The Life
I Invented

At the café I was halfway through telling them how I had found our old house by following the smell of coal smoke. It always got a laugh. A woman in a wet coat stopped beside my chair. She hadn't taken her gloves off. “Turn it over,” she said. On the back of the photograph, in the blue pencil my sister used for everything, was a bus number and an address.

“You cried the whole way,” my sister said. I waited for her to say it kindly. She was already peeling off a glove to take the cup somebody had put out for her. I moved my chair. It was the first time in years that I heard the rest of the story.

I used to bring her roses and Earl Grey because she had once pressed a rose into a book I lent her. I knew which page. I could have drawn the brown stem from memory. When she began to tell me what it was doing there, I kissed the top of her head and went to fetch the cups.

One evening she put the untouched tea in my hands. “It was a bookmark. I wanted to come back to the bit about the bird.” She opened the book and read the passage aloud. Her reading voice was lower than the voice I gave her in my head. I made coffee the way she asked and sat down before it went cold.

Every March he unpacked the boots and rubbed oil into them. Wrapped in tissue in the suitcase, they had crossed a dozen winters without crossing the yard. He could describe the orchard where he meant to wear them down to the last wasp in a fallen pear.

The knock came while he was polishing the left toe. His neighbour's shopping bag had split. Could he take one end of the crate? They carried the apples through two puddles and up three flights. Back home he found a dark crescent of mud in the welt. He left it there. The next morning he laced the boots at the door.

The girl in the photograph was holding both arms out in a field. At every birthday somebody said she had been trying to fly. This time the girl was thirty-eight and had brought the cake. She rested the knife on her plate. “I was measuring the distance between the scarecrow and the gate,” she said. “I was frightened to go past it.”

Her aunt lifted the photograph out of its corners. In the space that had been hidden was the crooked end of a straw sleeve. “Hadn't thought of him in years,” she said. She stayed beside her niece while everyone else passed the cream. They ate from the same plate because neither wanted to break off for a clean one.

From the pavement she could recognise their flat by the two lamps. Upstairs there would be water in the jug, forks in their places, and a man who would ask about her day with his eyes on the kettle. Tonight he was standing by the window. She lifted the shopping bag in the old signal for I've forgotten my keys.

He came down without his shoes. The string handles had cut two red grooves into her hand. He took the bag, then set it down to touch the grooves. Behind them the lamps went on lighting an empty room. They sat on the bottom step until the marks began to fade.