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taught English to the kids of ex-pats from the US and all over Europe. Cushy, as he often admitted. He was well out of it.
    We were keen to move away from the town. Well, to be fair to Carol, I was keen. I’d lived there all my life. She was from Wolverhampton and it never seemed to bother her. She’d have been happy with a new house on one of the estates that made me want to scream.
    Here I was, thirty-three, and still shopping in the supermarket where I’d had a holiday job as a teenager. Still seeing lads I’d gone to school with, looking years older than they really were, yelling at their kids in the town centre or trapped against the window in Burger King. Some of them had already got divorced from the teenage girls they’d married. Some had joined the army and came home on leave from wherever and whatever it was they’d learned to kill. You saw them drinking alone in pubs, pulling at a cigarette, staring at the one-armed bandits as they jerked down the lever. They were always glad to see you, glad to bribe you out of a few minutes of your life with a pint. Sometimes you met them jogging down the canal towpath at weekends with their Walkmans and iPods. Occasionally, they turned up in the local papers, injured in a car accident or blown to pieces in Iraq or up in court for kicking somebody’s head in over a girl. Maybe all three, but not in that order.
    I hated the feeling of belonging. Today offered a chance to put some distance between the past and me. For a house in the country, this one was suspiciously affordable. It wasn’t the cottage with beams and a tiled kitchen that I’d hoped for, but on the website the rooms had looked spacious and it boasted long views of the valley. Even a wide-angle lens couldn’t fake that. The house faced southwest where it would catch the sun for most of the day. The write-up was ambiguous about the garden and, now we were here, it was definitely close to the road.
    We huddled in the little mock-Tudor porch, half turning to the view of slate roofs crouching on the opposite side of the valley. Carol was dabbing on lipstick. Smoke was curling over grey stone houses, crows calling from the copse on the hill behind. There were streaks of white shit down the clay tile roof and the drainpipes were crooked where the fixings were missing. Someone was clearing his throat.
    â€˜Mr and Mrs Peyton? Hi, I’m Martin. Come in, now.’
    The ‘now’ was meant to be homely. But it sounded false. We shook hands and he brought us inside. He was a man in his thirties, like me. Medium height, thinning hair, a hollow-cheeked, long-nosed face with broken veins purpling his cheeks. His teeth were stained and when he smiled, his face twisted slightly out of true, as if he’d once had Bell’s palsy. I knew about that because Carol’s mother had suffered from it and it had left her with a drooping eyelid.
    Martin walked with a dropped shoulder, a faint lopsidedness. He was wearing a pale blue Reebok tracksuit and tartan bedroom slippers, broken down at the heel. There was a smell in the hallway that leaked through the house. It was the smell you find after a week’s holiday when someone turned the freezer off by mistake – a mixture of forgotten fish and stale cat food. I’d done that once and Carol had gone berserk: coming back from a week’s camping in France, which she’d hated (surprise, surprise) to that.
    â€˜Can I take your coats?’
    Carol shook her head. Her tight coral lips told me that her first impressions hadn’t been good. She flicked her hair from her forehead and pulled the coat closer.
    â€˜We’re alright, thanks. This is a lovely space…’ I didn’t really mean that. But you have to try to say something positive, because you’re about to trample through someone’s life and maybe that’s all they have. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true. Not much is,