“…to study pattern-cutting, but I need to make up the points for entry, so I’ve been working on it after my shift.” She clears her throat. “I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
There’s nothing I can say.
Genuinely.
I have to keep my mouth shut, because if I open it, I don’t know what will come out – which bit of me will start speaking. The manic part who talks too fast and says things that I don’t mean…or the sad one, who will rain all over her best friend’s future? I don’t want to be either of them right now.
There’s nothing I can say.
Luckily, Felix is way ahead of me – and he beams at Mira. “Good for you. If that’s what you want to do, you should go for it.”
I stare at my plate.
Between them, Charlie and Mira and Felix fill the silence – talking about her studies, the course she wants to apply for, work stuff…All of it’s just noise. Filling the silence, filling the room, filling the house.
Filling my head.
It’s almost a relief when Mira says she has to get home – to do more studying, I guess. She gives me a hug as she grabs her bag from the sofa.
“I shouldn’t have kept it secret. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to…”
To upset me. I know she didn’t. Just like she knows that’s why I couldn’t say anything when she told me – because what comes out isn’t always what I mean. It’s not always the me I want to be who speaks; the me I used to be. The one who could be a friend, who could go out to see bands, who could go to the cinema, who would lie on the floor of other people’s rooms and laugh. The one who won prizes for projects, who could catch the bus and drop into a seat next to someone and just be.
Now, there’s only Mira.
Soon, there won’t even be her.
I stand in the porch and watch her walk across the deer park, her headphones already in, while above her head the swifts wheel and dance against the pale summer sky to a music all of their own.
“Woah.”
Overnight, the library has been transformed. When I left it yesterday, it did still look like a library. Now, it looks like a hundred filing cabinets have exploded in here. There is paper everywhere. Stacks of it on every flat surface, covering the table, piled on the chairs – even sections of the floor have disappeared. Dotted across the room are cardboard archive boxes, piled two or three high…and in the middle of it all is Hal, his back to the door. Hearing me walk in, he turns suddenly – so suddenly that he almost loses his balance. His hair is ruffled, the fringe pushed to one side and the shorter hair on the top of his head sticking up as though he’s been running his hands through it over and over again.
“Oh. Umm. Hi.” He looks vaguely embarrassed, like I’ve caught him out somehow.
Instead of my housekeeping uniform, which I just sort of automatically wore before, I’ve switched to a pair of denim shorts and a pale blue T-shirt – my present from Charlie last Christmas, with a tiny picture of an old-fashioned film camera printed on the pocket. It’s not the smartest T-shirt in the world, but it’s the only thing I had left in my wardrobe that was clean.
Clothes aren’t a problem Hal has, apparently. He’s wearing dark jeans, expensively soft-looking, and a plaid shirt half-open over a black T-shirt. It’s funny, because it’s similar to Felix’s work outfit, but Hal looks like some kind of model in it (rather than a woodsman escaped from a fairy story, the way Felix does) and it only shows how far apart he is from the rest of us.
“You’ve been busy.” It feels like a safe thing to say…but it’s obviously not, because he frowns and looks at the chaos around him. I tuck my bag into the nearest leather armchair – and just about the only one not piled up with paper. “What do you need me to do?”
He looks from me to the room, and then back to me again.
Fair enough.
Hal picks his way between boxes to the far end of the table and scoops three separate stacks of stuff into his arms, shifting them all to the floor. But he doesn’t just drop them – he lays each one down like they’re made of spun sugar. There’s now a small space on the table. I guess this is where I’m working today.
“Here. I might have found something while I was sorting through these last night. Would you take a look?”
“Last night? How long were you in here?”
“I’m not sure.” He frowns again. “I came back in after dinner, and started looking through the box over there by the fireplace…and I sort of lost track of time.” He shrugs. “Five or six hours, maybe?”
“Five or six hours? After dinner?” Seeing as the kitchen doesn’t even open for dinner till seven o’clock, he can’t have gone to bed any earlier than one in the morning. “This is really a big deal to you, isn’t it?” I find a path to the clear end of the table and I’m about to pull a chair out when I realize he’s beaten me to it. With a sweep of his arm, he offers me the seat. Feeling self-conscious, I sit – and as I do, Hal smoothly slides the chair in under me. There’s something about the way he does it – just like the way he put the papers on the floor – that seems kind. Gentle.
He pulls up the chair next to mine and as he moves, the faintest scent of lemons and something green-tinted and fresh fills the air around us. It reminds me of the woods in the spring, but it’s only there for a moment and then it’s gone, lost under the familiar smell of dust.
“These were in one of the boxes. I think they’ve been moved from somewhere else. Just dumped and forgotten about. There’s no order, and they look like they’ve all been mixed together.” He slides the nearest, smallest, stack of papers into the empty space, fanning them out. Some of them are upside down, some of them are sideways, some of them have got crumpled and folded together.
“Like they were in a drawer, maybe? Or a desk? And someone’s tipped everything into the box?”
He nods. “That’s what I thought. I wasn’t sure they’d be worth the time, but there was something…” His voice fades as he peers at the pages, sifting through them. Some are scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them, some are printed leaflets and fliers. There’s a page from an old newspaper from 14th July 1953, next to a shopping list for some kind of building work and a scribbled-out menu from 1987.
“Here it is.”
Even before he’s smoothed it out on the table, I can tell why it caught his eye.
“It’s the same handwriting!” It comes out far louder than I expected and he flinches. “Sorry. But it is. I recognize it.”
The sheet of paper is old, faded and crumpled, and part of it has either fallen off or been torn away, but the handwriting that covers what’s left is unmistakably the same as on the letter he showed me yesterday.
“I think so too. There’s not much more in this one – but there is a name.”
“There was a name on the last one, wasn’t there? You said it was from somebody called Jane.”
“Yes.” He glances up at me, as though he’s surprised I remember. I meet his gaze, feeling the back of my eyes prickling, until he looks away again. “But this time, it’s who the letter was to. Somebody who must have lived here.”