Inventory

A list of the things in flat 4B, 11 Carlow Street, made by her son on the Saturday after the funeral.

One coat, navy, wool, hanging on the back of the door. The left pocket has a bus ticket from 14 March, a hair grip and two mints stuck together. The right pocket has a list in her handwriting: milk, stamps, ring Danny. She did not ring me. I did not ring her. I had meant to on the Sunday.

Six cups, all different, on hooks under the kitchen shelf. The blue one with the chip is the one she used. The one with the robin on it I gave her when I was eight, with my pocket money, from the market. She told me it was the most beautiful cup in the world. It has a crack down one side now, mended with glue. I did not know she had mended it. I did not know it had broken.

One radio, tuned to the station that plays old songs in the afternoon and the shipping forecast at night. She never went to sea. She said the names were a kind of poem. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties. When I was small she would say them to me at bedtime instead of stories and I thought they were places in a fairy tale. I suppose they are.

Forty-one books, mostly library, three overdue. The overdue ones are on the table by the chair with the bookmarks in them. She was two-thirds through all three. That was how she read: several at once, a bit of each, like visiting friends. I will have to take them back. I do not know if I can bear to take them back.

One chair, green, the arms worn through to the stuffing on the right side, where her hand rested. It is facing the window. From the window you can see the roof of the school where she taught for thirty-one years, and the tree in the playground that she planted with her first class in 1979. The children who planted it would be fifty now. Some of them came to the funeral. I did not know who they were until they told me.

One drawer in the kitchen, the one that sticks, full of things that did not have a place. String. Rubber bands. Seven keys that do not open anything in the flat. A birthday candle shaped like the number six. A tin of buttons. My first tooth, in an envelope, with the date. A photograph of a man I do not know, young, laughing, standing on a beach in a coat too big for him.

I turned the photograph over. On the back, in pencil: G., Whitby, 1971. Said no. Right decision. Still.

I sat on the kitchen floor with the photograph for a long time.

We are not the story we tell about ourselves. We are the drawer that sticks.

from a notebook found on the kitchen table

One notebook, on the kitchen table, open. Not a diary. Just things she wanted to remember. Recipes. The names of her neighbours' children. A list headed Things Danny liked when he was small: the shipping forecast, custard, the robin cup, being carried up the stairs pretending to be asleep. The last entry is dated the Thursday before. It says: He sounded tired on the phone. Don't nag. Send the cake recipe he asked for.

I had not asked for a cake recipe. I think I said, once, years ago, that I missed her lemon cake. The recipe is there, copied out neatly, with a stamp on the envelope, ready.

One window, looking west. At four o'clock, the sun comes in low and lies across the carpet and reaches the foot of the green chair and stops there. I watched it happen today. I think she must have watched it happen thousands of times. I think it was the best part of her day.

One son, forty-four years old, sitting in the green chair at four o'clock with the robin cup in his hands, making a list of everything so that he will not have to decide what to keep.

It is not working. I want to keep all of it. I want to keep the string.

One cake, lemon, made tonight in her kitchen from her recipe, in her tin, at her oven, which runs hot, as she wrote in the margin. It sank in the middle. She would have said that was where the love went.

I ate it standing up, with the radio on. At twelve forty-eight, the shipping forecast came on, and I said the names along with it, out loud, in the empty flat, the way she used to. Viking. North Utsire. South Utsire. Forties. A kind of poem. A list of places I will never go, that I have always known by heart.