dust on their wings is disturbed, but maybe it’s an old wives’ tale. She takes her hand from Harry’s arm; his finger has already dipped in and out of the water. Wings closed, only the dull underside visible, the moth stands on his fingertip with the absolute stillness of death. As the two of them stare down, Nora can hear Harry breathing. Finally, the moth lifts a front leg, stiff and tentative; another leg, another and another, one after the other, as it unglues its feet from his skin. Front legs stroke along one antenna and then the other, uncoiling the entire length, then, apparently exhausted by all this effort, the moth is completely still once more.
    They watch. The wings shift. Again, a rapid flutter followed by a pause. Finally, after a luxuriously slow fanning of the wings, spreading them wide, take-off is abrupt. The moth zooms skywards, veering to one side before righting its trajectory and heading straight into the blue.

4

     
    The ball of Ada’s foot sinks as she leans forward to throw a chunk of bread into the water, mud squirting between her toes. The fresh ciabatta cradled in the crook of her arm is warm, doughy and alive. Saliva floods her mouth.
    The chunk of bread sinks, disappearing from sight entirely before it looms, pale and ghostly, from the depths to bob on the surface. Again she leans forwards, to repeat the pleasurable ooze of mud between her toes.
    The swans are a long way off, where the creek points a finger inland towards the Downs. They do not look her way. Ada flings the bread harder, her kimono rippling, the silk liquid against her skin. She lifts her arms high to allow the breeze to stroke the silk against her thighs and breasts and, when she does so, recalls the man who came to the house yesterday, a young man, who shook her hand and spoke her name as if he knew her. Tall, he was, and lanky, with a mop of hair and something of the eagerness of a puppy about him.
    Was it his height, or his hand pushing the hair back from his forehead which reminded her, took her straight back to a party sometime that summer, the cacophony of voices and