What Waited at Home

There was a note on the back door that Jip must have written one-handed. Milk, with an arrow pointing to full-fat. Underneath: not the horrible one.

Lena hung her coat over a chair. An open packet of rice cakes lay in the kitchen. The scissors Jip had used to cut it open were sticking out between two rice cakes; a wet ring marked the worktop.

‘I've done the shopping,’ she called upstairs.

‘Did you get milk?’

‘Semi-skimmed.’

Silence. Then Jip came down, her socks brushing against the stairs.

‘That's the horrible one.’

‘You always buy semi-skimmed.’

‘Dad buys full-fat.’

Lena unpacked the cartons. A tomato had been squashed among the apples; she could have avoided that if she had paid attention in the shop. Jip put the scissors in the cutlery drawer. Her right arm rested in its sling. She could do more with her left hand than in the first few days, but still opened a door gingerly, as though something might catch there too.

‘I thought you'd be home at four,’ she said.

‘It ran over.’

‘I guessed.’

It was not even half past four. Lena nearly said so, then realised in time that Jip did not mean this half-hour. For days she had been hearing that something had run over. A conversation, an email, a visit whose address Lena did not mention. Small explanations that, taken together, shut a door.

‘Was there something you needed?’ she asked.

‘My presentation. I asked if you'd listen.’

‘I will. Let me just put this in the fridge.’

Jip pushed the kitchen door open with her knee and went into the living room. Lena stayed at the worktop until the fridge began to beep. She had not left a torch behind in somebody else's house. These were the things waiting at home, the things nobody recorded.

Jip had set up her laptop on the dining table. The first slide was mostly white, with a photograph of a derelict station building in the middle. Her assignment was about somewhere in the town that had been given a new use. She had chosen the station that now housed a dance school.

‘You do actually have to watch,’ she said as Lena put her phone beside the keyboard.

Lena moved it to the cabinet behind the sofa, face down.

The presentation lasted seven minutes. Jip explained why the ticket windows had been kept and where the cloakroom was now. She stumbled over repurposing, gave a quick laugh and started the sentence again. At the last slide, she asked what Lena thought.

‘Good. Especially showing where the old doors still are.’

‘You said that yesterday.’

‘Because it is good.’

‘But do you understand what I'm saying about them?’

Lena looked at the floor plan. The dance studio stretched across the former waiting rooms. A thin yellow line marked where a wall had stood. Jip explained that the different waiting rooms had once been for different fares. Now everyone danced on the same floor.

‘You mean the building's changed without having to get rid of everything.’

‘Yes.’ Jip tapped the photograph. ‘And sometimes you need to know what it used to be. Otherwise you don't understand why a wall goes off at that weird angle.’

She meant nothing beyond that. It was Lena who immediately wanted to connect it to her own day. For once, she resisted. She asked Jip to enlarge the caption on the last photograph; it would be hard to read from the back of a classroom. Jip moved the text box aside.

Tom arrived while they were looking for a better photograph. He knocked twice on the glass, as he used to when he could not find his key, and held up a shopping bag. Jip opened the door.

‘Milk,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

He looked past her at the two cartons on the worktop and set his beside them without a word. There was a box of bread rolls in the bag too. He kept his shoes on. His shift started in an hour.

‘Still ten on Friday?’ he asked Lena.

For a moment she did not know what he meant. The appointment was a blue bar in her phone calendar; she had entered it on Tuesday. A check-up for Jip's arm. No disaster if Lena herself did not go, but somebody needed to be there.

‘Yes. I can drive.’

‘I've already been asked,’ Tom said. ‘By Jip.’

Lena looked at her daughter.

‘You said on Monday you had to check,’ Jip said.

‘I did check.’

‘But you didn't tell me.’

Tom perched on a chair. He was not a man who naturally called everyone together for a discussion. His hands stayed near the bag. There was a black rim beneath one nail, which he tried to rub away with his thumb.

‘I've booked Friday off until two,’ he said. ‘I'll leave it that way. Saves you rearranging everything.’

It sounded helpful and felt like a reproach. Lena knew those were different things. She set three cups on the table and filled one with the new milk.

‘I don't mean to leave you both guessing whether I'll be here.’

‘Then tell us whether you'll be here,’ Jip said.

‘Your mother's trying to—’ Tom began.

‘No,’ Lena said. ‘She's right.’

Tom stopped rubbing his nail. He did not look triumphant. In the past she had often blamed his job for things that had nothing to do with the taxi. He had done the same with her inspections. She had to take care they did not slip into settling old scores.

She took a sheet from the printer. Jip pulled a face at the idea of a weekly timetable, but wrote school beside Thursday herself, then a question mark beside Saturday. She wanted to see her friend Noor without discussing every speed bump along the way with both her parents first. Tom wrote down Friday. Lena put her name beside Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon.

‘And ring if anything changes,’ Tom said.

‘Before it changes,’ Jip said.

Lena looked at her name. ‘Yes.’

Nothing remarkable was resolved after that. Tom thought Jip spent too much time on her phone; Jip thought he did too. Both wanted a cheese roll. Lena cut the rolls because Jip found that awkward one-handed, then Jip said she was perfectly capable of buttering her own. The conversation frayed back into its familiar shape. Lena was grateful.

After Tom left, she went to her study and kept the door open. On her desk, the original inspection sheets and the printouts from the project portal sat in separate folders. Small yellow notes marked the differences. By daylight it had looked thorough. Now it also looked like something she could disappear into for another entire evening.

The records team's reply had arrived at 4.19 p.m. The administrator thanked her for sending the original report. Only the approved final version was retained in the project system. Additional documents had to be submitted through the project coordinator. It was therefore not possible to add an earlier draft directly.

She read the paragraph again. It did not say they refused to correct errors. It said the text that could demonstrate an error would stay outside the system until someone who might be involved in that error forwarded it.

There was a name at the bottom, Selma, and a direct number. Lena rang.

‘There's no need to label my report a draft,’ she said when the administrator had found her message. ‘It's the version I sent after the inspection.’

Selma explained that she used draft for everything before final approval. A category in their system, not a judgement on the document.

‘Who gave that final approval?’

‘I can't see that on this screen.’

‘Can you at least record that I dispute the version?’

‘As a reported issue. I think reception have already done that.’

She did not sound indifferent. She sounded like somebody who had access only to the buttons her job required. Lena asked whether the issue was linked to the address or to the report as well. Selma would have to find out. She promised to email.

‘Please leave it open in any case,’ Lena said. ‘Even if the coordinator says we've spoken on the phone.’

‘I'll add that.’

When she hung up, Jip was standing in the doorway, the box of rolls pressed against her stomach.

‘Is this one of those things where you're really angry but you speak really nicely?’

Lena smiled. ‘More or less.’

‘Has someone broken something?’

‘Someone's changed a report with my name on it.’

Jip stayed where she was. Until now, Lena had said there was something wrong with a file, something she needed to look into. It was the first time she had told them at home about an act somebody was responsible for.

‘Is that a crime?’

‘I'm not sure yet. I'm going to get some advice.’

‘But you didn't change it?’

‘No.’

‘Then why's your name on it?’

Lena closed the folder. ‘Because I didn't check that version myself when it went into the portal. I trusted it was the same report.’

‘Because I'd had my accident?’

‘It was that week. But that doesn't make it your fault.’

‘I know.’

The answer came quickly, too quickly to tell how certain Jip was. Lena looked at her.

‘I should have made better arrangements. If I couldn't work, I should have put off checking it or asked someone to check it properly. I should have been doing that better before then, too.’

Jip put the box on a clear patch of desk. ‘So now you have to tell them you didn't do it.’

‘And that I didn't manage part of my own job properly.’

‘I wouldn't lead with that bit.’

‘You're sixteen.’

‘That's why I'm telling you. I'm not getting paid for this.’

Lena laughed. When Jip went upstairs again, the door stayed open. She began a reply to Selma, correcting the label draft and attaching the acknowledgement of her original email. She deleted the sentence this is outrageous. It was outrageous, but telling Selma would not give her another button.

For the wider correction, she opened a new document. At the top she put the address, the inspection date and the date of the altered file. Below that she wrote that the tenant had been present. She stopped after three paragraphs. She still needed advice on some questions. A hurried second report must not acquire the same uncertain life as the first.

Instead of sending it, she emailed Mieke to ask if they could speak on Thursday. She mentioned the occupied house and the incorrect departure date, nothing about her suspicions concerning Henk. Mieke replied within ten minutes with a time and a request to bring only her own documents. No residents' papers they did not know were being shared.

Lena entered the appointment in her calendar. Below it was Jip's presentation, a little green block she had almost passed over earlier that day. She left it there, though it was over.

At six she went downstairs to cook. She scraped the soft part from the tomato and put the rest in the sauce. Jip came to ask if there would be enough for tomorrow. This time Lena had an answer.