Empty Space

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Anna Waterman heard two cats fighting all evening. At ten o’clock she went out into the garden and called in the family tom. A decade or so ago, her daughter Marnie, age thirteen and already unfathomable, had named this animal ‘James’. Late summer displayed a greenish afterglow at the bottom of a sky full of stars. Anna’s was a long garden, perhaps fifty yards by twenty, with lichenous apple trees in unmown grass and a leaning summerhouse which looked like something from a 1970s Russian film — falling apart, surrounded by overgrown flowerbeds, filled with those things you discard but don’t throw away. The flowerbeds had an unhealthy vitality. Every year, tended or not, they produced dense mixtures of indigenous weeds, wild flowers and — since the warming of the mid-2000s — exotics with large petals and fleshy leaves, blown in as seeds from who knew where.

‘James!’ Anna called.

James didn’t respond, but neither were there sounds of him killing or being killed. Anna was encouraged.

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