My mother told it to the oven.
"It was a Tuesday," she said. "I know it was a Tuesday because the bins had gone."
I sat down at the table without being asked. She stayed at the sink in her plastic cap with the plum dye starting down her forehead, talking to the oven door, which had a smear on it in the shape of Wales.
"Your dad'd been on the Leeds run twelve years, and he'd done it before, Kit, a bit here and a bit there. He'd fill the cab tanks at the yard and then he'd fill jerry cans out of the back of the bowser and sell them to a man in Pudsey with a farm who didn't ask. Nineteen hundred pounds' worth, over the year. In a Quality Street tin on top of the wardrobe. And then Ashdown's sacked him and the police came to the door, a young one, in a cardigan."
"A policeman in a cardigan."
"A nice one. Fawn. He sat on the settee and he said, Mrs Mulvaney, where was your husband on the night of the fourteenth, and I said, he was here with me. We watched Casualty." She finally turned round. The dye had reached her eyebrow. "We didn't watch Casualty, he was in Pudsey with the cans. I lied to a policeman in a cardigan, Kit. It was a very nice cardigan."
I started laughing, it was the cardigan, and she took that as permission and went on faster, with the vape going in her fist.
"And the money was in the tin and it couldn't go back, it wasn't as if we could post it, and you'd got these teeth. You were fifteen. They were coming in like a dropped box of Lego, you wouldn't smile, you did that thing with your hand. And the man said two thousand. Mr Hargreaves. We had nineteen hundred in the tin and I had a hundred in my purse from the dinners. I took it in cash on the Saturday. He gave me a receipt and a lollipop, I don't know why. Your teeth, Kit." She pointed the vape at my mouth. "That's where it went. Your bloody teeth."
My tongue went round the back of my front ones before I could stop it. The wire's still there, behind the bottom row, where they never took it out. Three years of train tracks, and a lovely smile everyone says I've got, which it turns out was paid for in diesel.
I stopped laughing and started the other thing, all at once. My mother was across the kitchen before I'd got my hand to my face. She smelled of ammonia and Elnett and held my head against her apron with both hands, and the cap crackled, and a bit of plum went down my neck.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Don't hate me. I couldn't help it, you wouldn't smile."
"I don't hate you. Get off, you're getting dye on my collar."
"It's only temporary."
"It's permanent, Mum, it's got the word on the box."
She sat down opposite me with a bump, and I told her the rest, with my eyes running. Frank, and the hand on the blanket, and what he said: my dad had made a fool of him in front of his men and he didn't forgive fools. She heard me out with her mouth open.
"Over diesel?" said my mother. "Nineteen hundred pound? He's having you killed for nineteen hundred pound?"
"It's the principle."
"I've had worse off the Provident." She was up again, towel, kettle, plate of something. "Terry made a fool of everybody. It was his hobby. He made a fool of a vicar once, at a christening, with a coin trick. Nobody sent a man for him."
She had her coat off the hook already.
"I'll go up. I'll put it on and go up there and say sorry. I'll take a parkin."
"You will not."
"I'll take the spoon."
"No." I took the plate off her, because she was going to drop it. "I'll pay it back."
"With what? You've got forty-one pounds."
"Twenty a week."
"That's—" She did it on her fingers. "That's two year."
"He's got four days."
"Then he'll have to hang on, won't he," said my mother, and she looked at me for a long moment across the table, plum all down the side of her face, and her chin went. "Let's see them, then. Go on."
I showed her my teeth.
She leaned in and had a good look, at the front, at the corners, as if she was buying them. Then she nodded, once, like they'd turned out better than the receipt.
I slept at home in my uniform until half past four. There was a sheet of paper on the kitchen table when I got up, under the salt cellar, with a yellow Post-it on the corner in Owen's writing. Sorry. For the court. Whenever x.
It said Reference for Applicant across the top. Under Relationship to applicant I wrote landlady, witness to the seagull. Under Any concerns for the care of a child I wrote No, and underlined it twice, and added he does voices. I put Nurse where it said Occupation. I signed it with a loop on the K.
I was at High Royd by half past five, in the frost, because Frank had asked for me early for the solicitor. Owen was in the yard, stamping.
"I put that he does voices," I said, and gave it to him.
He read it standing up in the near-dark, with both hands on it, and his mouth moved on No.
"Kit," he said.
"It's only a form."
"It's not."
He was close. His face was just there, tired and flushed and so grateful it hurt to look at, with a bit he'd missed shaving. His hand came up to the side of my head. He tipped his face. I had time to think, oh, here it comes, and then I ducked, under his arm, like a woman under a falling tray.
"You're my lodger," I said, from behind him. "It's in the Bible."
"It's not."
"It's in a bible. Somewhere. Leviticus." I was already at the back door with my hand on the latch.
He was still holding the form when I looked back, standing in the frost with his hands full, and the light from the kitchen window across his shoes.
The solicitor came at six in a car like a bungalow. Malcolm Ackroyd was seventy-eight, in a three-piece suit with a watch chain, and his hearing aids whistled like kettles, so he talked at a volume designed for the back of the stalls. His clerk was a young woman in a green anorak who never said a word. A beneficiary can't witness, Malcolm announced to the entire house, and Owen went and sat in the van.
Frank was propped up for it with his hair combed wet. I'd done it myself.
"Mr Ashdown," Malcolm bellowed, "I am obliged to ask you some questions. WHAT DAY IS IT?"
"Four across," said Frank. "Starts the week and ends the patience. Six letters."
Malcolm asked again, with a hand cupped behind one ear, and Frank looked at him with enormous affection and said, "Malcolm. You have never in forty years managed to hear a word I've said, and you have never once got it wrong."
"EXCELLENT," said Malcolm. "SOUND."
He read the codicil out to the room and the garden. I wasn't listening much until the clerk held the page out to me with her thumb on a line, and it said: sixty thousand pounds to Owen Rudd in gratitude for his care.
Sixty thousand pounds. Owen, who'll do a seagull for anyone for nothing. I kissed Frank on the top of his dry old skull before anyone could stop me.
"Steady," said Frank.
Frank signed first, with the fountain pen. He took forty seconds to write his name and looked at the page afterwards as if it were a photograph of a house he'd once almost bought. Then I signed under the clerk's finger, and then the clerk signed.
Gareth was in the hall when we came out.
He'd let himself in at the back, keys in his fist, and he stopped on the lino as Malcolm told his clerk at a volume that rattled the coats: "A GENEROUS MAN. THE DAY MAN IS VERY FORTUNATE. MR RUDD WILL BE TOUCHED."
"Who the hell," said Gareth, "is Owen Rudd?"
"He's the day man," I said.
Malcolm patted his arm and went, and Gareth walked past me into the parlour and shut the door.
"Dad."
"Not today," said Frank.
I heard Gareth say something I can't repeat, and a chair, and then Frank, very mildly: "Close the door on your way out, would you, there's a draught." His headlights went down the lane fast, taking a corner on the grass.
Owen left at eight, without looking at me. I stood in the kitchen with my hand under the tap and let it run.
At nine, when the house had gone quiet, I took the Chinese takeaway menu out of my bag. I'd done the sums on the back in the car, in biro, with a little drawing of a calendar.
"I've got a proposal," I said.
"I'm all ears."
"You're all lung." I put the menu on his blanket. "I've done a schedule. Twenty pounds a week, every Monday, ninety-five weeks, so you'll have to hang on."
Frank read the menu upside down, little calendar and all. Then he started to shake. I thought it was the cough, and I'd got the sponge out, and then I saw it was laughing, great silent heaves, and tears down his big cheeks, until it did turn into a cough and I held him up by the shoulders and said, "Don't you dare die laughing, you'll ruin the schedule."
I put a twenty in his hand. "It's out of the envelope Rosie brought," I said. "I'm giving you your own money. It's how my family's always done business."
He looked at it as if it were a small bird. Then he folded it in half, and in half again, and slid it under his pillow, and patted the pillow.
"First instalment," said Frank.
At one I gave him the extra and wrote it in the ladybird book. At two he slept. At ten to three I was at the window with my back to the bed, listening to the oxygen, doing the thing where you count the lights in the valley, and the cough started behind me.
It wasn't his cough. I could pick his cough out of a choir. This one was wet and short and came again, and then there was a sound under it I've heard only a few times in nine years, like somebody trying to breathe through a mouthful of tea.
I turned round. He'd come up off the pillows with both hands out in front of him, and they were red.
It was on the sheet and his pyjamas and the wall, much brighter than you'd think, and more of it coming. His eyes found me, and for a second we just looked at each other across a great deal of blood. Then my hands were moving.
I got him on his side, the right, because the right is his bad lung and you let the bad side drain, and I hoped to God I'd got it the right way round. I tipped the head of the bed down. I hooked two fingers into his mouth and cleared what I could, wet, hot, and he bit me, not hard, he didn't mean to. The dark towels were in the cupboard under the stairs, where the hospice leaves them in a bag, dark green so it doesn't look like what it is. I got four of them back on the bed and pressed one to his mouth and held him against me with my other arm, my hand flat against his back.
I could feel his heart through his back, through the pyjamas, going like somebody running on the spot in the room upstairs.
"I've got you," I said. "I've got you. Frank. I've got you. Look at me. You're doing it. Breathe out."
He didn't breathe out. He held the towel and his eyes bulged at me, and his hand came down on my wrist and clamped, a hard old grip with all the strength he'd ever had in it, and I started to talk, because I couldn't think what else you do.
I told him about Benidorm. Auntie Maureen's flat and the sofa bed and the bar underneath, with a full English till four in the afternoon, and how I'd have the black pudding and he could have the beans, sat out on the front under a parasol with our feet in a bowl of cold water, and Maureen would bring him a San Miguel he wasn't allowed. I started singing, because I'm not capable of anything else, Dolly, God forgive me, something about a coat of many colours with the words all wrong, and Frank, who'd said don't sing every day since Monday, didn't say a word.
The towel was soaked. I got another one. His breath was coming in little bubbling sips now, and his colour was going out of him, from red lips to grey.
Then his hand came off my wrist.
It didn't let go. It fell, as if somebody had cut the string, and landed on the blanket, and lay there. His eyes rolled up and showed the white. Under my palm his heart went wrong. Three beats, a gap, a flutter like a bird in a chimney.
"No," I said. "No, no. You don't. You do not."
I knew exactly what my hands wanted to do. I've done it forty times. The heel of the hand in the middle, the other on top, the whole of your weight, two inches, one and two and three. They were already moving. And forty feet away in the kitchen, under a lighthouse, there was a form signed in his own fountain pen that said they were not allowed, and I put my hands flat on his back instead, both of them, and held him on his side in the dark in the middle of the blood.
"Not on my shift," I said. "Not on my shift, Frank. Come on. Come on."
The flutter stopped. The heart caught itself, and tripped, and went on again at the speed of a cart horse, and he coughed, one great clot of it, black, into the towel. And then he breathed. In. Out. A horrible wet whoop, like a drain, and then another, and I felt the colour start to come back up under my hand before I saw it.
I stayed where I was.
I did his mouth, in the end, because it was the only thing I could think to do. A pink sponge, a cup of water, round the gums, with my hands shaking and the water going red in the cup. I changed the sheet round him, a roll and a tuck, and the pillowcase, and the pyjamas. I washed his face, warm, wringing the flannel out twice. He let me. Once he turned his eyes to me and opened his mouth, and I said, "Don't," and he didn't.
Then I rang the hospice line from the cordless in the hall and told a woman with a nice voice what had happened, in sentences. A nurse would come at nine. Was I all right? I said I was fine.
My legs wanted the chair. I leaned on the wall.
At twenty to four I went up the stairs in my socks and got the ladder down out of the cupboard in the back bedroom, and went up it one rung at a time with my hand leaving a pattern on every rung. The skylight stuck. I put my shoulder to it. The cold came in like a slap, and the valley was below me, black, with its few orange lights, and I put my head and my phone out into it.
I'd never written a text I couldn't spell. It took three goes. My thumb left a red print on the glass.
Nearly lost him.
I sent it. I held the phone against my chest to keep it warm, and then I turned it over to look.
It had already come back. Four seconds.
I'm up.