Free The Dig by Cynan Jones Page A

her. This was a constant, however tense things got between them now and then. It seemed to be a sign how much he knew of her that he could imagine her old as well as he could recall her as a child, as if he could see her at both ends of her life, see her completely. But he could not imagine her dead.
    He had shut the door of the bedroom. He understood that at some point the scent of her would dissipate and go.
    Beside him there was a boy in a car and he was looking only at his phone and he could see the boy’s face lit up by the glow and not looking at the great, dramatic sea.
    He wound down the window and turned on the engine and drove out of the car park to the garage on the outskirt of town.
    He pulled the pickup over away from the fuel pumps and walked over the forecourt and into the garage and loaded his arms with the toilet roll he needed and took a four liter of milk from the fridge shelf. There was a truck driver there, pulling a coffee from the vending machine, but no one he knew.
    He walked down the shelves and heard the truck driver go out and turned to watch and saw him bite into a hot roll as he left, briefly feeling hungry but pushing it down from habit, as if hunger was a memory rather than a call. Things on the shelves registered strangely to him, but each item seemed like it would demand something of him if he took it home: washing-up liquid, firelighters, a newspaper. Something urged him on to take these things and to get back to normality, but when he felt this swell of hope that the energy might be there for this, he reached out to touch it and it faded, and he just took the toilet roll and milk to the counter.
    How are you keeping? said the garage owner. It was kind of balanced, how he asked it.
    Yeah, said Daniel.
    The garage owner nodded once. He totaled up the two items on the till.
    You want me to book those? he asked. The two men had known each other a while now and they had only ever had conversations like this.
    Daniel seemed momentarily confused at the question. Uh. Yes, he said.
    Are you okay? asked the garage owner. He knew about his wife, like everyone. He didn’t want to say anything too direct, but he liked the man. But he was trying not to show how he felt, seeing Daniel, which was the way you feel when you stop for an animal hit on the road.
    Uh-huh, Daniel said. The garage owner looked at him, pushed his lips together in acceptance and nodded an O.K .
    You want anything else? he asked.
    No.
    Anything to eat? There was a counter of hot food on display, cheese and ham pastries, a few pasties, some strips of bacon bedewed with fat under the hot light.
    There was a brief flash of wide hunger but it was like he’d forgotten how to register it and Daniel said automatically:No, I’m okay. The garage owner was looking at him as if he’d just seen him take a blow to the head.
    Okay then.
    Daniel took the goods from the counter and went out. He turned and nodded at the garage owner and went over the empty forecourt looking at the rich Georgian houses across the road.
    He got into the pickup and was about to drive off when the garage owner banged the door and passed a wrapped bacon roll through the open window. His guts immediately roiled. He looked at the roll in this hands and the garage owner just banged the sill of the door and walked away.

    Driving home he saw the badger on the road. He slowed. It was prone on the road. There was a magpie pulling at it. As he neared, the bird took a final pull and the leg raised as if it waved. Then it dropped again and the magpie let go of the scrap he was trying to loose, hopped, and went over the bank.
    He did not understand. He had lived all his life here and he had never come close to hitting a badger.
    He kept thinking of impact. Of horrible impact.

chapter two

    H E SHIFTED THE bunched carrier bags and the cleaning stuff and the shoe polish and dustpan and brush and box of nuts and hinges and screws and found an empty jar under the