Hellsborough Exposed

I mistook the first redfront I saw for an ordinary robin sat too still on a wall along the Bradfield Dale road, until I noticed the eye — it doesn't move the way a bird's should, more like a lens still deciding whether you're in focus. It doesn't feed, preen, or sing; it logs your pace, your direction, the fact that you exist on that stretch of road at that hour, and passes it along whatever the organic network's old lanes have carried since before the lanes were lanes. One on a wall is the toll for using the road — a second one further along means whatever noticed you the first time has already acted on it.

I found Van several jugs into one of his melancholic moods, talking to the fireplace more than to me: when the day comes you need care, he says, the responsible thing is to remove yourself from the burden of it before you become one, rather than expect your fellow apes to keep consuming resources on your behalf. He calls anyone who thinks otherwise selfish, living out their little Dunlockslyn lives by scriptures he reckons have long since gone milting — an old man's philosophy of dying I still haven't decided whether to find brave or terrifying.