Wren
Five days. Saturday.
The Fiesta started first time, which it has never done in its life, and I hated it for that.
The radio came on with the engine. It always does. It's tuned to us, because who else would I listen to, and it came on in the middle of a sentence, in the car park, with the frost going white on the bonnet and the skip beside me like a big dark animal asleep.
"It's Sam," said Sam, on the radio. "The producer."
I sat with my hands on the wheel and heard him tell the whole of Scarholme about a lamp room and a kettle gone cold and a man being kind to the dark. Then a trumpet came up under him, and Hector was playing a record to the city with nobody in my chair.
I drove round the harbour the long way, because the short way goes past the pier.
I parked on the Fish Quay, by the rank, under the one lamp. I turned the engine off. The radio went with it. The Lamp Café had its window lit and steamed, and a cab sat on the rank with its engine running and nobody in it, and the sea was doing its slow thing against the quay wall, slap and drag, slap and drag.
Then I couldn't start it again.
There was nothing wrong with the car. My hand just wouldn't go to the key. I sat there with it in my lap like something I'd been handed at a funeral.
My nana's song. I'd said it into the mic ten minutes before, with my hand on my chest, before I knew I was going to. A month before that I'd told the whole city she made it up.
And a man on a tape, thirty years ago, at the top of a lighthouse, with the brass done and nobody to show it to, had said: That daft song you sing her.
Her. The bairn. Me.
So it was Nana. It had to be. Nana, widowed at thirty, who walked the prom every night God sent. Nana, who minded me most nights when I was small. Nana, whose bags the red coat came out of. Nana at the rail at twenty to two, with me in a pram, and an old man coming down from the light with a flask. I sat there and built it, the way I build a story on air out of three texts and a caller's cough, and every piece went in.
And she'd never said. Thirty-three years of Sunday dinners, and she'd never once said.
My phone went on the passenger seat. Sam. One word.
Where?
I didn't answer. I couldn't have told him. I was on the Fish Quay, in a Fiesta, in a yellow mac and my dead nana's vest, and I was also somewhere else, very small, in the dark, being sung to.
At twenty to three somebody knocked on the window and I nearly went through the roof.
It was Bev, in her pinny, with a polystyrene cup. I wound the window down two inches, which is as far as it goes in the cold.
"Tea," said Bev. "Two sugars. Don't argue." She pushed it through the gap. She looked me over like a fryer, to see if I was done. "You look like you've been told the price, petal."
"I have a bit."
"Then drink that first," Bev said. "Prices are always worse on an empty stomach." And she went back across the cobbles to the Lamp with her arms folded against the wind, and didn't look back, which is the kindest thing anybody did all night.
One minute past three. My whole working life my phone's lit up then, one word from my mam.
It didn't light.
Five past. The phone went, and my heart went with it, and it was Sam.
Safe?
I sat on the Fish Quay till four o'clock with Bev's tea going cold between my knees. Then my hand went to the key on its own, and the Fiesta started first time again, the traitor.
The landing light was on at my mam's.
The landing light means somebody's up, because my dad goes to bed in the dark like a man going down a ladder.
I didn't get to knock. The door opened while my hand was still coming up.
My mam was in her dressing gown, the quilted blue one, done up to the neck. Her hair was flat on one side. She had her glasses on, and over them I was a child who'd come into the canteen without a coat.
"Shoes," she said.
I took my shoes off. I stood in the hall in my socks.
The bags were there, the six blue bags, queuing at the radiator like they've queued since November. But the coat wasn't on them. Six days ago I'd laid it across the nearest one myself, and smoothed it twice, and nobody had said a word.
It was on her hook. My mam's own hook, by the door, the first one, between her anorak and my dad's fleece. A red duffel, hung up properly, by the loop, the way you hang a coat you're going to wear again. Third one down, the odd toggle, the bright one, caught the hall light.
I looked at it. My mam looked at me looking at it.
I'd come to ask her about Nana. I'd had it ready since the Fish Quay: Mam, was it Nana? I looked at the coat on her hook, and the question went somewhere and didn't come back.
I think it was the only way I had left of asking. I sang it. In the hall, in my socks, at a quarter past four in the morning, badly, too high, with nothing to go to.
"Silver boat on a silver sea—"
And I stopped, because I didn't have the rest of it in me.
My mam said it. She didn't sing it. She said it flat, like she was counting dinner money, looking at the coat.
"Bring my bairn back home to me."
Then she turned round and went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
You'll want me to tell you she sat down and told me everything. She didn't. My mam has never once sat down and told anybody everything. She told me in bits, while her hands were busy, and if her hands stopped she stopped too, and found them something else to do.
She made the tea. She got two cups out, the good ones, and then put one back and got a mug for me, because she says I bang the good ones. She went into the hall and came back with the coat over her arm and her sewing tin from the drawer, and she sat at the table with the coat across her knees and threaded a needle on the first go.
"Twenty years of school dinners," she said, not looking up. "I can thread anything."
The bright toggle was hanging by a thread. She started on it.
"Your dad sailed Wednesday nights," she said. "Half eleven. Home the Friday."
I didn't say anything. I'd learned that from Sam. If you leave a gap, somebody fills it.
"You wouldn't settle. Not for me, not for your nana, not for anybody. Four months old." The needle went in and out. "You screamed the length of that pier."
"You walked me on the pier."
"I walked you everywhere. Prom. Quay. Up and down Harbour Road like a woman selling something. The pier was the only place you'd stop." She pulled the thread through. "The sea did it. Or the light going over. You'd lie there and watch it go round and you'd stop."
"At twenty to two."
"About that. On a Thursday. I'd stop at the box, under the lamp, for the shelter. And one night he came down." In, out. "With a flask. I thought he was going to tell me off for having a bairn out at that time."
"Did he?"
"He poured me a tea." She snipped the thread with her teeth, which she has told me all my life not to do. "Drink yours. You're grey."
I drank it. It was too hot. I drank it anyway.
"What did you talk about?"
"Weather. Ships. His knees. What the light was for." She smoothed the toggle with her thumb. "Nobody'd asked me a single thing since the August that wasn't about you. Was she feeding. Was she sleeping. Was I sleeping. And he never once asked me about you. He asked me what I'd have done if I hadn't had you." She put the needle back in the tin. "I'd never been asked."
"Mam." I put my mug down. I made myself say it plain, because there wasn't any way to say it funny. "Is he my—"
"You were born in the August," my mam said. "I met him in the November. Do your sums, Wren. You've a radio show."
I laughed. It came out wrong, half a sob and half a hiccup.
"He never laid a finger on me," she said. "He poured tea. Every Thursday, all winter. That's all it ever was." She looked at the coat. "It was mine. One winter. I'd never had a thing in my life that was just mine. I had you, and you were everybody's."
"Why did you stop?"
"You slept." She said it as if it had been done to her. "March. You slept right through, one night, and I woke at half six and came running in, sure you were dead, and you weren't. You were just asleep. You'd your fist up by your face." She folded her hands on the coat. "And I knew I'd not go again."
"Did you tell him?"
"No."
That was all. No. Thirty-three years in it, and she said it like the time.
"Nana's song," I said. "I told the whole city Nana made it up."
"Your nana learned it off me. She had you most nights that spring, while I," she stopped, and found a bit of cotton on her dressing gown, and picked it off. "She learned it off me. She never said she made it up. You said that. She just never said she didn't."
"And the coat."
"Couldn't wear it. Couldn't throw it out. Gave it your nana. She wore it up and down that prom for twenty years." My mam put her hand flat on the duffel. "Then your father brought it home from her bags and gave it to you to stand in a bus shelter."
"You've heard him. On my show. Every Thursday."
"On the stairs," she said. "Third one down. With the little radio in my dressing gown pocket." She didn't look at me. "Three years, every Thursday, I've heard that man talk to me through my own daughter."
I didn't try to say anything to that. I sat with my hands round the mug.
My phone went on the table, face up between us, and we both looked at it.
Sorry.
My mam read it upside down. She can read anything upside down; she's done the dinner register for twenty years.
"That's the thin one," she said.
"That's the thin one."
"Are you going to answer him?"
"Not yet."
"No," my mam said. "No, I didn't either."
At ten past six the doorbell went.
My mam looked at the clock and then at me, and I could see her think what you think when the bell goes at that hour: police, hospital, your dad. She got up. She did her dressing gown tighter. She went down the hall, past the coat, which she'd hung back on her hook, and opened the door.
Vi was on the step.
She was in her good coat, the navy, done up to the throat, and the hat with the pin, and her glasses on their chain. Her left hand was in its white bandage. Her right hand was in her coat pocket, and stayed there. Behind her the street was still dark, and the milk float was going up the next terrace with its little whine.
The two of them looked at each other. Two women at one door, in the cold, both with their chins up.
"Mrs Cray," said my mam. "From the office."
"Mrs Archer," said Vi. "From the kitchen."
There was a pause I'd have given a year's wages to have had on the radio.
"You did the dinner money wrong," said Vi, "in two thousand and eight."
"I did not."
"You put the Fishers' twins down as one child for a term. I found it at Easter."
"They were very alike," said my mam.
Vi looked past her, down the hall, at me in my socks. She looked at the coat on the hook. She didn't look at it long. She looked at it the way you'd glance at a photo of someone in another family's house.
"I said I was you," said Vi, to my mam. "On that pier. In front of the town." Her voice didn't go up. It went precise. "Don't make a liar of me."
My mam's hand was on the door. I saw it tighten.
"How long have you known?" I said, from the hall.
"I saw a lass at that rail once," Vi said. "That one winter. I'd gone down with a flask. A lass in a red coat, with a bairn, under the lamp, with one toggle brighter than the rest. I never saw her face." She took her hand out of her pocket, empty, and put it back. "Then I saw that toggle again, three weeks ago, on forty bus shelters. And I'd heard you say 'my mam' on the wireless, and I'd sat in an office for six years across a corridor from a woman who did the dinners." She looked at my mam. "I'm a school secretary, Mrs Archer. I'm good at a register."
"Then why," I said. "Why say it was you?"
"Because they'd have had her in a fortnight." Vi said it to me, but she didn't stop looking at my mam. "That lad with the beanie. That woman with the lanyard. A thousand people with telephones. So I gave them me." Her chin went up a quarter of an inch. "I've a lot of practice, pet, being the other woman. I thought I might as well be good at it."
"And the tapes," I said. "Every week he said what I'd just said. The cold. The boats. Spring."
"He never heard a word you said. He's been dead fourteen years." She looked at me, then, for the first time. "He pencilled a word down the spine of every one. I never heard them. I read his spines and listened to you."
"Why me? Why that March?"
"The Trust wrote that February, wanting his things. I found the tin in the loft. And that same week I had the wireless on at two in the morning, and you said, 'If you've nobody to tell, tell me.'" Her mouth went thin. "So I told you."
My mam opened her mouth, and shut it, and opened it.
"Come in," she said. "You're letting the cold in."
"I'll not, thank you. I've a taxi." Vi turned on the step. At the gate she stopped, with her good hand on it, and didn't look round. "Your husband," she said. "Is he in?"
"Fishing," said my mam. "Saltby rocks. With the anglers."
"With the radio on, I expect," said Vi, and went down the path to where Gaz's cab was waiting at the kerb with its indicator going, and got in the back, and sat very straight, and was driven away.
My mam shut the door. She stood with her back to it. The coat hung on its hook beside her, and the bright toggle had been sewn on so tight now it would never come off.
"Mam," I said. "Does Dad know?"
She looked at me. Then she went past me, into the kitchen, and I heard the tap go, and the kettle go on again.
"Your dad listens every night," she said.