“What did it take?” said Elliot. He had the ledger open on the flour-dusted table in the back of the bakery, a plain green book from the bookbinder’s shelf with four hundred blank pages, and he’d written the date at the top in his small upright hand. Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of October. Underneath, Cecily Ashe, returned. And then he’d sat for a long moment with the pen above the page, and asked me that. “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the horrible part. It doesn’t announce itself. I only find out when I reach for it.” “Then we’ll reach for everything.” He said it so gently that I almost missed the steel in it. He turned a page, and then another, and in his careful clear voice began to read me back my own life. “You told me on the first night that you work the late shift at Dunmore’s Pharmacy. That the owner calls you young lady and has never got your name right. That you take the night bus home, the number forty-one, and the driver on Thursdays hums.” He didn’t smile. “You told me your mother’s tea tasted of burnt toffee. That your landlord is a Mr Pryce and you owe him eleven days.” Every one of these things was there, solid and exact, like furniture in a lit room. “You told me,” said Elliot, “that you live above a laundrette.” “Yes. On Marlowe Road. It’s…” I stopped. I could see the laundrette. The pink sign, buzzing. The steamed-up windows. I could even see myself coming up the street in the rain with my bag over my shoulder. But when I tried to go up the stairs, to open my own front door and step into the room where I’d slept and eaten and cried for four years, there was nothing there. Not a blank, exactly. A kind of grey. A room in a dream, with the details sliding away as I looked at them. I tried to place the bed. I tried to place the window. I couldn’t tell you whether the curtains were blue or yellow. “I can’t see it,” I whispered. “I know it’s there. But I can’t see it.” Elliot wrote something short in the ledger and set the pen down carefully. “That makes two,” he said. “Winifred cost you the kitchen. I knew about that. But the flat went at the same moment, and you didn’t feel it, because it wasn’t the one the Oak was showing you.” He met my eyes. “It’s taking two. One that hurts at once, and one you only find if somebody goes looking.” A thin cold feeling ran down my back. “Why would it do that?” “Let me check something.” He went back through what I’d told him, line by line, and it took him about ten minutes, and at the end of it there was one more entry in his tidy hand. “Cecily’s second one, I think. The day you got the job at Dunmore’s. You told me about it on the second night. You’d walked in at nine in a borrowed blouse. You said you were so frightened you could barely sign your name. And you said, I thought, well, that’s one place that will have me.” I could not remember saying it. I couldn’t remember the blouse. I couldn’t remember one thing about my first day at the pharmacy except the word Dunmore. “Four things,” said Elliot. “The kitchen. The flat. Your first day. And the laugh.” His voice was steady. “Mira, look at them. A room, a room, a day. Every one of them is a place you came from. It isn’t taking what it likes. It’s taking what ties you to somewhere else.” The tea had gone cold in my hands. “It wants me to have nowhere to go back to.” “I think it wants you to have nowhere to go back to,” said Elliot, “when it’s time to choose.” I should tell you about Dorothy. I should tell you because I did it badly, that first time, and the way I did it badly taught me almost everything I know about doing it right. She was waiting in the square when Elliot and I came out. She hadn’t moved from where she’d stood that morning, a short round fifty-eight-year-old woman in a flour-dusted apron with her hands knotted in front of her and her small grey eyes fixed on the library door. Round her, in loose ranks across the cobbles, the other empty residents waited with the same patience, and it was only in the cold clear afternoon that I saw how many of them there were. Over a hundred. Here and there, on a shoulder or a sleeve, a pale ash moth sat folded and still. “I’m sorry,” said Dorothy Webb. “I didn’t know how long you’d be. I’ve just been standing.” “You don’t have to apologise.” “I know. It’s just I always do.” A small quick nervous laugh. “I’ve the strangest feeling I always did. Isn’t that funny? I can’t remember a single thing from before, and I can still feel myself apologising.” I took her arm. It was warm and solid and a little damp with nerves. “Come on. I want to show you something.” Tomas lit our way down through the cellar, and the roots opened without a sound. Dorothy came down the long white passages with her head tilted back, gazing up at the glowing vaults, and she didn’t say a word until we reached the gallery of kneeling figures. Then she stopped. I’d known she would. I’d thought about how I’d explain it and decided I wouldn’t. I’d only let her see. She stood at the mouth of the alcove with the blue light on her face. Inside it, on a floor of soft pale moss, a young woman knelt with her head bowed. A round freckled face, straight brown hair cut in a hard uneven fringe, a thin cotton dress and a cardigan far too big, the sleeves pulled down over her hands. A white root ran into her spine. Her eyes were open. A smile sat on her lips, a little lopsided and perfectly calm. “That’s me,” said Dorothy Webb, in a whisper. “Isn’t it?” “Yes.” “I was seventeen.” She took a step forward. Another. She was pale. “I look so young. Why is nobody looking after her?” “She’s been looked after. As well as the Oak knows how.” “She’s got a bruise.” The older woman pointed with a trembling finger. “On her cheek. Just there, under the fringe. Why has she got a bruise?” I looked. I hadn’t seen it. A faint yellow-green mark on the girl’s left cheekbone, three or four days old, half hidden by the hair. It hadn’t healed in forty years. “I think,” I said, as gently as I could, “it’s one of the things she gave up.” Dorothy Webb stood still. Her round face had gone blank, and I saw behind it the first faint stir of something rising, like a fish under ice. “I don’t want to know,” she said. “I don’t think I want to know. I’ve been so happy, Mira. I made forty years of cinnamon buns.” “I know you did.” “And I’d have gone on and on, wouldn’t I? And never asked.” Her mouth trembled. “Why am I asking now?” I didn’t know. I told her so. I said I couldn’t make the choice for her, that I wouldn’t, that all I could do was open a door and let her stand in it. I said she was free to turn round and walk back up those stairs and I wouldn’t think one bit the less of her. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said in a small voice, “There was somebody. I can’t remember her. I can feel the shape of her, like a tooth that’s been taken out.” “Do you want to find out who?” “I want,” said Dorothy Webb, “to have been the sort of person who would have wanted to.” She stepped into the alcove. I’ve thought about what happened next more times than I can count. The young woman didn’t look up when the older one knelt in front of her. But Dorothy took both her hands, the thin hands lost in the cardigan’s cuffs, and held them gently, the way you hold the hands of a sleeping child. “Hello, love,” she said. “I’m so sorry I left you down here.” I laid my palm against the white root that trailed from my own back and said, quite steadily, “Dorothy Webb. Do you want back what you surrendered in the autumn of 1985?” “I do.” “Knowing what it weighs?” “No,” said Dorothy, with an odd flat honesty. “I don’t know what it weighs. But I know what it costs not to have it. I’ve been paying that for forty years.” “Freely?” “Freely.” The root pulsed. The light didn’t come as it had for Winifred, in a golden river. It came one at a time, slowly. A single dark heavy reluctant spark, the colour of a bruise. It hung between the two women, and it didn’t speak. It showed. I didn’t see what it showed. I think that was a mercy. I saw only Dorothy’s face, lit from below by that dull violet glow, and I watched it change as a landscape does when a cloud passes. A kitchen, I think. A man’s voice. A door slamming. The smell of cigarettes and boiled cabbage and wet wool. A small stubborn frightened hand slipping out of hers at the end of a long grey street. “Rosie,” whispered Dorothy. Her whole body bent as if somebody had struck her between the shoulder blades. “Oh, no. Oh, Rosie. My little sister. I left her. She was only six. I said I’d come back for her, I promised, I said I’d get a job and a flat and we’d get out, the two of us. I held her hand and I promised, and I got on a bus and came here, and I…” She couldn’t go on. She doubled over on the pale moss and put her face against her younger self’s knees and sobbed, huge tearing ugly sobs, forty years of them wrenched out at once. I stood there with the root in my back and the whole weight of it passing through me like current through wire, and I did the only thing I knew how. I didn’t say it was all right. It wasn’t all right. I didn’t say it wasn’t her fault. It was complicated, and she’d been seventeen, and I had no right. I knelt beside her on the moss and put my arm round her shoulders, and I stayed. The sleeping girl, the kneeling one with the bruise, didn’t move. But as the older woman wept, her serene smile slowly faded. The root in her spine began to go grey. And then, as I watched, the girl’s whole form grew pale and thin and clear, like a figure drawn in breath on a window, and flowed, in one long shining ripple, into the woman who held her. It didn’t hurt. I think it was the opposite. Dorothy Webb gave one long shuddering gasp, and her shoulders dropped, and she lay quite still. The white thread that had run into the girl’s spine for forty years fell away to dust. We took her up to the bakery and put her to bed in the little room over the shop, and Tomas brought her tea. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up. She didn’t speak for a long time. At some point I realised she was awake, looking at the ceiling, and I sat quietly in the chair by the window and waited. “Was it wrong?” she said at last. Her voice was thick. “To forget?” I thought about it. “I think it was human,” I said. “That’s not an answer.” “It’s the only one I’ve got.” She made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. “You’re like her, you know. Your mother. Tomas says. A bit bossy and a bit soft and neither on purpose.” She turned her head on the pillow. Her eyes were swollen but clear, and her own. “I want to find Rosie.” “We’ll write.” I’d already thought of it. “Elliot’s good with addresses. And the post will carry it. The post always does.” “She’ll be forty-seven. She might not want to hear from me.” “She might not.” “She might hate me.” “She might.” I took her hand. “But you’ll have asked. That’s the only part you get to control.” Dorothy looked at me for a long time. Then she closed her eyes and nodded once, and in a minute she was asleep, breathing slow and heavy and entirely her own. I sat in the chair by the window until the light went. Elliot found me afterwards on the bakery step in the blue dusk. He sat down beside me without a word. He had the ledger under his arm, open, and he held it out so I could see the page by the glow of the lantern Pip had left on the step. A wick the size of a thumbnail sat in it, cautiously, with its small face turned up towards the page. Dorothy Webb, returned. Freely asked and freely given. And beneath it, in the same hand: Price: the road to the school I went to as a girl, and the name of the boy who sat next to me in Chandler Road. “It’s taking them in pairs,” said Elliot quietly. “I’ve been through it a third time. The one that hurts, and the one that doesn’t, until you look.” He turned the page. “Six, now. Six things in a single day. And that was only three returns.” Nine thousand, four hundred and six, the Oak had said. I put my head down on my knees. It was a still evening. The lanterns had not been lit, but the stars were out, huge and cold and close, and a thin wind stirred the fallen leaves in the square. Behind us, in the bakery kitchen, I could hear Tomas moving about, humming a tune he must have learned from my mother. And under it all, from the cellar, deep in the stones, came the Toll. Slow. Patient. Sweet. Four days, said a voice at the back of my mind, in my own head, in the soft warm tones of someone tucking in a child. Four days, dear Keeper, and then the Season closes. And at the closing, the root sets. I lifted my head. Nobody told you that part, did they? A small drowsy contented sound, like a cat in the sun. Cecily couldn’t, you see. It was one of the things I never let her say. Elliot had gone white. I knew he’d heard it too. It will be so much easier, said the Oak, once you have nothing left to go back to. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
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