Excerpt: The false entity

A young woman walked along a residential street in an only slightly rundown suburb of an only slightly rundown English town. The street was fairly wide with cars parked along most of it, giving the effect of a six-year-old child's elongated gappy grin. Most of the street lights were lit; it was dark, after all, and there was a chill in the air. One or two flickered as if indecisive about whether to actually be on or off. One light did not even make that effort. The houses were semi-detached, with each member of the pair being a mirror image of the other. Each pair was identical to the next, with only the gardens being different. The houses were a mix of owner-occupied and rented accommodation. The former type of house were in better condition than the latter, and some even tried to escape the monotonous aspects by painting the woodwork a different colour or even fitting a new style of door. The gardens were generally tidy, with trimmed lawns or paved over where the owner was not green-fingered. The rented houses were typically in a slight state of decay, with the original white paint peeling from the woodwork, although it mostly was no longer white. The gardens were mostly paved or concreted over and where this was not the case, it was as if the garden was actually a country meadow transplanted into an urban environment; the wildlife loved it.