The road is silver somehow and then without warning the clouds thicken and fall and I keep driving with the windows rolled down, the rain soaks first my arm then my hair as it whips rounds my face then my dress right through to my legs, I turn the music up and drive faster and faster until I might be flying, until I think for the first time that I might like a bike, it would be purer, freer, that way. I drive all the way across the moor like that in the crazy rain getting wetter and wetter until I’m scared I might blow the speakers out, the music blurs and distorts until it’s too loud to hear. Then later after dinner I sit with my Granny, we look at old photos, the edges rounded, some creased, it’s easy to tell the ones that meant something. She can’t remember all the names, or where they fitted in and they all look like strangers to me, actors from another time of regattas and houses with front and back stairs and cottages with five bedrooms, then we play cards and get passively violent, and then it is time for bed and I climb up to the attic like I used to, to the only place sleep comes easily and peacefully. It’s too hot still though, heat trapped and risen so I fall to thinking, about this Grandmother of mine and all of her perplexing complexity, so well concealed. How two years ago in the middle of the night she called my uncle and said that’s it, time’s up for me and he drove out there in the dark, heart beating all the time not sure what he might find, the light was on in the shed when he arrived, he could barely bring himself to look, but he found her in the house and then they put her in hospital after that. We arrived a couple of days later and she sat there shrunken, exposed, washed clean with her wounds on show. And she was still for the first time. She talked of secrets, things she should’ve done, things she shouldn’t have done and we couldn’t understand, we all spoke of the strangeness, the out of characterness and we persisted in seeing it through our own eyes, a few weeks later she came home and we didn’t talk of it for fear it would be real. But now I start to think of it, of how all she’d ever done was run, even if it didn’t look like it, she got married, had children, went back to work, and you didn’t do that then, way before feminism and she’d be the first to say she did it because she couldn’t just be at home and her brother’s were fine, they got to go away to sea and instead she just didn’t sit still, ever, filling her days full from the morning swim until emptying the dishwasher last thing, and then two summers ago she couldn’t drive anymore, and maybe it was this, this disintegration of her freedom, the way it made her stop that meant her fears all caught up with her. I begin to see how we’re not all that different the two of us, our lives might look opposed, but close up, on the inside; we’re pretty much made of the same stuff. I hope I don’t have any fears left y then, that I’ll have ticked them off the list, that I’ll be scared of the normal stuff, the planet and what the hell we’re doing to it, and the way we all stick pins in each other and not food or puzzling over belief systems. The sun wakes me up at dawn, I pull on my clothes, head to the beach, everything has shrunk, the towns reduced to villages, roads to tracks, everything apart from the hedges and trees, these have kept on growing, making it harder than ever to see out. I wonder if everything always shrinks, every city once it’s known is reduced, when does it stop, when does that wonder and surprise come back, how do you get overwhelmed again, and then I round the bend and I am there and I can breathe again. I walk up the beach feet bare and in the water and think of the past too many years, the way things have been, the way I have been, and I think of Zooey saying ‘goddamn it’, to Franny, ‘there are nice things in the world and I mean nice things, we’re such morons to get sidetracked’. I must not let this happen again. I drive through towns once familiar, lose my way and meander back, then later we go for a drive together and unwittingly Granny cracks me up with her observations of the road ‘it doesn’t matter if we’re lost, every road goes somewhere’ or ‘was that a dog or a person you almost just hit?’ or ‘every river has to have a bridge’ or the most bizarre ‘it’s nice to keep a souvenir of each person you’ve been with’?! We get home exhausted, she thinks gin sounds like a good plan, so do I, we drink it in the porch, eat, I give up on trying to explain veganism, and before the sun sets, before I have to put on another face for a different day I go a walk, paddle through the stream, pat the horses, walk up the hill, watch a horse silhouetted against the sun until it looks like a galloping ghost and then the rain begins to fall, lightly, I hear it before I feel it, in the clouds a rainbow is beginning, I paddle downstream, catch myself thinking how we could’ve done this together, me and the him that almost was but wasn’t and have to console myself quickly, we didn’t, maybe I will with someone else, I walk back, past fields full of rabbits so smooth and still they could be stones and then we sit the dusk out in the garden, the moon rises, almost full and we make our way to bed, I watch the night thicken and fall from the window in the eaves and I don’t want this day to end, and I realise for the first time in a long while there’s nowhere else I’d rather be, and one thing is for sure, I don’t want to leave.