Some places unlock the body

Too easy to slip off the earth. He wonders where Bea got to. He's disturbed the animals. Faint scratchings under the floorboards and high in the rafters. A couple of birds fly out a hole in the wall. There's a nest up in the far corner of the roof but he tries not to look at it directly. He read somewhere birds don't like that.

There's a desk. Solid wood with intricate pathways and holes made by insects that click as they eat. He knows the contents of its drawer—bottle of Teachers brand quarter-full, pages of a paperback held together with string and a bull sale catalogue from 1968. All the bull names start with F and one is called Ferdinando. There are a few meat hooks bunched up in a corner, but the rest of the room has been stripped back to floor and iron walls. He flipped through the book. It's set in Wellington, but the end is missing.

Separate from this barn, the old meat works stands. He won't go in there, scared of sheep and cattle ghosts, the way they might silently crowd in on him. Spots of light come through holes in the roof, change shape on the floorboards. One afternoon it rained and he found puddles with tiny black insects floating and flapping their wings. In the middle of the floor a steel plate covers some boards. He tried to lift it, curious to know if there were any animal bones beneath. The weight of it caught him off balance, it wouldn't budge.

He sits against one of the beams and rests his feet on the edge of the steel, looks up through the hole in the north wall. A patch of blue where birds come and go talking, fighting. He's not sure where page 111disputes end and play begins. Here in his barn everything has its own language.

He flicks the lighter, on off, on on off. There's a groove, a rhythm that washes over the body until it comes from the body. The side of his right thumb has developed hard compressed layers of skin. A callus must be worked at, regular practice so the skin doesn't soften. Here in his kingdom of one he tries to hold onto Bea's voice. Once he tried to copy her by saying his name out loud, wanted to roll over the r like she did. But the angles in his voice were all wrong, nothing of Bea left in it.

Inside the soft yellow light of the barn he lays intricate networks. Strips of bark tied round a pine cone, paper twists ripped from his maths book, a handkerchief. He lays out matches, then groups them into patterns, thinks of ignition like dominoes crashing. He loves the mechanics of the lighter, but sulphur from the matches cuts in his nostrils like horseradish. Flames have to move through different pathways to reach the bundle of twigs he's set up on the plate. When it's going, he rests against the beam and watches his fire. All the locks in his body come undone.