I Was Told Never to Answer Anyone Who Calls My Name After Nine.

There's a wasp circling the olive oil, and I've decided to let it. If it wants to drown in the good stuff, that's between it and Lucía. I'm at the kitchen table with a pen from the drawer, a pad of paper that smells of dust, and a plan to be useful for once.

Whoever you are, you'll get the room at the end of the hall. It's the narrow one. The bed is shorter than it looks, and the shutters don't close all the way. I'm writing this down so you know more than I did when I got here.

For twenty-two years I was an administrative assistant to parole officers. I filed. I scheduled check-ins, answered phones, and rebooked appointments for men who'd missed them. I also told every officer who handed me something, and there were a lot of them, "noted." It's a good word.

It means nothing and everyone likes hearing it. I said it so often that my own mother once asked if I was all right, because I'd said it to her at a funeral.

A year ago, a transfer request crossed my desk for a parolee named Andrés Brea. Quiet man. Thirty-six, never late, never a complaint on his file. His last address was a farmhouse outside Alcántara, which I know because I typed it, and because I typed it in the wrong box the first time and had to fix it.

I processed the transfer. That's all I did. A few weeks later he stopped appearing in the system. No violation, no warrant, no new address. He just wasn't there anymore.

Nobody on the floor cared, since a man who disappears quietly is the cheapest kind of problem. I put a note in the file and went to lunch.

Then, a month ago, a recording came to the office. It was a woman's voice, no name, no return number, and it said only that I should come and see where he went. It said "I." I mean, it said "you," and it was me it meant. Not the office or the department.

Me. I played it three times at my desk with the volume low. Then I played it a fourth time and asked the person at the next desk whether she'd heard anything odd. She said she'd heard me playing something.

Nobody asked me to chase it. I want that to be clear for whoever reads this. No officer wanted it chased, and Gloria Estévez, my supervisor, told me to forward it to someone who'd forward it to someone else. I said noted.

I also had my own problems. I was a month from defaulting on a loan. I'd taken it out for my brother Peter, who needed it, who said so in the tired voice he uses when he asks for things, and who has never paid back a cent. I'd stopped opening the letters from the bank.

I didn't tell anyone at work I was leaving. I took a Friday off, which I'd never done without a doctor's note, and drove out.

The reason is a little embarrassing. It itched. A man's file shouldn't just stop. Twenty-two years of putting things in the right box leaves you with a bad reaction to a box that's empty and still has a lid on it. So I drove four hours with the windows down because the air-conditioning in my car has been dead since spring, and I arrived in the middle of the afternoon.

The heat there is the kind that stops being weather and turns into a condition. The cicadas were screaming. There's no other word. It was one long note from every tree at once, and I could feel it in the fillings in my back teeth. The farmhouse was long and low and whitewashed, and the white hurt to look at.

Behind it was a threshing circle of flat stones, worn smooth, big enough to park three cars on. Beside it sat a cattle trough, stone, empty, with a crust of dry green at the bottom that might have been algae once. Cork oaks stood around in the cracked pasture, stripped halfway up their trunks, the bare wood a startling orange.

Nothing moved in the grass. Even the dust on the track seemed to have given up.

The only wet thing for a mile was a tap on the side of the house, dripping into a dent in the concrete. Wasps crowded it. Fifteen or twenty, walking around the drip on their legs, drinking. I went wide around them. I'm not brave about wasps.

Lucía Quintana opened the door before I knocked. Sixty-four, stout, gray hair pinned back hard, a housecoat on in that heat, buttoned to the neck. She looked at me the way a woman looks at a delivery she's been expecting.

"You'll be wanting the room," she said.

"Come in, come in, it's cooler."

It was. The kitchen floor was tile, and the cool came up through my sandals. The place smelled of dust and hot stone and, faintly, of something frying that had stopped frying some time ago. A bottle of olive oil stood open on the table with a cork beside it, and I remember thinking nobody in this house worries about the wasps.

I had a speech ready. I'd practiced it in the car, something about being a friend of a former lodger, something about a recording. I got as far as "Good afternoon, I was wondering whether—" and she waved a hand at me.

"One night? Two? It's eight euros a night."

She said it the way you'd give the price of a sandwich. I'd paid more for a sandwich at the petrol station outside Cáceres, a bad one, with the crusts left on. I counted out the coins on the table and she swept them into her housecoat pocket without looking at them.

She never asked why I'd come. She never asked for anything, now that I think about it. She showed me the room at the end of the hall, opened the shutters an inch, and told me where the towels were, and that the water was fine to drink, and that dinner was whenever.

At the door she turned around, one hand on the frame, and said, "Oh, and there's one rule."

I waited. In my experience there's always a list.

"If anyone calls your name from the circle after the bell rings nine, don't answer. The church bell, you'll hear it. Don't answer, that's all."

She smiled, warm and plain, the way you'd tell a guest about bin day. "Anything else you need, you just shout."

Then she went back down the hall in her slippers, and I stood there holding my overnight bag with the cicadas screaming through the gap in the shutters.

I said "Noted" to the empty hall. She was already gone, so it was wasted. Twenty-two years and I still do it to doorframes.

I put the bag on the bed, which took up most of the room, and sat there going over the rule. Don't answer if someone calls from the circle after nine. It wasn't a hard rule. I've followed worse. At my last job there was a laminated sheet about which stapler was whose.

What bothered me was the other stuff. She hadn't asked for my surname. She'd taken eight euros in coins and not asked for a name of any kind, not even the one on the cheque I'd have written if I'd had a cheque. I went back down the hall to look for the guest book, because every house that rents a room has one, even if it's just a school exercise book with a rubber band around it.

I found it on a little table by the front door, under a plastic saint with a chipped halo. A proper bound book, red cover, the ribbon still in place. I turned the first page. Nothing. Second page, nothing.

I flipped through the whole thing with my thumb and the pages were clean all the way to the back, no signature, no date, not even a pen mark where someone had tested a pen.

Eight euros a night and a book nobody had ever written in. I closed it and put it back square under the saint.

Dinner was whenever, so I had some bread and a heel of hard cheese standing at the counter while Lucía clanked about behind a door somewhere. I didn't ask her anything. I'd come all that way to ask questions and it turned out I'd rather not. I took a glass of water from the tap, which tasted of pennies, and went back to my room.

I lay down in my socks. I don't know why I kept my socks on, in that heat. Habit, probably. My feet had been in sandals since Cáceres and the socks felt like a decision I'd made on someone's behalf. The ceiling had a long crack in it running toward the window.

The shutters let in a bar of light the color of weak tea, and it sat on the wall and didn't move. Eight o'clock, then nearly nine. My shirt stuck to the sheet. I could hear the cicadas going without a break, one shift handing off to the next, and somewhere in the yard a wasp bumping at the glass.

I thought about the loan. I thought about Peter, and tried not to, and thought about him anyway, the way he'd said "Jamie, it's just till September," two Septembers back. I thought about my desk, and whether anyone had noticed the chair was empty. Gloria would have noticed by about ten that morning, and she'd have said, "Can someone just check where James is," to the room, and the room would have shrugged.

The light was still gold. That surprised me even though I'd been warned about Spanish summers. It didn't go orange or red. It stayed gold, flat and bright, as if somebody had left it on.

The church bell started up.

It wasn't a nice bell. It was a cracked, heavy one, a few streets or fields away, and it rang each stroke separately with a long gap between. I counted. I couldn't help it. Seven, eight.

On nine I held my breath and lay very still and listened to it fade, and for a few seconds there was just the cicadas and my own heart.

Then, from the back of the house, someone said, "James."

Flat. Patient. No hurry in it at all.

I knew it before I'd thought about it. Andrés Brea had called the office a handful of times in the year before he went, always to confirm an appointment, always the same. This is Andrés Brea, I have an appointment Thursday, I'm confirming. Never late, never asking for anything. I'd have known that voice in a crowded station.

I was up on one elbow.

"James," he said again.

Same pitch. Same patience.

I didn't move. I counted my own breathing, and it was bad.

"James, can you just—" That was Gloria.

Gloria, with the quick little lift on just that meant the request was already half-done and I was only being informed. There was a rustle in it, paper or a blazer.

"It won't take a second."

My mouth was dry. I'd gone cold under all that sweat, which doesn't happen unless something is wrong.

Then, quieter, close, as if she were standing right outside the shutter with a hand on the sill:

"James."

Not Jamie. She never used that. James, flat, with the end clipped off, the way she said it when I'd come in at six and the dinner had gone cold on the table and was now a problem I had caused. My mother, Margaret Whitcombe. She'd been dead three years.

I'd carried one of the handles.

I sat up. My socks were on the floor. I don't remember getting them there.

"James," said Andrés.

"It's the trough," said Gloria.

"It's so dry."

"Bring water to the trough," my mother said.

"It's so dry, James. Look at it."

The three of them then, one after another, none of them over the others, each one waiting politely for the one before to finish. Bring water to the trough. It's so dry. Can you just. Please.

I stood at the shutter with my fingers on the slats. Through the gap I could see the edge of the stone circle, white in the gold light, and past it the trough, long and empty, and nobody at all.

Twenty-two years. I'd been polite to people who didn't deserve it, and to people who did, and to people who were already walking away while I answered. It was the only thing I was ever properly good at. It went off in me before I'd decided anything, the way a hand goes up when somebody throws something.

"Coming," I called.

"Just a minute. I'm coming."

My voice went out through the shutters and across the stones, and then there wasn't any sound. I stood there with my mouth still open on the last word.

The cicadas had stopped. All of them, all at once, the whole field, a mile of them. I hadn't known how much of the world was that noise until it was gone.

Lucía was in the doorway before I'd closed my mouth. I hadn't heard the slippers. She was holding a stubby church candle on a saucer, lit, though the room was still full of gold light and the flame didn't show. The smile had gone. Her face looked older without it, and tired in a settled way, like somebody who'd done this before.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"I really am. James."

I hadn't given her my name. I filed that where I file things, which at that moment was nowhere useful.

"It's all right," I said.

Politeness again, and I heard it come out. "I mean, I only answered. You said not to, and I did, but it's only..."

"No, love. Listen."

She set the saucer on the sill, because there was nowhere else, and the flame stood up straight in the dead air.

"The rule was never about being quiet. It doesn't care if you're quiet. It can't do anything with quiet."

"Then what's it for?"

"It learns the voices of the ones who answer. That's all it does. It hears somebody answer and it keeps the voice."

She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the saucer. "The rule is how it gets them. I tell every guest not to answer, and so every guest lies there listening hard, to be sure they don't. Listening hard to something that sounds like your mother."

She shrugged, a small movement. "Nobody can listen that hard and not go."

I looked at my socks on the floor. "So you telling me..."

"Is why it had you. It had you the minute I said it. You'd have gone either way, but this way I'm sure."

She said that last part gently, the way you'd tell someone the test results were what they'd expected.

"Now it's got your voice as well. I'm sorry."

I sat down on the bed because my legs had made the decision for me. The mattress was shorter than it looked, and my heels hung off. I noticed that. It seemed like the sort of thing I should keep track of.

"Why say it at all?"

I asked. "You could've just told me about the towels."

"I could."

She didn't look away, which I'll give her. "The council pays me. A little every month, for each lodger who sleeps the night. It isn't much. It's about what the roof costs."

She tipped her head toward the ceiling crack. "They send me the guests, too. Not just anybody. Men, mostly. Men nobody's going to come looking for. Fellows out on parole, fellows with nobody. The unattached."

I thought about the empty guest book under the plastic saint. I thought about my own file, which I could have recited: no spouse, no dependants, one brother who didn't call. Twenty-two years of paperwork had made me the ideal lodger. Nobody had been waiting for me to put a foot wrong, because nobody had been waiting for me at all.

"What does the council do with it?"

I said. "The voices."

"They collect it. Whatever the thing learns, it goes through me and out to them. Don't ask me how, I don't go to the meetings."

She pulled the housecoat closed at the neck, though the room was thirty degrees at least.

"I never asked what for. You get to where you don't, you know? It's easier."

"And Andrés Brea."

Her eyes moved at the name. "He's alive. I want you to know that, because you'll wonder. He answered once, the first week, and then he left. He's in Lisbon now. Somebody told me he doesn't take calls. Doesn't want to hear his own phone ring, I'd think."

"And the recording," I said.

"The woman. The one who said come and see."

"That's his sister. Consuelo."

She said it softly, plainly, the way you'd say the name of a neighbour who'd moved.

"She came looking for him, the autumn after, and she answered too. Of course she did, she's his sister. That's her voice you heard. Only she never said it. It took her voice and said it for her. It must have wanted somebody to come."

"Somebody," I said.

"You were the one who came."

She picked the saucer up off the sill. "Try to sleep. It won't come in. It doesn't come in."

"Noted," I said, and I felt my own mouth do it.

She stopped in the door with her back to me. For a second I thought she'd turn around and say something kind. She went down the hall instead, and the little light went with her.

I sat there. The room was still gold. Through the shutter gap I could see the edge of the circle, flat white stone, and the empty trough, and the sky not even thinking about getting dark. Not a cicada. Not a wasp against the glass.

I'd driven four hours in a car with no air-conditioning, on an expensive sandwich, with my bank's letters unopened in the glovebox, to find out what had happened to a man whose file had stopped. And what had happened was that somebody had been very, very efficient about it. They'd had my details before I'd turned the engine on.

I'd been expected. I'd been, in the proper sense, processed.

I laughed. It came up without asking and I let it, a short bark and then another, and I put my fist against my teeth to stop it turning into the other thing it was close to. It was that or scream. I was the only man in Spain who'd driven four hours to be filed.

I packed the car at seven in the morning, and it was already hot enough that the steering wheel hurt to touch. There wasn't much to pack. I'd slept in my shirt, so that was done, and the bag took ten seconds. I left the key on the kitchen table next to the olive oil, where a wasp was making its rounds again.

Lucía wasn't about. I stood there a moment, feeling I owed someone a goodbye, and then felt stupid about that, and went out.

The cicadas were back. They'd obviously decided last night was a private matter.

The track from the farmhouse is dust and ruts for about two kilometres before it meets the road. I drove it slowly with all the windows down, and nothing happened, and I started to feel a bit foolish. Maybe it was a bad night in a hot room. Maybe I'd answered a neighbour's radio. I even had the thought that I'd be telling this at work, and then I remembered I wasn't going back to work with a story.

I was going back to work with a Friday off and a lot of explaining.

At the first junction there's a rusted sign with no name on it and a dead thistle growing out of its base. I stopped, because you stop, and I put the indicator on for nobody.

"Jamie."

It came from the passenger footwell. Low down, near my ankle, where the mat's gone grey from dust.

"Jamie. You there?"

I didn't look. I looked at the thistle.

"Come on. It's me."

Peter's voice, the tired one. He's had it since he was about nineteen. It's the voice of a man who has had a long day of being let down by other people, and it goes up a little at the end so you can feel generous.

"I wouldn't ask. You know I wouldn't ask. It's just till September."

It was two Septembers ago he'd said that. I hadn't known he could still say it so well.

I took the right turn, because the right turn was the road, and I got maybe two hundred metres before my hands were so wet the wheel was sliding. I pulled onto the verge and put it in neutral and sat there with my mouth shut. My jaw hurt. I had my tongue pressed flat to the roof of my mouth like a man at a dentist.

"I know it's been a while," Peter said.

"I know. I should've sent something. You've been good about it, Jamie. Better than I deserve."

That was new. Peter has never once said that in his life, so it was clearly somebody else doing the writing. It was a good line, though. It was the line I'd waited about six years for, and I knew exactly what it was for, and my eyes still stung.

I said nothing. I put the car back in gear.

"Hey, it's all right," Peter said.

"I'll wait. I've got all day."

It did sound patient. That was the worst part. Peter has never waited for anything.

A little further on the voice had come up out of the footwell and into the dashboard, somewhere behind the speedometer, where the plastic vents are. I thought, fine, it's a voice, I have heard worse. I've listened to a man in a cheap suit explain for forty minutes why he couldn't make a Tuesday appointment because of his cousin's wedding, which was in Portugal, in March.

I could do this.

At the third kilometre it said, "Look, while you're out there, somebody ought to see to that trough. It's so dry, Jamie." And then, in the same breath, in the same easy tone, "I'll pay you back. Honestly. I will."

I almost laughed. I didn't. I think that's the only reason I'm writing this.

Fourth kilometre by the odometer, because I'd been watching the numbers to give my eyes something to do. The voice was in the glovebox now. It was low and muffled in there, because of the bank's letters, I suppose, all those envelopes with the little windows. I could hear it rustle through them.

"Open one," it said.

"Go on. It's probably not as bad as you think."

That one nearly got me. I want to be clear that I didn't answer. I wanted to. My whole mouth was full of the word. It had a rhythm to it now, the voice, a few phrases going round in the same order, and it had got behind my teeth where I couldn't reach it.

I could hear it with the windows up, which I tried, and with my fingers jammed in my ears, which I also tried, and I'll admit that was not my best driving. A cork oak came up on the left, orange and stripped, and I looked at it very hard and went on past.

Fifth kilometre. Sixth. It never rose or got angry, and that was what frightened me. It just kept on, tired and reasonable. It had all day.

Somewhere past the sixth I understood that I was not getting to the end of it. I don't know where the end was. Wherever it was, I wasn't going to reach it by driving with my fingers in my ears. There was a wide place on the road with a drystone wall and a goat standing in the shade of it, who looked at me with total disinterest, and I turned the car around there in three goes.

The goat watched. Peter said, "That's it, Jamie. That's all right," as if I'd done something nice for him, and I cried a little, which I'm not going to dwell on. It stung worse than the sweat did.

The way back felt longer. The sun was in the windscreen now, and my shirt was wet down the whole back and stuck to the seat. Peter went on. Then, partway there, it sounded as if it had lost interest, or had to wait its turn, and I caught the other two, Gloria somewhere near the gearstick saying can you just, my mother saying nothing yet, only breathing.

I don't know how I'd have told them apart with the windows up.

I came around the last bend with my eyes streaming and there it was, the long white wall of the farmhouse, flat and bright as a sheet of paper.

The voices stopped. All of them, all at once, in the middle of a word.

The car ticked. The cicadas screamed on as though nothing had happened, and I sat there with the engine running and the dust settling on the bonnet, a hundred metres from a house I'd tried to leave.

I walked the last hundred metres, because the car didn't seem like a place to be. The front door was unlocked. The kitchen was empty, the key still on the table beside the olive oil, and I left it there. Lucía was either in her room or not in the house, and I wasn't in the mood to find out which.

I ended up in the yard, sitting on the concrete lip beside the tap with my back against the warm wall. That's the one place with any shade, and it's also where the wasps are. I'm afraid of wasps. I've been afraid of them since a school trip in 1987, and I'd walked wide around that tap the day before like it was a bad debt.

Now I sat a yard from it and watched fifteen or twenty of them drinking from the dent in the concrete, and not one of them cared about me. It's humbling to be ignored by something you're scared of. It was the only thing all day that had gone the way I expected.

Across the yard the circle was bare and white in the sun, and the trough beside it was dry as ever. It looked smaller in daylight. I didn't look at it long.

I went back over it all, in order, the way I'd go over a diary that had been double-booked. The rule said don't answer. I'd answered, and that was my fault, fine, noted. Then I'd done the sensible thing and kept my mouth shut for six kilometres of Peter, and the more I shut it, the more there was of him.

Peter in the footwell, Peter in the vents, Peter behind my teeth. I'd thought the silence would be the safe part. That was the whole plan, such as it was. But it wasn't safe. It was just room, and the voices filled it.

So I decided to try the opposite. Not a clever idea. Just the other one.

My phone had two bars if I held it up toward the roof. I scrolled to Peter and pressed it before I could think better. I wanted something ordinary. I wanted Peter being Peter: late, vague, a bit sorry, a telly going in the background. I'd have taken him asking for money.

I'd have honestly said yes.

It rang six times. That should have told me something. In forty-four years Peter has never picked up on the sixth ring. He lets it go to voicemail and texts me three hours later, sorry, driving, when he isn't.

Then it clicked, and a voice said, "Jamie."

I hadn't said anything yet. I'd opened my mouth for hello and there it was, in front of me, and then there was a gap. Half a second, maybe less. The voice was there, and then a little after it, the sound of the line catching up. The way it is when you call someone abroad, except Peter lives twenty minutes from my flat.

"Jamie, you there?"

It was the tired one, the same one from the car. And behind it there was nothing. No telly, no traffic, no kettle, no one in the next room shouting at him. Peter has never in his life been anywhere quiet.

"I wouldn't ask," it said.

"It's just till September."

I ended the call. My thumb did it, hard, and then I sat with the phone in both hands and a wasp walked along the rim of the dent and left. A real thing, doing something real. I held on to that.

I thought about what had picked up. Not a recording, because a recording can't be late. It had waited for the sound of me, I think, and then answered. Peter's phone had rung somewhere, in his pocket or on his counter, and something had been listening in his place. Or it didn't need his phone at all.

I couldn't tell which, and I'm still not sure which is worse.

What I knew was this. It had my voice already, because I'd given it away through a shutter like a man calling out for a taxi. Then it had Andrés. It had Consuelo. It had my mother, who is three years dead and shouldn't have been available, and Gloria, who'd say whatever you needed as long as it was quick.

And now it had Peter, or enough of him to pick up my call. It wasn't taking them for the sake of it. It was working through the list of everyone who might ring me and not get an answer, and the people who'd stand on a doorstep and wonder where I'd got to, and the people who'd notice.

One at a time, in order, like it was clearing a desk.

There weren't many. That was the trouble. Gloria wouldn't. She'd said noted to my absence by now and gone to lunch. My mother couldn't.

That left Peter, who didn't call but who'd miss me in about a month, when the bank had finished with me and sent the next letter to his address, and he'd go to ring and find himself already on the line.

And after Peter, there was nobody. I'd made sure of that over twenty-two years without meaning to. Nobody to look in the guest book, and nobody to wonder why it was empty.

The tap dripped. A wasp took off from the dent and went over the roof. I stayed where I was, against the warm wall, with the phone still in my hand, and I didn't try anyone else.

The days I'll skip, mostly. They were hot and nothing happened in them, which I'd begun to count as a kind of luck. I ate Lucía's bread and whatever she put on a saucer. I sat by the tap with the wasps until I stopped flinching, and then I stopped noticing, and that scared me more than the flinching had.

I didn't go near the car. Lucía asked every morning if I'd slept all right. I said fine, and she nodded and let me have it.

The nights were the work.

The bell rang nine, each stroke separate, and the light stayed gold on the wall. On the third night they came to the shutters. Andrés first, flat and patient, saying he was just confirming Thursday. It's what he used to say on the phone to the office, and I'd put that exact call in the diary a handful of times.

Then he mentioned the trough. They all got to the trough eventually. It was so dry, would I mind.

I lay on my back with my arms straight at my sides. The bed was shorter than it looked and my heels hung off the end. By ten the sheet was soaked and I could feel the sweat pooling in the dip of the mattress under my spine. I pressed my tongue flat against the roof of my mouth, the way I had in the car, and counted the length of the ceiling crack in my head.

I got to the window end of it nine times that night. Nobody had asked me to count it. It gave my head something to do.

On the fifth night they moved down to the keyhole. There's an old iron one in the door, with no key in it, and the voices came through it at the height of a person bending to look in. That was the part I couldn't stop picturing.

Gloria had the keyhole most of that night. "James, can you just," she said, and I felt it in my stomach before the sentence finished, because twenty-two years had trained me to.

Then she went on cheerfully. "Listen, we noticed you were gone. Everyone did. Honestly? It's been lovely. Marisol's picked up your Thursday list and nobody's said a word. Nobody's even sighed."

There was a rustle of paper, or a blazer. "Anyway. The trough. It's very dry, and can you just."

She wasn't cruel about it. That was what got under me. She sounded pleased, the way she did when a form came back correct. I lay there with my jaw set and sweat running into my ears, and I'll admit I thought about the Thursday list, and whether Marisol was doing it in the right order.

Then I wanted to throw something at the door. I had nothing to throw but a sandal, and that would have been an answer of its own.

On the seventh night it got to the pillow.

I don't know how. The shutters were a foot from my head and the keyhole was across the room, but the voice was in the pillowcase beside my left ear, close and low, the way you'd talk to someone who was asleep.

"James."

Flat, with the end clipped. Then, "I'm cold."

She was always cold. My mother wore a cardigan to the beach. It was thirty-nine degrees in that room by my reckoning and I could smell my own shirt, and my dead mother was telling me she was cold in the voice she'd used for the last two winters of her life, when she had the blanket tucked up to her chin and wanted it tucked higher.

"Is there a blanket? It's so dry out here, James, and it gets into your chest."

A pause, polite, the length of a person waiting for you to fetch it. "You haven't got a jumper on, have you. You'll catch your death."

I bit the inside of my cheek until it tasted of coins. My whole body had already sat up in the dark of my head and gone to look for a blanket. I stayed flat. The sweat ran off my ribs and into the sheet, and I breathed through my nose, and my mouth stayed shut around the word it wanted.

It was only Mum, nothing more. It would have been easy.

Each night was the same shape, with small changes. Andrés would confirm something. Gloria would impose on me, kindly. My mother would be cold. Then all three would turn to the trough, one after the other, waiting their turn, as polite as a queue at a post office.

Nobody wept or begged or said anything that would have made a good story. If one of them had screamed my name, or spoken in a ruined voice from the bottom of a well, I think I could have hated it and been done. But it was Andrés double-checking a time, and Gloria passing on news, and my mother worrying about a jumper.

Every line was something one of them had really said to me, and I had to lie there and not answer people I'd answered all my life.

On the ninth night the light was still gold at ten past nine, because it never changed. My mother asked about the jumper again. The pillowcase was wet under my cheek, and I didn't turn my head. I lay there with my mouth shut, listening, and I knew within a breath or two when she'd get to the trough.

Lucía had a bucket by the back door, a galvanized one with a dent in the side, and nobody had ever said it was for anything. On the tenth evening I took it out to the tap. A dripping tap fills a bucket slowly. I stood there with it between my sandals for the better part of an hour, wasps walking over the rim of the concrete dent a foot from my hand, and I didn't flinch once.

Thirty-seven years since the school trip, and I'd only needed to be more afraid of something else.

I hadn't worked out a plan. I'd worked out that the trough was the only thing all of them ever asked for, and I'd said yes to every request I'd had in my life except that one. Nine nights of leaving it unanswered hadn't changed a thing. Maybe it was spite. Maybe I was just tired of being asked.

By the time the bucket was three-quarters full, the light on the yard wall had the gold it always had. I carried it carefully, because it was heavy and I didn't want to waste any, and the water slopped over my wrist and dried before I reached the corner of the house. The cicadas were going full volume.

The circle was white and bare ahead of me, and the trough sat at the far edge with its crust of dry green.

I stepped onto the stones. They were hot through the soles of my sandals, hot enough that I walked faster than I wanted to.

The bell started when I was about halfway across. One. The cracked note, the long gap. Two.

My mother spoke first. "James."

The dinner-gone-cold voice. Then Peter, from my left, then Peter again from behind, close to my ear.

"Jamie, come on. Just till September."

Gloria was somewhere on my right. "James, can you just. It won't take a second."

Four, five. Then there were more of them, and I stopped being able to tell where one began. Men and women I'd never met in person, people from the caseload whose appointments I'd moved around a Tuesday or a Thursday, voices off a phone line, saying "Mr. Whitcombe" and "James" and "hello, are you there?"

Hundreds of them, I'd say, though I never counted. They had all been waiting for somebody to pick up.

They weren't angry. Some of them pleaded. Some of them bargained: if I'd only say one word, they'd leave me alone, they'd stop, it was such a small thing. A few of them cried, politely. Peter promised to pay it all back by the end of the month.

I walked, and the bucket swung against my knee, and the water slapped inside it.

Seven. Eight.

The one that nearly did it was mine. It came from just in front of me, at about the height of my own mouth. It was calm, and a bit bored, the way I sound at the end of a Friday on the phone.

"It's all right, James," it said.

"You can answer. It's only manners."

My feet stopped. I'd like to say it was courage. I think it was that the voice was right, and that was precisely the trouble. It would have been rude not to. I'd spent forty-seven years being the sort of man who said it was no trouble at all.

I knelt at the trough with my knees on the hot stone, and I tipped the bucket. The water ran out over the dry green and darkened the bottom, and then it was gone. It didn't soak in or run off. It made a swallowing sound, one long gulp, and the stone was dry again as if I'd never come.

Nine.

The voices went quiet, every one of them, all at once. In the quiet I could hear the last of the bell dying off over the fields, and the empty bucket ticking as it cooled in my hand.

Then someone said, from right behind me, low and rough, "I'm proud of you, James."

My father. Albert Whitcombe, who in seventy-eight years never said a kind word to me at the dinner table, at my wedding, at my mother's funeral. Not one. He'd put out his hand to be shaken at the end of things. It was the plain voice, with the cough in it, the one that had never once been gentle with me.

I had waited most of my life for it to say that.

I bit down on my lip, hard, and kept biting. It split. My mouth filled with blood, thick and warm and tasting of pennies, and I held the word behind it. I didn't turn around. My eyes were running and I let them.

He said it again, quieter. "Proud of you, son."

I stood up. My knees had printed themselves with grit. I walked back across the stones with the empty bucket knocking my leg and the blood running down my chin, and I didn't look at the trough, and I didn't look behind me.

The bell had finished. At the edge of the circle the cicadas started up again, as if there'd been nothing to stop for.

It's a hot late evening, and I'm back at the kitchen table. Same pen from the drawer, same pad that smells of dust. The wasp is back at the olive oil, and I've stopped shooing it. We've come to an understanding. My lip has scabbed over and pulls when I talk, which is no loss, since I don't do much of that now.

You'll want to know why I'm still here. It's not a good reason, and it's two reasons anyway. The first is the loan. It's still out there, a month from default, and the bank's letters are in the glovebox of a car I haven't touched. Staying is not a plan for paying it back.

It's just that the loan has been waiting for me longer than anything else has, and it can wait a bit more. The second reason is simpler. I tried leaving, and you'll have read about the six kilometres by now, or you will. It ends at a wide place in the road with a drystone wall and a goat.

After that I turned around.

So here's what I've worked out. I'm writing it down because I used to write down everything for other people and nobody ever read it. Maybe you will.

Don't say "noted." I know how that sounds. I said it for twenty-two years, to officers, to the photocopier, once to my own mother at a funeral. It's a way of agreeing without being there. In this house it's a way of being there.

Lucía told me the rule, and I said it, out loud, to an empty hall. I think part of me had already started answering.

Don't say "coming." That's the one that got me, through a shutter, in my socks.

"Coming, just a minute."

Four words and a bit of manners. You'll be sure you'd never do it. You'll be lying on a bed that's shorter than it looks, and a woman you buried will say your name in the voice she used when dinner had gone cold, and you'll find out what you're made of. I'd have bet a lot on myself.

I'd have lost.

Here's what does work. At dusk, before the bell, take the bucket from beside the back door. It's got a dent in it. Nobody tells you what it's for. Fill it at the tap.

It takes most of an hour, the tap being what it is, and the wasps will walk along the rim near your hand. Leave them. They want water as badly as anything does. Carry it across the circle, keep your sandals on because the stones are hot, and tip it into the trough. It'll swallow it.

That's the only word for it. Then walk back.

And say nothing. Not "there you go," not "hope that helps," not a cough. I think that's the whole of it. It asks for water and it wants words, and it gets very good at making you think they're the same request. They're not.

Give it the water and keep the words. I did that on the tenth evening with the bell already going, which was late and stupid and very nearly the end of me. Last night I went out early, before the bell, and the voices stayed in the circle where they belong. They called at me from there, politely, and I lay in the room and let them.

It was the first night I slept more than an hour. Nobody told me to expect that, so I'm telling you.

Keep your phone off the sill. The only place in the house that gets two bars is the windowsill in the end room, and I thought that was convenient. Then I rang my brother. He answered before I'd said a word, half a second late, and he sounded tired and perfectly well, and the line was quiet in a way Peter has never been in his life.

So whatever you hold up out there, it can hear. Keep it with the pens. If someone you love picks up, ask yourself whether they ever picked up that fast.

I haven't rung him since. I think about it most days. I'd like to think he's wondering where I am. I'd also like to think he isn't, because I've worked out what happens to the people who do.

Last thing about the voices. Most of them are easy, if you can call it easy. Gloria is Gloria. She says "can you just," and you know exactly what she wants and that she'll never mean it kindly. My mother is cold, and I've heard her be cold for real, so I know the difference, and it's the difference that helps.

Peter says it's just till September. Fine. He's said it before.

The one that gets you is your own. Mine came at the end, standing right in front of me on the stones at mouth height, and it was tired and a bit bored and very reasonable. It said it was all right. It said I could answer, it was only manners. If it ever happens to you, and it will, think about how nobody in your whole life has ever been that kind to you, including you.

That's how you'll know. Anyone that kind who's calling from the circle after nine is not on your side. Out of all of them, that's the one I'd fear most, and I still can't tell you why it nearly worked.

My father came last, and I won't go into that. I'll only say that I held onto my lip, and that it was the hardest thing I've done, and that nobody checked. No one will ever give me a certificate for it. That's all right. I never wanted one.

I'd got used to being thanked for nothing, and it turns out I can get used to not being thanked for something.

It's getting on for nine. The light's still gold on the wall and the cicadas are going. The bucket's by the door, and I filled it earlier, so there's no rush. I'm telling you that because rushing at dusk makes you spill, and spilled water is wasted water. Your trousers will dry.

Take your time.

I hear Lucía in the hall. She's humming, in her housecoat, buttoned to the neck in thirty-odd degrees, and she's going to put her head round the door in a moment and ask if I've eaten. She'll be cheerful about it. She's always cheerful. I've stopped holding it against her, mostly.

She's sorry and she means it, and she's also still taking the council's money, and both of those are true on any given evening. I've decided I can live with a landlady like that. I just won't believe the smile.

You'll get the room at the end of the hall. The bed is shorter than it looks, and the shutters won't quite close, and you'll lie there in the gold light listening to the bell, and you'll think you're a sensible person.

So be careful of her smile. And if Lucía smiles, ask her what the council is collecting.