Chapter Text
The pipes started up at some point after eleven and went on for a while, the way they did every night, a shuddering knock that came up through the floor and travelled along inside the wall behind the bed before giving out.
Calvin had been talking for about twenty minutes. It had begun with the order for the morning and had got round, by a route neither of them could have traced, to a man at the warehouse called Ackroyd, who was not called Ackroyd, and who had told Calvin's uncle a thing on Friday that was not true. Esme had stopped following it somewhere near the beginning and had gone on making the right noises anyway. She was quite good at it. She could do it for a long time.
"— and he'd packed them himself," Calvin said. "That's the bit."
"Mm."
"On the Thursday. I watched him do it."
The pipes knocked twice more and stopped.
"You're not listening," he said. "Are ya?"
"Something about boxes?"
"Right on topic, about twenty minutes ago."
"Oh sorry."
He shifted onto his back and the whole mattress moved, because it was that sort of mattress. Somewhere below them a dog barked, twice, and then packed it in.
"Whose dog is that?" Esme said.
"I don't know."
"It can't be Mr Prewer's."
He didn't answer, having gone back to Ackroyd in his head.
The flat was above a shop that sold secondhand cauldrons and, for reasons that had never been explained to anybody's satisfaction, umbrellas. There was one bedroom and a kitchen you could stand in the middle of and touch two walls of, and a window at the front that had never shut properly since before either of them had lived there. Calvin had several charms on it. His father had come round and tried a another and had then explained, at length and with diagrams drawn in the air (made of some weird silly string) why the fourth had not held, until Esme put her coat on over her nightdress and went out to walk round the block.
He had taken the place two winters ago. He had been very certain that week about a number of things, most of which had gone another way since, and the certainty had been mainly about living somewhere his family were not. He remembered standing in the front room with the man from the agency, thinking, in almost these words, that nobody in the building knew the first thing about him; and then the man had glanced at the paperwork and said, "Weasley. That's the joke shop," and had gone on to describe something he had bought there years ago and the state it had left his kitchen in.
Esme had come to it from a village on the coast that she did not talk about much, and a mother who wrote about once a month and asked, every time, in the same sentence, whether she was eating properly. She had answered the last one three weeks ago and had not sent it. It was still folded on the shelf in the front room under a bowl, and every few days she moved the bowl and looked at it and put the bowl back.
Esme's feet arrived against his shin. He made a noise.
"They're cold."
"Are they?"
"It's the floor," she said. "There's nothing under it. It's air and then it's the shop."
Calvin got the duvet up off the floor and put it over them both and tucked the edge under his arm where she couldn't reach it.
They lay there for a bit. Out in the street somebody went past whistling and then stopped whistling, which was worse.
"How long are we here?" Esme said.
"Sorry?"
"Here. This."
"What, the flat?"
She was a while answering, and when it came it came in the flat voice she kept for putting things away again.
"Forget it. I was just saying it out loud to myself."
He turned his head, though there was nothing to see, and waited to find out whether that was true. She didn't say anything else. After a while he gave up waiting and said he didn't know — till things were sorted — whatever that means.
The window at the front moved slightly in its frame and let a thin line of cold along the floor of the other room. Neither of them got up to it.
"I don't hate it," she said.
"It's alright if you do. It's falling apart all around us."
"It's cozy, and it has history." "You've been very loyal about that landing for two years," said Calvin, "and I've never once believed you."
The room went quiet. He listened to the building doing the things it did at that hour, which he could have listed now in order: the man below going along his passage; the tap upstairs that nobody had ever turned off properly in living memory; and, at the back, a gutter letting go of everything it had held all day, all at once, onto what he had always assumed was a bin and had never gone out to look at.
"Where would you go?" Esme said.
"Nowhere. It's raining."
"If you could get out, I mean. Properly. Anywhere you liked."
He came back up from wherever he had been going.
"A house," he said.
"Everybody says that. Nobody in the world has ever wanted a flat."
"You have to settle what before you settle where. Everyone gets it round the wrong way. They pick somewhere marvellous and then wake up over another shop wondering how it happened."
"Go on, then."
"A bath you could lie down in."
"Taps at the far end," said Esme. "Not halfway along where they get you in the spine."
"My grandmother's has a step down into it. Like a swimming bath."
"Who cleans it?"
"Nobody," said Calvin, after a pause, "has ever raised that."
She laughed into the pillow, and the man downstairs, who had opinions, knocked once on his ceiling.
"And hot water that doesn't stop after four minutes," Calvin went on, more quietly. "Have you noticed ours makes a decision? There's a dial on that boiler that isn't connected to anything whatsoever. I've had the front off it. It exists so you've got something to turn while you wait to hear what it's chosen."
"The woman above has the same one. She washes at her sister's on a Thursday."
"That is the saddest thing you have ever told me."
"Your dad would have it going in an afternoon."
"There is silver string on that ceiling from the last time he helped and nobody has got it down since."
"I tell people it's decorative."
"Do they believe you?"
"They move on to the smell," said Esme.
He got on to stairs after that, about which he had strong feelings, on account of the ones outside their door turning at the top in a way that no object of any size had ever survived. He had brought his grandmother's green chair up there the week he moved in. Forty minutes, it had taken. He had removed the arm with a screwdriver in the end and it had never gone back on properly.
"You put your boots on against that chair."
"Where else is there?"
"It's got a year left in it. Two if you're careful."
"It was finished before it came out of your grandmother's front room," said Esme. "You've carried a corpse up a flight of stairs and put a cushion on it."
He defended the chair at some length, including a passage about the springs that was not true. She had stopped listening again. She was thinking about the sill in the front room, which had the damp in it, and about the two things she had put there in the last eighteen months that had both been dead inside a fortnight, and about the fact that she had never mentioned either of them to a living soul, not even at the time.
It had been happening all week, this — a sort of dropping out, where the words went on arriving and stopped meaning anything, and then she would come back and find he had moved on two subjects and she had missed the join. She had blamed the office for it, which was a plausible thing to blame. It had been a bad week there even by the standards of the place. She had spent Tuesday and most of Wednesday copying names out of one ledger into another because the first had been made up wrong in a year before she was born, and on Thursday a man three desks along had explained to her twice, in identical words, why it had to be done that way. She had gone out at eleven and stood in the yard with both hands on the railing until somebody came to find her, and had told them, when they did, that it was stuffy indoors. It was the coldest room in the building and everybody said so.
"— and a garden," Calvin said.
She didn't say anything.
He let it sit. Something went past in the road with iron wheels, slowly, and the sound of it thinned out and was gone.
"Esme."
"I'm here."
"You've gone quiet."
"I'm listening."
He waited, for once, instead of filling it, and after a while she said:
"It would have to face south. There's no sense in it otherwise — everything comes up leggy and leaning sideways trying to get at the light, and you've given up your whole spring for a lot of sticks. And a brick wall, if you could get one. Not a fence."
"What's the difference?"
"One of them just stands there. Brick works for a living. It takes the heat all day and gives it back at night, so anything you plant against it does about twice what it would out in the open. You can grow things on a warm wall that have no business being in this country at all."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You've thought about that before tonight."
"It's bricks and weather. Everyone knows it."
"I've known you three years and I've never seen you pick up so much as a leaf."
"There's nowhere here," said Esme, and left it.
He didn't go after it, which cost him something. He had learned it in the last year or so, mostly by getting it wrong: you could not open a thing Esme had said while she was still watching you do it. Go at it and she put her back against it and it stayed shut for weeks. Leave it, and she would sometimes bring it out again a fortnight later, unasked, halfway through doing something else, and hand it over as though it had never been closed.
"There'd have to be one room I'm allowed to leave as it is," he said.
"No."
"Out of an entire house."
"Not a chance."
He laughed and let it drop, which surprised them both slightly.
Below them a door went, and the dog that belonged to nobody had a brief opinion about it and thought better of it.
"Has anybody ever bought an umbrella out of that shop?" Calvin said.
"I've never looked."
"They're the same ones. There's a green one at the back with a bent spoke and it was there the day I signed for this place. Fourteen. Always fourteen. If one goes, one comes back."
"You've been keeping a tally."
"Somebody has to. That man is up to something and he's had two years' start on me."
"You want a job with more in it."
"Mine's full to the top," said Calvin. "That's the difficulty."
"There's a place on the way to the warehouse with a monkey puzzle in the front of it. I've walked past that tree twice a day for two years."
"My mother had one. She took it out in the end because of the drains."
"Whoever planted it is dead. That's what gets me about them. Nobody puts one of those in for himself — it's forty foot of a man being optimistic on behalf of strangers."
"It came up through the path and lifted it."
"Where is this house, then?"
"Not near my mother and father."
"I wasn't going to say —"
"No, I'm saying it. Near enough. Not near." He put his hands behind his head. "If we lived on that road my father would be through the door twice a day and one of those times would be to tell me something he'd read."
"I like your dad."
"Everybody likes my dad. That's what's the matter with him."
He said it lightly, having had the practice. His father was, by common agreement, the funniest man to walk into any room he had ever walked into, and being his son was a good deal like standing next to a fire in February — extremely pleasant, very warm, and never once your own heat. There had been about a year, when he was seventeen, when he would have said something sour about it if anybody had left him the gap. Nobody had. And he was old enough now to see that it was not his father's doing, which was worse, because it left nobody to be annoyed at.
"Your mum would come and look at it," Esme said.
"She'd stand in that doorway with her cloak on, telling me she wasn't stopping, and there'd be no comment made at all, and I'd hear about it for the next eleven years."
"She asks you something and then she waits. Have you noticed that she does that? Everyone else puts a question to you and they've already gone — they only wanted to have asked it. She just sits there."
"Thirty years at the end of a bed waiting for people to own up to what they've done to themselves."
"She did it to me at Christmas."
"When?"
"While I was doing the plates. She asked how the office was and then she left a gap, and I put more into that gap in four minutes than you've had out of me since I started there."
Calvin lay very still.
"What did you tell her?"
"Go to sleep."
He turned it over and decided not to go after that either, which was, for him, a considerable piece of work, and one nobody was ever going to give him credit for.
"Somewhere I could walk out of, though," Esme said. "Not one of those villages where they've got your name by the second week."
"The post office at my grandmother's knew I'd failed my Apparition test before I got home to tell anyone."
"Who told them?"
"I have never found out. People enjoy it too much to say."
"By the sea, maybe."
"You said before you couldn't see the point of it."
"When?"
"After that afternoon at Sheringham."
"It rained for six hours," said Esme, "your father walked up and down the water's edge telling everybody it was lovely, Callum was sick in the car twice, and Riley wouldn't come out from behind the windbreak until it went dark."
"He wasn't wrong about the water."
"You'd gone a colour."
She laughed, and it went on longer than it needed to, and then stopped in a way that he noticed and did not understand. She sat up. The duvet went with her and the cold came in all along his side.
"All right?"
"Back in a minute."
He heard her go out along the passage, and the tap, and the pipes setting off under the floor in sympathy. It took a while. When she came back she got in and lay flat on her back with both hands on her stomach.
"That curry," she said.
"Tuesday."
"It's still going on."
"Nothing survives that long."
"You eat things off the side. There was a fork standing up in one of them."
He began to explain the difference between eating a thing off the side and whatever it was she was accusing him of, and got some way into it before he noticed that she hadn't come back at him, which she always did.
"You haven't slept all week," he said.
There was a small gap.
"It's warm in here."
"You told me the floor was made of air."
"Both of those are this flat's fault," she said. "Go on about the house."
He got as far as opening his mouth. Then he didn't — partly because he had been shown twice now that the shortest way to Esme talking about a thing was to leave the door open and go and stand somewhere else; partly because it was gone midnight; and mostly because it did not, at that moment, seem like the important part of the evening.
He would think about that afterwards. Not straight away. A long time afterwards, in a corridor with too many doors in it, holding a cup he had no intention of drinking, he would think: I asked her twice.
"There'd be a room for people," he said.
"Nobody visits."
"They do if there's a bed in it. My grandmother's got one in the back and four hundred people have slept in that bed, not a single one of whom meant to."
"And what have I got?"
"You'd have the rest of the house."
"During the day, I mean. You've got the table and the bath with a step and four hundred strangers. What am I doing?"
"I don't know. What do you want?"
She was quiet long enough that he thought she had gone off.
"That's the part everybody says as though it's the easy end of it," she said. "I don't know. That's the whole answer. There are about eleven things I'm certain I'm not doing and none of them join on to anything. And then somebody asks what I'm good at, and I say I don't know, and they decide I'm being difficult about it." She pulled the duvet up. "I'm not going in and out of that place until I'm forty. That's the only bit of it I'm sure of."
He waited to see whether there was more. There wasn't.
"So don't," he said.
"It isn't as simple as —"
"You've hated it since the first month."
"I haven't hated —"
"You come in, take your shoes off and sit in that chair without putting the light on. Three times a week. Coat still on. The first time you did it I thought somebody had died."
She didn't say anything to that at all.
"Esme."
"It's not that bad."
He knew better than to argue with her about it. He lay there listening to the man below moving about, and thought that he had got something wrong somewhere in the last two minutes and could not for the life of him have said where.
"You'd be good at something with your hands," he said, eventually.
"Meaning?"
"The catch on that door."
"It took ten minutes."
"It had been sticking eighteen months and two men had looked at it. One of them charged me for the privilege."
"It was hung an inch out, that's all."
He grinned at the ceiling, which he could not see, and had the sense not to say the thing he had been about to say, and lay there rather pleased with himself on both counts.
"We couldn't afford any of it," she said, after a while.
"I know."
"Not the house. Not even the gate to go in it."
He attempted a sum. He got as far as saying that if he stopped buying anything at midday, five days a week, that came to — and then stopped, having lost it.
"Two Galleons a month," said Esme. "About."
"Is that all?"
"About that."
"Right." He lay there. "There goes lunch."
"And you're no nearer a wall."
"I shall be starving by three o'clock every afternoon until I die," said Calvin, "and nothing whatsoever to show for it."
She laughed, which he had hoped for and not expected, and put her cold foot deliberately against his ankle, and he took it without a word of complaint, which she noticed.
Neither of them said anything for a good while, and he thought she had gone off. Then she turned over, and her forehead came against his shoulder, and one hand took a fistful of his sleeve, hard, the way it did, as though he had somewhere else to be.
"Say the room again."
"Which one?"
"The horrible one."
"A long table," he said. "A clear bit at one end. No shelves. A window that opens. My boots where I've left them."
"The boots go by the door."
"Then what have I got?"
She made a small sound against his shoulder that might have been a laugh, and after that she didn't say anything else, and a few minutes later her breathing went long and slow and even, and in the morning she would say she had been awake the whole time.
Calvin lay in the dark with his arm going dead underneath her and thought about the wall. Brick. Facing south. Taking the heat all day and giving it back at night. He had never in his life given a wall a moment's thought and found that he could see this one perfectly clearly, down to the colour of it, which was ridiculous, because he had never seen it.
He thought about the two Galleons, which had sounded like a great deal while she was saying it and had stopped sounding like anything at all about four seconds later.
Nothing had been decided. He knew that lying there — that they had put the whole thing up in the dark and left it standing, and that neither of them had said one word they would be held to in the morning.
The pipes went again, further off, in somebody else's wall.
He was asleep before they finished.