Not Like This
Alcántara House, and then the news
Roland Haas resigned on a Thursday, for health reasons, and the statement was a few lines long and cost more to write than most people’s cars.
There were charges. There would be more of them, and slowly, and in a language designed to make a reader give up halfway down. Milan was on bail and living in the flat, and had been photographed once, from behind, going into a solicitor’s office in a coat June recognised.
June was not in any of it. Theo was, in a small way, and had been very calm about it.
At work, Beckmann stopped by her desk and said the family thing had come up in a meeting and that it had come up well, and June looked at him until he went away.
She should have felt something. She kept checking, the way you press a bruise.
June’s flat, a wet Tuesday
The estate had a long tail. It always does.
There was an account her mother’s solicitor had set up and never closed, and June went through it that evening at the kitchen table, under the one lamp she liked, because there was nothing else left to go through.
Deposits. Small ones. Irregular. Coming in since about a month after her mother died.
She’d noticed them before, early on, and assumed a pension or a rebate or one of the boring streams that come out of a dead person’s paperwork.
She’d never looked at where they came from. Looking at where things came from had been a full-time job, and this had not been one of the things.
She looked now.
Cash deposits, made at branches, never the same one twice.
June sat back in her chair with the laptop open and the rain going at the window and thought, quite calmly: he’s been sending it to me.
The man who did it. In small amounts, in cash, at counters, for a year, while his wife was dying.
She did not know what to do with that.
She sat with it and got nowhere, and it was still open on the table when somebody knocked at the door, late.
The doorway
Wren was leaning on the frame with one shoulder.
She had her work coat on over something that wasn’t work clothes, and her hair had come out of its tie on one side, and the corridor light was doing the thing corridor lights do to a face.
“Your buzzer’s still broken,” she said.
June had the door open on the chain and then off it.
“I know. They send a man.”
“He agrees with you and then leaves.”
Wren almost laughed and it came out wrong.
“That’s the one.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Bit.” Wren considered it, honestly, the way she considered everything. “Yeah.”
“Where have you been?”
“Pub by the station. On my own, which I’m told is bad.” She pushed off the frame and got about half a step into the flat and stopped. “Can I come in?”
“You’re already in.”
“That’s not the same.”
June stood back and opened the door the rest of the way.
“Come in, Wren.”
She came in and stood in the middle of the room the way she stood everywhere, hands where you could see them, not touching anything.
“He gets a date next month,” she said. “For the plea. His solicitor says twelve to eighteen and he’ll do less. She said it like it was good news. It might be good news, I don’t know how to tell any more.”
“Sit down.”
“No.” Wren looked at the ceiling for a second, and her jaw did something. “Right. I’ve had a few, and I’ve been building this on the walk over, and if I sit down I’ll lose it.”
June didn’t move.
“I did it and I’d do it again,” Wren said. “That’s the first thing. You need to know that I’d do it again.”
“Okay.”
“He put a man in the ground. He didn’t mean to and he did.” Her voice was steady in a way that took visible effort. “And now there’s nobody in the flat and the chair’s just a chair and I did that, and both things are true, and I’m not — I’m not asking you to make either one smaller.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“No. You wouldn’t.” Wren almost laughed. “That’s the problem with you.”
The rain kept going.
“Second thing,” she said.
“Wren.”
“Second thing.” She looked straight at June, which she almost never did. “I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen.”
June’s hand went to her thumb, and found nothing there, because the ring was on the kitchen table where it had been for weeks.
“I said it once already.” Wren’s hand closed at her side, opened, closed again. “In the systems room. And I’ve spent a month telling myself you were asleep.”
June didn’t move.
“You didn’t shift when the coat went on,” Wren said. “Nobody lies that still.”
She pushed her hair back off her face with the flat of her hand.
“I’ve been over it and it comes out the same way every time. And I’m not asking you to say it. If you say it out loud I’ll have to leave.”
She stopped, and made herself keep going.
“So that’s the second thing. I said it to you, and you heard it, and I’m saying it again now on purpose.”
June crossed the room.
She did it without any plan, which was so unlike her that she noticed it happening, and she got to about a foot away and stopped, and Wren didn’t move.
“You’re not saying anything,” Wren said.
“I’m trying to work out where to start.”
Wren’s chin came up half an inch.
“Start anywhere.”
So June kissed her.
It was not a decision so much as the end of not deciding.
Wren made a small sound against her mouth, surprise mostly. Then her hand came up and closed on the back of June’s coat — she was still in it, she’d been in it all evening — and pulled her in.
She tasted of beer and the cold. Her hair was against June’s cheek. Her hand was flat between June’s shoulder blades and it was shaking, slightly, the way it had shaken around a paper cup in a hospital corridor.
June kissed her, and let herself have it, and had it for a while.
Then Wren’s other hand moved to the front of her shirt.
June put her palm on Wren’s chest and pushed — hardly a push at all, a few inches of space.
“No,” she said. “Not like this.”
Wren stood there with her eyes shut and her hand still fisted in June’s coat.
“Right,” she said. “Yeah. Course.”
“Look at me. I’m not saying no to you.”
“You don’t have to—“
“I’m not leaving you a way out. You told me to stop doing that.”
June kept her hand where it was.
“You’ve said yes to me every single time I’ve asked you for anything. Every time, before I’d finished asking. And I took all of them.”
Wren opened her eyes.
“I’m not taking another one,” June said. “Not tonight. Not from someone who’s been drinking and walked here in the rain to say a thing she’s been carrying since she was seventeen.”
She let her hand drop.
“When it happens, I want you to remember choosing it. That’s the whole reason. That’s all of it.”
The rain went at the window.
“That’s a very annoying thing to be right about,” Wren said.
“I know.”
June put her on the sofa, which took some negotiating, and got the blanket off the end of the bed and put it over her.
Wren was asleep before the light went off. She slept like somebody who hadn’t in a long time, on her side, one hand under her cheek.
June stood in the dark of her own front room with her hand on the back of the chair.
Then she moved the ring off the kitchen table into the drawer, so it wouldn’t be the first thing Wren saw in the morning.
She sat down with the laptop still open on a year of small cash deposits, and waited for it to get light.