Round the corner, on the next face, there’s a figure with a woman’s body and a horse’s head. She’s down on one knee with her arm out, reaching for a man who has his own arm up over his head. The museum says this “probably illustrates the story of the horse-headed yakshi who ate her victims.”

That’s a fair summary of the first part. The story is a jataka, one of the tales of the Buddha’s earlier lives, number 432 in the standard collection. A queen of Benares swore an oath she knew was false: if she was lying, she said, let her be reborn as a demon with a horse’s face. She was. After three years serving the demon king, she was given leave to eat any human who strayed into a certain stretch of country. One day she caught a young brahmin, and instead of eating him she fell in love with him. She kept him in a cave, and when she went out she rolled a stone across the mouth so he couldn’t leave.

They had a son, and this son is the one the story is about, because he’s the future Buddha. When he was old enough, he asked his mother how far her ground reached, and she told him. She named the landmarks and pointed out the space, thirty leagues by five. Then he moved the stone while she was away, and he and his father ran for the edge of it. She came after them and stopped where her ground stopped. She begged them to come back. They wouldn’t.

So she gave her son the only thing she had left to give. “Take, my child, this invaluable charm,” she says in the 1897 English translation: a charm that let him follow anyone’s footsteps, even twelve years after they’d been made. Then she died there at the boundary, of grief.

I keep coming back to what she gave him, and that she gave it twice. When he asked where her ground ended, she told him, landmark by landmark. That was all he needed to leave her. Then, at the line she couldn’t cross, she gave him what she couldn’t have herself: the power to follow anyone, anywhere.

The rest of the story barely remembers her. The son goes to work for the king of Benares. To test him, the king and his chaplain steal from their own treasury and hide the loot in a reservoir, and he tracks them, even through the air. “I see footsteps in the air,” he says. “Bring me a ladder.” The jataka is told to explain a seven-year-old boy in the Buddha’s own day who could read footprints. In this story she isn’t the point. She’s how the boy got his gift.

If that is her, the carver gave her the grab. That’s the right scene for a railing about wine and music. Wine-pouring, drunk musicians and a woman with a horse’s head who eats people all make a lively, slightly dangerous post. But anyone walking past who knew the story would have known how it ended. She doesn’t eat him. She falls in love with him, shows her son the way out, and dies at the edge of her ground.

I count my lengths by the man in lane three.

The lido is heated, which is the only reason anyone our age is in it in January. At half six the water steams and the lights are still on. He gets in first, always, and sets off with a slow crawl that hasn’t changed in the six years I’ve been coming. I wait on the steps until he reaches the far end, then push off, so that he touches the deep end when I touch the shallow end, and the other way round. I swim breaststroke with my head up, so I can see him through the steam the whole way. I count his turns, not mine. He does forty. When he gets out, I do one more, and that one is mine.

I could just stop when he does. But counting is what keeps my mind in the water, and my own I lose at about twelve, thinking about something else. His I don’t lose. There’s a turn to watch for every time.

We’ve spoken perhaps a dozen times, in the queue at the gate, about the cold. I don’t know his name. In my head he’s Lane Three.

After Christmas the council let lanes three to six to a triathlon club on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. That left lane one, which is the fast lane, and lane two, which is mine. The first Tuesday he stood at the edge of lane three, looking at a young man in a wetsuit, then walked along and got into lane two, my lane.

The sign at the end says keep left. With two of us that meant passing in the middle every length, him on one side of the black line and me on the other. He breathes to his right, and coming back I was on his right, a yard away. Every time we passed, he lifted his head to see where I was.

At the shallow end, on his twenty-sixth length, he stopped and held the wall. He looked up at the pace clock, the way people look at a clock for something a clock can’t tell them. His lips were moving.

I know that face. I had it most mornings, before him.

I swam the length and touched the wall beside him. “Twenty-six,” I said, and pushed off before I could see what he made of it.

It’s an odd thing to let a man know, that you’ve been counting every length he swims. I’d been doing it for six years. Halfway down I thought of several better things I could have said, such as nothing.

He didn’t stop again. At forty he got out, and I did my one more and didn’t look to see if he was looking.

On Wednesday there was no club. Lane three was empty and flat. I came out of the changing room at half six, and he was already in, at the shallow end of lane two, holding the wall. He stayed there while I came down the steps. When I was in the water beside him, he pushed off, and I waited until he touched the deep end, and went.

I’ll have to think of something else to call him.

Most museum objects this old are dated to a century, or a span of them. The date comes from the colophon, a note on the last leaf, which the museum has translated: “This is a religious donation of Āryaśrīmittra, an eminent follower of the Mahāyāna, a monk coming from Nepal.” He asks that the merit go first to his teacher, his preceptor, his mother and his father, and then to every living being. Then comes the date: “In the year 239 [Newar Era], on the 8th [tithi] in the bright fortnight of Āśvina, at the great monastery of Vikramaśīla.”

There’s no Sunday in it, and no September. The scribe counted by the moon: the eighth lunar day after the new moon, in the month of Āśvina, in year 239 of the Nepalese era. A lunar day doesn’t start at midnight. It starts whenever the moon reaches a certain distance from the sun, which can happen at any hour. Someone later turned that into a day of the week in the calendar Europe used then. I tried the conversion myself, roughly: the new moon fell around midnight between 6 and 7 September 1119, so the eighth lunar day ran from about Saturday evening to Sunday evening. The usual rule gives a day the lunar day in force at sunrise, so that’s Sunday. The conversion holds. It just isn’t what the scribe wrote.

Then the database copies that one Sunday onto everything. The paintings on the leaves and covers were added in Nepal, after the book came north, the museum says, so not on that day. The last leaf’s back is blank, and it has the date too. At some point between the 1500s and the 1800s, someone pasted yellow Nepalese paper onto the first leaf to stop it falling apart. A corner near the end is patched with the same kind of paper. Folio 2 was lost before the museum bought the book in 1938. None of these days were written down anywhere, so a database with one date field per record files them all under the Sunday.

The colophon wasn’t written to date the book for us. It said who gave it, where, under which moon, and who the merit was for. The museum’s database needs one day, so it has one, and it’s right. Nobody wrote down the other days.

Each has its own record, and the records are nearly identical. Here is one: “Wood, camelid hair.” Ten inches long, a quarter of an inch thick. Dated “10th–16th century (?)”, which is a span of about seven hundred years with a question mark after it. No place more exact than Peru. The others differ only in length, from about fifteen centimetres to twenty-six.

The photographs are where they stop being identical. There aren’t seventy-three; there are four, and each record points to one of them, so the spindle you looked up is somewhere in a group of fifteen to twenty-five, laid out like pencils. In one photograph a handwritten card sits at the bottom: “115-130”, the run of catalogue numbers in the shot. In every photograph the yarn is wound around the middle of each shaft, and the amount is different on every one. Some are thick with it. Some have a thin wrap you could unwind in a minute. Some yarn is dark and some is pale, and a few loose ends curl off the side.

A finished cloth hides how long it took. A spindle with yarn on it does the opposite. It holds exactly as much as was spun before someone stopped. That might have been the end of a day, or the moment the work was put away for good. I don’t know which, for any of these. The record doesn’t say where they were found. Elsewhere, on the dry Peruvian coast, spindles turn up with yarn still on them in workbaskets buried with their owners, but I can’t tell you that’s what happened to these seventy-three.

What I can say is that the museum can’t date any of them to within seven centuries, and yet each one shows, to the turn, how far its spinner got. The records make them all but identical. The photographs show seventy-three different stopping points.

The log book kept in the wheelhouse of the Skellow Sound ferry. Whoever has the boat fills it in. Only the entries that matter here are shown.

Lost Property. Kept in the hardback book on the front desk at the baths, under the till. Anyone on the desk writes in it. Columns: date, item, where found, found by, claimed.

(Marcus, margin, biro) Dilys, Mr Pugh’s left his towel every time he’s been in. Does he ever remember it?

(Dilys, under it, felt tip) Not so far. Swims Tuesday lunchtimes, leaves without it, comes back for it.

(Marcus) He’s in Thursdays too. Evenings.

(Dilys) I know. It’s always folded, though. Forgets the towel, never forgets to fold it.

(Marcus) He never goes back to look for it. Comes straight to the desk, and then asks how my exams are going. Every time.

(Dilys) Asks me about my leeks. Knows more about my allotment than my husband does.

(Marcus) He didn’t come Thursday. I looked.

(Dilys) Nor Tuesday.

(Dilys) He’s back. Came to the desk with the towel in his bag and said “Anything handed in for me?” I said not today. He said “Well, there’s a first.” He’s been at his daughter’s in Leeds for the new baby. Showed me a photo. Said his house is very quiet after a fortnight of a baby. Then he asked was my mum home from hospital yet. I’d mentioned that once, in February. I wrote him in anyway, for a laugh.

(Marcus) That’s not lost property.

(Dilys) I’m not sure the others were either.

(Marcus) I’ll bring biscuits on Thursday. I want to see the baby photos.

LENTIL SOUP (serves 4, or 2 if it’s been one of those days)

1 mug red lentils 1 onion 2 carrots 1 stock cube water, about 4 mugs salt a spoon of vinegar at the end

Onion and carrots small. Soften them in the pan in a bit of oil, don’t brown. Lentils in, rinse them first. Water, stock cube. Simmer until the lentils have gone to nothing, about 25 min. Stir it anticlockwise. Vinegar last.

(pencil, slanting) Mam: Don’t add the salt until the end or the lentils go tough. Not proper cooks who say otherwise.

(blue biro, in the margin by “1 mug”) Rhian: Which mug?? Asked Mam. She said “the mug.”

(blue biro, underneath, later) Rhian, 2019: It was the blue one with the chip. Measured it after the clearance: 250ml to the brim, so the lentils are about 200g. Writing it here so it isn’t lost.

(blue biro, lower down) Rhian: The salt thing is wrong. I’ve put it in at the start for 25 years and the lentils are fine. I never told Mam.

(blue biro, by “anticlockwise”) Rhian: I do this. I don’t know why. Mam did it so I do it. I asked her once and she didn’t know either.

(blue biro, on the back) Rhian: Our family soup recipe. It’s yours now, Ceri. Don’t lose it.

(green felt tip, different handwriting, added later) Ceri: I haven’t got the blue mug (it’s still at home), so I used the 200g thing. Made it in the flat. Too thin. Took out the 4th mug of water and it was right.

(green felt tip) Ceri: Flatmates said it needed more salt. They were right and I hate it.

(green felt tip, squeezed in at the bottom, in smaller writing) Ceri: Stirred it anticlockwise. I noticed myself doing it halfway through. Didn’t stop.

Riverside Road & Footbridge Neighbours (group, 412 members)

Priya Nair · Mon 12 Oct, 8:10 FOUND: one navy glove, left hand, hand-knitted, on the railing by the footbridge steps. I’ve left it where it was so whoever dropped it can find it. Shout if it’s yours.

Hamid Qureshi · Mon 12 Oct, 8:32 Could be mine. I lost a navy glove last winter. Left hand.

Priya Nair · Mon 12 Oct, 8:40 Was yours hand-knitted? This has a ribbed cuff and the thumb has been darned in green.

Hamid Qureshi · Mon 12 Oct, 8:51 Mine was from Next. Sorry. It was a long shot.

Dot Ferris · Mon 12 Oct, 12:15 Lovely bit of knitting, that. Someone will be missing it. It’ll have been out since the weekend, by the look of it.

Femi Adeyemi · Tue 13 Oct, 7:55 Passed it this morning. It’s on the post at the top of the steps now, not the railing. Did someone move it?

Priya Nair · Tue 13 Oct, 8:02 Not me. I looked at it on the railing last night about six and left it there.

Dot Ferris · Tue 13 Oct, 9:20 Probably a dog walker thinking they were helping. People do.

Femi Adeyemi · Wed 14 Oct, 7:50 Now it’s on the lamp bracket. Higher again. About my shoulder height, and I’m not short.

Priya Nair · Wed 14 Oct, 8:06 Just been. Yes, lamp bracket. It’s been turned so the cuff faces the path.

Hamid Qureshi · Wed 14 Oct, 8:30 Someone’s moving it every night. I’d say it’s one person, and they’re not trying to keep it, or they’d have kept it.

Dot Ferris · Wed 14 Oct, 9:45 I’d leave it alone. Whoever it is will turn up.

Priya Nair · Thu 15 Oct, 7:40 It’s gone off the bracket. Nothing on the ground either. I hope that’s the owner and not the bin lorry.

Nathan (age 9, posting from his mum’s phone) · Thu 15 Oct, 16:25 It was me moving it. It’s my gran’s, she lost it on Saturday. She can’t bend down now and she looks ahead when she walks, not at the ground, so I put it higher up so she’d see it. I had to stand on the rail for the lamp. I took it home today and she knew it straight away because of the green bit. It’s the wool left over from her cardigan, she ran out of navy.

Nathan (age 9, posting from his mum’s phone) · Thu 15 Oct, 16:27 Sorry about moving it. I didn’t know about the group. Mum says thank you for not taking it.

Priya Nair · Thu 15 Oct, 16:40 Glad she has it back.

Dot Ferris · Thu 15 Oct, 17:02 I take it back about the dog walker.

Hamid Qureshi · Thu 15 Oct, 17:30 Does she have the other one?

Nathan (age 9, posting from his mum’s phone) · Thu 15 Oct, 17:41 She’s got the right-hand one. It’s been in her coat pocket since Saturday and she keeps putting her hand in to check.

Nathan (age 9, posting from his mum’s phone) · Thu 15 Oct, 17:48 She put them both on in the hall. Mum said it isn’t even cold. Gran said she knows, and she’s still got them on.

14 Alder Terrace. Kitchen, left-hand drawer. Contents for the executor (Mr T. Pryce), as found.

Sunita Rao, Rao & Daughter Clearances. Most of this is rubbish and I’ve marked it so. The keys I’ve listed one by one because you’ll want to know what they open before we skip anything.

1. Brass key, label in biro: back door. Fits the back door. Keep.
2. Small silver key, label: shed. The shed is open and has no lock. Padlock found hanging on the nail, no key to it. Bin both.
3. Yale, label: Mrs Hanley next door, 2009. Mrs Hanley’s house is now a holiday let. Suggest posting it to the address, if you have one.
4. Long iron key, label: church vestry. Not ours to dispose of. I rang the parish; they’d like it back, and said Gwen was the last one to lock up there.
5. Tiny key, label: tea caddy. Fits the tin on the dresser. The tin holds tea.
6. Two keys on a ring, label: Bethan’s old flat, don’t lose. Bethan’s flat was sold in 2014, per the sale papers in the bureau. Bin, unless there’s feeling about it. I’ve put them to one side in case there’s feeling.
7. Padlock key, no label. Opens nothing in the house. I tried the shed padlock, the bike, the coal bunker. Bin.
8. Chubb, label in the same biro, newer: front door spare. The front door has been bolted on the inside since we arrived, so we’ve gone in and out by the back, which the solicitor opened for us the first day. This is the key to it from outside. Keep.
9. Chubb, shiny, cut recently (the brass is still bright). Label: Tomos, who always knocks three times. So he won’t have to.

I haven’t marked 9 keep, return or bin. It has your name on it, so I’ve put it in the envelope with the letters from the bank, and I’ll hand the envelope to you myself on Thursday rather than leave it with the rest of the paperwork.

On the first morning you came to the back door, which was standing open, and knocked three times, though you’d said the house was yours to go into. I thought that was manners. You asked me to be quick and not to be sentimental about it, and I haven’t been. Only, on 3 I’d say post it. And on 7, if you think of what it opens, ring me.

Total: 9 items (6 is a ring of two, so 10 keys). Keep: 2 (1, 8). Return: 2 (3, 4). Bin: 3 (2, 5, 7), and the padlock from its nail. Set aside: 1 (6). No recommendation: 1 (9).

The 43 ran for the last time on a Friday, which Declan thought was a poor day for it. Nobody rides a bus on the last night of a route to be sad. They ride it because they were already going somewhere.

By the Quay stop he had four passengers. Two students, loud and kind about it. A man with a cello case who had said, getting on, “Is it still the 43?” and then nothing else. And Maeve, who sat in the second seat on the left, where she had sat on the 7.40 home every weekday for eleven years.

At Fenner Road he slowed. The bell had been broken since March, so what Maeve did, every evening, was lean forward and say “Fenner Road, please, Declan,” in the voice of someone ordering a coffee she had ordered before. He looked up in the mirror.

She hadn’t leaned forward. She was looking out of the window.

“Is this our stop?” said one of the students.

“No,” said Declan. “Fenner Road’s not for you.”

He pulled in anyway and opened the doors, and the cold came in, and nobody got off. After a bit he closed them again.

“You live there,” he said, to the mirror.

“I do,” said Maeve.

“You can get off.”

“I know where I live.” She was folding a glove into a smaller glove. “I thought I’d see where it ends. Eleven years and I’ve never been past my stop. I looked it up. It turns round at a car park behind a garden centre.”

“It does.”

“Is it nice?”

“It’s a car park.”

The man with the cello said, from the back, “I’d like to see it too, actually,” and one of the students said they would also like to see it, and that was how it was decided.

It was a car park. The lights were on a timer and had gone off already, so he stopped the bus in the middle of it and left the headlamps on, and they sat there looking at a wall of stacked compost bags and a trolley someone had left standing with great dignity. Declan turned the engine off for the first time in a long time and it was very quiet.

“Right,” said Maeve, to no one, and nodded, as if something had been confirmed.

He drove them all back the way they had come, and at Fenner Road he opened the doors again and she stood up.

“Same time Monday,” she said, and then heard it. “Well.”

“Well,” said Declan.

She leaned forward. “Thank you, Declan.”