She’s a little drunk, my wife. That’s okay. So am I. On a day like this—most of this usually grey country dozing in a heatwave for the last month and both of us with a week off work—what else is there to do but spend the afternoon in a beer garden and have a boozy lunch?

“Come on. I haven’t been up here since I was a kid.” Dawn leans closer to kiss my cheek. It’s heat and wine on my skin and I lick salty sweat from my lips as I pretend to think it over while knowing I’m about to agree. We’re less than ten minutes from the pub and the pricey houses all along Hopton Road, but this path lined by shrubs and bushes made tired and brown by the temperatures, and the fences around the grounds (grounds, not gardens) feels far removed from the pub and the unbroken sunshine with its pretty flowerbeds and landscaping. There’s nobody else in sight. Nobody else with the idea of climbing the steps inside Muscott Tower. Dawn’s idea.

“It won’t be open. It’s gone three,” I say.

“Bet you a drink it is open.”

She’s already walking towards the low fence and gate at the foot of the entrance steps. Her legs are bare; her denim skirt is slightly above the knee and her legs gleam. This is where I want to be, I think. Always. In the sun and the heat with Dawn always happy and pretty. This is the life.

Just a little drunk?

I snigger at myself and follow as Dawn reaches the gate and the sign beside it listing the opening hours. There’s no need to check the times: the doors at the top of the steps are wide open, offering a little glimpse of the old walls, their stone, their age. Muscott Tower is at least five hundred years old, built in the centuries before Muscott was a town, before the Civil War or the Great Fire of London or the Industrial Revolution. Or anything that’s shaped this country and become a history lesson for bored kids waiting for the final bell of the day to send them home. Five centuries of summer, winter, storms, and days like this when the summer has knocked everyone into a doze and turned green bushes into tatty brown.

“How much is it?” I ask.

“Six quid each.”

“Twelve pissing quid to climb some steps?”

“It’s worth it. The view is great.” Dawn laughs softly. “I think. Been a while.”

We know the Tower and this part of Muscott. We grew up here, went to the same schools, then left home for different universities. Return visits to the hometown, shared nights in the pub and at gigs with friends we still sometimes see meant we stayed mates. That developed into something more in our early twenties. Now close to fifteen years later and after nine years of marriage, we have our mid-terrace house a few miles across Muscott. Both sets of our parents sold our childhood homes to move away. Our visits to this area with its village feel, its houses completely out of our reach, and this trailing path like a secret with the Tower bisecting it are occasional. And visits are all they are. The days of people like us—mid thirties, in decent jobs and without kids—being able to afford a house here to start a family are long gone. They died when people like our parents moved and landlords rented out their houses for hundreds more a month than their mortgages cost.

“You really want to trek up there?” I crane my neck to peer to the roof. The Tower is probably the same height as a six-storey block of flats. Cracks and thin splits in the exterior brickwork prove its age, but it also has a sturdiness and solidity that say there’s still strength in the structure.

“Yeah. It’ll be fun.” Dawn takes a furtive look around and lightly squeezes my groin. “We can have a quickie on the roof.”

“Really?”

Twelve quid suddenly doesn’t seem like too much to climb the steps and stand under the perfect blue of this late July sky.

Dawn laughs. “No. Not at all.”

“Shit.”

She ascends the steps. I follow, enjoying the view, and we enter the Tower.

Although there are small windows and slats plus the doors we’ve just come through, vision goes almost completely black for a second. I blink, adjusting to the change of light, welcoming the cooler air.

It’s larger than I expected. The walls stretch high; the floor is paving, worn in places, mostly flat and coloured a faded yellow. Faded is the key issue. Bricks, paving; the orange and brown of the surrounding walls. All faded. Even the small desk where a guy in his late middle-age sits with a Chromebook, his phone, and a few other items is faded. He smiles and it’s warm.

“Good afternoon.” His voice is smooth and cultured. He could work as a butler.

“Hi.” Dawn crosses to him and I don’t miss his gaze on her. “Are we too late to come in? We weren’t sure what time you closed.”

“Last visits are quarter to four.” He makes a show of checking his watch. “I think we can squeeze you in, madam. Not as if I’m rushed off my feet this afternoon.”

He chuckles. I’m in a good enough mood to let him off his checking out my wife, although when we take the steps through the little alcove, I’ll be sure to send Dawn up first and block the old man’s eyes on her.

“Thanks. I came up here when I was a kid. Been meaning to come back since, but never got round to it.”

She’s like this especially after a drink. Dawn likes people. I say to her she’s like an old lady at a bus stop, talking to anyone who’ll listen. And she tells me that’s exactly what she’ll do when we’re old farts.

“Do you know the history of the Tower and the area?” he asks.

“More or less. We grew up here.”

I dig out my phone to pay, not too interested in a history lesson. He gives it anyway. Old times; dead kings; wars and upheaval under our feet, sleeping in the earth. Mouldering there. The potted version is the Tower was built in the late fifteenth century for a family who owned Muscott back when it was only a village connected loosely to surrounding villages which eventually become the town Dawn and I know. It passed through other families thanks to marriages and deaths and the long years. An adjoining building and other smaller dwellings were destroyed around 1650 (ten to five, I say, and while Dawn laughs, our guide doesn’t). Whoever owned it after that didn’t rebuild and the Tower became its own structure in private hands until the last owners sold it in the 1960s and it made its way into the ownership of a private company. It’s a listed building; doing anything to it other than general maintenance and repair is out of the question. He winks at us right then and says no matter how much some people would like to knock it down and sell off the land, then smiles as if the three of us share a secret. Dawn nods in the right places and I give my phone a discreet shake. He’s still checking her out; Dawn catches the movement.

“We’re okay to go up, then?” she asks.

“By all means. The passage up is a tad tight. You’ll be fine, though.”

“We definitely will.” I put a tiny emphasis on the first words and pay. He insists we take a few thin booklets “on the house” which look to detail the history he’s just told us. Dawn doesn’t have pockets in her skirt. I jam them into the side pocket of my cargo shorts and take her hand.

“Don’t lock up before we come down,” Dawn says.

He puts a hand on his chest. “Not a chance, my dear. Enjoy the view.”

Not as much as you are.

I smile. Dawn catches my eye. She’s seen the old gent’s wandering gaze. Of course she has. Women always do.

Dawn a step ahead, we enter the narrow opening directly opposite the man and his quiet afternoon. My eyes take another moment to adjust. Slitted windows cut into the ancient stone let sunlight poke its fingers in and fall to the small steps. I’m not a tall guy, but I’ll have to tread practically sideways; there’s no chance I can fit my whole foot on one of these steps.

“Who the fuck lived here?” I whisper. “Hobbits?”

She shushes me, checks the angle to make sure only I can see, and wiggles her bum. Without bothering to check if I’m in the old man’s view, I squeeze her and pretend to slide my hand around to her front. She smacks it away and starts up with a hand on the rail. I use the curving wall, pretty much walking on tip-toe. As narrow as the slits are, the sunlight is hot. The days before this heatwave were usual July before they climbed above thirty overnight and have hovered around thirty-five since. Not a drop of rain since and barely any breeze. People have been complaining since day two. Not me. Bring on the sunshine. Bring on moments like this with the stale but still pleasant air in this staircase and now having to turn sideways to keep ascending.

“Christ. He wasn’t joking,” I say. “The passage is definitely tight.”

“I forgot about this. It’s okay in a minute.”

My fingers are still on the wall, still trailing across scars. Tiny flakes fall silently. I rub the tips of my fingers together, feeling the grit and the dust. Centuries of it. More time than I will ever have. More time than I can possibly know even if I combined my life with my parents and their parents and their parents. All the time sliding down an endless tunnel, and the weak flutter of the light at its end is the moment the first brick of Muscott Tower is placed into position.

I grunt, mouth dry and tasting of cold lager. I get like this after a few, sometimes. Thinking too much. Thinking in ways my fully sober mind doesn’t touch. But then if I’d been fully sober, no way would we be clambering up these stairs, me with my back to the wall simply to fit, and Dawn panting in the heat. Conversation stops as we focus on one step in front of the other, tasting the summer and the age. After what feels like half an hour but is more like three minutes, Dawn cheers and fresh air—boiling but fresher than the stairs—hits me.

“Finally.” I follow her to the roof and to the view.

“Wow.” My admiration is unforced; my surprise is completely real.

“Told you,” she says just a little smugly.

The Tower isn’t the tallest building I’ve ever been up. Probably not even the tallest building in Muscott. Right now with the perfect sheen of the sky and the smells of summer all around, it doesn’t need to be the tallest. It only needs to be what it is: a place to see across Muscott—a sleeping Muscott made sluggish by the heat. Roads, pathways, long avenues, and little lanes between houses alongside the huge gardens and grounds of homes we will never be able to own; swimming pools and garages separate from the houses; grass bordering the pavements and low bushes offering a fraction of shade to those pavements. The post office on Hopton Road that’s been there since at least our childhoods; the wide path beside it that reaches the high fence around the bowls lawn, private tennis courts, and then a huge circle of grass turned into the yellow of old hay. Further out, the even more expensive homes built in the last twenty years. I have faint memories of the land before those homes. Nothing but trees and fields all the way to the neighbouring villages. The view of those empty miles is gone. In its place, this view of our resting town overseen by an endless sky, a fat sun I can feel through my hat; our town where Hopton Road meets Vine Avenue and its little offshoots of lanes that end at Williams’ Woods. The woods where friends and I spent a lot of time as kids in the shade and the cool of days like this or trudging through air stinging with frost.

Muscott below us. Our home—or at least this part of it—available to us solely through snatched moments. Not ours to know, and definitely not ours to own even a piece of this day.

“Impressive.”

Dawn catches on something in my voice. She looks at me, not smiling, and I keep my gaze on the curving line of Hopton Road, tracking it until I stop on the pub. A vehicle pulls into the car park, and my eyes are good enough to make out it’s a BMW.

“You okay?” Dawn asks.

A couple emerge from the car. The distance is too great to be sure—they might be around our age. All at once and for no good reason, I hate this nameless, faceless couple and their car. Their lives I don’t know but can see. Their money. Their drive out to the pub for lunch as they doubtless do whenever the hell they like, not when they manage to put the money together for an occasion. Two people who definitely live within walking distance of this pub, who have been out all day. A trip a few hours ago to the coast thirty miles away; a drive home and stopping here for a quick drink. And all of it done without any thought because there didn’t need to be any thought or planning or thinking about money.

“Si?” Dawn pulls on my wrist. “What’s wrong?”

I clear my throat. “Nothing. I’m good.” Pulling her close, cupping her hip, I trace a light touch on her skin where her t-shirt leaves a tiny gap between it and her skirt.

“Si.” She won’t let it go, and despite my sudden bad mood, this makes me laugh gently.

“Just seeing it like this.” I wave at the picture below. We’re standing above a painting created by an artist who knows how to add detail the eye doesn’t see at first and then can’t unsee.

The young trees near the post office, probably planted a decade ago compared to the oaks that have been standing for a few hundred years at the junction of the road and Vine Avenue. The wall beside the cut-through that links the Avenue with Merson Way standing out because half of it has been replaced, so the yellow bricks don’t match the old brown of the next section. The display stand at the curve of the road to announce local business and issues. Five miles away on our street, the stand would be destroyed purely because it could be. Here, it stands unmolested and clean. The sun glints on the glass.

“What’s wrong with it? This is a lovely view,” Dawn replies.

“I know. It’s a great place. We had it when we were kids, but now . . .”

“What?”

“Would you live here? Like our parents did?”

“We have the same parents?” She pulls away in mock horror, and I love her for trying to lighten my mood.

“You know what I mean,” I say.

“Yeah. I do.” Dawn sighs. “I’d buy a house here tomorrow if we could. Not much chance, though.”

“No.”

“It’s okay. We’ve got our house. We’ve got enough.”

I wipe hot sweat from my neck. Even with the best part of a whole bottle of lotion smeared on our skin, we’ll have to get the after-sun out when we’re home. Home in our little house on our street that could never have a display like the one below with the sun winking. Glinting.

“We should be able to buy a house here. Our parents did. It was no big deal for them. They did it on one salary, for Christ’s sake. We can’t do it on two. We can’t have this comfortable, boring middle-class life in this boring place. That pisses me off. I know it does for you, too,” I say.

“Yeah. A lot. You’re right, but what we can do about it?”

“Not much.”

I’ve brought the mood down and I’m sorry for it, but there’s only my tired anger and bitterness up here now.

We stand together in silence, hand in hand, and I let my eyes move where they want across the slumbering streets. The dreaming places. Funny to think of the hundreds of houses down there and all of them new when our parents bought their homes. Funny to think of that past and people our age beginning their lives and their families with the view to the west offering a clear line of sight out to Muscott’s surrounding villages. On days like this with the sun free to land on every inch of the fields or days when there was nothing but ice in the wind and the twilight coming down hard to the clean roads and avenues. To the spaces below the land.

Something behind my eyes turns over. It feels like a key turning in a lock, and while I’m aware of Dawn’s hand and of how small we are under the sky, I’m down there on the pavement, flat on the ground with my ear to the baking surface. Listening. A heartbeat.

A dream.

“Let’s head off.” Dawn squeezes my hand. I crash back into myself and come close to staggering. It’s the sun and the beer. Too much of both. We need our cool bedroom and an hour or so together in its privacy and to be far away from this dream.

“We can stay a bit longer,” I reply.

“It’s okay. Time’s getting on and I need a pee.”

Surprised, I check my watch. It feels like we’ve been up here for all of five minutes, but it’s somehow pushing half an hour. The old fart downstairs will be locking up in fifteen minutes, and on the tiny chance anyone fancies exploring the Tower and taking the narrow staircase, he’ll have turned them away.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring you down,” I say.

“It’s fine. You’re right. I love coming here. I loved living here as a kid, and there’s a big part of me pissed off our parents moved.”

“Instead of leaving us their houses?” I smile.

“Well, put it like that and I sound like a bitch.” She answers my smile with her own. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” And I do. And there’s no way around it. A life here isn’t for us. If the houses cost the same as they did in the early 70s, we’d be laughing. Instead, we have what we have, and the dozing lanes and roads below have what they have. A heartbeat far below the surface.

It’s time to go. Too much to drink; too much sun.

Dawn leading the way and still holding my hand, we descend the stairs, neither of us speaking. Going down is easier than coming up, although the cramped space is still pretty horrible. Heat follows us along with the scent of dust and grit on the walls. I concentrate on Dawn’s hair, the brown lightened by the day, and silently promise her a happy week off work. Another lunch somewhere; a drive to the coast. Nothing major. Enough for us because it has to be enough.

“I thought I might have to come and get you,” the old gent says.

“Sorry. Lost track of time,” Dawn replies.

“Lovely view, isn’t it?”

“It really is.”

He leaves the desk as we head towards the doors and he’s professional enough to keep his keys almost out of sight. We thank him; he tells us to come again and make sure we tell our friends about the Tower, as if it’s a new attraction in Muscott. We smile and nod and his eyes linger another second too long on Dawn and I’m the same second away from putting myself between them to block his view. He steps out of sight and Dawn eyes me.

“Going to punch him?” she whispers.

“Perv.” I say it slightly too loudly and she puts a finger to her lips.

Again hand in hand, we follow Tower Lane towards Hopton Road, emerging into unbroken sunshine. I’m painfully thirsty, and while the sunlight is still glorious, it’s also overpowering.

“Taxi or pee?” I hope for the former if only to get home quickly.

“Pee, definitely. Call the taxi now and tell them to pick us up outside the pub.”

She increases her speed despite the heat. I call the taxi; they’ll be ten minutes. We walk and I crack a few jokes, hoping to bring back some of the good mood before my little speech up on the roof of the Tower. Dawn goes with it, understanding it, understanding me. The occasional car passes. The growl of a lawnmower is distant, and I wonder who’s mad enough to cut their grass in this heat, especially when the grass will be close to dead. The answer is all around us. Middle England in its dozing peace. Middle England cutting its grass even with the temperatures as high as they are. Middle England shutting us out.

We cross the road, barely bothering to check for traffic, and Dawn gives me a quick kiss.

“Don’t run off,” she says.

“Don’t take too long.”

The entrance to the pub is around the side. I watch her go and briefly consider cancelling the taxi so we can have another drink here and relish the cool shadows inside. Deciding against it, I lean on the low wall running the length of the pub’s front and lower my head to study the pavement. It’s been freshly covered. No cracks or potholes here. Only the black ground, probably too hot to touch.

Probably.

Unsure why I’m moving, I squat and reach for the pavement. Heat meets me, but it’s bearable instead of the oven touch I expected. Fingers splayed, I listen to nothing but the blood in my ears and the faint whisper of my breath. Dawn will be back any minute; the taxi’s on its way, and it’s only the layout of the pub that means I’m unseen. No traffic here; no footsteps on these pavements and lanes and dead grass. Only me here right this second with the home I’m locked out of. My home. I know this area as I know my own name because both belong to me.

“This isn’t right.”

Someone speaks. It might be me.

“This is mine.”

Yes. It is. And it’s wrong that I’m forbidden from living here, from building a life in what is mine purely because of something as basic as money. Private landlords; mortgage lenders; politicians and everyone else conspiring to keep what is mine out of my hands because my face doesn’t fit.

The beating heart below. The sleeping and the dreaming.

It’s old. I can feel that. Much older than the houses built on top of its slumber. It might be older than any part of the town or the county. Sleeping under the ground before there was anything I would recognise. An old god of the land.

Now there is heat on my fingers and it is a good heat. A welcome fire. A cleansing fire.

What the hell is this?

I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m the only living thing in Muscott and maybe further. The sleeping god isn’t in Muscott. It’s under Muscott and if it rises . . . if it comes to the pavements and the roads . . .

What then?

I see.

Houses costing at least half a million vanishing from view as they fall into pits in the earth; gardens of perfect grass and flowerbeds swallowed by chasms; the water of dozens of swimming pools churning and boiling and spilling into new crevasses. In place of those homes, sheets of dirty air and smoke turning the summer day into night. It’s a night lit by the glow of a hundred dancing fires from wrecked gas lines. The song of those fires; the harmony of the crackle and the roar and the screams. Hopton Road buckling, breaking, coughing up in huge shards and chunks of fresh tarmac to pierce the smoke before raining down to the people attempting to flee. Crushing bodies; opening skulls. Blood boiled away by steam bursting from underground pipes; the corpses left as smears on the rubble. The pub burning, burning. Its windows blown out to scatter glass and bodies pierced with shards. The lanes branching off Vine Avenue torn into pieces, spilling people into the terrible rumbling emerging from the depths; the same lanes snapping like twigs so there is no longer any access to Williams’ Woods, so the Woods exist without the touch of human life and are happy for it. The rumbling, the groaning from far underground where the days and the sun never reach, returning to a world so far removed from that moment the first brick of Muscott Tower was put into place. Returning to take its place and rule over the chaos and the fires. Sheets of billowing smoke blown into the ruptured windows of the few remaining homes, choking those hiding in the wreckage, rising to obscure the sun; rising higher and higher while below that new night, this area of Muscott with all its middle-class glory and beauty collapses into the widening pit of a hungry God’s mouth.

And everything wiped away, taken from those who live here as they have taken it from me. From us.

“Si?”

Dawn calls to me from the side of the car park. My wife joining me in the wait for our taxi to take us across the miles to our home. My wife who deserves more than I’m allowed to give her.

I push on the boiling ground, my palm flat and my hope that my beating heart is somehow audible through the layers of ground and earth as the ancient heart under my palm reaches me.

“Si? You okay?”

She’s seconds away.

I whisper: “Wake up.”

Dawn reaches me as I stand and wiggle my foot. “Tying my shoelace. Good pee?”

“The staff gave me dirty looks when I didn’t buy a drink.”

“Balls to them. We spent enough at lunch.”

That gets me a little laugh. Dawn studies the pavement, then looks back to me. She kisses me, mouth open slightly, and I taste everything that is good in the world.

“You sure you’re okay?” she asks.

“Never better.” It’s the warm truth. Never better because I know what’s coming to these streets. It’s coming to put things right. And after the fires are out, the smoke clears, and the smashed and broken bodies are given to the ground, it’ll be a fair town for everyone. After the god below my feet goes back to sleep. I’m sure it will.

I pull her to the wall. “Taxi will be here any minute.”

We wait side by side while the afternoon burns. We talk and Muscott slumbers. The Muscott all around us and below our feet where sleeping becomes waking.

While the sun shines down on England, we wait.