Terroir by Graham Mort

blinds the lawn was covered in bluish dew and there were jackdaws hopping across the turned earth of the flowerbeds. Beyond the garden were fields of maize and barley, cabbages spreading to the flat line of the horizon. Last year it had been sunflowers. Turnesol. The mist had almost cleared.
    She made coffee, poured breakfast cereal into a bowl, plugged in the laptop at the kitchen table and piled up a stack of case notes with the report she was working on. The house was at the edge of the village and it was quiet, just the odd farm vehicle moving on the lane outside. It led nowhere, to a farm gate, to those fields of drilled crops. She ate the cereal walking barefoot on the lawn where there was no one to see her except the jackdaws squabbling in the ash tree now. The dew was numbingly cold, like needles against her toes.
    Zoscia dried her feet, dropped the dishes into the sink, found her spectacles and set to work. She thought about Carl waking in a hotel room, finding a crisp shirt from his luggage, shaving, fastening cuff links, pulling the lapels of his suit jacket tight. She frowned at the dry air of a hotel, anonymous rooms, air conditioning, the breakfast queue. Malaysian and Filipino maids moving between tables in tight uniforms. The way Carl would watch them. All that smiling politeness, their real lives somewhere else.
    Zoscia worked all morning, stopping for coffee and a cigarette which she smoked sitting at the garden table on the iron chairs. Her mobile rang a couple of times but she saw it was the office and let it go onto answerphone. She’d pick up the calls later and deal with them in one go. She could always blame the signal, which came and went like a ghost here. Their phones worked almost everywhere but at home. That’s good, Carl said when they found out it was the downside of their new house. No signal, excellent. Fuck them. Downside was upside. To hell with it. Peace. Until a new radio mast went up and one bar became five. Not yet. As she pulled the smoke into her lungs, she remembered her mother tying up her pigtails before she left for school. Her leather satchel with the broken strap. She was in a home now and didn’t know them. Zoscia stubbed the cigarette. She cleared the dirty cups and plates into the dishwasher and ran a cloth over the sink, spattered with coffee grounds from the cafetière.
    Carl entered the main stream of traffic. The sun was trying to burn away the mist. It cast a yellow glow onto the windscreen. Each time he passed into a zone of cold air – a temperature inversion – there was a thicker band of white. The radio news was followed by one of those arts programmes where the guests had done supposedly interesting things and written a book about it. An actress writing about her father who’d been a wall of death rider; an ex - gang leader who ran an NGO in the Sudan; a mother who’d published a diary about her son’s autism. Carl switched the radio off. In the silence, he though about Anika. He thought about Michal, the smell of his baby head, his tiny fingernails, the creases in his skin. Fat thighs buttoned into a striped baby suit. The way he’d bang a wooden spoon against this highchair or patter across the kitchen floor, pulling himself upright against the fridge or kitchen cabinets. He’d be walking soon. Into the future, into whatever lay ahead.
    The car appeared to glide, entering another veil of mist that thinned momentarily then seemed to clear. He’d got the climate control on so it was warm. The heated door mirrors stayed clear. Carl pressed the accelerator and gathered a little speed. The turbo was almost silent. He liked that relaxed sense of speed. The scent of leather upholstery that creaked faintly as he shifted in the seat. The leather steering wheel and gear shift. His hands were freckled, the skin softly wrinkled. But the car was almost new, renewed every three years, mocking him.
    The banks of the motorway were