Yet we never hear the thunderous footsteps of explication. Within a story’s frame, emotional or psychological pressure will increase to an unbearable degree – then, almost imperceptibly, something shifts, and the paralysed situation cracks open to admit a speck of light, or a relaxation before the inevitable, or a surge of amazed compassion.

There’s a freshness in these powerful new stories, a sense that, as they grow, they are surprising not only Kennedy, but themselves. A woman, dumped by her partner, stalks him at night on the internet her obsessive search for his traces becomes creative, an act of imagination in which wry healing begins. A lonely husband, watching through the kitchen window as his driven, manically perfectionist wife sifts sugar onto mince pies, understands that they will never have a child. Tender or shattering insights come to them in these moments of pained observation that can break a heart, or mend it – explosions of meaning that will force them to change their lives. In secret they gaze, helpless, while the other is sleeping, or walking away, or struggling with a social duty. When verbal communication fails, spouses, or parent and child, watch each other. Indeed, a lot of watching happens in Kennedy’s work. I want people in my stories to act, even if what they’re doing seems distorted or deformed by the damage that’s been done to them. Not so much what they’re feeling or thinking, but what they do. The way they put themselves back together again. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m interested in the way people behave when power has been stripped from them. ‘Every morning waking is like going through a windscreen.’ ‘Like the woman in your poem who’s lost a baby,’ I say. I’m really interested in aftermath – what we do with what’s happened to us.’ ‘People often say there has to be drama in a story, but I think, what about the day after the drama? You’ve had the baby or the bike accident, and you wake up the next morning. I love to look at those things in a fresh way. The gift is the ordinariness – things that are well-used, unexpressed, taken for granted.

I listen to other people and I hear what they’re saying. I live in a very ordinary place, a farm on a river. And I don’t want characters who are larger than life. ‘The whole confessional thing, where you’re always taking your own emotional temperature, is no use to me. ‘Everything’s ordinary in my work,’ she says when we sit down to talk about her new short story collection, Like a House on Fire. She has the feel for shape and pace, the mastery of the pause and the undercurrent of complex humour that can only have been born in speech. It was at the Wheeler Centre’s first Gala Storytelling night, when she stood on the Town Hall stage with barely a scrap of paper and rocked a crowd, that I saw what a natural Cate Kennedy is. Cate Kennedy returns to the well-fortified ground of the short story with a new collection,

Like a house on fire by cate kennedy