You stand at the open door of the garage with one hand on the frame, the wood warm under your palm from a whole day of sun. The yard runs out behind you in long grass already cooling, but here the air still holds the heat the corrugated tin pulled down all afternoon. Inside, the light is the colour of weak tea. A motorcycle leans against the back wall, the chrome gone soft, the leather of the seat dark where someone sat a long time ago. Engine oil rises from the concrete floor in a low steady note, the kind of smell that has been here so long it has become part of the building. Somewhere up the lane a radio is playing, slow brass, the tune half-finished by distance.
You step in. The concrete keeps the cool it gathered overnight and gives a little of it back through your shoes. Along the side wall a workbench runs the length of the building, its top scored by decades of small cuts and ring-stains from tins of grease. A vice is bolted at the near end, the jaws shut on nothing, the handle hanging down. Above the bench a pegboard holds spanners in a rough order of size, each one outlined in faded marker so its place is kept even when it is gone. A few outlines are empty. The tools they belong to are probably out on the bench under a rag, or in a drawer somewhere, or lent down the lane years ago to a neighbour who meant to bring them back.
The swallow comes in. It enters so quickly you almost miss it, a dark curve across the rafters, and then it is gone again through the gap under the eaves. You hear the small dry click of its wings against the air more than you see it. A nest sits up in the angle of two beams, mud-built, ledged with straw, and one of the parents will be back through any moment now. The other is already out over the field, you suppose, working the last of the midges before the light fully goes. The radio up the lane changes tune. A piano now, three notes turning over each other, the melody so quiet it could be coming from inside the walls.
You move along the bench, drawing a finger across the wood. The grain is raised where oil and weather have worked into it. A coffee tin at the back holds a fistful of bolts, washers, two stub pencils, a key for something no longer in the building. You lift the tin and the bolts shift against the metal with a sound like rain on a window. You set it down in the same circle of clean wood it came from. Next to it a rag, folded, dark in its folds. Next to the rag a small jar of bearings in oil, the oil thickened to honey by years of sitting. The label is gone except for one corner of paper still gummed to the glass.
The motorcycle is at the back, and you go to it because you have been going to it since you came in. The tank is a deep red under the dust, the kind of red that was painted to last and has. You crouch. The tyres are flat and have been flat for a long time, the rubber gone pale at the sidewall. A spider has run a single line of web from the brake lever to the handlebar grip and abandoned the project. The leather of the seat takes your hand when you rest it there, warm from the day still held in the tin above. You can smell, very faintly under the oil, the older smell of petrol that has not been in the tank for years but has become part of the room the way the oil has. The chrome of the exhaust shows your fingers in a soft blur when you touch it. You stand again, slowly, and the joints of the building stand with you, small ticks in the roof as the tin gives back its heat to the cooling air.
Outside the door the grass is turning the colour grass turns at this hour, a green that has gone grey at the edges and silver where the seed-heads catch what light is left. A moth lifts out of it and drifts in past your shoulder, finding the dim square of the doorway and going on through. It settles on the inside of the lintel, wings folded like a closed book. The swallow comes back, fast, and you feel the small movement of air on your face as it passes. Then out again. Then in. The nest above receives a brief muttering sound, very small, and goes quiet. The radio up the lane is talking now, a voice too low to catch the words, only the shape of them, a steady patient rhythm like someone reading aloud to a room that may or may not be listening.
You walk to the back corner where an old armchair has been pushed, its upholstery sagged into the shape of whoever last sat in it for any length of time. A folded blanket lies across one arm, the wool gone fuzzy with use. Beyond the chair, a shelf holds tins of paint stacked two deep, the labels in a typeface no one prints anymore. Linseed oil. White spirit. A tin of beeswax polish with its lid half on. You lift the wax and the smell comes up at once, honey and something green underneath, and you close it again carefully and put it back into its own ring of dust on the shelf. The dust there is fine and even, settled in the slow way dust settles when nothing disturbs it for a season. A single long cobweb runs from the top of the tins to the underside of the shelf above, holding two husks of fly and a fleck of straw from the nest.
The light is changing. Where it came through the door in a slab it now comes through more thinly, taking the colour from the concrete and laying it across the toe of your boot. The far end of the bench, which was bright when you came in, is in shadow now, and the vice at the near end has caught what the bench has lost, its iron showing a dull red along the upper jaw. Out in the yard the swifts have started, higher than the swallows, their cries thin and far. A dog barks once down at the farm and does not bark again. The piano on the radio resumes, the same three notes, or three close to them, the player perhaps having stopped to drink something and come back to the keys.
You walk slowly to the door and stand in it again, half in and half out. The fields beyond the yard fall away in long pale rectangles, hay cut a week ago and still smelling sweet at this hour, the smell rising as the ground cools. A bat goes over, low, and is gone before the eye fixes it. The hawthorn at the gate has begun to lose its definition, becoming a darker shape against a sky that is itself only just darker than the shape. A first star, or what might be a star, or might be the light from a window two valleys over, sits low above the line of the hill. You lean against the doorframe and feel the wood give back the day to your shoulder. The swallow comes in once more, and once more goes out. The mud nest in the rafters has gone quiet now, the parent settled, the small bodies under her settled too.
Inside the garage the oil-smell has thickened a little as the air cools, the way a smell will when the room around it gives up its heat. The motorcycle stands where it stood. The spanners hang in their outlines. The radio up the lane has gone down to almost nothing, a thread of sound that comes and goes with whatever small wind is moving in the hedges. You stand a while longer at the door. The hay-smell rises. The tin above your head makes one more small tick as it gives back the last of its warmth, and another after that, further apart, and the swifts thin out into the upper air, and the field beyond the gate goes from grey to the soft blue-grey it goes to before there is no colour at all, and the moth on the lintel does not move, and the light at the door