What He Was Given
The landing, Kovač flat
Wren rolled her sleeves back on the landing, outside her own front door, before she put the key in.
She noticed herself doing it. She stood there with the key in the lock and her cuffs turned and understood that this was now a place she went into carefully, because everything in it belonged to somebody she wasn’t sure she knew.
She’d been staying at her aunt’s since the funeral. Nobody had made it a thing. She came back for post and clean clothes and left again, at hours when he’d be out.
He was in tonight. She’d checked.
Milan was in the front room in the good chair with the television on with no sound. Nobody had moved anything since the funeral. The blanket was still over the arm where it had been folded, and there was a water glass on the side table that had been there long enough to go cloudy.
“There’s food,” he said, without turning round.
“Not hungry.”
He looked at her properly then. He’d got thinner in the face and his shirt collar stood away from his neck, and she thought: he’s been eating the way I’ve been eating.
Wren stayed in the doorway.
“I found the pages,” she said.
Her father didn’t move.
“They were in the shoebox,” she said. “Under the frame in the box room. With Mum’s photo. That’s where you put things you can’t throw away.”
The television changed to something with a cooking programme on it.
“Sit down,” Milan said.
“No.”
The television changed to something with a cooking programme on it.
“Wren.”
“I’m not sitting down in this room.” Her voice came out level, which surprised her. “You drove that road three times. You wrote waited in the margin. Tell me what I’ve got.”
Her father put his hands on the arms of the chair, and she watched them, because his hands were the part of him she trusted most in the world and always had. They looked like an old man’s hands.
“Your mother’s treatment,” he said. “The first course. The one that worked for a while.”
“That was insurance.”
“Some of it was insurance.” He said it flatly. “The rest was a loan.”
“From who?”
“From a man at the club. Then from a man that man knew.” He stopped, and his hand went to the arm of the chair and stayed there. “Then from Haas.”
She hadn’t cried in the box room and she didn’t cry now. It came in a different way, in her legs mostly, and she stayed standing because sitting down would have been agreeing to something.
“He came to me in the car park,” Milan said. “Very nice about it. Very sorry about your mother. Said the loan was nothing, forget the loan, these things happen to families.”
“And then.”
Her father took a long time over it, and did not look away from the screen.
“And then, a while later, he asked where Mr Alcántara would be on a Saturday.”
“That’s all he asked me,” Milan said. “One morning. One car park. I thought — a man wants to know where another man will be. Businessmen do this. They arrange to run into each other.”
“Dad.”
He was looking at the television, where a woman was silently folding pastry.
“I thought I was giving him a Saturday.”
“You gave him a photograph.”
He nodded at that, slowly, like a man agreeing with a bill.
“I know what I gave him.”
The cooking programme went on doing whatever it was doing.
“When did you know?” Wren said.
“When it was in the paper.”
Wren’s hand was flat on the door frame and had been for a while.
“And you said nothing.”
“And I said nothing.” He nodded slowly, as if agreeing with somebody else. “And then it was too late to say nothing about, if you follow. There’s a day where you can still speak. Then there isn’t one.”
“The pages.”
“I took them out that week.”
He said it the way he gave mileage.
“Why keep them?”
Milan was quiet for a moment.
“Because if I burned them,” he said, “then it never happened.”
She asked about the watch last, because it was the smallest thing and she had wanted to ask about it since a Sunday night before her mother died.
“He gave it to me,” Milan said. “At Christmas. In front of people.”
His hand had gone to the cuff again without him noticing.
“Why do you wear it?”
“Because if I don’t wear it, he asks me why I don’t wear it.”
Wren put her hand flat on the door frame.
“There’s money,” Milan said. “He kept paying. After. Not much, and never the same way twice. I used what your mother needed and I didn’t touch the rest.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s gone. I’ve been sending it.” He looked at the television. “To the girl.”
Wren didn’t understand for a second. Then she did.
“To June.”
“Anonymous. Through the account, small amounts, since the mother died.” Milan lifted one hand and let it drop. “She won’t know where it comes from. Nobody knows. I’m not telling you this so it counts for something. You asked where it went.”
“It doesn’t count for something.”
“No,” Milan agreed. “It doesn’t.”
And that was the worst of it, Wren thought. Not that her father had done a terrible thing. That he had spent a year quietly doing a decent one about it, and the two just sat there side by side, not cancelling out.
Her aunt’s kitchen, next morning
She stayed at her aunt’s that night and did not sleep. In the morning she sat in a kitchen that smelled of somebody else’s cooking, at a table with a wipe-clean cloth on it, and took the plastic wallet out of her bag and put it down and looked at it.
Three pages of times and mileage in her father’s handwriting.
Hand them over and he goes to prison. He would be an old man in a room with a door that locked from the outside, and there would be nobody left in the flat, and the good chair would just be a chair.
Don’t hand them over and Roland Haas keeps a photograph in a drawer and gets to be the man who says these things happen to families.
There was no version where anybody won.
She sat with that for a long time and it did not get better. Eventually she understood that waiting for it to get better was just another way of not deciding.
She put the wallet back in her bag.
Alcántara House, sixth floor
June’s floor was busy in the daytime, which was somehow worse. Phones, a printer, two men laughing about something by the window.
She came to reception. She looked like someone who had been not sleeping in a more expensive way than Wren had been not sleeping. Her hands were empty and her ring was gone.
“Wren.”
She stood up so fast her chair went back into the desk behind her.
“Not here.”
They went into a meeting room with glass walls. Everything they did would be visible and nothing they said would be heard, and Wren thought that was about right.
She took the wallet out and held it.
“My father took money from Roland Haas for my mother’s treatment,” she said. “Then Haas asked him where your father would be on a Saturday. He gave it to him. He says he thought it was a meeting. I believe him and it doesn’t matter that I believe him.”
June’s face did something June did not have control of.
“Wren—“
“The pages are in here. His handwriting, his signature at the back of the book, the road written out three times.” Wren held it a moment longer. “He’ll go to prison. I’ve worked out that he’ll go to prison and I’m doing it anyway, and I want you to know I did the working out.”
“You don’t have to be the one who—“
“There isn’t anyone else.”
She held it out.
June took it. Their hands were both on it for a second, and Wren felt the flat edge of June’s thumbnail against her knuckle, and neither of them let go of it quickly.
“Thank you,” June said. Her voice had gone.
Wren let go.
“I’m not doing this for you,” she said.