Lotte.
No one ever sent her anything.
After her name were the letters she knew to be Rune.
Rune’s name came all at once, like a picture. It didn’t need to be worked out. It was his name next to hers.
Turning the package over, there were no words to puzzle on the back. She ripped open the envelope and pulled out a battered purple exercise book, just like the ones at school, with a piece of paper wrapped around it.
She looked up the stairs to where Papa slept.
It was still, quiet, unmoving. And yet the upstairs felt somehow heavier, as though the parcel in her hands made the stairs grow and then shrink, like a cat stretching out in the sun.
Back in the kitchen, holding the exercise book and envelope out in front of her, Lotte placed the letter next to her flour bowl. ‘Lotte and Rune. Rune and Lotte,’ she said. Unfolding the sheet around the exercise book, she saw an entire page of words; they swirled around like fish in a tank. She tried to take each word at a time – Frau Anst had taught her how to do that. One letter at a time, then the word should come together, like adding beads on a string to make a necklace. What actually happened was that some words came together ready-made like a stamp, while others she could puzzle over forever and they still wouldn’t work. They called it a learning difficulty, part of her Down’s syndrome. It didn’t matter; those were words that didn’t matter.
But somehow this book, these words, did matter. She opened the folded letter cautiously.
Lotte, that word dotted here and there, and Rune. She heard a footstep. Her heart stammered wildly.
And then another step; the creak of the stairs.
Footfall startled her into action.
She looked at the letter closely, understanding that as each step came closer, she would have less time to read it.
On the plain white sheet were large swoopy letters, written in black ink and curved like knitted loops.
She read aloud, her voice a whisper:
‘L.O.TT.(uh) and Rune,’ the two names belonging together.
The banister creaked, and as she knew panicking didn’t help her read, she struggled to calm her heart. The paper shivered. ‘I . . .’ She tried to read the words along the same row but couldn’t make her eyes focus. Further down she found L.O.V.E, love AL.WAY.S. always and M.A.M.A.
‘Mama!’ That sharp pointy word came at her from the page with soft hands and the voice of songs. It was an all-over feeling. It was a new feeling. It was a feeling of holding on so tight, so as not to be left. Of being still, which was far harder than being quiet. Of quiet being the sound that roars on the inside. Of sucking her thumb and listening to words transformed into the cakes of dreams.
It was a memory, a thought, fleeting but real, and she felt it through her entire body. Mama.
Papa yawned loudly in the hallway and Lotte, brought back to the letter in her hands, couldn’t think of what to do. She didn’t want to show it to Papa.
With fumbling fingers, she folded it around the notebook and placed them back into the envelope. She slid the envelope under the other letters on the kitchen worktop, and just as she felt Papa’s presence behind her she stepped back to her bowl, picked up a wooden spoon and stirred her freshly sieved flour and cocoa too fast.
Papa flooded through the doorway as a cocoa-flour cloud swirled up from the bowl.
As the fridge door wheezed open and the milk bottles chinked, her thoughts pounded and boomed to the words in the letter. She didn’t know what it meant. Why was there a letter to her, and what did it say?
She would ask Roo.
Her heart rattled to the sound of the fridge closing.
The block of butter was to her left. She pulled a knife from the rack.
Papa was behind her, watching. ‘Steady,’ he said, but she knew to be steady. Knives were sharp.
She measured the butter before placing it into the pan and lighting the stove.
Quickly she made a well in the flour and cracked in two eggs, distracted into forgetting her earlier decision to make a sunshine-moat with the butter first. ‘I was going to make a moat,’ she said into the mixture. She watched the eggs as they slopped and shifted before settling like sadness, yolk to yolk. She whisked them in the bowl, added the melted butter from the pan on the stove and turned the gas dial to off. The flame went out. As the mixture turned to silk, she saw Papa check the dial, to make sure she had turned it off correctly. She felt Papa watch her for a moment before turning away, and only then could she concentrate on her cake.
The coffee machine whirred to life in a mechanical buzz that set Lotte’s teeth on edge. She watched Papa place his coffee glass under the spout and the machine mulched and whined and whirled.
‘I know Rune was going to take you to school, but Joann stayed last night and she’s offered to take you instead.’
‘But Roo was going to take us today, in the car. You said he could have the petrol to get us to school.’
‘I know what I said, but Joann’s going that way and she offered. It would be very rude not to accept such a kind offer, wouldn’t it?’
Lotte folded the mixture onto itself in a figure of eight, over and over, and poured it into the tins, using the long thin spatula to create crested waves.
‘I am not rude,’ Lotte said, trying not to let the coffee machine noise into her head. She focused on making the cake look exactly right and placed both tins in the warm oven.
‘Good girl,’ Papa said.
Finally the coffee machine spouted brown-black coffee with a cream-brown foam into the glass, and the whining turned into a buzz-purr. Papa said he was going to have a shower.
Lotte nodded and started running the tap into the sink, where she placed the used utensils. Scooping the leftover mixture from the bowl on her finger, Lotte enjoyed the sticky, chocolatey goo as it slipped over her tongue.
Papa cleared his throat and she turned to see him looking at the letters she had placed on the kitchen side. He lifted one, with the crinkle-window, but his dressing gown sleeve caught on the rest and they fell to the floor.
Turning, she saw Papa pick them up, the yellow envelope exposed on the side. He put down his coffee and looked at her, turning the envelope with her name and Rune’s side by side, revealing that it had already been opened.
He looked at Lotte again, but this time she looked at her feet and waited. The coffee machine stopped making its turning-off noise and all Lotte could hear was her breathing as it shook, sheared and shimmered from within her.
Papa clicked open the bin with his slippered foot. He tore the letter in two. Just like that; one piece, then two. Tearing it again and again, until it was in tiny pieces. Then he flicked them into the bin. The pieces landed without a noise, but Lotte’s mouth was open and her voice was small. She felt like she was shrinking. She took a step forward.
Papa was bent over the bin, ripping the pages of the notebook. The pages full of words.
Lotte stepped towards him to try and stop the ripping. The words, dribbling their letters, fell silently into the bin. The front and back cover of the exercise book plummeted, and then he was tearing their pages too. Taking one at a time and making two, then four, eight, then more than she could count. She hadn’t even opened the exercise book and Papa was turning it into paper snow.
It happened so fast. Her hands were trying to stop his. Moving towards him. Finally using her voice. ‘Please. No. Stop.’
Then she looked at his face and a whiplash of thought, sharp and brief, stopped her.