“Looking good,” Cal says. He passes the kid a plate, and pulls a carton of orange juice from under his arm and his mugs from the pockets of his hoodie. Probably he should be giving a growing kid milk, but he drinks his coffee black, so he doesn’t have any.

They sit on the grass and eat in silence. The sky is a dense cool blue; yellow leaves are starting to come off the trees, lying lightly on the grass. Off over Dumbo Gannon’s farm, a cloud of birds swoops through impossible, shifting geometries.

Trey eats in big wolfish bites, with an intentness that makes Cal glad he fixed him two sandwiches. When he’s done, he downs his juice without pausing for breath.

“You want some more?” Cal asks.

Trey shakes his head. “I have to go,” he says. He puts down the glass and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “Can I come back tomorrow?”

Cal says, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Nah.”

“Yeah you should. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Bullshit.”

The kid evaluates him for a moment. “Thirteen,” he says.

“Then yeah you should.”

Trey shrugs.

“Whatever,” Cal says, as it suddenly occurs to him. “Not my problem. You want to skip school, knock yourself out.”

When he looks over, Trey is smiling, just a little bit. It’s the first time Cal has seen him do that, and it’s as startling as catching a baby’s first smile, seeing an unsuspected new person breaking through.

“What?” he asks.

“A cop’s not supposed to say that.”

“Like I told you. I’m not a cop any more. I don’t get paid to hassle you.”

“But,” Trey says, the smile vanishing. “Can I come here? I’ll help with this. And the staining. All of it.”

Cal looks at him. That urgency is back in his body, poorly concealed, hunching his shoulders forwards and pinching his face.

“What for?”

After a moment Trey says, “ ’Cause. I wanta learn how.”

“I’m not gonna pay you.” The kid could clearly use some cash, but even if Cal had any to spare, he doesn’t plan on being the stranger who hands out money to young boys.

“Don’t care.”

Cal considers the possible ramifications. He reckons that if he says no, Trey will go back to lurking. Cal prefers him visible, at least until he works out what the kid wants. “Why not,” he says. “I could use a hand.”

Trey lets out his breath and nods. “OK,” he says, getting to his feet. “See you tomorrow.”

He brushes off his jeans and heads for the road with a long, spring-kneed woodsman’s lope. On his way past the rookery he tosses a rock up into the branches, with a hard wrist-whip from a pretty good arm, and tilts his head back to watch as the rooks explode in all directions and cuss him to hell and back again.

After Cal washes up the lunch things, he heads for the village. Noreen knows everything and talks a blue streak—Cal figures these are two of the real reasons why she doesn’t get along with Mart, who likes to have a monopoly in those areas. If he can aim her in the right direction, she might give him an idea where Trey popped up from.

Noreen’s shop packs a lot into a little space. It’s floor-to-ceiling with shelves crammed with the essentials of life—tea bags, eggs, chocolate bars, scratch cards, dish soap, baked beans, batteries, jam, tinfoil, ketchup, firelighters, painkillers, sardines—and a variety of things, like golden syrup and Angel Delight, that Cal doesn’t understand but has ambitions to try if he can work out what to do with them. It has a little fridge for milk and meat, a basket of depressed-looking fruit, and a ladder so Noreen, who’s about five foot one, can reach the high shelves. The shop smells of all those things, with a strong underlay of some uncompromising disinfectant straight out of 1950.

When Cal pushes open the door with a cheerful bell-ding, Noreen is up the ladder, dusting jars and humming along to some cheesy young guy on the radio aiming for a hoedown feel. Noreen favors tops with explosive flowers and has short brown hair set in such tight curls that it looks like a helmet.

“Wipe your boots, I’m only after washing the floor,” she orders. Then, noticing Cal properly: “Ah, ’tis yourself! I was hoping you’d call in today. I’ve that cheese in that you like. I’ve been keeping a packet back for you, because Bobby Feeney does like it as well, and he’d buy the lot on me and leave you with nothing. He’d eat it like a chocolate bar, that fella. He’ll have himself a heart attack one of these days.”

Cal wipes his boots obediently. Noreen comes down the ladder, pretty nimbly for a round woman. “And come here to me,” she says, waving her dust cloth at Cal, “I’ve a surprise for you. There’s someone I want you to meet.” She calls through the door into the back room: “Lena! Come out here!”

After a moment a woman’s voice, husky and firm, calls back, “I’m making the tea.”

“Leave the tea and come here. Bring that cheese out of the fridge, the one in the black packet. Do I have to come in and get you?”

There’s a pause, in which Cal thinks he catches an exasperated sigh. Then there’s movement in the back room, and a woman comes out holding a packet of cheddar.

“Now,” Noreen says triumphantly. “This is my sister Lena. Lena, this is Cal Hooper that’s after moving in up at O’Shea’s place.”

Lena isn’t what Cal expected. From what Mart said, he was picturing a beefy, raw-red six-footer with a voice like a cow’s bellow, brandishing a frying pan menacingly. Lena is tall, all right, and she has meat on her bones, but in a way that makes Cal picture her hillwalking, rather than hitting someone upside the head. She’s a couple of years younger than him, with a thick fair ponytail and a broad-cheekboned, blue-eyed face. She’s wearing old jeans and a loose blue sweater.

“Pleasure,” Cal says, offering his hand.

“Cal the cheddar fan,” Lena says. She has a firm shake. “I’ve heard plenty about you.”

She gives him a quick wry grin and hands over the cheese. He grins back. “Same here.”

“I’d say you have, all right. How’re you getting on in O’Shea’s? Keeping you busy?”

“I’m doing OK,” Cal says. “But I can see why nobody else wanted to take it on.”

“There’s not a lot of people looking to buy houses, round here. Most of the young people take off for the city as soon as they can. They only stay if they’re working the family farm, or if they like the country.”