The House with the Red Door

The last thing Leila took from her bedroom was the shape the wardrobe had left on the carpet.

She drew it in the corner of a page already covered in other things: the hook behind the door, a dead fly on the windowsill, the small crack above the radiator that looked like a country nobody would want to invade. The wardrobe itself was downstairs, waiting for Janice's brother and his van. Without it, the room had become both larger and less useful.

“Leila.”

Mum was on the landing, holding a roll of packing tape by the empty cardboard centre.

“Five minutes.”

“You said five minutes ten minutes ago.”

“I've got better at estimating since then.”

Mum did not smile. Leila shut the sketchbook.

The house sounded wrong without their things in it. Every footstep came back slightly louder. Toby was in the front room trying to remove a screw from the wall because his football shelf had gone and he believed the screw still belonged to him.

“Leave it,” Mum called down.

“It came in the packet.”

“Then the next person can have a screw.”

“What if they don't like football?”

“It's not a football-specific screw.”

Leila put the sketchbook in her bag and checked the room once more. There was nothing under the bed because there was no bed. Nothing behind the door except the hook she had drawn. At the window, the pale marks left by her posters looked brighter than the wall around them.

She had imagined feeling dramatic when she left. Instead she felt annoyed about the dust.

Downstairs, Mum was wiping the kitchen worktop with a cloth that had already been packed twice. Her name was Caz on her work badge, Caroline on official letters, and Mum in every conversation where something had gone missing. Today all three versions of her looked tired.

“Have you got your charger?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Your school things?”

“Yes.”

“Anything you need before Janice's garage gets full of somebody else's sofa?”

“Mum.”

“I am asking because tomorrow is a bad time to remember your art folder is under a chest of drawers.”

Leila lifted the large folder against her hip.

“I've got it.”

Mum looked at the folder, then at her face.

“Good.”

Toby came in with the screw in his palm.

“I got it.”

Mum closed her eyes for a second.

“Put it somewhere you won't stand on it.”

He put it in his pocket, which Leila thought was an ambitious interpretation of the instruction.

The tenancy had ended. The landlord had sold the house. Those were the short sentences adults used because the longer ones involved dates, forms, deposits they did not have and rent on houses Mum could not make fit inside her wages. For seven weeks, there had been a date circled on the calendar. For six of those weeks, Leila had behaved as though a circled date was merely an opinion.

Now the calendar was in a box.

Janice's brother arrived with the van and three straps he regarded as essential to civilisation. He and Mum carried the wardrobe out, turning it carefully at the front door. Toby stood in the path holding the loose handle like a surgical assistant.

Leila took the last bag to the car.

The red front door had needed repainting for years. Near the letterbox, the paint had cracked into little islands. She knew the exact place to put her shoulder when it stuck in wet weather. She knew which floorboard would announce her coming in late and which stair let her pass without comment.

She photographed the door, then disliked herself for doing it and nearly deleted the picture.

“Can you move?” Toby asked. “You're in the way of the wardrobe.”

She moved.

The letting agent came at four. He wore a shirt too thin for the weather and carried a tablet that made the house look like a list of conditions to be checked. Mum walked round with him. Leila stayed in the front room, where she could hear words like existing and wear and noted.

She did not know whether Mum was embarrassed. That made it harder to know what face to put on.

At the end, Mum placed the keys in the agent's hand. The small front-door key had a blue plastic cover that had split down one side. Toby had bitten it when he was little. Leila remembered Mum telling him that keys were not food, in the same tone she later used about pen lids and pieces of Lego.

“Right,” Mum said.

No one moved.

Then Janice's brother called that he needed somebody to check the side gate, and the day continued because there were still practical jobs inside it.

They drove to the retail park with the bags packed so tightly that Toby had to sit with a saucepan between his feet. Mum said it was only until they knew what kitchen arrangements there would be. Leila did not ask what that meant. She had already asked too many questions whose answers began with We'll see.

The Junction Lodge stood between a tyre place and a restaurant with a permanently bright picture of chicken in the window. It had brick walls, dark green curtains and a sign advertising a breakfast none of them had booked.

Toby looked at it through the car window.

“Are we on holiday?”

“No,” Mum said.

“People stay in hotels on holiday.”

“People stay in hotels for other reasons too.”

“What reasons?”

Mum turned off the engine.

“This reason.”

Inside, the reception smelled of carpet cleaner and warm toast, though it was late afternoon. A man behind the desk wore a cardigan with a pen clipped to the pocket. He looked at Mum's name on a sheet, checked a message on the computer and handed over a key card.

“Room two-one-four. Lift's round the corner. The breakfast room has a microwave you can use after service, but ask at the desk first so we don't have three families trying to heat everything at once.”

Mum nodded as though she knew what questions to ask. Leila watched her trying to learn them quickly.

“How long is the booking?”

“Through to the date on your placement letter for now. Any extension comes through the housing team. They'll speak to you.”

“And parking?”

“Give me the registration. No charge while you're booked with us.”

Mum's shoulders lowered a fraction.

The man's badge said MO. He noticed Toby examining a bowl of wrapped mints.

“One,” he said. “Not a structural handful.”

Toby selected the largest-looking mint and put it in his pocket beside the screw.

Upstairs, Room 214 contained a double bed, a folding single bed, a desk too narrow for Leila's art folder and a picture of a hill that might have been anywhere. The window looked towards the back of the restaurant, where an extractor fan sent a steady breath into the evening.

Mum put the bags down.

“Right,” she said again.

The word was beginning to sound like something she used to keep the next minute upright.

Toby sat on the folding bed. It made a noise like a complaint submitted in writing.

“That's mine, then.”

Leila stood by the desk with her folder still against her hip.

“Where do I put this?”

Mum looked round the room.

“Under the double bed, perhaps. Flat.”

“There might be dust.”

“I'll wipe under it.”

“I can do it.”

They spoke at the same time, both sounding angry and neither quite meaning to.

Mum sat on the edge of the double bed. Her work shoes were still on. One had a pale scuff near the toe that Leila had never noticed before.

“Give me ten minutes,” she said. “Just ten minutes where nobody needs me to know where a thing goes.”

Toby lay back on his bed, then sat up because the spring had pressed through the thin mattress.

Leila put her folder on the desk and went into the bathroom.

It was clean. That mattered to her immediately, and she felt ashamed of how much she had expected it not to be. There were three small towels, a sealed soap and a mirror lit by a strip above it. She shut the door, sat on the closed toilet lid and took out her phone.

Esme had sent four messages.

A photograph of a sandwich with the filling sliding out.

A complaint about biology homework.

A question about whether Leila still had the green nail varnish.

Then: You alive?

Leila typed that they had moved.

She deleted it.

She typed that things were complicated at home.

That sounded like something that would make Esme ring immediately, which was both what she wanted and what she could not bear.

Still unpacking stuff, she wrote. Mum's making us reorganise everything. I have the green one.

The reply came at once.

Tell her organisation is a trap. Saturday still happening?

Leila looked at the strip of hotel light beneath the bathroom door.

Probably. Will check.

She sent it, locked the phone and stood up.

When she came out, Mum had taken off her shoes. Toby was arranging three toy footballers along the windowsill. One had lost its head months earlier but remained, in his opinion, useful in defence.

“Food?” Mum asked.

Leila nodded.

They ate supermarket sandwiches on the beds because the desk held the folder and the chair held everybody's coats. Mum spread napkins beneath the wrappers. Toby asked whether the television cost extra. When Mum said no, he looked pleased for the first time all day.

Leila watched a game show without understanding the rules. Outside, the extractor fan hummed. Someone wheeled a suitcase along the corridor, its small wheels catching at every join in the carpet.

Later, Mum stood at the window speaking quietly to someone from the housing team. Leila could hear fragments: school, work, documents, Monday. She took out her sketchbook and turned to a clean page.

She drew the red door from memory.

She made the paint smooth.