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sound, she could not quite decide.
     
    The following day she decided to go into town after school. Set off on the same route she took every day. The buses from Farnworth back to Drayfield went every hour, with one leaving straight after school. She usually took a later bus. Avoiding people she knew. And it was better to be out of the house.
    She headed down the alley next to the school. Kept to the left, clear of the garages where older kids went to smoke. Concentrated on stepping around the cat shit which was liberally scattered among the gravel.
    Didn’t notice the people emerging from the garages, walking behind her.
    The first blow caught her on the ear and knocked her sideways, into the wall. She stumbled, dizzy, and someone grabbed her hair, pulling her to the floor. Face-first, so that the gravel bit into her cheeks and split her lip. She closed her eyes and tried to curl into a ball.
    ‘Coward. Weren’t so cowardly when you were killing that guy, were you?’
    She didn’t know how many there were. At least three, she guessed. They kicked her repeatedly, until she lost count of how many blows landed on her body, and she could no longer feel the individual impact. Just the juddering of her whole body as shoe collided with skin.
    ‘We thought we’d give you a lesson in the transference of kinetic energy,’ said one voice. A hiss, venomous, but also amused. It was the amusement that made Connie feel genuinely afraid.
    It didn’t last long. Maybe a minute before they spat in her hair and left her on the ground. She heard laughter as they retreated, and the lighting of cigarettes.
    She lay there for just a few moments too long; when she got to the bus station the early bus was leaving, its brake lights waving cheerfully as they disappeared around the corner. She could think of nowhere else to go, and so she sat at the bus station for an hour, until the next bus arrived. The bus driver looked at her when he pulled up – dirt-smudged, gravel-grazed – but he made no comment, and she sat down without a word.

now
    Lily was the first person in the department most mornings. She shared an office with two other members of the faculty: a lecturer in algebraic topology, Eric, who insisted on drinking out of a mug bearing the slogan ‘To a Topologist This Is a Doughnut’, and Marianna, a German who specialised in archaeostatistics and being quiet. They tended to work in near-total silence, which was only ever interrupted by Eric, whose opinions fluttered out of his mouth and settled ineffectually on the indifference in the room.
    Lily treasured the early mornings, when she could work without interruption. She hated sharing an office; had several times considered moving to a new institution just for the privilege of having her own space in which to work. But Richard didn’t want to move. And when it came right down to it, nor did Lily. So she came in early, worked hard, taught for the required number of hours, and went back home to capture a few uninterrupted hours of productivity before Richard arrived home.
    She set up the coffee machine, switched on her computer, and raised the blinds to let in the first struggling signs of daylight. The sky was blue-grey, without any genuine promise of becoming brighter later in the day. It was the claustrophobic darkness of mid-October, the kind that in the evenings carried with it promises of trick-or-treating, bonfires, hot chestnuts and tinsel, but in the early mornings merely pledged drizzle and murky, rain-bleached sunlight.
    Checking her emails took considerably longer than usual. It was her first day back in the office. They’d offered her compassionate leave, but she didn’t see the point. The longer she was out of touch with the academic world, the harder it would be to fight her way back to the centre. Besides, excessive thinking without an object on which to focus thought was the quickest route to insanity, in her limited experience.
    When she was most of the way through