Sketchbook weather
The morning never quite settled into focus. I’d been trying to finish the last paragraph of the Frankfurt retainer — its final week now closing in — but the sentences kept listing sideways, as though my attention had lost its own centre of gravity. The heater hummed. Murphy lay on his side beneath the bench, breathing in long, even pulses, the occasional twitch of a paw suggesting a better landscape than mine.
Outside, a dunnock tried out a thin thread of song, hesitant, as if the air weren’t yet convinced it wanted to carry sound. The thaw had loosened the ground; the hedges dripped in intervals slow enough to measure time by.
Around eleven my phone buzzed.
A message from Emma: Progress!
She’d sent a photo of the shop mid-refit. Dust sheets pooled like shed skins in one corner. A line of new shelving clung to the wall, waiting for brackets. In the centre, a mannequin torso in a Breton top looked faintly haughty, as if judging the entire endeavour. Emma stood beside it in paint-smeared leggings, hair scraped up, smiling with the intense focus she gets when she’s coaxing a space into shape.
In the foreground — almost as an afterthought — her sketchbook lay open on a stool.
A few pencil marks, some shading around the outline of a window display. And across one section, lightly drawn, two faint strokes running parallel. They could have been guide lines. They could have been nothing. But the angle made something catch in my mind before I could decide why.
Another message arrived:
Don’t judge the mannequin. It’s temporary.
Then: How’s the exile?
Still intact, I wrote back. Trying to finish Frankfurt. Heater’s holding. Murphy says he hasn’t been fed in years.
She sent back a heart and a photo of a mug of pale coffee: Lunch of champions.
Murphy lifted his head, stretched, and pressed it against my knee — either moved by the exchange or campaigning for treats.
I tried the laptop again but managed only half a sentence about cross-border settlement delays before deleting most of it. The fog of the last fortnight seemed to have lodged in my thoughts, blurring the edges between inside and out. Eventually I pulled on my boots and took Murphy along the boundary to shake the feeling loose.
The hedges dripped in long, slow ticks. A cow in the neighbouring field voiced a complaint that travelled oddly through the wet air. Murphy paused now and then to look toward the lower field, though nothing moved beyond the soft outline of the rise.
Back in the caravan, the heater had coaxed the damp into a usable warmth. I made tea and looked again at Emma’s photo, zooming slightly. The parallel strokes were barely there — tentative, casual — but the angle bothered me in a way that wasn’t entirely rational. It reminded me of frost or field-lines or something half-held in thought.
I closed the image before the feeling settled.
The rest of the afternoon thinned out quietly. Murphy dozed. The barn creaked in the shifting damp. Somewhere behind the rise, a rook rasped out a call with more persistence than the hour required.
Near four, Emma texted: Late one. Don’t wait up.
I typed Okay, deleted it, and sent Good luck instead.
As dusk came on, a low seam of mist gathered along the hedge line — not the fog of January, just breath held close to the ground. The yard blurred at the edges. The world seemed to lose its crispness, as though someone had touched the day with the flat of a thumb.
Inside, the heater hummed; Murphy sighed. The sketchbook photo was somewhere in the depths of the gallery, just another moment.
But the parallel lines lingered longer than they should have, as though waiting for a part of me to catch up.