Don't Ask Me That
St Brendan’s, fourth floor
They moved you to a side room at the end, away from the ward. It had a window that looked at another wing of the same building and a chair for one visitor and a clock that was two minutes fast.
They said she could stay as long as she wanted. Wren stayed a little while, and then she asked about the paperwork.
The nurse stopped halfway through folding the sheet back. Then she straightened up and put on the careful voice, the one they must be taught.
“There’s no rush on any of that,” she said.
“I’d rather know now.”
“Of course.” The nurse had been on nights all week and had been kind every single time, which Wren would remember later and be unable to do anything with. “There’s a folder. I’ll bring it up.”
So Wren stood in the corridor with a green folder, next to a vending machine that had been broken since the spring, and read about registration and certificates and who to notify next. She understood all of it. She could not have said one word of it out loud.
Her father came before six.
He’d driven straight from a job and he was still in the coat.
“She’s gone?”
“Yes.”
He put his hand over his mouth and kept it there. Wren watched him and thought, with a clarity that frightened her, that he had got old in a week. Not tired. Old. The line of his jaw had gone somewhere.
“Sit down,” she said.
“No.”
He had his hands behind his back and his weight forward, the way he stood at the door of rooms he was not invited into.
“Dad.”
“I’ll sit down later.”
So they stood together in the corridor, both refusing the chairs. After a while a porter came past with a trolley, and they both stepped back against the wall at the same time to let him through.
“You’ll have to ring people,” Milan said.
“I know.”
“Your aunt. The ones in Sombor. I can’t —“ He stopped. “I’ll do the ones at the depot.”
“I’ll do all of them.”
Her father made a small sound that was not agreement.
“You don’t have to do the ones in Sombor. They’ll keep you an hour each and they’ll cry.”
“It’s fine. It’s phone calls. I’m good at phone calls.”
That wasn’t true either, and he let her have it, and she stood in a stairwell saying the same short sentence over and over. In Serbian to the ones in Sombor. In Dutch to the neighbour. In English to the woman from the depot, who was Polish.
She got better at it each time, which was the worst thing that happened all day.
The flat, that night
The flat was exactly as they’d left it.
That was the part nobody warns you about. The good chair still had the shape of her in it. The blanket was folded over the arm the way Wren had folded it that morning, before any of this, when it had still been a morning like the others.
She hung her coat up. She washed the mugs in the sink. She wiped the counter.
Then she took the pill box down off the shelf and had it open and the Sunday compartment loaded before she understood what she was doing.
She stood there with a small blue tablet between her finger and thumb.
Her father was in the doorway.
“Give it here,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
He held his hand out and kept it there.
“Wren. Give it here.”
She gave him the pill box. He put it in the drawer with the batteries and the takeaway menus and shut it. Neither of them said anything.
Then he went and sat down in the good chair, which she had not expected and could not watch.
Andric & Son, Verrall Road
The funeral home was on a road Wren had driven past her whole life without ever once looking at. Inside it was carpeted in a way that took the sound out of the room, and there were fresh flowers on a stand that were the only thing in the building not the colour of oatmeal.
The man there was called Andric and he was very good at his job, which meant he said almost nothing and left long spaces for other people to fill. He put a folder on the desk. Wren opened it and started reading the prices, because reading prices was a thing she could still do.
“We don’t need the middle one,” she said. “The second column is fine.”
“Take your time.”
Andric folded his hands and did not look at either of them.
“The second column’s fine, Dad. It’s the same service, it’s just the—“
“We’ll take the first,” Milan said.
Wren looked at him. He was reading the page as if the numbers on it were in another language.
“It’s what she’d have wanted.”
It was a sentence that had never been true in the history of the world. He said it the way a man says a line he’s been going over in the car.
Andric wrote something down and said there’d be a deposit today and the balance within the month.
Milan took an envelope out of the inside pocket of his coat.
It wasn’t a cheque. It wasn’t a card. He put the envelope on the desk and opened it and counted notes out onto the wood, flat and quick, the way a man counts who has done it recently and more than once.
Andric didn’t blink. People must pay him in all sorts of ways.
Wren sat very still and watched her father’s hands.
There had been a deposit at the hospital, in cash, the day before her mother went down in the hall. There had been a new watch. There had been a heater fixed by a man he’d got in, and a box of the good tea in a house where nobody bought the good tea.
She’d put each of those somewhere separate, in a different part of her head, the way you file faults you haven’t got time to look at. On their own, each one had an answer. A bonus. A cheap strap. A neighbour who knew a man.
They came together on the desk in front of her, all at once, in the shape of an envelope.
The ring road
He drove them home, because he always drove.
The ring road ran alongside the dock wall for a stretch, and the ships behind it were lit and working, the way they were at every hour of every day of her life.
Wren sat in the passenger seat with the folder on her knees and let the streets go past. Rain came on. He put the wipers on the slow setting and then didn’t touch them again.
“Dad.”
“Mm.”
The wipers went. She watched the road with him for a while before she said it.
“Where’s the money coming from?”
Her father’s face didn’t change. That was the thing she kept coming back to afterwards — it didn’t change at all.
The wipers went. Went again.
“I’ve got a bit put by,” Milan said.
“You haven’t got a bit put by. I do the accounts. I’ve done the accounts since college, because you said numbers gave you a headache. There’s nothing put by.”
He changed gear, though he did not need to.
“There’s some you don’t see.”
“Then show me the some I don’t see.”
He indicated, and turned, and did it perfectly. He had driven for a living for as long as she’d been alive, and his hands never did anything wrong no matter what the rest of him was doing.
“I took extra work,” he said. “Private hire. Weekends.”
He had both hands at the proper positions on the wheel.
“When?”
“Last year.”
It came out with no space in front of it, which was how she knew.
“You were home at weekends last year. Every weekend. You watched the football with the sound off because Mum was sleeping.”
The wipers went. He let them go twice before he answered, which he had never done in his life; her father answered questions the way he took corners.
“There were some I didn’t tell you about.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d have taken it off me and put it in the account for the house.” Milan’s voice stayed flat. “And it was for her.”
For a moment it was almost enough.
It sounded like him. Hiding money was exactly the sort of kindness her father would do badly — take on work he was too old for, say nothing, and let his family think worse of him rather than explain. A week ago she would have believed it and been angry with him for a day and let it go.
But weekend driving pays into an account. It does not come home in an envelope.
“Dad, the deposit at the hospital was paid the day before she fell.”
“Leave it.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.” She heard her own voice go up and hated it. “I’m asking a question. That’s all it is. It’s a question.”
They came to the lights on the ring road and stopped. The indicator kept going. The rain got heavier and the wipers stayed slow.
Her father looked at her.
It lasted a second. Then he turned back to the road and put both hands on the wheel at the proper positions, the way he’d taught her, and said:
“Don’t ask me that.”
Wren didn’t say anything.
“Not now. Not this week.” He didn’t look over. “Don’t ask me that.”
The lights changed.
Her phone buzzed while they were still on the ring road. She read it at the next set of lights.
I heard. I’m so sorry.
Tell me when it is and I’ll be there.
And I’m not asking about anything else. Not now, not for a long time. I want that on record.
Wren looked at the messages. At the capital letters and the full stops. At somebody typing carefully, late at night, and then reading it back before sending.
She wrote ok and sent it, and put the phone face-down on her knee.
In the mirror she could see the empty back seat, and her own eyes above it, and she looked at that instead of at her father for the rest of the way home.