The Return Address

The fog stayed close to the front of the shop, curling around the shelves without becoming dense enough to hide anything useful. It was less alarming than the rain and much better at attracting people with phones.

“Do you do this every day?” a woman asked through the door.

“No.”

“What times?”

“No times. It's a fault.”

She looked disappointed. I had apparently failed to make my technical problem available as a scheduled attraction.

Bex helped me put up a notice saying that some weather stock was temporarily unavailable. We covered the lower shelves and moved the two empty display tins onto the window ledge. Then she had to leave for rehearsal, carrying her half-finished coffee and a promise that she wouldn't tell everyone at the fair committee that I could provide atmospheric effects.

“Not without a fee,” she added.

“Not at all.”

“Fine. We'll describe it as a limited private breakdown.”

Mum collected me at five. She worked in a school kitchen and was spending the summer doing things to our house that required her to announce, with dangerous optimism, that they would only take an afternoon.

“Agnes rang,” she said.

“I thought she might.”

“She says you've handled it properly.”

“After causing it.”

“She mentioned that too. Your brother has moved most of his project off the kitchen table. Be grateful.”

Ollie's project was a cardboard recycling centre with defensive capabilities. This distinction mattered to him. He said people kept throwing away perfectly good things and the centre therefore needed protection. Mum said it needed to stop blocking the toaster.

We ate at the cleared half of the table. I described the coat without making it sound exciting enough for Ollie to ask whether he could try it on. He asked anyway. I told him no, followed by the more effective explanation that Agnes would ask him to write out the inventory if he touched it.

Dad texted during dinner.

Still on for Saturday? Barbecue, weather permitting. Found another tin of your grandad's bits. Can bring it over or you can collect.

I put the phone face down.

“Reply,” Mum said.

“I will.”

She didn't ask what he had said. That was one of the arrangements our family had acquired without announcing a meeting about it. Since Dad moved out, Mum tried not to be the person passing information between us. Sometimes I wanted her to do it anyway, which felt unfair but did not make the wanting disappear.

After dinner, I spread the papers from the trunk on my bedroom floor. I had brought them home because Agnes wanted everything kept dry and because the thought of leaving the coat alone with its own instructions made me uneasy.

There were receipts, a photograph of the shop before its sign was repainted and recipes for small captures. Grandad had written comments in the margins: too eager, hangs badly, ask Stan about vent. On one page, he had crossed out a careful diagram and drawn a caricature of a man asleep in a chair. I hoped it wasn't the official conclusion of the experiment.

Under the receipts lay a photograph of a young woman wearing the blue coat.

She stood on steps outside a narrow white house, one hand raised against the light. Her hair blew across her face. Grandad stood beside her, much younger than I remembered him, holding something just outside the frame. He looked pleased in the broad, careless way he did when he thought an object was about to behave exactly as he'd intended.

On the back, in his handwriting, were six words and an initial.

M. Lark. Salt House. Before the station.

I found the corresponding work slip beneath a torn envelope.

A day from home, suitable for departure.

The collection box was empty. No price had been entered. A later note, squeezed between the ruled lines, read: Not for ordinary sale. Sequence unresolved.

I searched M. Lark on my phone and found a dentist, a furniture business and a man who wanted people to know that he had invented a better method of feeding pigeons. None looked likely to have commissioned a coat thirty years earlier.

Agnes replied to my photograph of the slip.

Keep it with the rest. Don't try the sequence from the notes. They're working pages, not instructions.

That was fair, though slightly irritating. I had not yet decided to try it. I merely wanted the option of being clever before someone pointed out why I shouldn't.

Dad rang. I watched his name fill the screen.

I didn't want to talk about the barbecue, or pretend I was delighted to spend Saturday in a house where I still opened the wrong cupboard for glasses. I also didn't want him to think I didn't want to see him.

I answered before the phone stopped.

“Hi.”

“Hi, love. Have I caught you in the middle of something?”

“Just Grandad's papers.”

“Anything good?”

I looked at the photograph of the girl on the steps.

“Maybe.”

We arranged Saturday. He said Tess would be pleased and Pip had learned to clap, which was apparently thrilling despite Pip being an unreliable judge of entertainment.

When we hung up, I returned to the work slip.

The coat was something made for leaving. I wondered where the girl had gone without it, and why the unfinished thing had stayed behind for me to find.