Free Golden Hour by William Nicholson

high fence. A sign on the fence reads:
Anything you need to transform any landscape
. A grand promise indeed.
    Give me a fleet of bulldozers, Travis Perkins. Give me flame throwers, and a giant incinerator. Let’s take this landscape back to the Stone Age and start again. Oh, and this time leave out the people.
    The long road stretches out ahead, lit by the white glow of truck headlights, the red glow of tail lights. How far is it to Edenfield? Five or six miles, no more. But not tonight.
    He veers off the main road up a fork to the left. Here there’s a car graveyard where the cars have been lifted up as if by a tidy giant and stacked close together in layers. On top of a blue steel container there sits a yellow Skoda pickup, wheelless and gutted, with a message painted on its doors:
If your car has a drama get your parts from Motorama
. This is a vehicle-dismantling yard.
    A gap in the fence opposite leads to a stile. Toby climbs the stile, seeking some sheltered spot where he can lie down to sleep. Beyond the stile is the railway line, straight and gleaming in the moonlight. A red stop-light in the distance. He crosses the tracks, follows a narrow path round a building site. On one side a dense hedge, on the other, beyond a chain-link fence, a man-made mountain of fresh earth. He has no idea where he’sgoing, only the knowledge that where there are stiles there are footpaths, and where there are footpaths there are places people like to walk to.
    The path climbs a rise, and all at once he’s out of the dark tunnel, and there before him is the river. The dark gleam of water is edged with a broad band of chalky mud, all clearly visible in the light that never entirely leaves the sky. Town light, moon light, star light.
    He walks the high embankment, following the river inland. Ahead he sees some kind of shelter in an open field. He tramps through dry thistles which scratch his calves, and comes to a strange brick ruin built on a wide concrete apron. It’s low but substantial, a flattened pyramid of bricks, like a sacrificial altar. Beyond it is another ruin, made of upright iron girders supporting immense concrete beams and a concrete roof. There are no walls, only a strand of barbed wire fuzzy with sheep’s wool. The underside of the concrete roof drips with white stalactites that crumble at the touch. Some of the concrete beams have collapsed, and lie at an angle.
    There are sheep here, huddled up, asleep. They become agitated as Toby approaches, but he moves slowly and makes no noise and keeps himself some way away from them, and they settle down again. He takes out a ground sheet from his backpack and lays it on a patch of rough grass in one corner of the shelter. Then he stretches himself out on the ground, with his pack as his pillow, and composes himself for sleep.
    He hears the breathing of the sheep, and the rumble of the trucks on the distant road. I’m back in England, he thinks. Safe, small, joyless England. Why have I come back?
    The demon commands. I obey.
    Then a smile forms on his face in the night, even as his punishedbody cries out for sleep. He’s remembering the little boy on the boat.
    Maybe I am Jesus. Maybe I’ve returned from the wilderness to bring new life. The gospel according to Toby.
    Sleep now, Toby. Sleep, demon.

MONDAY

8
    Maggie Dutton wakes with a headache, a dull pain behind her ears and eyes. It’s hard to get out of bed. Her head has grown too heavy to lift. Later it’s hard to go in to work. Her feet stick to the ground.
    What am I afraid of?
    She loves her job. Ask anyone who knows her and that’s what they’ll tell you. Lucky Maggie to be paid for her passion. But a job isn’t a life, and all of a sudden Maggie’s in hiding from her life.
    She swallows two paracetamol. One sticks briefly in her throat, leaving behind its bitter taste.
    This has happened before. Call it a panic attack. The form it takes is a voice in the head,