The house sits on the outside of a bend. The road comes past the front of it with its back turned.
There is a curved scratch in the living room floorboards, very shallow. You only see it if the light rakes across.
He had always assumed the previous tenants dragged furniture over it.
One day he lay on the floor with a tape and a piece of chalk and took three points off the arc, and worked out the radius. Two metres thirty.
He went up onto the roof and looked at the road. The bend out there has a radius of about thirty metres.
The scale does not match, but the curvature runs the same way — the back of the bow toward the house, both of them.
He traced the floor arc onto tracing paper, enlarged it to scale, and laid it over the bend on the map.
It fitted. The same arc, thirteen times the size.
He extended both ends of the floor arc outward and kept drawing until he had closed the circle. It took a whole sheet.
The centre was not in the living room. He measured the coordinates twice. It fell in the bedroom, on the bed.
The bed came with the flat from the furniture shop. It has stood in that spot for three years.