Chapter 6 THE LIFE SHE BUILT

On the fourteenth, I got up at six and decided to have a good day. It was not a decision most people had to make on purpose.

The alternative was sitting on the end of my bed for seven hours watching a burner phone. I had done a version of that on Sunday and had come out of it stupid and mean. I had said something to Nell about the milk that I had to go back and apologise for on Monday. So I put the phone in the bottom of my bag where I could not reach it without meaning to, and went out into a morning that had frost on the railings for the first time that year. 

I gave the day to Ashcombe.

Wren's at twenty past eight. Nell had the machine apart on a tea towel.

"It's dead."

"It's not dead."

"It made a noise at half-past six and then died." She had one hand flat on the counter and the other holding a portafilter like a weapon. "You do cars."

"That is not a car."

"It has a pump. Cars have pumps." She pushed the tea towel two inches toward me. It was as close to please as she had ever come. "There's a pastry in it."

The group head gasket had gone. I could tell from four feet away. The thing was weeping down the front of the boiler and had been for longer than that morning. I told her so. She took it badly, and then went and found a torch and held it for me while I got the screen off with a butter knife because there was not a hex key in that building.

Twenty minutes. It was not a repair. It was the sort of thing you did to keep a person going for another eight days until the man from Leeds came.

"You've done that before," Nell accused.

"I've done a lot of things before."

"Where?”

"My aunt had a place."

There it was again, easy as breathing. The aunt in Wilmington had a coffee machine now. In two years she had acquired a house, a road, a bad hip and a business. She had never existed, and I had come to be fond of her in a way I never thought.

Nell gave me the pastry and would not take the coins probably because we were now in a dispute I had no way of winning before Christmas.

Theo came at ten to nine, on his way to being late for Fenwick, and stopped dead in the doorway at the sight of me with grease on two fingers.

"You're fixing the coffee."

"I'm delaying the coffee."

"Callum owes me four pounds." He got his phone out to tell Callum so, walking backward. "He said you'd never touch it. He said you're the kind of rich where you call somebody."

"I'm the kind of rich where I call somebody about the things that are worth calling somebody about."

"That is a horrible sentence and I'm going to say it to people."

He went. He was thirteen minutes late, which for Theo was punctual, and Fenwick had long since given up on the subject.

Callum was not wrong about me, and neither was Theo, and neither of them had ever come within a hundred miles of the truth. What they had was a story that explained the visible facts. Dolly Vance had money and did not talk about it. They had concluded it was either shame or divorce, and both of those were boring enough to stop anyone asking a second question. I had built that on purpose, and it had held for two years. Standing in Wren's with a butter knife in my hand, I realized for the first time that I would miss it.

Being known slightly, by people who were fond of me, for reasons that had nothing to do with my father.

Aldiss at eleven. 

I sat four rows from the back in the seat with the fire door behind it and didn’t once look at the row across the aisle, which took most of what I had.

He was not there anyway. 

He had told me the archive opened at ten on Thursday and that was everything about our arrangement. I had spent Monday night deciding I would not think about the basement, then thought about it in a loop until three. His sleeve going past my hand. The way he had shut a door with no sound in it.

Nobody's been in your room, either.

I put my pen down and started counting the people between me and the side exit. Then I made myself stop, because it was a Tuesday in November and there were about two hundred people in that hall and every last one of them was thinking about lunch.

The market ran on the fourteenth in the square behind the old post office. A dozen stalls, most of them selling things nobody needed. The girl from the lecture had mentioned it in Wren's the week before.

I bought a pair of gloves.

They were not sensible. They were lined with lambskin in a dark green that had almost nothing to do with the car's green and everything to do with it. The woman selling them had bought a box of house-clearance stock and had no idea what she had. I paid what she asked without a word because arguing would have been obscene.

There was a way of holding a thing that told you whether it had been made by somebody who was paid enough. My mother had taught me that with her hands rather than words, in shops, on Saturdays, when I was still little for her to take me along.

Turn it over. Look at where nobody looks. If they finished the inside, they finished all of it.

I stood in a wet market square with a pair of gloves in my hands and had to wait a moment before I could put them in my bag.

Then I bought a jar of honey I didn’t want from the stall next to it, so the woman with the gloves would not be the only person I had given money to. That was another thing my mother had done.

I had never been able to stop doing it.

There was a grey car in the corner of the square, eight years old or so, parked nose out.

I noted it and let it go. Every second car in that town was a grey saloon eight years old, and the square filled with parents on market day. I had spent most of my time here learning the difference between a fact and a fear.

I gave Theo a lift at four. He only asked when it was raining and was ashamed of asking at all.

The Alfa started on the second turn, the way she did in the cold. Theo folded himself into the passenger seat with his knees somewhere near the dashboard and his bag on his lap because there was nowhere else for it to go.

"Your car is a beautiful and stupid object," he informed me.

"She's forty years older than you and she'll outlive you."

"That is not a defence, that is a threat." He put a hand on the dash. "Is that noise the coin in the dryer?"

"That noise is a heat shield and I've been meaning to get at it."

"When?”

"Thursday. Friday."

The wipers on that car were a joke. You steered by memory and the shape of the hedges, and I had never once minded. I didn’t mind that afternoon either, going out past the playing fields with the heater roaring at our feet while Theo talked about a paper he had not started.

He got out at the end of Vicarage Lane and leaned back in before he shut the door.

"You're all right, aren't you?”

"Why?”

"You've been counting things." He shrugged with the door in his hand. "You do it when you're all right too. You've just been doing it more."

Two years. Nineteen months of that with Theo, who thought my father was in freight and my money was in trusts and my silences were about a divorce, and who had noticed something nobody else in that town had noticed. Had waited until he was halfway out of a car in the rain to mention it.

"I'm fine."

"Okay." He nodded, believing me, because that is what he did. "Friday. Callum's. You're coming."

“I’ll see how the week goes.”

“You always say that and then you don’t come.”

“That happened once.”

“It happened in October, and before that in August, and I’m fairly sure it happened in June, before I even knew what October was going to look like.”

He ran up the lane with his bag over his head. I sat there with the engine going and the wipers making their terrible sound. I watched him get to his door, get his key in, turn around and lift a hand.

I had thought about that afternoon a great deal since.

Not the conversation. The ten seconds after it, when he had been fumbling with the lock and I had been idling at the kerb, and neither of us had known there was any reason to hurry.

At half past nine I ran a bath I did not get into. At twenty to ten I took the burner out of the bottom of my bag.

The fourteenth. Two years of fourteenths. 

Bianca had made us a rule. One day a month to remember instead of two. Fewer dates meant fewer chances to get one wrong. My mother and I had made a smaller rule inside it. The call happened at ten. Whoever could not talk simply did not answer. Nobody was ever to read anything into a silence.

That last part had been my mother's condition. I had agreed to it without understanding that a rule like that was only ever written by somebody who expected to need it.

I sat on the end of the bed with the window open because the room had gone stale, and at ten exactly I dialled.

It rang.

My mother's phone was not in a shoebox. My mother's phone sat on a table by a chair, and she was near it from nine. In two years I had never once got past the fourth ring.

Six. Seven.

I got up and went to the window. Standing seemed to help, which was the kind of thought you had when the useful part of your mind had stepped out for a moment.

Twelve. Thirteen.

The launderette below me was shut and the street was orange and empty. Somewhere off toward the Corley road a car changed gear.

Twenty-two rings. I knew it was twenty-two, because at twenty-two I remembered Bianca on Thursday, the chest of drawers, the floorboard. I realized that I had been counting my mother's rings against Bianca's and that there was no comparison to make. There was no floorboard. There was a table and a chair.

I let it go to thirty and then hung up.

The rule was that you did not read anything into a silence.

I called again anyway.

The second time it didn’t ring at all. It went straight to nothing. The flat electronic nothing of a phone that had been switched off at the last minute.

I remained at my window with the cold coming in and heard a car go past below me on Fell Street, heading toward the market square.

Grey. Eight years old, or thereabouts.

I didn’t need to look.