AS THE WEATHER WARMED, his father went to Ley one day to sort out the handover of the cottage with the yellow windows, and for the first time in his life John spent the night alone in Hemhill. The house seemed empty, each room solid like a cube of glass, though there were no barriers left in any of the doorways. He listened to his father’s music, he stared at the polished wooden box engraved with Hal’s name and the dates of Hal’s life that lay on the mantelpiece, then at the blank and meaningless screens. He lay on his bed fully dressed and watched the occasional light flow across the ceiling when the valley grew silent. He got up and pulled his case down from the wardrobe, breathing in as he opened it, although no trace remained of the Magulf air. The lights of a car went by, catching the glint of the vial that Kassi Moss had given him. I’m still waiting, he thought, his fingers gripping the thin glass stem, for something to give, something to snap, something to break. Hal’s dead, but I’m alive.

He went into his brother’s room, wondering without looking down at the new screen of his watch what time of night it was—somewhere in the uncertain middle hours, when it was too late for sleep, too early to get up, the time when sperm met egg and life began and dreams were formed, when the sky was at its darkest, hope ended, and hearts stopped beating. Hal’s room remained as they’d left it on the night when Eliot Farrar and Father Leon came to take his life. A temple, abandoned, smelling for the first time in years simply of empty air. The breathers and monitors were gone, leaving their indentations on the special floor, and the bed had been powered down. It looked just like a bed now. The sheets sagged and slumped when John touched them.

Neither he nor his father had thought to reprogram the cleaner to come and do its usual tasks in here. The bowls and trophies on the shelves by the door had become tarnished. He took down the biggest cup, pewter and long-handled. It rattled as he did so, and he unscrewed the lid. Inside, there was a smooth stone—no, a piece of glass. Red, sea-corroded driftglass. He wet it with saliva and held it up to his eye, seeing how his brother’s room changed, how the shadows grayed and the ceiling softened and swelled. The night sky outside the window lightened to mottled red-pink, glowing, forever strange.

He put on his father’s old coat and went out, gazing at the houses and through the railings of the park. Everything was newly revealed, yet everything was the same. He walked by the shockwire of the compound where the snow still lay in patches beyond. He went up High Street, where a machine whizzed by in a clicking of blue lights. He walked along the road to the field that had once contained the carnival. He looked up at the hills as dawn whiteness began to appear at the edge of the sky. Finally, on his way back into the village, he stooped by a gutter and took Kassi’s vial from his pocket. He crushed it through the grating with the heel of his shoe. Then he walked home, and found his father arriving from Ley, still half asleep as he climbed from his car but excited with the prospect of change and carrying with him the scent, John was sure, of sea and sand and far away.

Father and son stood watching on the pavement as the house at Hemhill was finally cleared. Machines scuttled in and out, singly and in twos and threes, carrying things into the spring morning, chairs and tables and ornaments that waited on the pavement, looking naked and out of place before they were put into the vans. The cottage with the yellow windows at Ley was too small to take more than a little of this furniture. John’s father had even come to accept that he’d have to change his loudspeakers for something smaller. But that was just another challenge.

A few days before, the Youngsons had switched on their pool. John could see the top of its steaming bubble over the edge of the fence. He’d watched earlier from a back window as a granddaughter, her hair slicked along the scar of her spine, splashed about in the shallow end. And the tennis players were back out practicing in the park, swiping at balls and bemoaning their lack of timing. Pock. Fuckit. Life went on.

“You know, Annie called when you were out one day,” his father said. He was dressed in his best suit. His shoes shone. His hair was parted. “We sat and talked about some of the old times. She said I should get a dog for myself when I move to Ley.”

“It’s not such a bad idea, Dad.”

“I don’t fancy those collars, though. Snap your fingers, and the creature whines. She says they get used to it, but what kind of life is that?”

A chair went by, then a mirror, then a rolled carpet. John remembered how after Hal’s accident he’d sometimes look out of his bedroom window as the local kids, in an elaborate mime, put their fingers to their lips as they tiptoed by on the street.

“I’ve got happy memories of here, Son. Me and your mother and Hal used to sit and play cards a lot when you were younger. The three of us eating crackers and drinking fizz after you went upstairs. I’d sometimes look in on you, sit by your bed. You liked to have the screen from whatever story you were watching left running. Have the bubble images float around you. You seemed to be able to tell if I turned it off, even when you were sleeping.”

John nodded. They studied the cracked skirt at the rear of the big van they were standing by. In the gutter, bright as tinsel, a thin last thread of frost still lingered in its shadow. The machines were spinning a protective web of shockwire around the house, now that its shell was almost empty and the major work could begin. One of the bigger machines had already climbed up on the roof and was starting to pull away the jelt. The cable-entwined ribs of the joists emerged. Then they, too, disappeared.

As the task continued, John and his father went and had lunch in the village. They sat at the bar of the café that had once been Tilly’s. By the time they got back, the vans were fully loaded and the site was empty. Even most of the garden had been stripped: his father had decided to take only the codes of a few of the most precious plants with him for the windowbox he’d keep at Ley.

“You know it’ll be different, don’t you, Dad?” John said. “We only went to Ley for a few months in the summer.”

“Different.” His father nodded. “You will come and visit, won’t you, Son? When you’ve seen the bishop, in a few days. I mean, that room at the back is small, but—”

“It’s okay, Dad. It’ll be good to see Ley again.”

But they looked at each other, suddenly aware that this was more than the temporary parting they’d planned. John opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment one of the brown-eyed Borderer workers who’d supervised the removal came over and handed his father the house’s last screen. There, glowing in the warm spring air, were all the rooms and all the history, all the changes and adjustments they’d made. His father moved his hand to erase the house forever, then paused and held it out towards John.

“I can’t.”

John took it without looking, feeling the quaternary pressure on his fingertips.

“And you’ll know what to do about Hal, Son? Something that’s right?”

John nodded.

“I’d better be going. It’s a long way.”

They embraced.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

His father opened the doors of his car, half-lifted the cleaner into the front passenger seat, then got in himself. John heard the plangent trumpets of Mahler’s Fifth fading as his father drove off. He stood watching the car until it vanished down the familiar street where the lime trees were starting to bud. Then he realized that he still held the house’s last screen in his hand. As he raised it and prepared to bring an end, he saw that one final message had come through.