Post by Ellis Locke

The first page: Culvert Row, the wind down

Tuesday, 25 August

Seventeen days out

Seventeen days until The Long Kindness. Here is the opening, and a word about why it starts where it does. It does not start with Jo. It starts with a man marking condemned houses for the council, and his system, and the reason he writes the time next to the date. I wanted the first thing in the book to be procedure done properly by someone who takes it seriously, because that is what the whole book is made of. Nobody in it is careless. Nobody is cruel. Everything that happens to Jo Fenn happens because competent people followed the rules they were given. The cliff is real in the way Saltchurn was real: not on any map, but you can stand at the back of a terrace like that on more than one stretch of that coast and look at where the gardens finish. A straight edge, quite clean, and then nothing, and then the sea. Eleven houses. Four minutes. It is on the tide. Read the opening below. If you want to do the book a kindness, go in knowing nothing else. From The Long Kindness, chapter one: They came out at first light with the spray can because the wind was down, and the wind being down was the only reason anybody worked that end of the village at all. Dennis Ruddock had been marking condemned property for the council for nineteen years and had a system. You went from the landward end so the sea was behind you. You did the doors and then the boards, never the other way round, because a door could still be a door and a board was already rubbish. You wrote the number, then the date, then the time, and you wrote the time because there had been an incident at Halsey in 2011 and nobody wanted another one. The lad with him was called Ryan and had been on the job eleven weeks. "Do they all go the same day?" "All eleven."