Luke

I have green eyes. Probably not the green you are thinking of now. They are bright green. They are startling. This is not a boast. I am just trying to be accurate. Precise and clear. If I told you my eyes were green and left it at that you may picture them as a shade of hazel, or olive. They are vivid green. I will be honest from the start.

When people meet me for the first time, there is often a moment of shock, a pause, and then they scramble to recover. We continue as normal. Later, the shy or polite ones will risk a quick sideways glance. The confident or rude ones will stare. They are both just checking that they aren’t mistaken, it isn’t a trick of the light and those really are my eyes.

I live in a house on top of Bowland Fell. The house looks down on a small town called Duerdale. I moved here with my dad some time ago. My old life finished somewhere else and my new one was supposed to start here. We ended up in Duerdale for different reasons, the practical reason being we could afford the house. We could afford the house because it’s falling down. There are holes in the roof, cracks in the walls, and the window frames are rotten. ‘Cosmetic problems,’ my dad muttered, ‘we’ll take it.’ He shook hands with the estate agent and walked away. The estate agent laughed and then smiled. He thought my dad was daft. My dad isn’t daft. We needed somewhere to live and this is what we could afford.

Jon

“He was wearing granddad clothes: brown shoes, grey trousers and a dark-green knitted jumper. He was even wearing a bloody tie. He had a side parting that revealed a thin white line of scalp on the left-hand side of his head and each strand of hair looked separate and solid like it was being held in place by glue. He looked like it was 1945 and he was on his way to church.”

Duerdale

It’s about an hour away, to the north-west. It’s tucked between hills and moors, almost hidden, like a mole between rolls of skin.