No. No, I don’t. I’m not with anyone. Work doesn’t leave a lot of time.
She wonders why she is making excuses.
What do you do?
I suppose I’m unemployed.
I’m sorry.
That’s OK.
So they talk about lost jobs and in particular the job that Lindsey loved, working reception in a radiology department, until Lindsey says,
I think I will have that biscuit.
Frances follows her this time into a small, neat kitchen, the walls clad in pine boards, orange and uneven and studded with hooks around the window, from which hang ladle, tongs, whisk, spatula and other utensils. Above the draining board, two more hooks hold photographs of Steven and Patrick as children, the younger proudly freckled, the older narrowly tolerating a maroon uniform. Frances places her cup in the sink, then overrules herself and washes it.
Oh there’s no need for that! Lindsey says, pleased.
Prising off the lid of a tin with dogs on it, she offers Frances first pick from a stack of homemade cookies, which engulf them both in warm vanilla.
Those look amazing.
Frances takes a bite and with a squeal lifts her hand to catch the crumbs.
How does this happen? she thinks. How does a woman waiting for news of her son’s death conceive the desire to bake cookies? Are they fuel for Steven? Were they made for her visit? The tin is quite full and they are fresh.
These are fantastic, she says. Don’t tell me you made them yourself?
Oh it’s not difficult. Lots of butter and an egg, a basic soft cookie really. I’ve been making them for years.
They’re really, really good.
Thank you.
They talk about cooking. With effort, the dog pushes through the door to join them. Presently Frances sees it visit what appears to be a litter tray in the corner. When it finishes, Lindsey removes the small crumbed stool with a plastic bag, inverts it, ties the handles, and drops the package into a dustbin in the garden. On her return her cardigan sparkles with raindrops not yet drawn into the wool.
Sorry about that, she says, and it is true that Frances was tardy in hiding her disgust. I think what’s hard, what I really struggle with, is that Pat never goes this long without visiting. It’s not something I can tell my friends, if I’m being tactful. With some of their children, you know, you’ll hear nothing until Christmas. One of them goes missing and you’d believe they had a secret life, but with Pat I can’t. I try to. Steve tries to make me. But I can’t. I feel like I do know this isn’t him. He only moved out two years ago, and he’s been back so often. I suppose it’s because his dad and me aren’t together any more. Maybe he takes pity on me. Or actually. She laughs. Actually it’s probably just because I’ve got his fishing rods.
He likes fishing?
Oh my God. He is obsessed with it! There’s a bit of river he goes to just behind these houses. You should see his room. I’ll show you.
And what way is there to refuse? So up the narrow stairs they go into the first room on the landing which, as promised, is full of angling magazines and plastic boxes and rods that twitch like whiskers in the stirred air.
Wow.
Some of it he’s had since primary school.
It’s incredible.
It is. The orderliness, the array, the bellowing of Carp! by a thousand covers.
Do you fish as well? Frances says.
You must be joking! That was his dad. Steve enjoyed it for a while, but nothing like Pat.
She steps deeper into the room. Frances wants to go now. She feels a fraud and a failure.
Mum! Steve is calling from next door. That was the bus company. They’ll do it.
That’s great news, Lindsey says. Oh well done!
It’s unsold ad space, Steve explains when they go through to join him. They’ve agreed to use our poster instead of house ads next month. It’s only for the month, but a lot of people will see it.
He swings his chair to face them, full of accomplishment, a spreadsheet on the screen behind him. There are storage boxes on the floor and squares of paper on the walls. They itemise what was found in the flat and make a timeline of Patrick’s last known hours. Frances herself is there.
I think it’s amazing what you’re doing, she says.
Steve shrugs.
You’ve got to do something. Are you sure you don’t want that lift?
*
She fetches the laundry basket from the cupboard under the stairs and turns on the kitchen lights. The clean clothes have gone cold and stiff in the machine and she hauls them out like a great cable from the sea. Those that can take mechanical drying she puts back, carrying the rest to the boiler cupboard where she droops them over the slats, plus a few leftovers on a radiator, and a few more on another. The smell of tired water mixes with the smell of the chicken stock on the stove, a large batch, simmered from roasted bones. Last time it made a rich and flavoursome risotto, the best she has yet cooked.
She mops the kitchen floor and thinks about Patrick and his family. Being with the brother was hard. It is hard to be with heroes. Driving to the station, he looked only forwards and shared some troubles that he hadn’t shared with Lindsey. Patrick’s flat is one. The landlord is now owed two months’ rent, and has warned them that he will have to advertise for a new tenant and retain the deposit if the next is missed as well. Steve does not think the family can pay, and is worried that evidence may be destroyed when the flat’s relet. The police searched it once but rather casually, he thought. There’d not been the tents and space-suits he was expecting. New developments will get them interested, he thinks, but his hopes for some are thinning. People just get bored after a while. The few calls that still come are all wellwishers or gossips. He no longer shows their messages to his mother. Next Wednesday he must return to his job managing a timber yard. He isn’t sure, but he thinks he’ll quit instead to keep the search going. He reckons they’ll rehire him when he’s finished. Mum’s just not up to it right now and Dad, he said, Dad’s not the kind of guy you give important stuff to. Pat would have a right laugh at that. And he laughed too. Then he said, Of course everything would be different if it was someone’s little girl. Not just my … He couldn’t say little brother. She saw the work in his eyes. He was hoarding something savage.
She decides to pay Patrick’s rent herself, for a month at least. She’ll email Steve and insist. He’s too practical to be proud. Going upstairs for her laptop, she passes what in her mind is still Steph’s room, though it is bare now. The external walls are speckled with black where moisture was allowed to condense behind costume mounds. That’ll need dealing with. Her steps echo. Echo, the word people call to summon one.
She makes tea and emails Steve in the front room. It takes time to find the right tone, the right firmness that will keep her offer from starting a discussion. She sweeps the grate and lights a new fire. She considers breaking up the remnants of the kitchen chair for wood, but she quite likes the chair. It could be mended. It just looks messy where it is. She gets up to see if it will fit in the loft, but on her way out to the hall she sees something else. She stops. On the floor below the coat hooks, half-hidden by her coats, is a pair of men’s shoes. Brown leather shoes, quite expensive-looking but practical, with thick black rubber soles. Her first thought is Patrick, with a leap of excitement, but of course they can’t be his. Had he walked home in socks? Even if he had, could his shoes have lain here for weeks without her seeing them? They can only be Greg’s, though that is strange in another way, because it has gone unspoken for months that Greg never visits. Then she understands. It’s obvious. He will have come to help Steph move the last of her stuff, and in the middle of helping changed shoes for a more suitable pair, maybe for driving. There are dark patches where rain has soaked into the leather, so evidently there’d been more to do today.
She returns to the living room and finds her phone. Steph answers breathlessly.
Fran!
Hi Ste
ph. Hope you’re not in the middle of something?
No, no, no. Just got out the shower.
A tight little laugh between them.
Excellent. I see you’ve got the last of your stuff now. Well done. I hope it wasn’t too arduous?
No, no. I got there.
The house feels so empty. It’s the end of an era, Steph.
Aah. I know. But we’ll still see each other.
Of course we will. I’ve been giving the place a clean before the new people look round. You wouldn’t recognise it.
Ha! I bet.
I meant to say, I found a pair of Greg’s shoes. In case he was looking for them?
Greg’s shoes?
Yes. They’re brown leather. Quite nice.
He does have some brown leather shoes, but he hasn’t mentioned losing any.
Could you ask him?
Sure, but he’s out at the moment.
Ah. He did help you move, right?
Yes. At the weekend he did. Although it took a few trips and I did most of them on my own. I have more crap than I thought!
Frances watches the fire. Her cheap logs are hissing.
Oh well, she says. I’m sure I’ll find a home for them eventually. Could you let me know what he says when you see him? They’re nice shoes. Someone will want to know where they are.
Of course.
The other thing was, I don’t know what you’re up to this evening, but how about one last night in? There’s still a huge pile of CDs and DVDs in the front room. I’m sure most of them are yours. We could split a bottle of wine and go through it all, being miserable.
Oh Fran, I’d love to, but I’m actually off to meet Greg at the theatre tonight. I’m just about to get ready.
OK, no problem.
Sorry.
No, that’s fine. It was just a thought. We can do it any time.
Well, let’s do it soon.
She stares at the fire, then goes back to the shoes. She is struck by the neat way that they sit side by side, insteps touching, laces tucked into the cavities. They look arranged by somebody with opinions on the subject. It is possible she shook water on to them while taking off her coat.
The rain has stopped, but the wind is getting up. Idly she patrols the house, her phone in her hand, not knowing what she’s looking for. Between times she goes back to the stock for soothing stirs.
She returns to the sofa and dials her mother, thinking of the phone on its table in the hall. The old phone table. The call connects. She hears her mother’s hesitation, then her slightly formal voicemail message, the voice younger than it has become.
Hi Mum. Nothing important really. It’s Tuesday evening. I just phoned to see how you were. Everything’s fine here, I don’t have any news. I may go out, so don’t call back tonight. Talk soon. Bye.
The fire lies low.
She latches and unlatches the laptop with her dialling finger.
She dials my number. It goes to voicemail. She leaves no message.
She goes upstairs and sits on the bed and tucks her legs under herself. She gets up and draws the curtains. She looks at her possessions. The lamp, the wardrobe, the old counterpane on its way back to threads.
She should eat. She remembers the instructions to dice the shallots and garlic finely. Finding the right page, she props the book open with the pepper grinder. The cat smears around her legs. She squeezes out a slab of food and disorders it with a fork. She spoons her own food out too soon. The rice grains have chalky hearts. She is learning. While you learn you eat your mistakes. The washing up done, she revives the fire and watches television with a good apple. She texts Steph to ask what Greg has said about the shoes, but gets no reply. Then she remembers they are at the theatre of course.
She tours the house locking doors and windows and turning off the lights. She washes her hands and from the bathroom cabinet takes two cotton pads, which stick to her wet fingers. The first she presses not quite tight against the mouth of the cleanser bottle, upending them both until a mauve blotch appears. With this she wipes the makeup from her face, then repeats the process with another. Afterwards she applies moisturiser, takes the toothbrush off its base and eases a stump of paste on to the bristles, which she guides for two minutes around her mouth. She flosses while using the toilet.
In the bedroom she undresses and examines herself. When running she imagines her arms like streams of liquid, her hands like splashes. Her hair pulled back makes shining grooves. She still can’t find a grey. Steph still has not replied.
Tomorrow she will run her furthest.
She pulls on pyjamas and picks up her book. The sheets grow warm around her. Next door the extractor ceases. Her eyelids start to sag. She flicks ahead and finds a break only a few pages away, but she won’t get there. She switches off the light.
*
Some people say that your mistakes are never really mistakes, which is another way of saying that you intend everything you do, even the unconscious things. I don’t feel that way myself, but I suppose I wouldn’t. The conscious part of me may be as much in charge as the rider of a horse who proudly steers where he is taken. Or it may not. This isn’t something anyone knows. All we know is that we are made of mysteries.
Have you ever wondered how you catch a ball? It should take calculus to determine the path that it will travel, and thus where to put your hand, but even people who can do calculus don’t bother with that. We just do it naturally, all of us, near enough, without knowing how. It is a mystery. Yet the deeper one in my opinion is how we manage to go through life without considering it mysterious. A hidden power controls our limbs and drives our dreams and we hardly think about it. Which movements of your jaw, lips and tongue are required to speak your name? You don’t even know. It is almost a miracle of inattentiveness, next to which it seems quite easy to believe that I am only half of who I am, and that you are too. That we blithely share this world with our own ghosts.
I’ve come to think that this explains the shoes. Taking them off on wet days to avoid leaving footprints on her carpet was a matter of habit. Sometimes I carried them in my bag as I went about my business, but they made everything else in the bag dirty, so I took to leaving them in the hall with a plan to remember, then forgot. Was this carelessness? Things have been easier lately. I won’t say easy, but there’s been more sleep and routine, and periods of calm, which breeds complacency, as I have warned, so at first that’s how I saw things, and berated myself for the blunder. However, after some thought I’ve come to believe it was the deliberate work of my other half, a wise region of my mind that was unknown to me until eight hours ago, and to which I am blessedly grateful.
She seemed to be acting normally. Without Stephanie these days there’s less to overhear, but I clearly made out the sounds of cooking, heard her potter about the house and start the dryer. She was a soothing companion for my writing. When she began to mop the kitchen floor, I took the opportunity to wash. I keep a water container, liquid soap, a plastic bowl and towels. Plus of course I have a makeshift bed in here, a compact camping toilet, my laptop, tools and odds and ends and, these days, most of my clothes. I need something to refresh me during the long hours of stillness and confinement, to reset what at times feels like a very slow clock, and I’ve found that nothing works better than a wash and a change. I have to manage in low light, but it’s a small space. The glow of the laptop screen suffices.
Replacing the headphones, I heard she’d made a fire. I drank coffee from the lid of my flask and listened, quite content and unsuspicious until her call to Stephanie. Instantly I knew what I’d done, but searched for my shoes anyway in a hopeful frenzy. Then my phone was ringing. Frances B, it said. Frances B. I found my bag and pulled the hammer out, and a roll of tape. I stuffed my pockets with cable ties. I crouched, ready but terrified. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared. Doing nothing in these situations is I suppose either the worst plan or the best. I waited a long time to find out which.
These were
my thinking hours. Now I feel calm. Better than calm. She’s had her dinner and is watching television. It seems my shoes have stopped being a mystery she expects to solve by morning, and I’ve had time to change plans. I’m sad that we won’t have our date on Friday. It’s been one of those nice stored anticipations, you know, a recurrent little happiness to toy with, but it was always a mistake. I would have been pretending. I’m only glad that I heard my other half in time.
Now she’s given up and is locking the doors and turning off the lights. She’s washing. She’s getting undressed. I sit for a long time in darkness feeling the warmth of the chimney breast beneath my palm. I let her reach deep sleep.
I switch on my torch and change clothes again. I want her to see me dressed as I was the first time, in the checked shirt with the navy pullover and jeans, relaxed but serious. I lift the hatch from the floor and place it to one side across two joists. I tie a length of rope to the handles of my bag and lower it through the hole. Unwinding the thicker rope from its fixings on the rafters, I switch off my torch and grip it in my teeth. I pause, take a deep breath through my nose, and slide down from the loft into the blackness. I feel the landing carpet meet my socks.
You sleep. The curve of your cheek. The point of your chin. The soft wisps at the margin of your hairline. Your lashes chatter. The duvet rises and falls below your throat. Outside the wind is loud, but get close and your breath can be heard whispering. Get closer still and it can be felt like a feather. Your breath explores the canyons of my ear.
I could leave. There is still time. I could walk downstairs, put on my shoes and dissolve into the wind. Instead I climb on to the bed and switch on your light.
*
As a young man, even as a boy, I was frustrated, as the young are, by what seemed to me the timidity and the cynicism of older people. I should stress that this was not the arrogance that it was taken for. I inwardly admitted older people’s greater knowledge and experience. My argument was that you can have too much. You can gather knowledge and experience in the belief that they will help you solve the problem of what to do with your life, but gradually get nowhere, then quickly say you’ve discovered that the problem is unsolvable and, therefore, that your failure is success. After a while all the old seemed to know was the comfort of surrender, and for this they were called wise.
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