Lawson’s house was just how Daniel had dreamt it: a 1940s red-brick affair, standing on its own about a mile outside Cambridge down a potholed lane. Fields of tall golden wheat shimmered all around it.
Daniel opened the gate and wheeled his bike down the concrete path. Through the front window he could see what the house was like inside. Tidy. But tired. There was a sofa and two armchairs, all covered in a severe grey fabric that made the seats look hard and uncomfortable, as if designed to make a person sit upright. The arms were stripped down to bare wooden struts. The wallpaper was densely patterned with precise rainbow semicircles, geometrically arranged one behind the other in rows, seemingly overlapping like fish scales.
The front door opened before he had time to knock and his hand took fright and retreated, his arm upright like a cobra ready to strike. Lawson beamed as if he had been expecting him.
‘What’s happened to me?’ Daniel asked immediately. ‘What’s the fit?’
Lawson beckoned Daniel into the hallway. ‘You can leave the bike outside,’ he said. ‘It’s safe. No one ever comes down here.’ But Daniel stood his ground. Lawson squinted in the daylight as if he had just awoken from a long sleep. ‘The best way to explain it is to show you.’ He backed away from the doorway and held out a hand again. ‘Please.’
‘You said we could help my dad?’
But Lawson just kept his hand out. ‘Please,’ he said again. ‘I promise I’ll show you what I know.’
Daniel felt the sunlight on the back of his neck, and it seemed all the warmer as he looked into the cool, dim hallway.
He rested the bike against the red-brick wall and then his feet were moving, stepping into the house, taking him with them because they knew he was desperate to know more.