When we first met, I began by collecting an assortment of facts about her that I stored up and kept safe in a cardboard-box-shaped part of me. I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to apply the techniques endorsed by the City and Guilds electrical courses that I pored over at night. I wanted to find ways of opening her up, observing her, passing electrical currents through her and recording her reactions. it was the only was I knew.
I met her on a Wednesday in January. My father had left me in charge of the dairy, and I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out under the counter, a heavy textbook balancing on my knee. i was reading about spectral lines, me neck aching with the effort of trying to memorise the frequencies at which streams of darkness could be detected in sunlight.