The Kettle
Kovač flat, east side
The block had four floors and a lift that had been broken since they were children. The stairwell was tiled halfway up the wall in a green nobody would choose now, and there was a strip light on the second landing that buzzed and had always buzzed.
June was oddly pleased that the lift was still out, which told her something about herself she didn’t examine.
She went up on foot. The smell on the landing was exactly what it had always been: fried onions, wet coats, and the bleach somebody used on the steps every Friday.
For about four steps she was seventeen again, coming up here to get away from her own house.
Wren opened the door before she knocked.
“Heard you on the stairs,” she said.
“You knew it was me?”
“There’s a metal strip on every step. You can hear anyone coming from the ground floor.” Wren stood back to let her in. “So no. Sorry.”
“That’s the least flattering thing anyone’s said to me this week, and it’s been a week.”
The flat was smaller than June remembered, which was how it always went. The hall was full of shoes. There was a jacket drying over the radiator. There had always been a jacket drying over that radiator — never the same one, and always one.
“She’s awake,” Wren said. “You don’t have to go in.”
“I’d like to.”
The front room was small and very warm. Everything in it faced the television — the good chair, the sofa with the throw over the arm, a side table with a water glass and a paperback lying face-down.
On the wall above the sofa there were three photographs in the same cheap frames. Milan in his first company uniform, standing far too straight. Wren as a child, in a school jumper too big for her. And the two of them at a wedding, Zora in blue, holding on to his arm with both hands.
She was in the good chair with a blanket over her knees and the television on with no sound.
She looked at June for a second before she got there.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Hello, Mrs Kovač.”
“Zora. You’ve called me Zora since you were a girl and now suddenly it’s Mrs Kovač.” She put her hand out and June took it. It was cool and light and there was almost nothing to it. “Sit where I can see you.”
June sat.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” Zora said. “I sent a card. I don’t know if cards get to people.”
“It got to me.”
That was a lie, and June had no idea whether it was one. There had been a lot of cards.
“You’ve got thin.”
June laughed, once, with no breath behind it. “Everyone keeps saying that.”
“That’s because everyone can see it.”
Zora turned her head towards the door. Wren was standing in it with two mugs, and had stopped there.
“She’s been at that hospital every night,” Zora said. “She thinks I don’t notice, because I’m asleep, and I let her think it.”
“Mama.”
“You can come in and hear it, or you can stand there and hear it. It’s the same room.”
Wren stayed where she was.
June understood, watching her, that this was a thing that had a rule to it. Wren did not sit down in a room where somebody was saying a good thing about her. She had never done it. She would go and be useful somewhere else instead, and everybody in this flat had let her.
“I’m allowed to say true things,” Zora said. She patted June’s hand and let go. “Go on. Drink your tea in the kitchen. She won’t come in here while I’m awake.”
The kitchen was small enough to cross in a few steps. There were two chairs at the table and both of them had something on: a folded pile of washing on one, a carrier bag of medicine boxes on the other. The counter was full. June stood in the middle of the floor, because standing was the only thing left.
The kettle was the same kettle. She was fairly sure of that. There was a black scorch on the base of it from a night when the two of them had tried to make popcorn and put the kettle down on the ring that was still on. It was still here. Still working. Still boiling water for people.
A cupboard door was held on by screws that didn’t match each other. One drawer had a loop of cord where the handle used to be. A tile above the sink had been glued back and the glue had gone yellow.
Nothing in the room had been replaced. Everything in it had been mended.
June had grown up in a house where things that broke went away and came back new, or went away and did not come back, and it had never once occurred to her that there was a third option.
“Sorry,” Wren said, coming in behind her. “It’s a mess.”
“It’s not a mess.”
“It’s a mess.”
“Wren.” June turned round. “It’s the least mess I’ve been in for a year.”
Wren put the mugs down and didn’t answer that, and June understood she’d said something too true and had better move.
They sat at the small table by the window, where two people fit and a third would have to stand. Through the wall came the television going back on with the volume up, which was Zora giving them the room.
“How long have they given her,” June said.
Wren looked at the tabletop.
“They don’t give you anything. They give you a range and then they change it.”
“What’s the range?”
“Shorter than it was.” Wren turned her mug on the table without picking it up. “Ask what you came to ask.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not unfair either.”
June looked at her. Wren was doing the thing she did when she’d decided to make something easy for somebody else — sitting very still, waiting, taking up as little of the room as possible.
Tell her.
The thought was very clear, and it came with the whole shape attached. The torn pages. The Saturday with no destination. The four names, and the one that was left.
A few minutes and it would be out of her and on the table between them. Then it would be Wren’s as well as hers, and Wren could decide what to do with it.
And then Wren would go and ask her father directly, because that was exactly what she’d do, and he would know somebody was looking.
That was the reason. It was a good reason. June had checked it several times, the way you check a rope.
She smiled before she said it, which was a thing she did.
“I need the drive books,” she said. “All of them, if they’re here. I want to see where he went in the last year and a half, and the only complete record of that is in your father’s handwriting.”
“You said.”
“I’m saying it properly this time. In your kitchen, with your mother through the wall.”
“Why.”
“Because the company’s version of that year has holes in it, and I want my own version.” June kept her voice level. “That’s the truth.”
It was. That was the worst part. Every word of it was true and it was still not what was happening.
Wren looked at the table for a while.
“They’re in the box room,” she said.
“You don’t have to do it tonight.”
“Wasn’t going to do it tonight.” Wren’s thumb moved along the edge of the table, once, back. “Under the bed frame. He keeps them because he keeps everything.”
“Wren—“
“He’s out till late.” Wren stood and picked up both mugs, though June’s was still full. “I’ll do it tonight.”
June sat in the small kitchen and let that happen.
She had come here with three ways to ask and a spare in case they failed. She hadn’t needed any of them.
There was nothing in the world for her to feel except a quiet horror at how easy it had been.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“I’d like to say it.”
“Then say it after,” Wren said, “when you know if it was worth anything.”
At the door, Zora called her name from the front room. June went back in and let the old woman hold her hand again, and was told to come back when there was better weather.
Wren saw her out onto the landing.
“I’ll message you,” she said.
“Whenever. There’s no rush on it, and if you change your mind, that’s completely—“
“June.”
“Yes.”
“Go home.”
The door closed.
June stood on the landing in front of the lift she already knew was broken. There was a button and she put her thumb near it and did not press it, and stood there in the smell of somebody’s cooking, looking at the seam in the metal doors.
You could go back in.
She thought about the kettle with the burn on it. About a cupboard door mended by a girl nobody had asked.
Then she went down the stairs and out to the car, and by the time she got to the main road she had finished putting the reason back together, and it held all the way home.