# Endlessly ending stories, room 74, Before and after at once, Mythos
Text version of https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/r/both-before-after-mythos (the interactive reader). Instruction: Both at once (https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/i/both). Index of every room: https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/llms.txt
Part 4 of 4. https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos-2.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos-3.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos-4.txt
This part starts at lane 1, hop 47.

### hop 47 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1433 words)
The nurse who told me was young, and she said it the way they are taught to say it now, with the chair pulled close and her hands still in her lap, and I remember thinking that someone had trained her very well and that it had not helped either of us. The window behind her looked onto a car park and a line of poplars, and while she talked I counted the poplars, which was eleven, and then I counted them again in case I had been wrong. I was not wrong. There is not much else I remember of that afternoon except that the tea came round at four and I took a cup and did not drink it.

They kept me in another five days. My daughter rang each evening at seven, and I told her I was comfortable, which was true, and that the doctors were pleased with me, which was a word I had chosen with some care. I did not lie to her. I have never lied to her. I have only ever left out, which is a different thing, and which I learned at my mother's table along with how to hold a knife.

I was sent home on a Thursday in a taxi the hospital arranged. The driver carried my bag to the step and asked if there was anyone in, and I said there would be shortly, and he looked at me and let it go. The house was cold. I put the kettle on and stood in the kitchen with my coat still buttoned and listened to the clock.

The clock in the kitchen has run slow for as long as I have lived in this house, and I have never had it seen to. My mother did not either. It loses about four minutes a week, and on Sundays she would stand on a chair and put it right, and now I do, and I suppose that was how I first learned that some things are not mended but managed.

I have been thinking about the pantry since the hospital. Not the pantry itself, which is a cupboard with a door that sticks, but the shelf behind the flour, which is where the women in this family have kept the things they could not say aloud. My grandmother kept it there. My mother kept it there. I did not know about it until I was sixteen, and I did not know then that it was waiting for me, only that it was there and that I was not supposed to have found it.

My daughter rang on the Tuesday after they let me home and said she would come in July and help me sort the house, by which she meant she would help me leave it. She was kind about it. She has always been kind in the way of someone who has decided in advance what the kindness will cost and has agreed to pay it. I said yes. I did not tell her what the nurse had said. I had not decided yet whether to tell her anything, or in what order, or by what means.

What I found at sixteen was a notebook, soft-backed, the cover gone grey with flour dust. It was my mother's hand, and before her pages there were older ones in a hand I did not know, and the first entry was dated the year my grandmother was married. None of it was secrets, exactly. It was the things that had not been said at the table. A still birth. A brother who went to Canada and was not written to. A night my grandfather did not come home and the reason he gave and the reason she knew. I read it standing up, with the pantry door pulled to behind me, and then I put it back behind the flour and went out and set the table, and I never mentioned it, and neither did she. I understood that this was the arrangement. You did not read it until you were ready, and you did not speak of it after, and one day you added to it.

I wrote through June and most of July, at the kitchen table in the evenings, with the clock going wrong above me. I wrote about the hospital, and the window, and what the nurse said. I wrote about her father, which took longer. I wrote about my own marriage, which she had never asked me about, and I found I had been waiting forty years to be asked.

When it was done I put it behind the flour, where the old one had been, and I closed the door.

My daughter came up on the last weekend in July to help me clear the house. She did the pantry on the Saturday. I was upstairs with the linen. I heard the shelves being emptied, and then I heard nothing for a long while, and then I heard the shelves again.

She came up at half past four with a mug of tea for me and one for herself, and she set mine on the windowsill because the chest of drawers was covered in pillowcases. Her eyes were a little red, which could have been the dust. She asked whether I wanted to keep the good tablecloth, the one with the drawn-thread border, and I said I did, and she folded it into the box marked for the flat and wrote tablecloth on the lid in her square capitals.

We ate at seven. She had made a shepherd's pie from what was left in the freezer, and we sat at the kitchen table with the clock above us, and she looked at it once and said it was slow, and I said it always had been. She did not ask about the hospital. She did not ask about her father. She talked about the removal men and the parking at the flat and whether the armchair would go through the door, and I answered, and the whole time I could feel the shape of what she was not saying, sitting between us like a third plate.

When she had gone to bed I went down and opened the pantry. The shelves were bare except for a bag of flour she must have thought I would want, and behind the flour was the notebook, and when I took it out I saw that it had been opened, and closed, and put back exactly square. I did not look inside to see whether she had written anything. That was not the arrangement. I put it in my handbag for the flat, and I turned off the light, and in the morning she asked if I had slept, and I said I had.

The removal men came on the Tuesday. There were two of them, a father and a son by the look of it, and the son carried the armchair through the door on his own with a quarter inch to spare and did not make anything of it. My daughter stood in the hall with the list and ticked things off as they went into the van. I stood in the kitchen. When it was nearly done the father came in and asked about the clock, and I said it was coming, and he lifted it off the nail and the wall behind it was a paler square, like something had been standing there a long time out of the sun.

The flat is on the second floor and the windows look over a school playing field. There are no poplars. My daughter stayed three nights and hung the clock in the kitchen there, on a hook she put in herself, and when she had gone I stood on a chair and set it right, though it had only been down a day and could not have lost much.

The notebook is in the drawer with the tea towels. There is no flour here to put it behind, and I have thought about buying some for the purpose, and have not. She rings at seven. She asks if I have eaten and whether the heating is behaving and I tell her, and then there is a pause, and I can hear her deciding, and I let her decide. She has the arrangement now. She will speak when she is ready, or she will not, and either way I have written it down, and the clock will be four minutes slow on Sunday, and I will put it right.

### hop 48 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1999 words)
It was the postman who found me, which I minded more than the fall itself. I had gone out for the milk in my slippers, as I had done every morning for thirty years, and the step was wet, and that was all there was to it. I lay on the path and looked at the gutter above the porch and thought that it wanted clearing, and then I thought that I would not be the one to clear it, and that was the first time the idea came to me, before anyone had said anything.

He was very good. He put his bag down on the wall and crouched beside me and did not try to move me, and he rang for the ambulance with one hand on my shoulder, and I remember being grateful for the hand and not wanting it there, both at once. He asked my name though he had known it for years from the envelopes. I told him. I asked him to bring the milk in, and he did, and put it in the fridge, and when the ambulance came he stood at the gate until they had closed the doors.

They took the usual pictures of my hip, which was bruised and not broken, and then because I was there and because of my age they took some others, and then there was a day of being wheeled along corridors and left in them, and a day of nobody saying very much, and I knew what that meant. I have sat with enough people in enough wards to know what it means when the doctors stop looking at you and start looking at the notes.

The nurse who told me was young, and she said it the way they are taught to say it now, with the chair pulled close and her hands still in her lap, and I remember thinking that someone had trained her very well and that it had not helped either of us. The window behind her looked onto a car park and a line of poplars, and while she talked I counted the poplars, which was eleven, and then I counted them again in case I had been wrong. I was not wrong. There is not much else I remember of that afternoon except that the tea came round at four and I took a cup and did not drink it.

They kept me in another five days. My daughter rang each evening at seven, and I told her I was comfortable, which was true, and that the doctors were pleased with me, which was a word I had chosen with some care. I did not lie to her. I have never lied to her. I have only ever left out, which is a different thing, and which I learned at my mother's table along with how to hold a knife.

I was sent home on a Thursday in a taxi the hospital arranged. The driver carried my bag to the step and asked if there was anyone in, and I said there would be shortly, and he looked at me and let it go. The house was cold. I put the kettle on and stood in the kitchen with my coat still buttoned and listened to the clock.

The clock in the kitchen has run slow for as long as I have lived in this house, and I have never had it seen to. My mother did not either. It loses about four minutes a week, and on Sundays she would stand on a chair and put it right, and now I do, and I suppose that was how I first learned that some things are not mended but managed.

I have been thinking about the pantry since the hospital. Not the pantry itself, which is a cupboard with a door that sticks, but the shelf behind the flour, which is where the women in this family have kept the things they could not say aloud. My grandmother kept it there. My mother kept it there. I did not know about it until I was sixteen, and I did not know then that it was waiting for me, only that it was there and that I was not supposed to have found it.

My daughter rang on the Tuesday after they let me home and said she would come in July and help me sort the house, by which she meant she would help me leave it. She was kind about it. She has always been kind in the way of someone who has decided in advance what the kindness will cost and has agreed to pay it. I said yes. I did not tell her what the nurse had said. I had not decided yet whether to tell her anything, or in what order, or by what means.

What I found at sixteen was a notebook, soft-backed, the cover gone grey with flour dust. It was my mother's hand, and before her pages there were older ones in a hand I did not know, and the first entry was dated the year my grandmother was married. None of it was secrets, exactly. It was the things that had not been said at the table. A still birth. A brother who went to Canada and was not written to. A night my grandfather did not come home and the reason he gave and the reason she knew. I read it standing up, with the pantry door pulled to behind me, and then I put it back behind the flour and went out and set the table, and I never mentioned it, and neither did she. I understood that this was the arrangement. You did not read it until you were ready, and you did not speak of it after, and one day you added to it.

I wrote through June and most of July, at the kitchen table in the evenings, with the clock going wrong above me. I wrote about the hospital, and the window, and what the nurse said. I wrote about her father, which took longer. I wrote about my own marriage, which she had never asked me about, and I found I had been waiting forty years to be asked.

When it was done I put it behind the flour, where the old one had been, and I closed the door.

My daughter came up on the last weekend in July to help me clear the house. She did the pantry on the Saturday. I was upstairs with the linen. I heard the shelves being emptied, and then I heard nothing for a long while, and then I heard the shelves again.

She came up at half past four with a mug of tea for me and one for herself, and she set mine on the windowsill because the chest of drawers was covered in pillowcases. Her eyes were a little red, which could have been the dust. She asked whether I wanted to keep the good tablecloth, the one with the drawn-thread border, and I said I did, and she folded it into the box marked for the flat and wrote tablecloth on the lid in her square capitals.

We ate at seven. She had made a shepherd's pie from what was left in the freezer, and we sat at the kitchen table with the clock above us, and she looked at it once and said it was slow, and I said it always had been. She did not ask about the hospital. She did not ask about her father. She talked about the removal men and the parking at the flat and whether the armchair would go through the door, and I answered, and the whole time I could feel the shape of what she was not saying, sitting between us like a third plate.

When she had gone to bed I went down and opened the pantry. The shelves were bare except for a bag of flour she must have thought I would want, and behind the flour was the notebook, and when I took it out I saw that it had been opened, and closed, and put back exactly square. I did not look inside to see whether she had written anything. That was not the arrangement. I put it in my handbag for the flat, and I turned off the light, and in the morning she asked if I had slept, and I said I had.

The removal men came on the Tuesday. There were two of them, a father and a son by the look of it, and the son carried the armchair through the door on his own with a quarter inch to spare and did not make anything of it. My daughter stood in the hall with the list and ticked things off as they went into the van. I stood in the kitchen. When it was nearly done the father came in and asked about the clock, and I said it was coming, and he lifted it off the nail and the wall behind it was a paler square, like something had been standing there a long time out of the sun.

The flat is on the second floor and the windows look over a school playing field. There are no poplars. My daughter stayed three nights and hung the clock in the kitchen there, on a hook she put in herself, and when she had gone I stood on a chair and set it right, though it had only been down a day and could not have lost much.

The notebook is in the drawer with the tea towels. There is no flour here to put it behind, and I have thought about buying some for the purpose, and have not. She rings at seven. She asks if I have eaten and whether the heating is behaving and I tell her, and then there is a pause, and I can hear her deciding, and I let her decide. She has the arrangement now. She will speak when she is ready, or she will not, and either way I have written it down, and the clock will be four minutes slow on Sunday, and I will put it right.

In October she came for the weekend without being asked. She brought a bag of flour. She did not say anything about it; she put it in the cupboard above the kettle, where I would have put it myself, and went to hang her coat. I stood and looked at the cupboard door for a while and then I made the tea.

We went for a walk round the edge of the playing field on the Saturday, which is as far as I go now, and she took my arm on the uneven part without making a thing of it, the way the removal man had carried the chair. The boys were playing football at the far end and their shouting came across to us thinned by the distance. She said the flat was warmer than the house. I said it was. She said she had found the gutter man's number in the old address book, if I wanted it for anything, and I said there were no gutters here, and she said no, and we walked on.

On the Sunday morning I came into the kitchen and she was standing on the chair with her hand on the clock. She had her back to me. She turned the hands forward, carefully, the four minutes, and got down and put the chair back under the table, and when she saw me in the doorway she only said that it was done and did I want eggs.

I said I did. She has not asked. I do not think she will, now. But the notebook has gone from the tea towel drawer, and I have not looked for it, because I know where it is.

### hop 49 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 529 words)
[BEFORE]

The step outside the back door has been wet every morning of my life in this house, because the porch roof drips there and nobody has ever moved the drip. My father used to say he would see to it, and then my husband said he would, and I have said it myself, standing in the doorway with a tea towel over my shoulder, looking at the dark patch on the stone. It is the kind of thing you say instead of doing. The milkman left the bottles on the step until he stopped coming, and after that I walked to the shop at the corner for a pint, which is further than it looks when the pavement has frost on it.

I am seventy-six. I say that not because it matters to the telling but because people like to know where to put you. My daughter lives two hours south in a town with a bypass, and she rings on Sundays, and sometimes on a Wednesday if she has had a bad week, and I can tell which it is by the way she says hello. I have one grandchild, who is at university and writes to me on paper because I asked him to. The house has four rooms down and three up and a pantry under the stairs, and I have cleaned every inch of it more times than I could count, and I know which boards speak and which keep quiet.

That morning in April I put my slippers on and went out as usual.

[AFTER]

She stayed until the Monday. On the Sunday night she slept in the small room, and I lay awake in mine and listened to the flat settle, which it does differently from the house, in short dry clicks rather than the long complaints of old timber. I did not hear her get up. But in the morning the drawer with the tea towels was shut flush, which it never is, because the runner sticks, and I knew she had put something back and pushed hard so that I would not notice.

I noticed. I did not say.

At the door she held my shoulders and looked at me the way the nurse had, with her hands still, and I thought that somebody had trained her very well too, and that this time it had helped. She said she would come at Christmas. She said the flour would keep. Then she went down the stairs with her bag over her arm and did not look back from the car, which is how I would have done it.

It is November now. The boys on the playing field have gone in for the winter and the grass has been left long at the edges. The clock loses its four minutes. I put it right on Sundays from the chair, and the chair goes back under the table, and the notebook is behind the flour in the cupboard above the kettle, where I have not looked and will not. There is a new page in it, I think. I do not need to read it to know what it is for.

### hop 50 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 277 words)
I do not remember the step itself. I remember the sky, which was white and very close, and the cold of the stone coming up through my cardigan, and thinking quite clearly that the drip would have to be moved now and that it would be somebody else who moved it. A man from two doors down found me. He had a dog I did not know he had.

The hip was the easy part, they told me, as if there were a hard part they were keeping back. There was. The nurse who sat with me on the ward had been trained to hold her hands still while she said things, and she said that the house had stairs and the stairs would not do, and my daughter came up on the train and said the same, more kindly and at greater length. I did not argue. You can tell when a thing has been decided in a kitchen you were not standing in.

The flat is on the second floor of a block that looks over a playing field. It has a lift, which hums, and a clock on the wall that came with me and lost four minutes a week in the house and loses them here too, so that is one thing kept. My daughter unpacked the cupboards and put the flour where I would not have put it. She bought a notebook and wrote the names of the carers in it, and the days they come, and the number for the doctor, and she put it in the cupboard above the kettle, behind the flour, and told me where it was twice.

### hop 51 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 767 words)
The garden was never much. A strip of lawn, a bed along the fence where the neighbour's ivy came through no matter what I did to it, and the step down from the back door, which Frank had meant to put a rail on for eleven years. I used to tell people that. It was one of the things I said about him after, the way you keep a few stories polished and bring them out so the rest can stay in the drawer. He meant to put a rail on the step. He bought the brackets. They are still in the shed, in the paper bag, with the receipt.

I went out that morning for the washing. It was March and not warm, but there was a bit of a breeze and the sheets would dry if I got them out early, and I have never been able to leave sheets in the machine. The drip had started again under the kitchen window, the one the man came about in the autumn and said was nothing, and I remember standing at the sink watching it and thinking I would ring him after. I had the basket on my hip. I had the pegs in my cardigan pocket because the peg bag had gone somewhere, the way things did in that house, into whatever space it kept for them.

I opened the door and the cold came in and I went down.

I do not remember the step itself. I remember the sky, which was white and very close, and the cold of the stone coming up through my cardigan, and thinking quite clearly that the drip would have to be moved now and that it would be somebody else who moved it. A man from two doors down found me. He had a dog I did not know he had.

The hip was the easy part, they told me, as if there were a hard part they were keeping back. There was. The nurse who sat with me on the ward had been trained to hold her hands still while she said things, and she said that the house had stairs and the stairs would not do, and my daughter came up on the train and said the same, more kindly and at greater length. I did not argue. You can tell when a thing has been decided in a kitchen you were not standing in.

The flat is on the second floor of a block that looks over a playing field. It has a lift, which hums, and a clock on the wall that came with me and lost four minutes a week in the house and loses them here too, so that is one thing kept. My daughter unpacked the cupboards and put the flour where I would not have put it. She bought a notebook and wrote the names of the carers in it, and the days they come, and the number for the doctor, and she put it in the cupboard above the kettle, behind the flour, and told me where it was twice.

The carers are called Precious and Dawn and a young man whose name I have not yet got, because he says it quickly and I do not like to ask a third time. They come at eight and at six. Precious talks and Dawn does not, and I find I prefer Dawn, though I would not say so. They help me with the stockings and they look at the chart on the fridge and they ask if I have eaten, and I say yes, and sometimes it is true.

In the afternoons I sit by the window. There are boys on the field most days, in bibs, running at nothing I can see the point of, and a man with a whistle who stands very still in the middle of them. I have started to know which boy is which. The small one in the orange goes down easily and gets up angry. I watch him for the hour and then they go in and the field is empty and the light goes off it in the way it does here, all at once, with nothing to catch on.

My daughter rings on Sundays. She asks if I have been using the notebook. I tell her the flour is in the wrong place, and she laughs, because she thinks it is a joke, and I let her. The clock says twenty past. It is not twenty past. I know that, and I let it go on saying it.

### hop 52 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1366 words)
People ask how long I was in the house, and I say forty-three years, and they make the face. It is a kind face. It means they are thinking of their own houses and how they would not like to be made to leave them, and it also means they have already decided I was foolish to stay. Both of those can sit in a face at once. I have learned that in the last few months, the way you learn a language late, badly, but enough to get by.

Frank and I bought it in the spring, the year the buses changed numbers, and we never did find out why they changed them. The kitchen was green then. He painted it the first weekend, standing on a chair because we had no ladder, and he got a line of it in his hair that stayed for a week and that he would not let me cut out. The boiler was new when we came and old when he went, and the man who serviced it was the same man all that time and then one year it was his son. That is how long. You do not notice a house becoming yours. You notice it afterwards, when somebody who is not you is deciding where the kettle goes.

I am not going to tell the whole of it. There is a way of telling the whole of a thing that ends up being about the telling and not the thing, and I have sat through enough of that at funerals. I will tell the morning, and what came of it, and leave the rest where it is.

The garden was never much. A strip of lawn, a bed along the fence where the neighbour's ivy came through no matter what I did to it, and the step down from the back door, which Frank had meant to put a rail on for eleven years. I used to tell people that. It was one of the things I said about him after, the way you keep a few stories polished and bring them out so the rest can stay in the drawer. He meant to put a rail on the step. He bought the brackets. They are still in the shed, in the paper bag, with the receipt.

I went out that morning for the washing. It was March and not warm, but there was a bit of a breeze and the sheets would dry if I got them out early, and I have never been able to leave sheets in the machine. The drip had started again under the kitchen window, the one the man came about in the autumn and said was nothing, and I remember standing at the sink watching it and thinking I would ring him after. I had the basket on my hip. I had the pegs in my cardigan pocket because the peg bag had gone somewhere, the way things did in that house, into whatever space it kept for them.

I opened the door and the cold came in and I went down.

I do not remember the step itself. I remember the sky, which was white and very close, and the cold of the stone coming up through my cardigan, and thinking quite clearly that the drip would have to be moved now and that it would be somebody else who moved it. A man from two doors down found me. He had a dog I did not know he had.

The hip was the easy part, they told me, as if there were a hard part they were keeping back. There was. The nurse who sat with me on the ward had been trained to hold her hands still while she said things, and she said that the house had stairs and the stairs would not do, and my daughter came up on the train and said the same, more kindly and at greater length. I did not argue. You can tell when a thing has been decided in a kitchen you were not standing in.

The flat is on the second floor of a block that looks over a playing field. It has a lift, which hums, and a clock on the wall that came with me and lost four minutes a week in the house and loses them here too, so that is one thing kept. My daughter unpacked the cupboards and put the flour where I would not have put it. She bought a notebook and wrote the names of the carers in it, and the days they come, and the number for the doctor, and she put it in the cupboard above the kettle, behind the flour, and told me where it was twice.

The carers are called Precious and Dawn and a young man whose name I have not yet got, because he says it quickly and I do not like to ask a third time. They come at eight and at six. Precious talks and Dawn does not, and I find I prefer Dawn, though I would not say so. They help me with the stockings and they look at the chart on the fridge and they ask if I have eaten, and I say yes, and sometimes it is true.

In the afternoons I sit by the window. There are boys on the field most days, in bibs, running at nothing I can see the point of, and a man with a whistle who stands very still in the middle of them. I have started to know which boy is which. The small one in the orange goes down easily and gets up angry. I watch him for the hour and then they go in and the field is empty and the light goes off it in the way it does here, all at once, with nothing to catch on.

My daughter rings on Sundays. She asks if I have been using the notebook. I tell her the flour is in the wrong place, and she laughs, because she thinks it is a joke, and I let her. The clock says twenty past. It is not twenty past. I know that, and I let it go on saying it.

The young man's name is Tomasz. I got it in the end without asking. Dawn said it over her shoulder, not to me, something about a rota, and I held onto it the way you hold a coin you have found on the pavement, not sure yet if it is worth anything. The next evening when he came I said good evening, Tomasz, and he looked at me as if I had done a trick, and then he smiled, and the smile stayed on him while he did the stockings, which I had not known it could.

He is from a town I have never heard of and he has a mother there with a bad knee. He told me this because I asked, and I asked because it was something to say, and then it was not only that. He showed me a picture on his phone. She was standing in a doorway with her arms folded, squinting, and behind her was a yard with a line of washing across it, and I had to look away at the field for a bit.

The boy in orange was not there this week. I noticed on the Tuesday and again on the Thursday and I found I minded, which is foolish. He will have a cold, or his mother will have kept him in, or he has gone to another club where they let him stay on his feet. I do not know him. I know the back of his head and the way he gets up.

My daughter is coming on Saturday instead of ringing. She says she wants to see how I am getting on. I have moved the flour. I did it on Wednesday with the stick hooked over my arm, and it took a long time, and I have not decided yet whether to put it back before she comes or leave it, and let her see.

### hop 53 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1953 words)
There is a woman on the ground floor who stops me by the post boxes. She is new too, or newer, and she has a way of asking things that is really telling you things, which I know because I did it myself for years at the church hall and never once thought anybody noticed. She asked me on Monday where I had come from, and I said the name of the road, and she said oh, as if she had been there, which she had not. Then she asked how long.

I have been asked it in the lift and at the chemist and by the girl who came to do the gas, and I have found I can hear it coming now, the little pause in front of it, the way you can hear a kettle before it starts to sing. The girl from the gas was the only one who did not make the face. She was looking at her meter. I liked her for that more than she would have understood.

My daughter says I should not take it to heart. She says people are only being friendly, and that is true, and it is also true that I have had a great deal of practice at being friendly and I know what it costs and what it is for. I do not say this to her. I say the lift was slow again. She says she will ring the man. There is a man for everything here, and none of them is Frank, and none of them is the boiler man's son.

People ask how long I was in the house, and I say forty-three years, and they make the face. It is a kind face. It means they are thinking of their own houses and how they would not like to be made to leave them, and it also means they have already decided I was foolish to stay. Both of those can sit in a face at once. I have learned that in the last few months, the way you learn a language late, badly, but enough to get by.

Frank and I bought it in the spring, the year the buses changed numbers, and we never did find out why they changed them. The kitchen was green then. He painted it the first weekend, standing on a chair because we had no ladder, and he got a line of it in his hair that stayed for a week and that he would not let me cut out. The boiler was new when we came and old when he went, and the man who serviced it was the same man all that time and then one year it was his son. That is how long. You do not notice a house becoming yours. You notice it afterwards, when somebody who is not you is deciding where the kettle goes.

I am not going to tell the whole of it. There is a way of telling the whole of a thing that ends up being about the telling and not the thing, and I have sat through enough of that at funerals. I will tell the morning, and what came of it, and leave the rest where it is.

The garden was never much. A strip of lawn, a bed along the fence where the neighbour's ivy came through no matter what I did to it, and the step down from the back door, which Frank had meant to put a rail on for eleven years. I used to tell people that. It was one of the things I said about him after, the way you keep a few stories polished and bring them out so the rest can stay in the drawer. He meant to put a rail on the step. He bought the brackets. They are still in the shed, in the paper bag, with the receipt.

I went out that morning for the washing. It was March and not warm, but there was a bit of a breeze and the sheets would dry if I got them out early, and I have never been able to leave sheets in the machine. The drip had started again under the kitchen window, the one the man came about in the autumn and said was nothing, and I remember standing at the sink watching it and thinking I would ring him after. I had the basket on my hip. I had the pegs in my cardigan pocket because the peg bag had gone somewhere, the way things did in that house, into whatever space it kept for them.

I opened the door and the cold came in and I went down.

I do not remember the step itself. I remember the sky, which was white and very close, and the cold of the stone coming up through my cardigan, and thinking quite clearly that the drip would have to be moved now and that it would be somebody else who moved it. A man from two doors down found me. He had a dog I did not know he had.

The hip was the easy part, they told me, as if there were a hard part they were keeping back. There was. The nurse who sat with me on the ward had been trained to hold her hands still while she said things, and she said that the house had stairs and the stairs would not do, and my daughter came up on the train and said the same, more kindly and at greater length. I did not argue. You can tell when a thing has been decided in a kitchen you were not standing in.

The flat is on the second floor of a block that looks over a playing field. It has a lift, which hums, and a clock on the wall that came with me and lost four minutes a week in the house and loses them here too, so that is one thing kept. My daughter unpacked the cupboards and put the flour where I would not have put it. She bought a notebook and wrote the names of the carers in it, and the days they come, and the number for the doctor, and she put it in the cupboard above the kettle, behind the flour, and told me where it was twice.

The carers are called Precious and Dawn and a young man whose name I have not yet got, because he says it quickly and I do not like to ask a third time. They come at eight and at six. Precious talks and Dawn does not, and I find I prefer Dawn, though I would not say so. They help me with the stockings and they look at the chart on the fridge and they ask if I have eaten, and I say yes, and sometimes it is true.

In the afternoons I sit by the window. There are boys on the field most days, in bibs, running at nothing I can see the point of, and a man with a whistle who stands very still in the middle of them. I have started to know which boy is which. The small one in the orange goes down easily and gets up angry. I watch him for the hour and then they go in and the field is empty and the light goes off it in the way it does here, all at once, with nothing to catch on.

My daughter rings on Sundays. She asks if I have been using the notebook. I tell her the flour is in the wrong place, and she laughs, because she thinks it is a joke, and I let her. The clock says twenty past. It is not twenty past. I know that, and I let it go on saying it.

The young man's name is Tomasz. I got it in the end without asking. Dawn said it over her shoulder, not to me, something about a rota, and I held onto it the way you hold a coin you have found on the pavement, not sure yet if it is worth anything. The next evening when he came I said good evening, Tomasz, and he looked at me as if I had done a trick, and then he smiled, and the smile stayed on him while he did the stockings, which I had not known it could.

He is from a town I have never heard of and he has a mother there with a bad knee. He told me this because I asked, and I asked because it was something to say, and then it was not only that. He showed me a picture on his phone. She was standing in a doorway with her arms folded, squinting, and behind her was a yard with a line of washing across it, and I had to look away at the field for a bit.

The boy in orange was not there this week. I noticed on the Tuesday and again on the Thursday and I found I minded, which is foolish. He will have a cold, or his mother will have kept him in, or he has gone to another club where they let him stay on his feet. I do not know him. I know the back of his head and the way he gets up.

My daughter is coming on Saturday instead of ringing. She says she wants to see how I am getting on. I have moved the flour. I did it on Wednesday with the stick hooked over my arm, and it took a long time, and I have not decided yet whether to put it back before she comes or leave it, and let her see.

I left it.

She came at eleven with a bag of things I had not asked for, a cardigan and some of the biscuits I used to buy and a plant in a pot that she said would be fine on the sill. She kissed me and looked at me the way the nurse did, hands still, and then she went to put the kettle on, which is what she does, and I sat and listened to her open the cupboard.

There was a quiet. Not a long one. Then she said, Mum, and I said yes, and she said nothing else, and I heard her take the notebook out from where it was now, in front, where a hand would go to it first, and put it on the counter, and I heard her not say anything about that either.

We had the tea by the window. The field was empty, it being Saturday, and she asked what I looked at, and I told her about the boys and the man with the whistle, and I did not tell her about the one in orange because I could hear how it would sound. She told me about her Michael's work and the car. I asked after the house, and she said the sign was up, and I said good, and we both looked at the field.

When she went she held me longer than she needed to at the door. I stood at the window after and watched her cross the car park, and she stopped by her car and looked up, and I do not think she could see me, but I lifted my hand anyway. The clock said ten to. It was not ten to. She had not moved the flour back. I noticed that when I went to make my tea, and I stood there a minute with the cupboard open, and then I shut it.

### hop 54 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 2571 words)
The post comes at ten, or it did in the house. Here it comes when it comes, and it goes into a box with my name on it that somebody typed, and I have to take the lift down to see whether there is anything, which there mostly is not. I go anyway. It is a reason to put my shoes on, and I have found you need reasons here, or the day goes by without you in it.

I have a key for the box on the same ring as the key for the flat and the key for the shed, which is forty miles away and will be somebody else's shed by the summer. I keep meaning to take it off. I keep not doing it. It is only a key. It weighs nothing. Precious said once, that is a lot of keys for one lady, and I said yes, and did not explain, and she let it go, which is not like her.

The lift takes its time. There is a mirror in it, which I think was unkind of somebody, and a notice about not propping the doors, and the hum, which I have got used to the way you get used to a fridge. I stand with my back to the mirror. When the doors open there is the lobby, and the boxes, and the glass door to the car park where the light comes in sideways in the mornings, and more often than not there is somebody standing there who was not there for the post.

There is a woman on the ground floor who stops me by the post boxes. She is new too, or newer, and she has a way of asking things that is really telling you things, which I know because I did it myself for years at the church hall and never once thought anybody noticed. She asked me on Monday where I had come from, and I said the name of the road, and she said oh, as if she had been there, which she had not. Then she asked how long.

I have been asked it in the lift and at the chemist and by the girl who came to do the gas, and I have found I can hear it coming now, the little pause in front of it, the way you can hear a kettle before it starts to sing. The girl from the gas was the only one who did not make the face. She was looking at her meter. I liked her for that more than she would have understood.

My daughter says I should not take it to heart. She says people are only being friendly, and that is true, and it is also true that I have had a great deal of practice at being friendly and I know what it costs and what it is for. I do not say this to her. I say the lift was slow again. She says she will ring the man. There is a man for everything here, and none of them is Frank, and none of them is the boiler man's son.

People ask how long I was in the house, and I say forty-three years, and they make the face. It is a kind face. It means they are thinking of their own houses and how they would not like to be made to leave them, and it also means they have already decided I was foolish to stay. Both of those can sit in a face at once. I have learned that in the last few months, the way you learn a language late, badly, but enough to get by.

Frank and I bought it in the spring, the year the buses changed numbers, and we never did find out why they changed them. The kitchen was green then. He painted it the first weekend, standing on a chair because we had no ladder, and he got a line of it in his hair that stayed for a week and that he would not let me cut out. The boiler was new when we came and old when he went, and the man who serviced it was the same man all that time and then one year it was his son. That is how long. You do not notice a house becoming yours. You notice it afterwards, when somebody who is not you is deciding where the kettle goes.

I am not going to tell the whole of it. There is a way of telling the whole of a thing that ends up being about the telling and not the thing, and I have sat through enough of that at funerals. I will tell the morning, and what came of it, and leave the rest where it is.

The garden was never much. A strip of lawn, a bed along the fence where the neighbour's ivy came through no matter what I did to it, and the step down from the back door, which Frank had meant to put a rail on for eleven years. I used to tell people that. It was one of the things I said about him after, the way you keep a few stories polished and bring them out so the rest can stay in the drawer. He meant to put a rail on the step. He bought the brackets. They are still in the shed, in the paper bag, with the receipt.

I went out that morning for the washing. It was March and not warm, but there was a bit of a breeze and the sheets would dry if I got them out early, and I have never been able to leave sheets in the machine. The drip had started again under the kitchen window, the one the man came about in the autumn and said was nothing, and I remember standing at the sink watching it and thinking I would ring him after. I had the basket on my hip. I had the pegs in my cardigan pocket because the peg bag had gone somewhere, the way things did in that house, into whatever space it kept for them.

I opened the door and the cold came in and I went down.

I do not remember the step itself. I remember the sky, which was white and very close, and the cold of the stone coming up through my cardigan, and thinking quite clearly that the drip would have to be moved now and that it would be somebody else who moved it. A man from two doors down found me. He had a dog I did not know he had.

The hip was the easy part, they told me, as if there were a hard part they were keeping back. There was. The nurse who sat with me on the ward had been trained to hold her hands still while she said things, and she said that the house had stairs and the stairs would not do, and my daughter came up on the train and said the same, more kindly and at greater length. I did not argue. You can tell when a thing has been decided in a kitchen you were not standing in.

The flat is on the second floor of a block that looks over a playing field. It has a lift, which hums, and a clock on the wall that came with me and lost four minutes a week in the house and loses them here too, so that is one thing kept. My daughter unpacked the cupboards and put the flour where I would not have put it. She bought a notebook and wrote the names of the carers in it, and the days they come, and the number for the doctor, and she put it in the cupboard above the kettle, behind the flour, and told me where it was twice.

The carers are called Precious and Dawn and a young man whose name I have not yet got, because he says it quickly and I do not like to ask a third time. They come at eight and at six. Precious talks and Dawn does not, and I find I prefer Dawn, though I would not say so. They help me with the stockings and they look at the chart on the fridge and they ask if I have eaten, and I say yes, and sometimes it is true.

In the afternoons I sit by the window. There are boys on the field most days, in bibs, running at nothing I can see the point of, and a man with a whistle who stands very still in the middle of them. I have started to know which boy is which. The small one in the orange goes down easily and gets up angry. I watch him for the hour and then they go in and the field is empty and the light goes off it in the way it does here, all at once, with nothing to catch on.

My daughter rings on Sundays. She asks if I have been using the notebook. I tell her the flour is in the wrong place, and she laughs, because she thinks it is a joke, and I let her. The clock says twenty past. It is not twenty past. I know that, and I let it go on saying it.

The young man's name is Tomasz. I got it in the end without asking. Dawn said it over her shoulder, not to me, something about a rota, and I held onto it the way you hold a coin you have found on the pavement, not sure yet if it is worth anything. The next evening when he came I said good evening, Tomasz, and he looked at me as if I had done a trick, and then he smiled, and the smile stayed on him while he did the stockings, which I had not known it could.

He is from a town I have never heard of and he has a mother there with a bad knee. He told me this because I asked, and I asked because it was something to say, and then it was not only that. He showed me a picture on his phone. She was standing in a doorway with her arms folded, squinting, and behind her was a yard with a line of washing across it, and I had to look away at the field for a bit.

The boy in orange was not there this week. I noticed on the Tuesday and again on the Thursday and I found I minded, which is foolish. He will have a cold, or his mother will have kept him in, or he has gone to another club where they let him stay on his feet. I do not know him. I know the back of his head and the way he gets up.

My daughter is coming on Saturday instead of ringing. She says she wants to see how I am getting on. I have moved the flour. I did it on Wednesday with the stick hooked over my arm, and it took a long time, and I have not decided yet whether to put it back before she comes or leave it, and let her see.

I left it.

She came at eleven with a bag of things I had not asked for, a cardigan and some of the biscuits I used to buy and a plant in a pot that she said would be fine on the sill. She kissed me and looked at me the way the nurse did, hands still, and then she went to put the kettle on, which is what she does, and I sat and listened to her open the cupboard.

There was a quiet. Not a long one. Then she said, Mum, and I said yes, and she said nothing else, and I heard her take the notebook out from where it was now, in front, where a hand would go to it first, and put it on the counter, and I heard her not say anything about that either.

We had the tea by the window. The field was empty, it being Saturday, and she asked what I looked at, and I told her about the boys and the man with the whistle, and I did not tell her about the one in orange because I could hear how it would sound. She told me about her Michael's work and the car. I asked after the house, and she said the sign was up, and I said good, and we both looked at the field.

When she went she held me longer than she needed to at the door. I stood at the window after and watched her cross the car park, and she stopped by her car and looked up, and I do not think she could see me, but I lifted my hand anyway. The clock said ten to. It was not ten to. She had not moved the flour back. I noticed that when I went to make my tea, and I stood there a minute with the cupboard open, and then I shut it.

The boy in orange came back on the Tuesday. I will not pretend I did not look for him before the others had got their bibs on. He went down twice in the first ten minutes and the second time he stayed down a moment longer than he needed to, with his face in the grass, and the man with the whistle did not go over, and I thought, good, that is right, let him get up on his own. He got up. He did not look angry this time. He looked like somebody who has found out that the ground is only the ground.

Tomasz asked me on Thursday if I had a photograph of the house. I said I did not, which was true, and then I said there was one somewhere in a box my daughter had not unpacked, which was also true, and he said, next time, and I said, perhaps. He told me his mother had been to the doctor and the knee was to be done in the autumn. I said she would need a rail on the step, and he looked at me, and I said never mind, and he let it go, which I am starting to think is a thing they teach them.

The plant is still alive. I have been watering it on the days Dawn comes, because she notices if it is dry and says nothing, and I would rather she had nothing to say nothing about. The notebook is on the counter. I have not opened it. I have not put it back either.

This morning I took the shed key off the ring. It was not hard. It took a minute, with a knife, at the table. I put it in the drawer with the pegs, which I found in the bottom of the cardigan she brought, where I must have left them the day I went down, and had carried all this way without knowing. The clock said half past. I looked at it a long while. Then I got up and put my shoes on and went down for the post.

### hop 55 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 528 words)
BEFORE:

I wake before the carers now. I did not used to. In the house there was Frank's side of the bed to keep me from rolling, and then there was the cold of it to keep me from rolling the other way, and either way I lay until the light came round the curtain and told me it was time. Here the curtain is thinner and the light does not come round it so much as through it, all of a piece, so that I am awake at six with nothing to be awake for.

I lie and listen. There is the lift, which goes up and down for nobody at that hour, or for the man on the fourth floor who does nights at the hospital and comes in smelling of the soap they use there. There is the heating ticking in the pipes. There is a bird I cannot name, because I never had to in the house, where the birds were the ones I knew. I have thought about asking Tomasz, who seems to know things, but a bird is a small thing to ask a young man about at eight in the morning while he is kneeling at your feet with a stocking.

The chart on the fridge says what day it is. I do not need it for that. I need it for what I am supposed to have done, which is less than it was, and which I do, mostly, and tick, mostly. Then I wait for the post.

AFTER:

There was nothing in the box. I had known there would be nothing, and I stood there a minute with the little door open anyway, the way you stand at a window after the car has gone.

The woman from the ground floor was not there. In her place was the man who does nights, coming in with his coat over his arm, grey in the face, and he nodded to me and I nodded to him and neither of us asked the other anything. I thought, that is how it is done. You do not need to be told. You only need to be tired enough.

The lift came. I got in with my back to the mirror and then, I do not know why, I turned round. There was a woman in it with a stick and a cardigan that was not hers, and her hair wanted doing, and she looked, I thought, like somebody who had been somewhere and come back. Not foolish. Not what the face means. Only that.

Upstairs the flat was where I had left it. The plant was on the sill and the notebook was on the counter and the clock said twenty to, and I let it. I put the kettle on. I opened the cupboard, and the flour was where I had put it, and I got it down, and then I got the notebook and opened it, and read the names in my daughter's hand, and under Tomasz, where she had left a space, I wrote his mother's name, because he had told me, and somebody ought to have it down.

### hop 56 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 521 words)
BEFORE:

The flat has one plant, and it came with me, which is more than can be said for most things. My daughter chose it from the sill in the kitchen because it was the one that was not dead, and she wrapped the pot in a tea towel for the car, and it sat on my lap the whole way down the A-road with its leaves against my coat like a child that has been told to be good. I have not killed it yet. I water it on Thursdays because the chart says Thursday, though I would have said Wednesday, and I have decided the chart knows.

They call it a flat and it is, in the sense that there are no stairs inside it, but it is really a room with ideas. The kitchen is a wall. The bedroom is a door that does not close all the way because the carpet was laid too thick, and I have learned to sleep with the sound of the corridor, which is a sound of nobody until it is suddenly somebody, and then nobody again.

I am not unhappy. I want that written down somewhere, in case anyone comes to ask. My daughter asks on the telephone in a voice she uses for the doctor's, and I say I am fine, and she says good, and we both hear what is not being said and leave it where it is.

AFTER:

Tomasz had said it the way you say a thing you have not been asked about and did not expect to be. He was doing the stocking and I was looking at the top of his head, which is where you look, and I had said, to say something, do you have family here, and he had said no, my mother is in Łódź, and then he said her name, and then he went red to the ears and pulled the stocking straight and did not look up. I did not say anything. I had not needed to.

So I wrote it. Then I wrote, under it, the name of the bird, because I had asked him after all, at ten past eight, and he had said it without looking up either, as if it were nothing, as if everyone knew. I shall not say what it was. It is mine now, the way the plant is mine.

The kettle went. I made the tea in the pot, which my daughter says is a waste for one, and I sat with it by the sill with the flour on the counter waiting, and I thought about Frank, who could not boil an egg, and who would have had a word for the man who does nights, and for the woman in the lift, and for me. It would not have been an unkind word. He did not have many of those. It would have been the sort that lets you know you have been seen.

At eleven I got the scales down. I had not decided what I was making. I thought I would let my hands tell me.

### hop 57 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 251 words)
What I do instead is keep a book. Not a diary, I would not call it that, Frank would have laughed. It is the small one from the drawer by the till at the shop on the corner, the sort with the elastic, and in it I put down names. Only names. The woman in the lift who holds the door with her foot and says mind yourself: Pauline. The man who does nights at the shop, who is there at seven when I go for the milk and still there at eight when I go back for the thing I forgot, which is sometimes nothing: Tomasz. The bird on the railing outside the laundry room that is not a sparrow, I do not think, though I would have said sparrow once and been sure.

I write them in pencil. Pencil can be rubbed out, and I like to know that it could be, though I have not rubbed one out yet.

This morning I had the flour out because I had thought, waking, that I might make something, and the thought had got as far as the counter and stopped. I put the kettle on and I opened the book to the last page with writing on it, which was Pauline, and under Pauline I sat with the pencil up and looked at it for a while. Then I wrote the name of Tomasz's mother.

I did not know I was going to. I had not known I had it.

### hop 58 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 780 words)
The girl at the surgery said I should write things down. She did not say it unkindly. She had a laminated sheet with a drawing of a head on it and arrows coming out of the head, and one of the arrows said Journaling, with a little pen beside it, and she turned the sheet so I could see and said that some people found it helped. I said I would think about it. I have been saying that since January. It is a thing you can say to almost anybody and they will leave you alone, and I have found that out this year the way you find out where the draught comes from in a house, by sitting in it.

Frank did the talking. That was the arrangement, though we never said so. He would come in from the allotment with his hands still smelling of the shed and tell me who he had seen and what they had said and what he had said back, and I would do the tea, and by the time it was poured I knew the whole street. I did not need to know anyone. I had him for that.

So it is not that I have nothing to say. It is that I had somebody to say it to and now the saying has nowhere to go, and it sits in the flat like the smell of the shed used to, only there is nobody coming in behind it.

What I do instead is keep a book. Not a diary, I would not call it that, Frank would have laughed. It is the small one from the drawer by the till at the shop on the corner, the sort with the elastic, and in it I put down names. Only names. The woman in the lift who holds the door with her foot and says mind yourself: Pauline. The man who does nights at the shop, who is there at seven when I go for the milk and still there at eight when I go back for the thing I forgot, which is sometimes nothing: Tomasz. The bird on the railing outside the laundry room that is not a sparrow, I do not think, though I would have said sparrow once and been sure.

I write them in pencil. Pencil can be rubbed out, and I like to know that it could be, though I have not rubbed one out yet.

This morning I had the flour out because I had thought, waking, that I might make something, and the thought had got as far as the counter and stopped. I put the kettle on and I opened the book to the last page with writing on it, which was Pauline, and under Pauline I sat with the pencil up and looked at it for a while. Then I wrote the name of Tomasz's mother.

I did not know I was going to. I had not known I had it.

Halina. He said it in March, or it might have been April, the week the clocks went. I had gone in for the milk and there was a card propped against the till with a photograph of a woman in a garden, and I must have looked at it, because he said, my mother, and then he said her name, and then he said she had been poorly and was better now. That was all. I paid for the milk. I do not think I said anything beyond thank you. And there it had been since, somewhere, the way the number for the gas is somewhere, and this morning it came up the pencil without my asking.

I looked at it on the page. It did not look like much. A name under a name.

The kettle went off and I did not get up. I was thinking that I had not asked him how she was, not once since, and he is there every morning, and I am there every morning, and we talk about the weather and whether the bread has come. I was thinking that Frank would have asked. Frank would have known by now what she grew in the garden and what the doctor said and whether she took sugar.

I got up then and made the tea, and I left the book open on the counter beside the flour, which I still had not done anything with. Tomorrow at seven I will go for the milk. I have not decided what I will say. But I have the name, and I have it in pencil, and I find I do not want to rub it out.

### hop 59 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1363 words)
There is a tin on the shelf above the cooker that has not come down since February. It is the one with the Scottish castle on it, and it has his pills in it still, the ones that were not finished, and I know I ought to take them back to the chemist because the leaflet says so, and the leaflet is in there with them, folded small. I have taken it down twice. Both times I have put it back. The lid makes a noise when it goes on, a sort of sigh, and I had not noticed that in forty years, and now it is the loudest thing in the flat.

People say the first year is the worst. They say it in the lift and they say it at the surgery and they said it, the three of them, at the do afterwards, with the sandwiches going curled on the plates. I have never understood what it is meant to do, that sentence. It is not comfort. It is a weather forecast. It tells you to get the coat out.

What I have found is that it is not the big days. I was braced for the big days and the big days came and went like buses. It is the Tuesdays. It is the half past four when the light goes and the kettle has nobody to be put on for. It is the fact that I still buy two of the small loaves out of habit, and the second one goes blue in the bag before I think to freeze it, and I have started to do that on purpose, I think, so that there is something to throw away that is not his.

The girl at the surgery said I should write things down. She did not say it unkindly. She had a laminated sheet with a drawing of a head on it and arrows coming out of the head, and one of the arrows said Journaling, with a little pen beside it, and she turned the sheet so I could see and said that some people found it helped. I said I would think about it. I have been saying that since January. It is a thing you can say to almost anybody and they will leave you alone, and I have found that out this year the way you find out where the draught comes from in a house, by sitting in it.

Frank did the talking. That was the arrangement, though we never said so. He would come in from the allotment with his hands still smelling of the shed and tell me who he had seen and what they had said and what he had said back, and I would do the tea, and by the time it was poured I knew the whole street. I did not need to know anyone. I had him for that.

So it is not that I have nothing to say. It is that I had somebody to say it to and now the saying has nowhere to go, and it sits in the flat like the smell of the shed used to, only there is nobody coming in behind it.

What I do instead is keep a book. Not a diary, I would not call it that, Frank would have laughed. It is the small one from the drawer by the till at the shop on the corner, the sort with the elastic, and in it I put down names. Only names. The woman in the lift who holds the door with her foot and says mind yourself: Pauline. The man who does nights at the shop, who is there at seven when I go for the milk and still there at eight when I go back for the thing I forgot, which is sometimes nothing: Tomasz. The bird on the railing outside the laundry room that is not a sparrow, I do not think, though I would have said sparrow once and been sure.

I write them in pencil. Pencil can be rubbed out, and I like to know that it could be, though I have not rubbed one out yet.

This morning I had the flour out because I had thought, waking, that I might make something, and the thought had got as far as the counter and stopped. I put the kettle on and I opened the book to the last page with writing on it, which was Pauline, and under Pauline I sat with the pencil up and looked at it for a while. Then I wrote the name of Tomasz's mother.

I did not know I was going to. I had not known I had it.

Halina. He said it in March, or it might have been April, the week the clocks went. I had gone in for the milk and there was a card propped against the till with a photograph of a woman in a garden, and I must have looked at it, because he said, my mother, and then he said her name, and then he said she had been poorly and was better now. That was all. I paid for the milk. I do not think I said anything beyond thank you. And there it had been since, somewhere, the way the number for the gas is somewhere, and this morning it came up the pencil without my asking.

I looked at it on the page. It did not look like much. A name under a name.

The kettle went off and I did not get up. I was thinking that I had not asked him how she was, not once since, and he is there every morning, and I am there every morning, and we talk about the weather and whether the bread has come. I was thinking that Frank would have asked. Frank would have known by now what she grew in the garden and what the doctor said and whether she took sugar.

I got up then and made the tea, and I left the book open on the counter beside the flour, which I still had not done anything with. Tomorrow at seven I will go for the milk. I have not decided what I will say. But I have the name, and I have it in pencil, and I find I do not want to rub it out.

I went at seven. I had the words ready on the stairs and they had gone by the door, the way they do, and so I did what I always do, which is take the milk from the back where it is coldest and put it on the counter and look at the bread.

He said it was coming at half past. I said right. Then I said, before I could stop it, how is your mother. Not the name. I could not get the name out. But I said it, and I heard it in the shop like a dropped tin.

He looked at me the way you look at somebody who has stepped off a kerb without checking. Then his face did something I had not seen it do, and he said she was well, she was very well, she had been out in the garden again and was complaining about the slugs, and he laughed at that, a short one, and he said she grew beans. Runner beans. On canes, up the wall at the back.

I said Frank grew beans. I had not meant to say that either. It is the first time I have said his name to anyone who did not already know it.

He asked who Frank was. I told him. It did not take long, I am not a talker, but it took longer than thank you, and he did not look at the clock once.

When I got in I did not put the kettle on straight away. I got the book down and I turned to Halina and under her I wrote, in pencil, beans. Just that. Then I got the flour out again, and this time I did not stop at the counter.

### hop 60 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1903 words)
The flat has a way of telling you the time without the clock. The boiler goes at six, whether or not you want it to, and the pipes knock twice under the bathroom floor the way they have done since the council put the new heating in, and then it is quiet until the lift starts. I used to sleep through all of it. I do not now. I lie with my eyes shut and I count the knocks and I wait for the lift, and when it comes I get up, because there is no reason not to.

He had the side nearest the door. I have not moved over. I thought I might, the first week, when the nurse said you will want to make it your own, dear, as though a bed were a parlour. But I have stayed where I was, and the other half has gone cold and flat the way a cushion does when nobody sits in it, and I straighten it every morning all the same.

The days are not hard, exactly. That is what nobody tells you. The days are easy. You get up and there is nothing to do and so you do it, and the hours go past the window in a row, and nobody asks you anything. It is the small things that come at you sideways. The second cup on the drainer. The slippers I took to the charity shop in the end, and then stood outside with the bag for twenty minutes before I could go in.

There is a tin on the shelf above the cooker that has not come down since February. It is the one with the Scottish castle on it, and it has his pills in it still, the ones that were not finished, and I know I ought to take them back to the chemist because the leaflet says so, and the leaflet is in there with them, folded small. I have taken it down twice. Both times I have put it back. The lid makes a noise when it goes on, a sort of sigh, and I had not noticed that in forty years, and now it is the loudest thing in the flat.

People say the first year is the worst. They say it in the lift and they say it at the surgery and they said it, the three of them, at the do afterwards, with the sandwiches going curled on the plates. I have never understood what it is meant to do, that sentence. It is not comfort. It is a weather forecast. It tells you to get the coat out.

What I have found is that it is not the big days. I was braced for the big days and the big days came and went like buses. It is the Tuesdays. It is the half past four when the light goes and the kettle has nobody to be put on for. It is the fact that I still buy two of the small loaves out of habit, and the second one goes blue in the bag before I think to freeze it, and I have started to do that on purpose, I think, so that there is something to throw away that is not his.

The girl at the surgery said I should write things down. She did not say it unkindly. She had a laminated sheet with a drawing of a head on it and arrows coming out of the head, and one of the arrows said Journaling, with a little pen beside it, and she turned the sheet so I could see and said that some people found it helped. I said I would think about it. I have been saying that since January. It is a thing you can say to almost anybody and they will leave you alone, and I have found that out this year the way you find out where the draught comes from in a house, by sitting in it.

Frank did the talking. That was the arrangement, though we never said so. He would come in from the allotment with his hands still smelling of the shed and tell me who he had seen and what they had said and what he had said back, and I would do the tea, and by the time it was poured I knew the whole street. I did not need to know anyone. I had him for that.

So it is not that I have nothing to say. It is that I had somebody to say it to and now the saying has nowhere to go, and it sits in the flat like the smell of the shed used to, only there is nobody coming in behind it.

What I do instead is keep a book. Not a diary, I would not call it that, Frank would have laughed. It is the small one from the drawer by the till at the shop on the corner, the sort with the elastic, and in it I put down names. Only names. The woman in the lift who holds the door with her foot and says mind yourself: Pauline. The man who does nights at the shop, who is there at seven when I go for the milk and still there at eight when I go back for the thing I forgot, which is sometimes nothing: Tomasz. The bird on the railing outside the laundry room that is not a sparrow, I do not think, though I would have said sparrow once and been sure.

I write them in pencil. Pencil can be rubbed out, and I like to know that it could be, though I have not rubbed one out yet.

This morning I had the flour out because I had thought, waking, that I might make something, and the thought had got as far as the counter and stopped. I put the kettle on and I opened the book to the last page with writing on it, which was Pauline, and under Pauline I sat with the pencil up and looked at it for a while. Then I wrote the name of Tomasz's mother.

I did not know I was going to. I had not known I had it.

Halina. He said it in March, or it might have been April, the week the clocks went. I had gone in for the milk and there was a card propped against the till with a photograph of a woman in a garden, and I must have looked at it, because he said, my mother, and then he said her name, and then he said she had been poorly and was better now. That was all. I paid for the milk. I do not think I said anything beyond thank you. And there it had been since, somewhere, the way the number for the gas is somewhere, and this morning it came up the pencil without my asking.

I looked at it on the page. It did not look like much. A name under a name.

The kettle went off and I did not get up. I was thinking that I had not asked him how she was, not once since, and he is there every morning, and I am there every morning, and we talk about the weather and whether the bread has come. I was thinking that Frank would have asked. Frank would have known by now what she grew in the garden and what the doctor said and whether she took sugar.

I got up then and made the tea, and I left the book open on the counter beside the flour, which I still had not done anything with. Tomorrow at seven I will go for the milk. I have not decided what I will say. But I have the name, and I have it in pencil, and I find I do not want to rub it out.

I went at seven. I had the words ready on the stairs and they had gone by the door, the way they do, and so I did what I always do, which is take the milk from the back where it is coldest and put it on the counter and look at the bread.

He said it was coming at half past. I said right. Then I said, before I could stop it, how is your mother. Not the name. I could not get the name out. But I said it, and I heard it in the shop like a dropped tin.

He looked at me the way you look at somebody who has stepped off a kerb without checking. Then his face did something I had not seen it do, and he said she was well, she was very well, she had been out in the garden again and was complaining about the slugs, and he laughed at that, a short one, and he said she grew beans. Runner beans. On canes, up the wall at the back.

I said Frank grew beans. I had not meant to say that either. It is the first time I have said his name to anyone who did not already know it.

He asked who Frank was. I told him. It did not take long, I am not a talker, but it took longer than thank you, and he did not look at the clock once.

When I got in I did not put the kettle on straight away. I got the book down and I turned to Halina and under her I wrote, in pencil, beans. Just that. Then I got the flour out again, and this time I did not stop at the counter.

It was scones. I had not made them since the autumn, and my hands were not sure of the quantities at first, and then they were, the way your feet remember a staircase in the dark. I made too many. I always did. Frank would eat four standing up with the butter not even soft, and I would tell him off, and he would say he was only checking they were all right. I put six on a plate and I covered them with the tea towel with the ducks on, and I looked at them for a bit.

Then I took them next door. I do not know the woman next door. I know she has a cat and that the cat is called something with an S, because I hear her at the window of an evening. She opened the door with the chain on and then she took the chain off, and she said oh, and I said I had made too many, which was true, and she said would I come in. I said not today. But I said it the way you say it when you mean another day, and I think she heard that.

When I got back the flat smelled of baking, which it had not done all year, and the tin was still up on the shelf with the castle on it. I did not take it down. But I looked at it, and I thought: Thursday. The chemist is open late on a Thursday.

I wrote her name in the book before I forgot it. Sandra. The cat is Smokey. I put them both down, one under the other, in pencil.