Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Page A

into the foot of a hill that starts off as a sheep field so perpendicular the sheep look like fridge magnets stuck to it As the hill descends, it becomes a combination of ploughed red earth and grazing pasture, and ends up at the quay and the river.
    Kiln Cottage is named after the lime kiln which now makes a picturesque ruin at the foot of the garden. The cottage stands alone between the quay and the lane which takes traffic down and round into the village. This is so narrow it’s possible to lookinto cars and see what brand of cigarette the driver is smoking while washing dishes at the sink. Or, alternatively, watch the flies gorging themselves in the mucus draining from cows’ nostrils when they’re lumbering past. (You can see how easily I have adapted to not having a television.)
    ‘The foetor there must’ve been them days,’ Mr Brotherhood said, absently polishing the child’s clog on his cap now. ‘Days before the invention of sanitary science. Open drains. I remember when the families what lived here had earth-closets. Wasn’t so long past neither. Slop-pails in the kitchen that smelled to beat the band. Smelt it when you were passin’, you could. But those days evbody roun’ these ways was the same.’
    ‘More tea?’
    ‘Often occurs to me to wonder who that little girl might have been,’ he said, peering into the shoe now as if something on the inside could give him his answer.
    ‘Would you like your tea heated?’
    ‘Just half a cup,’ he said, setting the mug down between his boots, which was the cue for the dog to make a dive for it from the other side of the room. (All my dogs have been tea drinkers.) ‘I’ll have to let some out first.’
    *
    There is a set of photograph albums stored in one of the cupboards. I didn’t look at them for a long time. But when I did, less out of any sense of genuine curiosity than as a way of filling an empty hour (there are some things you don’t want to know, and will put off knowing), a number of things became apparent.
    Staff’s parents had moved into Kiln Cottage as young marrieds, when this place obviously represented what I recently saw described as ‘one of those Shangri-la-type concepts’. (Their well-bred young English faces – the eyes shy yet determined; the skin drawn tight across the bones – weren’t blurred with the inevitable loneliness apparent in the later pictures.)
    They had also changed the cottage over time to suit their needs. A second bathroom, for example, had been added off the kitchen. (‘This sink leaks’ a notice posted here used to say whenI arrived; still there but illegible, like all the other notices around the cottage – ‘The kettle sometimes switches itself on, so after use please switch off at socket’; ‘DANGER: the water from this tap can be VERY hot’, etcetera – it adds to the sense of layers; it forms the newest layer of secret surface information.)
    There had been several other modifications. The original thatched roof had been replaced with slate at some stage. An asparagus patch, which was fertilised with seaweed and lay between the cottage and the kiln, had been turned into a tufted sloping lawn with a clear view over the water.
    Most disconcertingly, what I still think of as the front of the house – the part of it which opens on to a small plot of garden and then the quay – used to be the back. As some of the earliest pictures in the albums make clear, the large cupboard on the lane-side of the living-room is built into a hole where the old front door used to be.
    These discoveries about what had seemed such a rock-solid, unchanged and unchanging set of circumstances left me feeling oddly skewed for a while. I felt the way I felt when I learned (more recently than I care to own up to) that all matter is perpetually in a state of vibration.
    I was still at the stage then when I believed that, simply by quitting London, I had entered a world in which all contradiction and complication had been