The House As It Is Now
The house had gone smaller. That was the first thing. It had not moved and it had not been altered and it was still the grey pebble-dashed bungalow my father had put up with his brother in 1978, but it had sagged a little at the shoulders the way a coat does when it has been on the same hanger for too long. The pebble-dash had come away in patches on the gable end. The satellite dish was still on the roof. The wall along the front had a new course of breeze block at the top where a car must have gone into it, and the repair had been done in a hurry, and was the wrong grey.
The yard had a dog in it I did not know.
He came around the side of the shed as I was getting out of the Skoda, a long low grey thing of no particular breed, half-collie, half-something-else, with the loose country walk of a dog that has never been on a lead. He stopped about six feet from me and looked at me with his head cocked and did not bark. He had grey on his muzzle. He had been there a while.
"Who are you," I said to him.
He did not answer.
The front door opened. My mother came out and stood on the step and did not come down it. She had an apron on over a navy jumper and a skirt, and she had aged. I had been prepared for her to have aged. I had told myself, on the plane, that I was prepared. But there is a thing that happens to the bones of a woman's face between sixty-four and sixty-eight, a