Chapter 3
The Shoes in the Hall
You’re picking up where you left off.
Daniel's shoes were in the middle of the hall.
Not against the wall, not under the coat rack, not in the corner where there had been exactly the right space for them for eleven years: in the middle, one lying on its side, the other upright, at precisely the spot where you put your foot down coming out of the kitchen in the dark. She had picked them up roughly four thousand times. She had made whole speeches on the subject, speeches with subclauses, examples and a conclusion.
She looked at them from the doorway, her coat still on.
Then she crouched down, picked both of them up, and put them in the corner.
— I saw that, said Daniel from the kitchen.
— I did not say anything.
— That is exactly what worries me.
He had put music on, something old, and he was chopping something on the board with the seriousness of a man who has a theory about the size of the pieces. It smelled of burnt garlic and butter, which in his case was a good sign: when it smelled of nothing, he had given up and they would be having eggs.
— Sit down, he said. You have a basement face.
— I have been working in a basement.
— There you are.
She sat at the end of the table, in her place, the one from which you can see the door, and she watched him cook.
It was something she no longer did. She realised it in the third minute, and it gave her an odd, unpleasant feeling, like rediscovering the taste of a childhood dish and finding that you had forgotten it entirely. Fifteen years. She knew how he held a knife, she could have described it with her eyes shut, and yet she had not watched him hold a knife for a length of time she could not work out.
He held the knife too high on the blade, with two fingers over the top, which a chef would have told him off for. He talked to what he was cutting. He tasted the sauce with the handle of the spoon, then thought better of it, then went to fetch a proper one. He had a small white scar at the base of his right thumb whose origin she had forgotten and which she did not dare ask about, that evening, because she would have had to explain why she was asking.
— You are looking at me.
— I am supervising you. It is not the same thing.
— I am beyond reproach.
— You have put garlic in something that does not want any.
— Everything wants garlic.
He started to sing, out of tune, the song from the morning, the one he only knew one line in three of, and he invented the others with a confidence that had not faltered since 2011.
Ellie laughed.
The laugh came out on its own and surprised her, and at the end of it there was something so dirty and so cold that she had to drink to make it go down: she had just thought, very clearly, I need to remember this.
The doorbell went at eight.
Mrs Aitken was holding two bags and the expression of somebody who has made a calculation and lost it. She had lived on the floor below since 1978, she was eighty-one, she refused the lift that did not exist and the taxi that did, and she had been calling Daniel the big one for eleven years.
— Is the big one in?
— He is in, said Ellie.
— It is the milk, said Mrs Aitken. It is the bottles. They have started making glass bottles again to be kind to the planet, and nobody asked me.
Daniel carried both bags up and went back down with her, and Ellie heard them stop on the half-landing, then set off again. He came back two minutes later, slightly out of breath, and returned to the sauce.
— Is she all right?
— She told me I had put on weight.
— She says that to everybody.
— She said it suited me. That is the part you systematically leave out.
He blew out through his nose, once, and leaned on the worktop with his fingertips, for a second, no more.
— By the way, he said, I had a wobble going up Dundas Street this morning.
— A wobble.
— A thing. Three seconds. I thought I was going to sit down on the pavement in front of everybody and then I did not. It is the hill. That street is an insult.
— Had you eaten?
— I had had a coffee.
— A coffee.
— Two coffees. Are you going to take me to court?
She looked at the back of his neck, bent over the pan.
The word stayed in the middle of the room for a few seconds, light, unimportant, an end-of-day word of the kind that gets said in kitchens by the thousand. Then Daniel said it was ready, and the word went off with the rest.
With Mrs Aitken gone, the kitchen settled back into its noise of hot oil.
— She talked about her son again, said Daniel.
— The one in Canada.
— The one in Canada. He is coming in May. He has been coming in May for four years.
— What did you say?
— I said May was not far off.
She watched him stir the pan. That was exactly what he did, that man, and always had: he did not correct people. He took their version and made it slightly more habitable. It had taken her years to understand that this was not cowardice.
— Would you do that with me? she asked.
— Do what?
— Let me believe something.
He turned his head, spoon in the air, genuinely surprised.
— You? You check use-by dates with a torch.
— That is not an answer.
— No, he said. I would not do that with you.
He said it simply, without pressing it, already turning back to the hob, and he added that it was ready.
Ellie got the plates out. She would remember that answer the following Thursday at two in the morning, in this kitchen, under the extractor light, and she would not have the strength to remind him of it.
They ate in front of an episode of a series they no longer really followed, having lost the thread two seasons earlier and watching it out of loyalty to a memory. He commented on the main character's clothes. She defended the main character. They argued for three minutes with conviction.
She said nothing.
She thought about it nine times. She knew, because she was counting, and counting had become since the morning a way of staying upright. Nine times she felt the sentence rise, and nine times something caught it back at the last moment — not the fear of worrying him, she told herself that and it was untrue, but the material impossibility of what came next. Because after the sentence there would be the image. And after the image there would be Daniel looking at the image.
She did not yet ask herself what he would see in it. She only felt, obscurely, that she must not.
At around nine, he had got up to fetch something and come back with a window manufacturer's catalogue.
— Look at this.
— No.
— Look. Two minutes.
He sat down beside her and showed her, on page 34, a counterweighted sash system in cast iron that had not been made since 1962 and that a small firm in Falkirk had started making again.
— That is exactly what we have, he said. Down to the cord.
— And?
— And nothing. I think it is a fine thing that there is still somebody doing that.
He closed the catalogue and left it on the coffee table, where it would stay for three weeks.
Ellie never understood anything about windows. What she had understood, at roughly some point in 2013, was that when Daniel showed her an object he was not talking about the object. He was saying: I thought of you in front of this. That was his entire inner conversation and he had never put a word of it out loud.
At ten, he half fell asleep on the sofa, head back, mouth open, and she turned the sound down without waking him.
At about half past ten he half woke, hunted for the remote that was under his own thigh, and said without opening his eyes:
— Did your mother ring?
— My mother died in 2019, Daniel.
— Yes.
— You are asleep.
— I am thinking.
He went back to sleep in thirty seconds. It was an old routine between them, this half-sleep that produced administrative sentences, and usually she saved the best ones to serve back to him at breakfast.
Sitting beside him on the sofa, the television down low, she did something she had never done: she tried to remember the last real conversation they had had. Not an arrangement, not a list, not a comment about somebody else. A conversation.
She went back. She found a discussion about the boiler. She found a discussion about the Easter weekend. She found, much further back, a late-summer evening when they had stayed in the car outside the building because they had not finished talking, and she could not date that evening, and she understood that it had to be more than three years ago.
It was not unhappiness. They were not unhappy. They had simply stopped, at a moment neither of them could have placed, asking each other questions they did not know the answer to.
She switched the television off.
— Go to bed, she said.
— I am in bed.
— You are sitting up.
— It is a stage.
He went to bed at eleven and was asleep in four minutes, as always, with that faculty she had envied for fifteen years and that had often driven her mad: he shut his eyes, he went. She could switch the lamp on, pull the duvet, ask a question — he gave reasonable answers out of sleep and kept no memory of them.
She sat on the edge of the bed, in the dark.
The bedroom was four metres by three and a half. The bed, the sash window, the chest of drawers, the cast-iron radiator under the window, four sections, the paint as thick as cream around the valve. The floorboard paler than the others at the spot where you put your foot down getting out of bed.
She had spent the day not naming a thing, and she named it there, looking at the skirting board.
It was their bedroom.
She had seen it immediately, that morning, in the very movement of opening the image, and for fifteen hours she had arranged matters with herself so as not to turn it into a sentence. You can hold out a very long time like that. You file the evidence where it belongs, you calculate fingerprints, you fill in tickets, and you do not say the name of the room.
Daniel was breathing slowly beside her.
She took out her phone, set the brightness to minimum, and opened the file's record — not the image, the record, the characters, which was still bearable.
20 March 2026, 07:13:40.
It was Friday the 13th, ten minutes to midnight.
She did the arithmetic although she had no need to do it, and it was the first time she put it in that language, the one that would be hers for the rest of the week.
Six days.
She switched off the screen, lay down fully dressed on top of the duvet, and stayed with her eyes open, listening to her husband sleep.