Out of politeness more than anything, I put the stuff I’d been carrying down by the door, setting off an epic cloudburst of dust, and I sat on the edge of the sofa while the little bird shivered in its cage and Henry searched for something in the kitchen.
“Do you like olives?” he said, not exactly hanging on an answer. “I’ve got a jar somewhere.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“Tea? Soup? I’m making soup.”
“I don’t need anything. I’m fine.”
“Hungry work, I’d have thought,” he said, “moving.”
“I’m used to it.”
“Lucky you,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.
“If you say so.”
“Are you furious?” he asked me, and I wasn’t expecting that question, so I was honest. I didn’t have time to hide my answer behind anything, to cover it up.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am, sort of. I hate change.”
In the silence that followed he went back to poking at the keyboard of a clunky old laptop. The ancient fridge hummed. The bird fussed. My asthma was starting up, that wet wheeze like chunks of my breath being passed through a sieve. I am allergic to dust. It makes my eyes burn and my nose run and my lungs block all the exits, and it is everywhere, I know, but that old house was the Mothership, the source of its Nile. I used my inhaler and concentrated on breathing, and I had another look around while Henry tapped away. The back wall was covered in clocks, different shapes and sizes, not one of them set to the same time. All that ticking sounded like rain dripping somewhere on a roof.
“Change,” Henry Lake said, “is unavoidable. Essential. It’s the engine of everything.”
“I know,” I said, because I hadn’t meant it at an atomic level, I’d just meant the my-mum, emotional-rebound kind of change.
“Imagine life without it,” he said. “A rock in a stream.”
“Rocks change,” I said. “The water changes them,” and Henry smiled.
“You’re a smart one, aren’t you. I can see we are going to be friends.”
“Friends are a bit of a sore topic for me,” I said.
“It’ll pass,” said Henry. “Life will provide.”
“You reckon?”
“I’m an unspeakably old man,” he said.
“So?”
“So I’ve seen it enough times to know.”
“I haven’t,” I said.
“But you will.”
It was quiet then, and I looked at the woman’s portrait again, the smooth skin of her back, her turning head. I looked at her for a long time.
“I do like that painting,” I said, and he smiled.
“Lifetimes since I did that.”
“You did it?”
“I used to love to paint,” he said. “A very long time ago. And then a very long time ago, I gave it up.”
Some tiny part of me believed the woman in the portrait might actually turn around. I remember thinking how silly that was, that I felt like that, even in that moment. “She’s very lovely.”
“Yes.” Henry frowned and carried on typing. “She was.”
He turned the laptop screen toward me, some kind of aerial view. Wild dust, scrubby trees, a shrunk river. A pack of dogs crossed the picture from bottom corner to top. Tall slanted shadows, left to right. “Look at this,” he said. “Today, we’re on the savanna.”
“Today?”
“Yes. See?” He got up and pointed to the giant wall map. “Sub-Saharan Africa. About here.” He put a pin in it.
“Have you been to all of those places?” I said. “With all of those pins?”
The estate agents had called Henry Lake a recluse. They hadn’t mentioned anything about world travel.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said.
“What manner?”
He didn’t answer me. Not directly. He said, “Have you ever seen these dogs in the wild?”
“Me? Nope. Never been anywhere. Not like that. I don’t even know what kind of dogs they are.”
“Well,” he said, flourishing his hands like a magician at the end of a trick. “There. Painted dogs. You’ve seen them now.”
“Yes, but we’re not in the wild, are we. We’re not actually there.”
Henry reached out a hand to touch the screen. “We work with what we have,” he said. “There’s more than one way to see the world these days.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you say so.”
The look on his face was kind of pleading. He so wanted to be right. “Those dogs are moving across that ground right now. Right this minute. Look. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that good enough?”
He typed something into the filthy keyboard and the picture zoomed, close up, a dog moving low to the ground, ears turning like satellite dishes, mouth dripping chewed foam and a grin. I remember the stark, strong shadows and the dogs’ tongues lolling, and I might have heard the ragged sounds of their breath. I can’t have felt the blunt heat of the air, the greasy nap of their fur. Still, my memory fills in those blanks for me anyway, and those dogs seem hyperreal now to me.
“How does it work?” I said. “Do you just shut your eyes and stick a pin in the wall?”
“Something like that.”
“Right.”
“Modern technology. It’s a tremendous help for someone like me.”
“Someone like you?”
“I can’t get out,” Henry Lake said.
“What, ever?”
He shook his head. “It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Really?”
I wanted to know how he lived like that. Where did his food come from? What happened if he got sick? And I wanted to know why too, more than anything, but I’d only just met him, so I was nervous to ask. Mum started calling me from downstairs, fifth-gear annoyed with me already—something about a chest of drawers, something about my skateboard being a death trap, something else about me lifting a finger to help.
“You’d better go,” he said, and I picked up my boxes from where I’d left them by the door, and our conversation was over.
Henry hunched down closer at his table, a world traveler under house arrest, with his elbow in a plate of dried sauce, his gnarled, papery hand scratching at the roots of his beard. One foot in the savanna, the other trapped in the yolk of an egg.