Wren
The last Thursday.
"I'm not going," said my mam.
It was twenty past one in the morning. She was standing in the hall in her quilted blue dressing gown, done up to the neck, with her arms folded, and the landing light on behind her, and the six blue bags at her feet like a very small picket line.
"Mam."
"I've work at eight. Three hundred dinners. It's fish Thursday." She didn't look at the coat on the hook beside her. She looked at Sam, who was standing on the step behind me in a brand new pair of shoes. "What are those?"
"Shoes," said Sam.
"They're brown."
"I was told the black ones were for a funeral."
"They were," said my mam, and turned back to me. "I'm sixty years old, Wren. Since Tuesday. I'm not walking down a pier in the middle of the night because a pensioner in a hat told you to tell me something in the Co-op."
"She didn't tell me what. She said, Thursday. Twenty to two. Tell her."
"Then you've told me."
"Then I'll go back to the car."
"Then go back to the car."
Neither of us moved. Sam, on the step, said nothing, very carefully.
My mam unfolded her arms. She looked at the ceiling for a second, like a woman who's decided it'll rain whatever she does. Then she undid the belt of her dressing gown and took it off and hung it on the newel post.
Under it she had her good slacks on. Her blouse with the little collar. A cardigan. Her scarf, already round her neck, already tied. On her feet, her outdoor shoes, polished, laced in double knots.
Sam made a small noise behind me, like a man stepping on a dog's toy in the dark.
"Don't," said my mam, to both of us. She took the coat down off the hook. She put it on, one arm then the other, and did it up from the bottom, every toggle, and at the third one down, the bright one, her fingers stopped for about as long as it takes to read a word, and then did it up as well.
"Shoes," she said to me, because I'd taken mine off out of habit. "And don't sing in the car."
I'd not been on the North Pier since the night it was full.
There was frost. That was all. Frost on the stone, white and fine, going away from us in a long straight road towards the lamp at the head, and the lamp going round, and every eleven seconds the whole length of it lighting up and going dark again, like the pier breathing. No torches. No crowd. A couple of anglers at the far end with their rods out over the rail and a flask between them, who didn't look up.
Gaz's cab was at the root, on the double yellows, with its engine running and its window down. He leaned out as we went past, in a red fleece.
"Evening, Mrs Archer," said Gaz.
My mam looked at him. "Do I know you?"
"No, but I've heard a lot about your gravy." He jerked his thumb at the dashboard. "I've got the Manchester fella on. The network. He's very calming. He just read the shipping forecast like it was a bedtime story. I've had to pull over twice and I'm parked."
Out of his window, low, came a man's voice, soft and round and a long way from the sea: "…and it's coming up to twenty to two, here on the network, so wherever you are tonight, whatever's keeping you up, I'm here till six…"
"He's not bad," said Gaz. "He's no you."
At twenty to two exactly, Gaz reached forward and switched his radio off. Down the Quay, across the black of the harbour, I saw the rank go dark, one cab after another, headlights off, like the torches the week before. Kev's aerial had a bin bag on it.
"Rank's having its minute," said Gaz, and sat back with his hands in his lap.
My mam had stopped at the top of the slipway.
It's a wide stone ramp, going down from the pier root on the harbour side to the water, where they used to pull the boats up. There's a railing along the top of it, and a lamp. From there you can see the whole length of the pier, all six hundred yards of it, and halfway along, under its own lamp, the box. Red. With a crown on it. And in the box, lit up like a figure in a clock, a very small upright woman in a hat.
My mam looked at the box for a long time.
"One forty-one," said Sam, under his breath.
"You stop here," she said to me. Not to Sam. To me.
"Mam—"
"You stop here, Wren." She put her hands in the pockets of the coat. "I'll not have you hear it."
And she walked out onto the pier on her own.
I watched her go. I'd never seen my mother walk away from me down anything. She walked like she walks to the bus, quick, not looking about her, a woman with somewhere to be. The red coat went dark, and lit, and dark again, every eleven seconds, getting smaller, all the way to the box, and Vi opened the door from the inside, and held it, and my mam went in, and the door swung to behind her.
Sam stood beside me at the rail. He didn't touch me. He was close enough that he didn't have to.
"She had her shoes on," he said, after a while. "Under the dressing gown. Laced."
"Double knots."
"She was always coming."
"She's been dressed under that dressing gown since I was born," I said. "That's my mam. She'll tell you she's not going to the wedding and she's had the hat in a box since March."
He laughed, without any sound, just the breath of it, which went white in front of him and blew away along the pier towards the box.
"Your shoes are very brown," I said.
"I know."
"They're lovely."
"I know," said Sam. "Your mother noticed."
I couldn't hear anything. Three hundred yards of wind and stone and sea, and I couldn't hear a word. I could see them. Two women in a phone box, side by side, facing the same way, not touching. Vi lifted something from her pocket, small and white, and her hands did something I couldn't make out. Then neither of them moved.
At the head of the pier the light went round.
"Bacon barm?"
I nearly went over the rail.
My dad was standing beside me, on my other side, in his fishing coat and his woolly hat, with a paper bag in one hand and a barm cake in the other, half of it gone. His van was parked behind Gaz's cab, with its sidelights on and the radio going low inside it, the Manchester man saying something kind to nobody.
"Dad. What are you—"
"Fishing," he said. "Fish Quay wall. Nothing biting. Saw the lights go off on the rank." He chewed. He offered the bag to Sam. "Brown sauce in that one."
"Thank you," said Sam, and took it, because you do.
I don't know how long it was. He'd know. He'd have counted. I didn't ask him and he didn't tell me. I stood with my hands on the frozen rail until I couldn't feel them, and watched my mother stand very still in a red coat in a box I'd once said hello into, and listen to a man who'd died before I'd ever had a show, say whatever he'd saved for last.
Then the box door opened.
Vi came out of it. She had the grey machine in her good hand, and she walked up the pier towards us, small and steady from lamp to lamp, a hundred yards, two hundred, till I could see the hat and the set of her mouth. Then she stopped, and turned something on its side with her thumb, and held it out at arm's length into the wind that was coming our way up the stone. She held it the way you'd hold a torch up for somebody on a dark path. She wasn't holding it out to me.
Gravel, small and far off. And then words, thin, but every one of them.
"…Your fella's on the slipway again, pet. Good lad."
Vi drew her arm back in, and turned, and walked back to the box, and the door shut.
My dad had stopped chewing.
Then, faint, flattened, carried all that way along the stone, I heard it.
A clunk.
My dad didn't look at the box. He looked at the barm cake. Then he looked down the slipway to the water, black, slapping, and up at the lamp at the top of it, the same lamp, I suppose, that's always been there.
"I knew about the pier, love," he said. He said it to the barm cake. "I stood here and watched the pair of you. The nights the boat didn't sail."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't have.
"Two or three times, that winter. They'd cancel after one, for weather. I'd get home and the flat'd be empty and the pram gone. So I'd walk down." He took a bite, and chewed it, and swallowed it. "And there she'd be. With you. And him, with his flask. Talking."
"You never said."
"What would I say?" He looked at me, then, properly. "She came home. Every time. I'd be back in bed when she came in, and I'd say, 'Good walk?' And she'd say, 'She's settled.' And you had."
"He saw you," I said. "The keeper."
"Lifted his cup to me, the once. From the rail." My dad looked at what was left of his barm cake. "I never lifted mine back. Should've."
Down the pier the box door opened. My mam came out first. Vi stayed in the doorway, holding it, and said something, and my mam stood with her back to us for a second, and then nodded, once, and Vi let the door swing to.
"And the coat," my dad said. "I knew whose coat it was. When I brought it you, for your poster. I knew." He screwed the paper bag up very small. "Thought it was time something came down out of the loft."
My mam was coming back up the pier. On her own again. Quick, not looking about her, a woman going for the bus. The red coat went dark, and lit, and dark.
My dad put the paper bag in his pocket and went down the step onto the pier to meet her.
I watched them meet. He didn't say anything. She didn't. He held out his arm, crooked, the way you would for a woman in good shoes on a frosty step, and she took it. And they came up past us onto the road, my mam and my dad, arm in arm, and as they went past I heard him say:
"It's blue bin tomorrow. I've not put it out."
"I put it out at teatime," said my mam.
"Did you do the cardboard?"
"I did the cardboard."
"Flattened?"
"Dennis."
And under it, very low, so low you'd only hear it if you'd known it since before you could hear anything, my mam was humming. Just the first line. The tune, not the words. She didn't know she was doing it, I don't think, or she knew and didn't care. It went past me on the wind in her voice, steady, in tune, which mine has never been, and then they were at the van, and he opened the door for her, and she got in, and he went round, and they drove home talking about the cardboard.
Vi came last, up the pier, very upright, with the tartan trolley rattling on the frost behind her. At the top of the slipway she stopped.
"That's the lot," she said. "He's said everything now. I gave her the tape. It's hers. It always was." She looked down the slipway at the black water. "Thirty-three years I've wanted to stand in a box with that woman. I thought I'd want to hit her."
"Did you?"
"No," said Vi. "We were both too cold."
She turned the trolley towards the Cliff Steps and went up them one at a time, clack, clack, clack, until the dark had her.
We waited out the dark in the Lamp. Hector was already at the counter, being fed a bacon sandwich Bev hadn't charged him for, and as we sat down I heard him tell her, in the plain version, that he'd put her down for the boat trip. Sam showed me a folder on his phone that had a name now, with one picture in it: me at the rail on poster day, turned round, laughing at him.
At seven we walked back out. As we got to the head of the pier the light stopped going round, and stood there in the sun, a small white tower, finished for the day.
"I love you," I said. "Stay."
"Yes," said Sam.
Priya Nair's door was still open, it turned out, for a Saturday late show made in Scarholme. Sam would produce it from above the launderette, with the dryers going round underneath.
He looked past me at the sea, grey and wide and doing nothing worse than shining. He walked over to the rail. He didn't lie down. He put both hands on it, in daylight, and looked at the sea.