A SMALL ERROR IN THE DISTANCE

For several years a man had been receiving postcards from a place he had never visited. They arrived irregularly and without stamps, usually bearing photographs of unremarkable things: a municipal garden, the entrance to a hotel, a concrete fountain, once an empty swimming pool in which someone had left a blue chair.

There was never much written on them. The weather continues. They have moved the trees again. You would not recognise it now.

He kept them in a drawer with batteries, foreign coins and keys whose doors had been forgotten. From time to time he would come across them while looking for something else and wonder briefly who had sent them, although the question never seemed important enough to pursue.

One morning another arrived. The photograph showed a yellow object standing in a field. It was difficult to judge its size. It might have been something small photographed closely, or something enormous seen from a great distance. On the reverse, in handwriting he recognised without knowing from where, were the words: It has begun to remember you.

He placed the card on the kitchen table and went to work.

Over the following weeks, small discrepancies entered his life. Nothing sufficiently important to mention, but enough to make the world feel fractionally misplaced. A shop moved two doors along the street. The journey between the station and his flat became shorter. His blue cup appeared one morning in the bathroom and subsequently remained there, although he was certain he returned it to the kitchen each evening.

Colours became particularly unreliable. A green wall he had passed every day for years became pink. When he asked a neighbour when it had been painted, she looked at the wall for some time before telling him that it was green.

After that he began walking without deciding where he was going. Certain streets seemed to invite continuation while others resisted him completely. He discovered passages between buildings, gardens behind garages and staircases descending beneath shops, and gradually developed the peculiar sensation that he was not discovering new places so much as remembering familiar ones incorrectly.

The postcards continued, and the yellow object grew larger. Other things appeared around it: a black platform, something resembling a ladder, three pale stones, and later a figure whose direction of travel was impossible to determine.

He arranged the cards along a wall and discovered that there were considerably more than he remembered receiving. Seen together they did not form a sequence so much as a place continually revising itself. Objects migrated between images, distances contracted, colours altered. The swimming pool appeared where the municipal garden had been. The blue chair stood for a time in the field before disappearing altogether.

Eventually the postcards became less frequent and then stopped. Their absence seemed no more significant than their arrival had once seemed peculiar, and over the following months they became simply another arrangement of things in the room. Occasionally he would notice one while looking for something else and experience the faint sensation that a detail had changed, although he could never remember it clearly enough to be certain.

Almost a year later, walking home in heavy rain, he allowed an unfamiliar street to determine his route. At its end, beyond a row of garages and a low concrete wall, was a large field. Something yellow stood some distance from the boundary and beside it, turned slightly away, was a blue chair.

He crossed the field, although afterwards he could not remember deciding to do so.

By morning the rain had passed. From the road there was little to distinguish the field from any other, except for something yellow some distance from the boundary and, further back, the indistinct figure of a man. It was difficult to tell whether he was approaching or leaving.

For several years a woman had been receiving postcards from places she had never visited. They arrived irregularly and without stamps, usually bearing photographs of unremarkable things: an empty field, the entrance to a hospital, a concrete underpass, once a municipal swimming pool in which someone had left a yellow chair.