Nothing That Sounds True
June’s flat, three weeks on
The messages went like this.
Wren, I’m not going to explain. I just want to say that the thing in the file and the thing in the yard were both real.
Delete.
I know how it looks. I know that saying “I know how it looks” is what people say when it’s exactly how it looks.
Delete.
Please don’t do anything with the pages until we’ve
June stopped halfway through that one and put the phone face-down on the arm of the sofa and sat with her hand over her eyes.
That was the problem, and it had taken her a fortnight to see it properly.
Every sentence she could build had a use in it.
The thing in the yard was real — that’s a woman softening someone up. I know how it looks — that’s a woman getting ahead of it.
Even I’m sorry had a job to do. The job was to make Wren feel something in June’s direction. And June had spent months making Wren feel things in her direction, and had a file about it.
There was no arrangement of words left that wasn’t a move.
She had done that. Not to Wren. To the words.
She went to work. That was the strange part.
She went to work every day and did the Hallow account and did it well. Beckmann told her that people had noticed, and June said thank you in the voice she used for men like that.
She ate. She slept in bad stretches. She did not cry in the building.
Then one evening she came home and noticed she’d stopped taking her coat off in the hall. That she’d been sitting on the sofa in it, for an hour at a time, most nights.
That there was a smell in the flat, because she hadn’t taken the bin out in a long time.
She took the bin out. She stood in the corridor by the chute in her coat and thought, clearly and without drama, that this was what it had looked like in her mother’s kitchen, from the outside, to somebody standing in a doorway.
Then she went back in and washed everything in the sink.
Sunday
Theo came without ringing first, holding a box file with a rubber band round it. The rain had got into his collar on the walk from the car.
“That’s a look,” he said.
June looked down at herself — the coat, still on, indoors, at four in the afternoon.
“I’m aware.”
“I brought coffee and then drank both of them in the car park, because I lost my nerve.” He came in. “I’d like that not to be the most embarrassing part of this visit, so I’m going to move quickly.”
He put the box file on the kitchen table.
“What is it?”
June didn’t sit down and didn’t ask him to.
“Bank statements. Accounts my father controls and doesn’t use. Company minutes from the week of the article, which are not the minutes that were filed.” He tapped the lid. “And a letter he wrote to a man at the bank in the spring, which is the only stupid thing he has ever done in his life.”
June didn’t touch it.
“Theo.”
“I know.”
“This is your father.”
“Yes.”
“You understand what happens to your family.”
“I’ve understood it since the spring. Slowly and thoroughly, in the way I do everything. I got to the end of it and then spent months finding reasons to wait.” He sat down without being asked, which he never did. “So. There it is. It’s on your table now. That’s the whole of my great moral achievement — I moved a box from my house to your house.”
June sat down opposite him.
“Why now?”
“Because at the funeral I ate a mint I don’t like,” Theo said.
She looked at him.
“He kept a tin of them in the car door,” he said. “Milan. For years. He gave me one every single time and I never once said I didn’t want it, because I was a child and he was a grown-up and it seemed like the thing you did.”
He turned one of the empty coffee cups round on the table.
“And I stood in that yard and thought: my father has been giving people things they didn’t want his whole life. Everybody takes them. Nobody says anything.” He put the cup down. “That’s the trick. That’s all it’s ever been.”
She opened it eventually.
It was good. It was very good. It was better than anything she’d built on her own floor, because Theo had access she would never have and had used it carefully, and there was a column of dates in his handwriting down the side of one statement that made her chest hurt.
It showed that Roland Haas had paid a man.
It did not show which man.
“It’s not enough,” she said.
Theo nodded at the table rather than at her.
“No.”
“There’s no name.”
“There’s no name. There’s an amount, a date, and a route it took. The other end of it is a person who was paid in cash, by somebody who is very good at this.” Theo pushed his cup away. “Which is where you tell me what you know, and you’ve been not telling me for a month, and I’ve been letting you.”
June said nothing.
“June.”
“If I say it out loud I have to do something about it.”
“Yes,” Theo said. “That’s what saying things out loud is for.”
Later, at the door, he stood with his coat over his arm for a moment too long.
“I’d like to say something and I’d like you to let me get to the end of it,” he said.
“Theo—“
“I’m not proposing anything. God. I’m not — no.” He laughed at himself. “I’m saying that whatever happens with that box, I’d like to be somewhere in the room. And I’m aware that’s a thing you can’t give me, and I’d like to say it once anyway so that it’s said.”
June thought about all the ways to answer that. There were several, and most of them were kind.
“I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t because of what happened between us. It’s because there’s somebody else, and it’s been somebody else for a while, and I didn’t work it out until it was already the worst thing I’d ever done to a person.”
Theo took that standing up.
“Right,” he said.
“I’m sorry. That’s not a soft version. I don’t have a soft version any more.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t. It suits you.”
After he’d gone she sat at the table with the box file and her phone, and she started another message, and got a few words in.
Her thumb was moving on her father’s ring. Turning it. Round and round, the way she did when she was about to say something that wasn’t quite the truth.
June looked down at her own hand for a while.
Then she took the ring off and put it on the table next to the box file, and did not put it back on, and sat there with her hands loose and nothing to do with them.
The message on the screen said I need to tell you something.
She read it over and over. It was true. It had no move in it at all. She had finally built a sentence that was only itself.
Then she deleted it, one letter at a time, and sat looking at the empty box.
Because that was the other thing, and she had got there at last. She did not have the right to send it. Not first.
There was still one piece missing from Theo’s box file. The piece was in a flat on the east side of the city. And the only person who could get it was the person she would be sending the message to.
Whatever she wrote next, Wren would be right to read it as an ask.
June put her hands flat on the table, either side of the ring.
The phone lit up.
Wren Kovač.
It rang twice before she could make herself move.