The corner of the boot box is off the line.
He sees it from the door at ten to seven, before the light's on, a darker shape on the carpet in the grey from the window. There's a line in the pile where a hoover once went over a seam, and for five weeks he has put the corner of that box on it, to the hair. It's an inch out. It's a very small inch.
He doesn't look at it. Then he gets down on his knees.
The money is there. Elastic bands, fifties and twenties, fanned a little wrong. The phone is face up on the lid with a cat hair across the screen. Maisie in her wonky fringe. The codicil, folded in thirds, where he folds it in quarters. Under the money, where a freezer bag used to sit, there's a dent in the cardboard in the shape of a bag, and nothing in it.
Five.
Three days to the hearing. It comes to a number that means nothing.
He didn't look last night. He lay two feet above this box with Kit's stew still warm in him and her mother's gate going round and round in his head, and he did not look. Looking would have been a decision.
Her bed's empty. The cat is on the pillow, in the dent. On the draining board there are two bowls and the big pan, washed, and a Polo mint wrapper folded into a very small square.
He puts the box back with its corner on the line. He makes it perfect. Then he goes out and scrapes the van, and the scraper snaps in his hand.
The lane takes the van to the second bend in first gear with the chains he hasn't got. Snow up to the sills in the passing places, blowing sideways off the moor, so that the barn comes up out of the white a bit at a time, a roof, a door, the loose sheet banging. Her car isn't in the yard. Nothing is. He parks by the back step and sits with the engine running.
Frank is propped on three pillows with his mouth a little open.
He's been smaller every day, but this is a different thing. It's in the nose. It's in the fingers, which have gone the colour of candle wax at the tips. The concentrator hums its two litres in the corner and the clip says eighty-four.
"Good morning, lad."
"Frank."
"You've a face on you." He's breathing in little pieces. "She's been in your room."
Owen's hand stops on the clip.
"How d'you—"
"You've come in like a man with his coat on backwards. She's been in. And she's taken something." Frank's eyes are on the ceiling. They don't seem to need him. "Good for her."
"You told her."
"I did. Yesterday." A breath. "I thought it only civil."
The oxygen goes in and out.
"She knows," says Frank. "She's known since two o'clock yesterday afternoon. She stood where you're standing and I told her about Malcolm's letter, and she went white, and she did my mouth. Quite beautifully." He licks his lips and nothing happens. "Tonight."
"What's tonight?"
"I am. Tonight, when I go. I've come to the end of the road, I can feel the sign." He turns his head on the pillow, just far enough to see Owen's face. "Then go home, lad. Go home to Albion Street and do what you were paid for. She'll be in a police station by tomorrow dinner time with whatever she took out of your room, and Monday isn't any use to you after that."
"You said Monday."
"I said a great many things."
"Frank, I can't, she's—" He stops. "It's not the same. She's not going to the Review, she told me, for Rosie—"
"She's lying to you, Owen. Very well."
He sits down in Kit's chair.
He had a timetable. Frank goes. Monday, half past two, the bench, the good shirt. Then Kit, after, never before. He built it in this chair on Wednesday and it held his whole weight. It's gone like a plank, and what's under it is a long way down, and a room in a house in Albion Street with a door that doesn't shut.
"I'll tell her," Owen says. "I'll tell her you're a liar."
"Do," says Frank, and shuts his eyes. "She knows."
At ten the snow comes in earnest. At eleven he can't see the barn.
He does the numbers on the clip every half hour. Eighty-four. Eighty-three. At twelve he sits Frank up another notch and the clip goes to eighty-five and falls back. At half past, Frank asks if there's any chance of a cup of tea, as a courtesy, and doesn't touch it.
The pole goes at ten to one. A flat crack out on the lane, like a rifle in a quarry, and the lights in the parlour go down and up and down, and out.
Then the machine.
It winds down on a falling note, long, a man humming one line of a hymn and running out of hymn. Everything in the house leans toward it. The fridge stops. The clock on the mantel goes on. He is standing with the clip still in his hand, and under his hand the number goes eighty-four, eighty-two, eighty.
"Ah," says Frank, quite clearly. "There it is."
Owen takes the cordless off its stand in the hall, because it's what you do. It's dead in his palm. He stands there pressing the button with his thumb, as if it were a lift.
He doesn't take the torch. It's day. He goes out of the back door into snow to the knee and across the yard bent double, and the wind takes his breath, and the barn door is drifted a foot up. He kicks it clear. He gets his shoulder to it.
Inside, it's quiet and the Jaguar sleeps under its sheet. The cylinders stand against the wall on their trolleys, tall and green, upright, chained to the ring in the stone, with the gauges turned to the wall where he turned them.
He turns one round.
The needle lies in the red on its side, as he left it. He knew. He puts his hand on the valve anyway and opens it, and holds it open, and counts, and nothing comes, and nothing, and at forty the dry cold off the brass is on his fingers and that's all there is. He does the second. There is a smell of cold metal and horse blanket.
He closes the valves, tight. Then he leans on the trolley a while with his forehead on the green.
The ladder comes down out of the back-bedroom cupboard with its crash and he goes up it with the number on his palm in biro, copied off the fridge, the hospice line. The skylight sticks. The snow comes in over his shoulders, and the valley under him is white, no orange dots, Sallowford gone, a world with a blanket put over it. One bar. He holds the phone up to the clouds.
A woman answers on the fourth ring. She is very kind. She is sorry. The roads over the tops are shut, there's no car that will get up that lane, there's a nurse on the way to him at first light, in a four-by-four with a farmer, but if the oxygen has gone she'd need him to ring nine nine nine.
His thumb is over the nine.
It stays there. The snow settles on the back of his hand. He knows what a crew does when it comes through a door. A man on a bed, a day carer, a gap on a sheet, two green cylinders in a barn with their gauges turned to the wall. They would stand in this kitchen with their bags and say right, what have we got, in the voice he used to use, and they'd look at him very kindly.
He presses the nine.
A woman, trained to be level. Which service? The address, the postcode, which he knows from the post. Is the patient breathing? Is he conscious?
"Frank Ashdown. Eighty-two. End of life, on a syringe driver, do-not-resuscitate, not for hospital. But the power's gone and the oxygen with it. He's at eighty. It's coming down."
"And your name, sir?"
"Owen Rudd."
"Are you a relative, Mr Rudd?"
"I'm the day carer."
A keyboard. It goes on.
"Mr Rudd, I'm going to be honest with you. We're under a red weather warning. There's a very long queue and the tops are closed. I can put him at the top of the list, but it's going to be three hours. Possibly more. I'm so sorry."
"Right," he says. "Thank you."
The bar goes. He holds the phone up at the sky until his arm shakes. It doesn't come back.
He doesn't tell her about the cylinders. He thinks about it all the way down the ladder.
The rest of the afternoon he does with his hands.
He has the bed cranked all the way and Frank on three pillows and a bolster, forward, with his arms on the over-bed table in front of him, tripod, as you sit a man with a chest. The window's open six inches. Snow comes in on the sill and melts on the carpet. He goes out to the van through the drift and brings back the work fan, the little one with its own battery, and stands it on the table and points it at Frank's face, and it makes a noise like a wasp in a jar. The clip says seventy-nine. He turns the fan a little to the left. Seventy-eight.
"Lips," says Owen. "Like you're blowing out a candle. In through the nose. Out through the lips, slow, for twice as long."
"Is that medical?"
"It's a trick. It makes the air stay in."
"How very clever."
He does it with him. He sits on the edge of the bed and breathes out through his lips, slow, for four, and Frank watches him do it with his bright blind eyes and does it too, badly, and a minute later gets a number, eighty, and they both look at it as if it were a goal.
At three he tries once more.
"There's a farm down the lane. Whitakers'. They've a tractor. I could walk down, they could get you down to the road, there'd be a crew at the bottom sooner than—"
"No."
"Frank—"
"Competent," says Frank. "Not for hospital. Not for tractors." A breath. "I shall go from my own parlour with the Flying Scotsman on the table. You'll find that's what it says on the form."
"It says do not resuscitate. It doesn't say—"
"I know what it says." He closes his eyes. "Sit down, lad."
By four it's dark in the window, and the clip says seventy-four. Torches on the sideboard. A candle on a saucer. The pump on its holster is going, small, on its own battery, ticking out its morphine along the line in Frank's chest, and it can't do more than it does, and the box is under Bev's arm on a table in Calderbank. His hands know what to give. There isn't anything to give it with.
Frank's lips are cracking. He licks them and nothing helps. He does it in his sleep, now, a small dry sound, over and over.
The sponges are in the drawer, behind the jigsaw, with the cup. Owen does his mouth with water. Round the gums. It does nothing. A man with a mouth like this wants something that tastes of something.
The whisky is in the sideboard, the good one. He knows it is. He doesn't look at it.
He puts on his coat and goes out to the van.
The snow's up to the doors. He wades to the driver's side and gets in and shuts it, and in the dark of the cab, behind the manuals where a freezer bag used to live, with the seal on, upright on its flat bottom, there is a half-bottle with a red label. Eight pounds ninety-nine in coins. He holds it in both hands in the cab light.
Twenty-two months and twenty-one days.
He thinks of the card in his wallet with a number on it, and the snow on the aerial, and nobody in the world within four miles. The multi-storey. The woman in the Fiat. Maisie in the lid of a box.
He breaks the seal. It makes a small clean snap.
It smells exactly as it smelled. That's the thing nobody tells you. Not horrible, not sharp. It smells like a door you know.
He sits in the van holding the open bottle against his chest for what the dashboard clock says is six minutes. Then he gets out, and wades back through the drift with it held in front of him in both hands, and goes in at the back, and through the kitchen, and shuts the parlour door behind him.
Frank's eyes are open. He smells it at once. His nostrils go.
"That isn't the Macallan."
"No."
"That is a very cheap vodka."
"It's what I had."
Owen gets the cup out of the drawer. He pours. His hand is fine. A capful, then another, and the smell comes up out of the cup and fills the parlour, the candle and the damp and the fan, and he breathes it. He breathes it all in. He puts a pink sponge in the cup and holds it up between them on its stick, and it drips.
"Ask," says Frank, very faintly. He is smiling.
"Is there a letter?"
Frank takes the sponge. He closes his lips round it and shuts his eyes, and sucks it slowly, all of it, like a baby, and when Owen takes it out the sponge is dry.
"Malcolm," says Frank, "has a letter."
That's all. Owen dips again. He gives it. He does it till the cup is empty, and then he pours the last of the bottle into the cup, and then he stands for a long moment with the empty bottle in his hand, which is lighter than anything he has ever held, and puts it in the bin under the tea bags.
At six he goes up the ladder.
The skylight is stiff with ice, and he breaks it with the heel of his hand. The snow has stopped, and the sky over the moor is clear, enormous, with a few stars like nails in it and a long white valley under, perfectly silent. One bar. Two. He holds the phone up, and it wakes with fourteen things: Leanne, Maisie's asking if Kit is still coming Sunday, and Rosie, PLEASE tell me he's ok, and Gareth, Ring me, and eleven he doesn't open.
Bernie's number is in the proper phone from Monday night, from a howl in his ear. He presses it.
If she picks up on the second ring, he'll tell her to stay where she is.
She picks up on the first.
"Owen."
It isn't Bernie. It's Kit, a bit breathless, in a room with a clock in it.
"He's going," says Owen.
Silence. Not a long one.
"How long?"
"Hours. Not many. It's his chest, the power's gone, the oxygen's gone. The line's dead, the crew's three hours, more. He's seventy. He's seventy and coming down. He's comfortable. He's had a lot of sponge."
"Owen."
"If you want to be here," says Owen.
A long gap. Somewhere under it he can hear a vape going, and a woman's voice saying no, you do not, and another saying Mum.
"Is that you asking," says Kit, "or him?"
He opens his mouth. He looks down the hatch at the dark of the attic, the tea chests, the horse with its one eye.
The bar goes before he can answer.
He shuts the skylight. He comes down backwards in the dark and leaves the ladder where it is.
In the kitchen he takes the blue tea towel off the rail of the Aga, and a torch off the sideboard. He goes back up the stairs. In the cupboard in the back bedroom he puts the torch in his teeth and starts at the top of the ladder, and wipes it. The top of every rung, and then underneath, where the fingers go round. Both rails, the whole length, front and back. He goes slowly. When he gets to the bottom he goes back up and does it all again.
He hangs the tea towel over the top rung, folded in half.
Then he stands at the foot of the ladder with the torch, and the light goes up the rungs, one, two, three, up to the black square of the hatch.
He puts the torch out.
At eight o'clock he is standing at the parlour window, at the place by the sideboard where the curtain doesn't quite meet. Behind him the pump ticks and the fan hums and Frank's breath goes in, and in, and out, and stops, and goes in.
There's a light a long way down the lane.
It's at the bottom of the white, where the gate would be, and it's moving, one small yellow light, up and down, up and down, held low. It stops. It goes on. Under it, in the lamp's circle, a coat, a shape bent forward with the whole of it going into the climb, and one arm held in against the chest the whole way, as if it were carrying something that might spill.
He watches it come.