No Moving Date

The floor in Bellbridge had been lifted.

That was how Ruth began the message, as though lifting a floor were a neutral stage in a process everyone understood. Underneath, the contractor had found more damage than expected. There would need to be further work before the flat could be inspected. No one could confirm the revised date yet.

Mum read the message at the desk, with her phone balanced against the cereal box. Her wrist was improving, but she still used her left hand for anything that required holding a position for long.

“How much longer?” Leila asked.

“It doesn't say.”

“Can you ask?”

“I have.”

“Did they answer?”

“Leila.”

She stepped back. Mum was not a machine that produced better information when the question was repeated more urgently.

Toby sat on the floor with his football cards spread around him. He had heard everything. He turned one card over, then back again.

“So we're not moving.”

“We're not moving this week,” Mum said.

“We weren't moving this week anyway.”

“No. We didn't have a date.”

“Then why does it feel like they cancelled it?”

Mum did not answer immediately. Leila knew why it felt that way. They had been living partly in the flat since the viewing. Every irritation in the hotel had acquired a possible end: when we have separate rooms, when there's a kitchen, when I can shut a door. The date had been imaginary, but the relief attached to it had been real.

“I don't know how long it will take,” Mum said. “I wish I did.”

Toby began gathering his cards. He pushed them into the box too roughly, bending one corner, and then became angry about the bent card instead.

Leila put on her shoes. She could not sit in the room while everyone tried to make disappointment sound reasonable. Outside, the afternoon was bright. The restaurant had propped open a side door, and the smell of hot oil made her feel sick despite being hungry.

She walked towards the supermarket without needing anything. Inside, she went up and down three aisles. Families stood around trolleys arguing about ordinary food choices. A father said they already had pasta at home. A girl younger than Leila objected that it was the wrong shape. Leila hated her for a moment with an intensity entirely disproportionate to pasta.

At the stationery shelf, she picked up a set of coloured pencils she did not need. They were arranged in a tin, each point facing the same direction. She could imagine putting the tin on a desk in the third bedroom. She could imagine buying something because she wanted it, carrying it home, leaving it out.

The price was more than she had intended to spend that week. She put it in her basket anyway.

Then she added a notebook with thick paper. A small block of sticky notes. A packet of biscuits because everyone at the hotel might like them, an explanation that made the purchase seem less like anger.

At the checkout, she used money she had saved for the next few bus journeys. She knew exactly what she was doing. That was the worst part later: she could not pretend the mistake had happened because she failed to notice.

Outside, Micah saw her near the trolley shelter.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

He looked at the bag. “Successful shopping?”

“Yes.”

Something in her tone made him stop smiling.

“Everything okay?”

“The flat's delayed. Again.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

She nodded and shifted the bag. He offered to walk with her to the crossing because he was going on his break. She said she was fine, too quickly.

“All right,” he said. “Message me later?”

“Maybe.”

She saw the small change in his face and kept walking because stopping would require being fair when she did not want to be.

In Room 214, Toby examined the pencils.

“Those are nice.”

“Yes.”

“Can I use the green?”

“Not now.”

He withdrew his hand. Mum looked up from the phone.

“Leila?”

“I bought them. They're mine.”

“No one said they weren't.”

The tin suddenly seemed very heavy. She put it under the bed with the notebook and sat on the edge of the mattress.

Mum waited until Toby went downstairs for water before asking quietly how much she had spent. Leila told her. Mum did not shout. She looked at the remaining bus money, counted the days and asked which items were unopened.

“I don't want to take them back.”

“I know.”

“I shouldn't have to count everything all the time.”

“No. You shouldn't.”

“Then why are you making me?”

Mum's expression tightened. “I'm not making the price different because we're tired. I wish I could.”

Leila looked at the clean, hopeful tin. It had given her perhaps six minutes of feeling that she could choose something. Now it was another practical difficulty Mum had to help her manage.

“I'll return the pencils and the sticky notes,” she said. “I opened the notebook.”

“All right.”

“Don't tell me it was a lesson.”

“I wasn't planning to. It was a bad afternoon.”

Leila went back the next morning with the receipt. The customer-service woman processed the return without asking for a reason beyond whether the items were unused. Leila walked out with the refund and a hot face.

She kept the notebook. On its first page, she drew the tin of pencils from memory. Then she crossed out the drawing, not angrily this time, and wrote the actual bus times for the week beneath it.

That evening she messaged Micah to apologise for being sharp. He replied that he had guessed she was upset but had not known whether she wanted him to leave her alone.

I didn't know either, she wrote.

Then tell me that next time, he replied. I can work with that.