Before the Second Ring
The Kovač flat, Merksem
From the kitchen window you could see the cathedral spire in one direction and three container cranes in the other, orange, lit all night. Everyone on that street had grown up with both.
The kitchen was small enough to cross in a few steps and had not been redecorated in Wren’s lifetime. One window over the sink, a table for two under it, a radiator that came on when it felt like it.
Four hours ago she had watched June walk out of the kitchen on Halden Road, and she had not gone back to the sink there for a while afterwards.
It was the back of her that did it.
June had held the front of herself together all afternoon. Wren had watched her do it from the doorway of a room she wasn’t in — the handshakes, the thank yous, the small correct smile. Then she had turned to leave, and there was nothing holding the back of her up at all.
Wren had wanted, with an urgency that frightened her, to put a hand between those shoulder blades and take some of the weight.
She had dried a dish instead.
Now she was home, and it was Sunday, and the pill box got filled on Sunday nights. Wren had done it enough times that her hands knew the order without her.
Her mother was asleep in the front room with the television on, tuned to the Serbian channel she could no longer follow. She slept most evenings now, sitting up, remote still in her hand, and the trick was to take it off her without waking her.
Wren rolled her sleeves back before she started. She’d done that since she was a kid — it was what you did before you touched something that wasn’t yours to break — and it had stopped being a decision a long time ago.
The kitchen door went. Her dad came in with the cold on his coat.
“You’re late,” Wren said.
“Traffic on the ring road.” He said it to the coat hook, working an arm out of the sleeve.
“There’s soup.”
“Ate at the depot.”
He put his keys in the bowl, and his sleeve came up as he did it, and there was a watch on his wrist that Wren had never seen before.
She made herself look back down at the pill box.
“That watch is new,” she said.
Her father’s hand went to the cuff and pulled it straight.
“It’s not new. Had the strap done, that’s all. Same one.”
It was not the same one. Her father’s watch was a flat grey thing with a scratch across the face, and she had looked at it from the back seat of a car more times than she could count.
This one was heavier, and it caught the light.
She let it go, because it was Sunday and her mother was asleep in the next room.
“The heater in the hall’s fixed,” she said instead.
“I got a man in.”
Her father had once spent an entire Sunday on that heater with a torch in his mouth rather than pay somebody.
“You never get a man in.”
“You’re busy. You’re at that place all hours.” He filled a glass at the tap and drank it standing up, which he did when he wanted the conversation to be over. “It’s done. Don’t pick at it.”
There was a box of the good tea on the shelf, the kind her mother liked and they bought at Christmas. There was a heating bill on the counter with a stamp across it.
Wren snapped the lid on the pill box.
“Do you still hear from them?” Milan said. “That family.”
The tap was still running. He turned it off, and did not turn round.
“No,” Wren said.
She was surprised by how easy it came out, and by how much she wanted the answer to be a different one.
“Good.” He said it like a man agreeing with a doctor. “That’s finished, that business. Nothing good in it.”
He went through to the front room, and she heard the television go quiet, and then her mother’s voice, small and pleased, saying his name.
Wren waited until he’d gone up, then took the box in.
Her mother was awake after all. She had the remote in her lap and wasn’t using it.
“You’re still up,” Zora said.
“Doing your box.”
Her mother’s eyes came round to her, then down to the box, then back. She was slower at that than she used to be, and Wren had got very good at not noticing.
“You did it last week.”
“It’s a week later.” Wren set it down on the side table and turned it so the lid faced the chair, which was how her mother could open it one-handed.
“You should go out,” Zora said.
“Went out Friday.”
There was a small sound from the chair that on a better week would have been a laugh.
“To the shop.”
“That’s out.”
“Wren.” Her mother’s hand came over and got hold of her fingers, which was as much as she could manage now. “You never ask me for anything. Not since you were small.”
“Nothing to ask for.”
Her mother’s grip did not tighten, because it could not.
“That’s what worries me.”
Wren took the remote gently out of her lap and turned the television off, and stood in the dark for a moment with the plastic still warm in her hand.
“Idi spavaj,” she said, because that was what you said in that room, and had been since she was small.
Her mother said something back in the same language, too quiet to catch, and closed her eyes.
The phone went late.
Wren was at the kitchen table with a laptop open and a mug she’d forgotten to drink, and the screen lit up face-up beside the water glass and her mother’s tablets, and it said June Alcántara.
She looked at it.
They’d been in the same house that afternoon and had said about eleven sentences to each other, most of them about a serving dish.
Before today it had been fourteen months. Wren knew the number the way you know your own front door, without ever having decided to learn it.
The phone rang once.
She had loved June Alcántara since she was seventeen. She had never said it, to June or to anybody, and after a while the not-saying stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a fact about herself, the way being tall was a fact.
She had told herself it would fade. It had done something else instead. It had settled.
She picked up before the second ring.
“Hi,” June said.
“Hi.”
Wren stood up without meaning to, in her own kitchen, at that hour.
“I wasn’t sure this was still your number.”
“It is.”
A pause. Wren could hear that June was outside somewhere, and that she was walking, and that she stopped walking.
“That’s fair,” June said. “I’d have hung up on me.”
“Nobody hung up.”
“No. You didn’t.” Something went past on June’s end, a car or a bus. “How’s your mum?”
“About the same.”
Wren looked at the pill box on the table in front of her. Sunday to Saturday, four compartments each, all of them full for the coming week.
“That’s not really an answer.”
“It’s the answer they give me.”
June laughed, one breath of it, and it was such a familiar sound that Wren put her hand flat on the table.
“Can I see you,” June said. “Tomorrow, or whenever. There’s — no, I’m not going to do it on the phone. Can I see you.”
“Where?”
There was a pause, and Wren could hear June deciding not to fill it with a joke.
“Anywhere. You pick. I’ll come to your side of the city, I’ve got nothing on and it’s easier for me than it is for you, and if you’d rather not, that’s completely fine and I won’t ask twice.”
There it was. The door she always left open for people, so that saying no to her would be easy.
“The place by the station,” she said. “The one with the bad chairs.”
“It’s still there?”
June said it the way you say the name of somewhere you have not thought about in a year and find that you can still see the door.
“It’s still there.”
“Okay.” June’s voice changed. Wren couldn’t have said how. “Okay. Good. Tomorrow, then. Six?”
“Six is fine.”
“Wren—“
She waited.
“Nothing,” June said. “See you at six.”
Wren put the phone down face-down on the table, which was a thing she’d started doing at some point without noticing, and sat there while the kitchen made its small night noises around her.
Then she went and took the remote out of her mother’s hand.
The café by the station
The place had been there since before either of them could drink coffee. It sat in the row under the station steps, between a locksmith and a shop that had been four different shops in ten years, and every time a train came in the window shook and the sugar bowls walked half an inch across the tables.
Inside it smelled of toast and wet coats. The chairs were the original ones, bentwood, with a split down the seat that got you if you sat wrong. There was a laminated menu nobody had updated and a radio behind the counter permanently tuned to something with adverts on it.
June was already there when Wren came up the street, sitting in the window with a coffee she hadn’t touched.
Wren stopped on the pavement for a second before she went in. Through the glass she could see the shape of her — the way June sat in a chair she didn’t like, straight, one ankle behind the other, as if the chair were a meeting she had to get through.
She was thinner. That was the first thing. Not thinner in a way anyone else would comment on, but Wren had spent a long time looking at her and the difference was there in her jaw.
The second thing was that she looked tired in a way that sleep wasn’t going to touch.
Wren pushed the door open.
“Hi,” June said, and stood up, and then didn’t seem to know what to do with the standing, so she sat back down.
“Don’t get up.”
“Too late.”
Wren took the other chair. The table between them was small and wobbled, and she put her hand on it out of habit to find out which leg it was.
“Sorry,” June said.
She stopped. Her hand went to the sugar bowl and moved it, straightened it, put it back exactly where it had been.
“About your mum. I know I said it on the phone.” She was looking at the table. “I’m going to say it properly once, and then I’ll stop, and you won’t have to keep receiving it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
June made herself look up when she said it, which visibly cost her something, and held it for about a second before her eyes went past Wren’s shoulder to the window.
“Thanks,” Wren said.
June nodded and reached for her coffee and then didn’t drink it.
The last time they’d spoken properly had been in the car park after June’s father’s funeral.
June had said I’ll call you. Wren had said sure. They had both known what that was.
She had not been angry about it. That was the part she’d never been able to explain to herself. She’d been at that funeral as well, at the back, near the doors, and afterwards she’d gone home and made her mother’s dinner and waited. The waiting had not felt like waiting. It had felt like the normal condition of her life.
Yesterday there had been another funeral. Today there was this. Wren had decided on the walk down from the station not to make anything of it.
“What are you doing now?” June said. “Work, I mean. Someone told me you were still in the building.”
“Systems.”
June waited, and when nothing else came she made a face at the table.
“That’s not a job, that’s a floor.”
“Access, storage, backups. When something breaks and nobody knows why, it comes to us.” Wren heard herself keep going, the way she always did once it was a machine and not a person. “Most of it isn’t broken. Most of it was set up wrong years ago by someone who left, and everyone’s been working around it since, and then one day the workaround stops and they call it a failure.”
June was watching her.
“What,” Wren said.
“Nothing. You always did that.” June turned her cup. “You could look at a thing and tell everyone why it was hanging crooked.”
“It’s not a talent. It’s just paying attention.”
“That’s the same thing. People don’t know that.”
Wren turned her spoon over. It was a small thing to have said and it had gone in somewhere under the ribs, and she did not want it to have, and it had.
The girl came and took June’s cup, and asked if she wanted another, and June said yes and then looked at Wren and asked if she wanted anything, and Wren said no.
“Get something,” June said.
“Not hungry.”
“You’ve come from work.”
“Still not hungry.”
June let it go, which was new.
The old June would have ordered for her anyway and made a joke out of it, and it would have been fine. Wren noticed the difference and put it somewhere to look at later.
“You look well,” June said.
“You don’t.”
June’s eyebrows went up.
“That came out wrong,” Wren said.
“No, it didn’t. It came out exactly right, you just don’t usually let it.” June turned the ring on her thumb. “I’m not sleeping much. It’s fine, it’s a phase, everyone’s very keen to tell me it’s a phase.”
“Where are you living?”
“A flat near the park. It’s rented and it’s beige and there’s a lift that talks to you.” June said it lightly. “The house went last week. Signed on Thursday.”
“The house on Halden Road?”
“That one.”
Wren didn’t say anything. She had fixed a cupboard door in that house. She had eaten in that house twice, both times because somebody had told her to sit down.
“It’s all right,” June said. “It’s actually all right. It’s just a lot of rooms I wasn’t using.”
“Sure.”
“You’re allowed to say something.”
“Nothing to say that helps.”
Wren rolled her left sleeve up, then down.
“Say what you came to say,” she said.
“That obvious?”
“You keep moving that cup.”
June looked down at the cup like it had betrayed her, and something went across her face that Wren didn’t have a name for, and was gone.
“All right.” June put both hands flat on the table. “There’s something I want to ask you. It’s not a small thing, and it’s the kind of thing you should probably say no to. So I’m going to explain all of it first, and then you can—“
“Yes.”
June stopped.
“You don’t know what it is,” she said.
“You’ll tell me.”
Outside, a train came into the station and people started coming up the steps in a group, and the window rattled slightly the way it always had.
Wren sat and listened to her own answer sitting in the air where she’d left it, easy, immediate, given away before there was anything to give it to.
You’d have said yes to anything, she thought. That’s the bit you’ll have to live with.
“Okay,” June said quietly. “Okay. Thank you.”
She reached across the table, and stopped, and moved the cup again instead.
Wren went back up the station steps afterwards because the bus from the other side took longer and she wanted the longer one.
She stood on the platform with her hands in her pockets and went back over it, the way she went back over a fault after the system was up again.
Someone told me you were still in the building.
June hadn’t spoken to anybody from the building in fourteen months. She’d said so herself, on the phone.
So somebody had told her. Which meant that at some point, June had asked.
The train came in. Wren got on it and found a seat and looked at her own reflection over the dark.
She could follow that thought. It was right there, and she was good at following things.
She put her phone face-down on her knee and let the thought go past her, the way you let a stop go past when you have decided not to get off.