The Last One
The systems room, early
The room looked worse in daylight. You could see the dust on the top of the racks and the ring marks on the desk and the fact that somebody had blu-tacked a fire notice up crooked in about 2011.
June waited until the light through the blinds had gone from grey to nearly white, and then she woke up.
She did it properly. A breath in that was slightly too long. A hand coming out from under her cheek. Then the small confused noise people make — which she rehearsed in her head first, and got right, and performed at the ceiling.
“God. What time is it.”
“Late.” Wren didn’t turn round. “Early.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
June sat up and the coat slid off her shoulder and she caught it, and looked at it as if she were working out where it had come from.
“Is this yours?”
Wren still didn’t turn round. “There wasn’t anything else.”
“You’ll have frozen.”
“It’s warm in here. It’s always warm in here.” Wren clicked something. “Restore finished about an hour ago. I stayed for the checks.”
“You could have woken me.”
“You were asleep.”
June rubbed the back of her own neck, where the chair had left a knot.
“That’s normally when people get woken.”
“You’d have got up and driven home badly.”
June folded the coat over her arm and stood, and had to put a hand on the back of the chair, because her leg had gone.
“Right,” she said. “I’m going to go home and shower and be unbearable about how tired I am for an entire working day, and you should feel lucky you won’t be there to hear it.”
“Mm.”
She was already clicking through something else, which was an answer.
“Go home, Wren. Actually go.”
Wren’s shoulders did something small that June chose not to read.
“After the checks.”
“You said the checks were done.”
Wren did not look round.
“There’s a second set.”
There wasn’t. June knew there wasn’t.
“Okay,” she said. “Then eat the sandwich. It’s still in the bag and it’s the only thing in this building that’s been alive recently.”
“That’s a horrible way to describe a sandwich.”
“It’s a horrible sandwich.” June got her bag. At the door she stopped. “Wren.”
“Mm.”
“Thanks for the coat.”
Wren’s hand paused over the keyboard.
“It gets cold up here,” she said.
The car park, level two
Then she took the lift down and got into her car and sat there with the key in her hand and did not put it in the ignition. The level was almost empty. Somewhere below her a barrier went up and down for somebody leaving.
She had not been asleep.
She had gone under for a while, genuinely, somewhere in the middle of Beckmann and the lift voice. Then she’d come back up the way you do in a warm room. Halfway. Aware of the chair, and the hum, and somebody moving quietly behind her.
Then something had come down over her shoulders, and she’d understood, in the half-second before she could arrange herself, that if she moved now Wren would apologise.
So she hadn’t moved.
She had lain there with her face against the chair and her eyes shut and heard all of it. The crouching down. The bit about the chairs. Her mother. She asked if you were all right. She asked more than once.
Seven years. That’s the whole thing.
You’d be so kind about it that I’d have to leave the building.
Don’t wake up. Please don’t wake up.
And June had lain there and let her think it had worked.
She sat in the car with the coat on her lap. It smelled of woodsmoke, and of the inside of the systems room, and faintly of the funeral.
There had been a moment. One. Right at the start, before the sentence about the chairs.
A second where she could have sat up and said I’m awake. Taken the embarrassment. Let it be something that happened between two people who were both in the room.
She hadn’t taken it.
She sat with the key in her hand and did not put it in.
Her hands were cold and would not stop being cold. Every so often her chest did something on its own — one hard breath in, and nothing after it. It had been doing that since the hospital. Each time she waited for it to turn into crying, and each time it didn’t.
She asked if you were all right. She asked more than once.
Somebody’s mother had asked about her. For years. In a flat June had been going to since she was small, and had eaten in twice.
That was the thing she kept going back over, and it was not the seven years, and she was ashamed of which one she kept going back over.
Because she had lain in that chair with her eyes shut and been held. First time in a year.
Somebody had put a coat over her and stood in the dark and said the whole of it out loud and asked for nothing back. June had taken every word and gone on lying still with her mouth shut.
She wanted more of it.
That was the true sentence, and it arrived in one piece, in a cold car under a strip light on level two.
So she built the other one on top of it, and it went like this. Wren had just buried her mother. Nothing a person feels in that week can be trusted. The kind thing was to leave it where it lay.
It was a good reason. It was even, in places, true.
The other reason was that she still needed her.
June’s flat, evenings
She opened the file that first evening, before she had read a single page.
She got home from the systems room, showered, went to work, came home again, and sat down on the floor with her coat still on. She made a new document. She typed the date of the Saturday at the top of it, and under that she typed MK, and then she sat looking at two lines of text for a long time.
Then she went and got the books out of the hall cupboard.
They took a week.
She did it on the floor of the front room, because there wasn’t a table big enough.
The flat was rented and beige and had a lift that announced the floors, and she had put nothing on the walls in a year. There was one lamp she liked. She worked under it and left the rest of the room dark. Milan’s handwriting, one book per car per year, columns of times and towns going back further than she wanted to think about.
The last week of the last book wasn’t there. That was the whole point of the last book. Three pages, close to the spine.
But the year before it was all there, and the year before that.
And in among the school runs and the airport runs and the endless quiet trips to Lorne & Sons, there was a pattern.
Weekend entries. Out and back. No destination written.
Milan wrote the destination every time. He wrote it when he drove to a garage. He wrote it when he drove her father’s dry cleaning across town, which had actually happened, more than once. June had to stop reading for a while after that one.
On these, he’d written the times and the mileage and left the middle column empty.
She measured one of them. Then another. Then she got a map out, because she didn’t trust herself.
The distance came out the same every time, and it came out at a road past the reservoir where the houses have gates and long drives.
June knew that road. She’d been to a party at the end of it, years ago, and had stood in a garden with a glass in her hand while a man called Roland Haas told her she had her father’s chin.
By the end of the week the file had a shape, because she was her father’s daughter and that was what you did.
Dates on the left, sources on the right. The things she was sure of in black and the things she wasn’t in grey.
Access log rows removed — week of the article. Weekend trips, no destination, mileage consistent with Haas property. Three pages removed from final drive book. Removed by hand, close to the spine. The books were kept by MK. The pages were removed by whoever held the books.
She looked at that last line for a long time.
Nobody in the family ever said what had actually done it. They said after everything. They said his heart wasn’t in it any more, which was not the organ involved.
The doctors were careful in the way doctors are. Stress is not a thing you can write on a form. It is only a thing everybody in the room agrees about and nobody signs.
June had not been in the house that afternoon. She’d been at Theo’s, and her phone had been face-down on a table for two hours, and by the time she saw the missed calls the ambulance had already gone.
So: there was a version of the torn pages where somebody else did it. She built it carefully, the way you check a rope. Somebody got into the flat. Somebody borrowed the book. Somebody who wanted to protect what was left of her father’s name.
It didn’t hold. It didn’t come close.
At the bottom of the file, under the last line, she typed:
Don’t tell W until I have the pages.
She read it back.
She could have written until I’m sure. She could have written until there’s a better moment, or until she’s had time, or any of the things she’d been telling herself all week on the floor with the books.
Her hands had written the true one instead.
Until I have the pages.
That was what it was. Everything before that sentence was a woman finding out something terrible about a man she’d known since she was a child.
Everything after it was a plan.
She did not delete it.
The message took her a while.
She wrote it and read it back and took out the part that sounded like a favour. Then she read it again and took out the part that sounded like an apology.
Wren had told her to stop leaving doors. June had discovered she could no longer leave one without hearing herself do it.
What was left was very short.
Her hand went to her father’s ring and turned it around her thumb, and she was aware of doing it, and went on doing it anyway. Again. Again.
Then she picked up the phone and sent it.
One more thing. The last one.