House and rope knot with TAKE CARE banner

At the far edge of the field sits Nell's wagon, the only one that never moved much. It's built like a cottage, with a scalloped roof the colour of slate, a tin chimney, and two shuttered windows she painted herself the summer she turned seventy. Above the door hangs a painted banner that says TAKE CARE. Every night for eleven years she has sent you off with those words, and every night her chimney has given out small dotted curls of smoke, as if she were stitching the sky.

You find her inside, bent over the stove with her coat still on. She doesn't look up. 'They'll want the wire rigged by morning,' she says, 'and you'll want this.' She hands you a length of hemp, and you recognise the sheet bend she taught you the first week, the one you tied on your wrist and never untied. You could cut the hitch and go. Instead you sit on the step and tie the knot again, slowly, pulling each loop snug before the next.

At first light the tent comes down in a long grey sigh, and the lorries grind away towards the ring road. Nell's wagon stays where it is, its hitch bound to the tow bar with your knot. When the engine finally catches, the cottage rolls out of the field with its chimney smoking, and you walk beside it with one hand on the rope, not ready to let go of it yet.