The Breakfast Room at Seven

Nina's laptop stopped working on a Monday evening when she needed it for an online meeting. It had been making a clicking sound for three days. Nina had explained the clicking by saying it was old, as though age were a repair she could perform without tools.

Now the screen was black and Anushka was trying to bring it back by patting the lid.

“Gentler,” Nina said. “It's having a difficult time.”

Leila had come down to heat dinner. She stood with two containers in a bag and watched Nina press the power button again.

“You could use mine,” she said. “The college one. I'd have to stay with it.”

Nina looked up.

“Would you mind?”

“It's a loan. I can't leave it overnight. But I don't need it now.”

“Just half an hour. It's a nursery meeting, not anything mysterious.”

Leila went upstairs to fetch it. Toby followed, carrying his cardboard house because he had decided Anushka might have suggestions about the garden. By the time Nina connected to the meeting, the far end of the breakfast room had become a small building site.

Mo came through carrying a box of paper napkins.

“What's happening here?”

“Town planning,” Toby said.

“Has anyone consulted me?”

“You can be consulted after we've done the trees.”

Mo looked at the cardboard scraps. “Keep it to this table. And no glue on the carpet. It was expensive once.”

Leila sat opposite Toby and cut broad strips of green paper. Anushka wanted every tree to be taller than the house. Toby objected on grounds of realism until she said that real trees were often taller than houses, at which point he changed the objection to proportion.

“You could put the big one at the back,” Leila suggested.

Anushka shook her head. “Then I can't see it.”

They moved the house instead.

Other residents came in with food. A man Leila knew only as Mr Blake waited for the microwave, holding a covered plate with both hands. He wore work trousers and had a small scar beside his ear. His daughter sometimes stayed on weekends. Leila had seen them eating breakfast together, neither speaking much but both arranging the little butter packets into lines.

“That's better than the one I made at school,” he told Toby.

“What happened to yours?”

“Roof fell in. I became an electrician.”

Toby considered the career implications of this while pressing a tree into a blob of glue.

Nina's meeting ran longer than half an hour. Leila checked the time, looked at her homework and decided not to pretend it did not matter. When Nina muted herself briefly, Leila pointed at the clock and mouthed fifteen minutes. Nina nodded.

At seven, Mum came in carrying the shopping and found Leila explaining to Anushka why the house could not have a swimming pool made from real water.

“Leaks,” Anushka said, in the tone of someone deeply familiar with adult excuses.

“Yes. Leaks.”

Mum set down the bags and took out a packet of flatbreads. The room filled with the awkward little preparations everyone had to perform to eat: containers opened, labels checked, chairs moved, someone looking for a cloth. At home, these tasks had been background. Here they were public enough to require constant small negotiations.

Nina closed the meeting at the time they had agreed.

“Thank you,” she said. “That saved me a lot of explaining.”

Leila took the laptop and logged out of the temporary guest session. Nina watched her check that the charger was in its case.

“Very organised.”

“Mostly frightened of losing it.”

“That's how half of organisation begins.”

They ate at adjoining tables. Anushka fell asleep halfway through her flatbread, her head settling against Nina's arm. Toby carefully removed a cardboard tree from beneath her elbow.

Nina looked towards Mo, who was speaking to someone at the desk.

“I've been offered a viewing,” she said quietly to Mum.

“That's good.”

“It's in Eastbridge.”

Mum's smile changed. Eastbridge was on the other side of the larger town, far enough that Leila did not immediately know how to reach it by bus.

“Would it work?” Mum asked.

“I don't know. The nursery, my shifts, Anushka's place. I need to check everything.”

She smoothed her daughter's hair with the edge of one finger.

“I want to be pleased. I'm trying not to start arranging furniture before I've worked out the school run.”

Leila thought of Toby measuring the bedroom in the flat they could not afford. She suddenly wanted Nina not to tell Anushka about the viewing yet, as though keeping the idea away from a child could protect it from being taken back.

“What would you miss?” Toby asked. He had been listening despite pretending to inspect the trees.

Nina looked at him.

“People,” she said. “Some things about being near here. Not the microwave queue.”

“You can come back.”

“Yes.”

“But you might not.”

She did not answer too quickly. “Not as often.”

Toby nodded and began packing the house into its box. He had known Anushka for only a few weeks. Leila had not realised that a few weeks could be enough to make leaving this place feel like another loss.

Upstairs, Mum unpacked the shopping while Leila put the laptop on the desk.

“Sonia's still looking,” Mum said.

“I didn't ask.”

“I know. Your face did.”

Leila sat on the bed. “What if it's somewhere miles away?”

“Then we look at what it would mean. Properly. We don't decide everything from the name of a town.”

“Would you take it?”

“I don't know what it is yet.”

That was the answer Leila disliked most because it left her nothing to argue with.

She took out her sketchbook and found the drawing of Toby asleep on the bus. Behind his hand, she had drawn the dark shape of the football bag. She added one faint line to the window frame and stopped. The picture did not need more; she did.

Her phone lit up with a message from Dad asking whether she had thought about his offer.

Have you checked the trains? she wrote.

He replied that he would look tomorrow.

Leila set the phone face-down and opened her English homework. The passage she needed to analyse was about someone arriving in a place they did not understand. For once she had more to say than the space allowed.