The poster had a red heart on it the size of a dinner plate, with a phone number in blue along the bottom that I had copied down in my notebook just in case. I taped it above the table with four pieces of scotch tape, one on each corner, very carefully, the way I did things at fourteen. My father came down in his undershirt - filled the kettle, cracked two eggs into the pan.
The Poster Above the Salt Shaker
My mother did it on a Tuesday, while he was at the dentist. The salt shaker - the squat one with the dented lid - went up behind the big tin of Ovaltine where a person would need a chair to reach it. The fruit bowl, which had been living on the counter beside the kettle holding three limes nobody was ever going to use, she moved to the exact centre of the table and filled it with apples - the kind he'd eat without thinking, the small red ones. She started parking on Fenwick Street, two full blocks past the chip shop, without a word about why, just clicking her seatbelt and opening the door and walking - so he walked beside her. The apples went.
The glasses were still warm from his pocket, or I told myself they were. A man in green scrubs walked past pushing something on wheels that squeaked once and then stopped, and I looked down at the biscuits - bourbons, three left in the silver sleeve, the last one broken - and understood that he had been in the middle of something ordinary when it happened. The fold in the arms was tight - the way he always kept them, the way a person keeps things they plan to use again by morning. Somewhere behind the double doors a machine made a sound I didn't have a name for. I held the glasses in both hands and didn't put them down.
The bowl is blue ceramic, chipped at the rim where I dropped it moving in, and it sits in the exact centre of the table the way hers did, though I didn't plan that. Every evening the keys go in first - then whatever I've carried in my pockets - a receipt, a stone I picked up on Brennan Road for no reason, once a plum I forgot to eat. The apples are the small red ones. I don't remember deciding that.
What the Corridor Kept
The notebook is still in the kitchen drawer, the one with the blue phone number copied out in my fourteen-year-old handwriting, the sevens with the little crossbar the way a teacher had once told me was the European way. I found it when I was looking for the tin opener. The number is probably nothing now - a recorded message - or a different department, or just a long tone and then silence - but I haven't thrown the notebook out, and some mornings when I reach past it for the wooden spoon I can feel the spiral binding catch on my thumb the way it always did, that small familiar drag, and I leave it where it's.
There's a leaflet on the community board outside the pharmacy - same red heart, same blue number, and I stopped in front of it last Thursday with my basket and a bottle of the vitamins he never took, and I stood there long enough that a woman with a pushchair had to angle around me on the pavement. I took a photo of it on my phone. The photo is still there, between a picture of a parking meter and a blurred shot of something I meant to look up and didn't - and I haven't sent it to anyone, because there's no one left to send it to. That evening I moved the vitamin bottle from the cabinet above the fridge to the windowsill beside the kettle, where the light hits it first thing, where a person would have to actively look away. I've no idea if that helps.
My nephew called on a Sunday, the one who looks most like him - and asked if I thought he should get his blood pressure checked, and I said yes, immediately, before he'd finished the sentence, and then I listed the surgery on Calton Street - the hours, the name of the receptionist who'd been there since before I could drive. He said, yeah, probably, I'll sort it. The call lasted four more minutes - I watched the timer on the screen - and we talked about a film - and whether the boiler in his flat was fixable, and I didn't say it again, because I knew how it sounded the second time, and he knew I knew. The referral card from my own last check is magnetted to the fridge, the pale green one with the date circled in biro - and sometimes I move it so I can get to the milk and then I move it back, always back to the same spot, slightly crooked, the circle facing out.
Disclaimer
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