Away from Work

The bag Jip wanted for school on Monday lay open on the sofa. There was no room for a folder with her gym kit at the bottom. She pulled it out and held the gym bag at arm's length with her free hand.

‘That's probably a life form in its own right by now.’

Lena reached to take it, but Jip was already on her way to the washing machine. She still kept a sling with her, though she used it less at home. Her movements had a different rhythm: first work out how to do something, then reach. Lena kept getting stuck in the moment before Jip reached for something.

Tom arrived with two loaves and a punnet of strawberries. He put them on the worktop and asked where the dishwasher had gone. Glasses filled the space where its door had once opened freely. Jip had emptied the bottom rack herself, leaving half its contents on the worktop.

‘Practising,’ she said.

‘I'd have started with the forks.’

‘Those are done.’

He picked up a glass and looked for the cupboard they were kept in now. Lena pointed. For a while it had irritated her that, two years after the divorce, he still tried the wrong cupboard. Today she was glad he asked instead of opening every door.

They had agreed to go through the coming week. Tom needed enough notice to swap shifts. Jip had an appointment at school and wanted to go back to her part-time job one afternoon to discuss what she could manage for now. She did not want her mother ringing for her. Lena had promised they would look at the calendar together first. Her phone lay face down on the table.

‘I can't be late for school on Monday,’ Jip said. ‘I've got something to catch up on. And I'm not leaving early to look at a house with you.’

Lena looked at her. ‘I haven't asked you to.’

‘No. You ask if I can keep a bit of time free. Then I end up waiting somewhere because your appointment runs over.’

Tom put away the last glasses and sat down. He opened his calendar on his phone and set it in front of him. Jip saw and pushed it into the middle of the table.

‘We're actually doing this now.’

Lena left her laptop shut. She took the paper timetable Jip had made. Her daughter had filled in her school hours, then added three lines for what she needed. Only one said transport. Lena had planned an entire week around her without knowing whether that was what she wanted.

‘I can do Tuesday's trip,’ Tom said. ‘We'll have to check the time on Thursday.’

‘I could get the bus,’ Jip said. ‘If my bag doesn't weigh a ton.’

‘We'll make it lighter,’ Lena said.

Jip glanced at the open bag on the sofa. ‘I'll do that. I want to know which books I'm leaving out.’

Tom drew the strawberries towards him and removed a bruised one. In the brief silence, Lena felt she ought to add something complicated to prove she was taking part. She took the timetable and wrote down only the arrangements for which help had been requested.

Her phone buzzed. Jip looked at the dark screen.

‘Is it those people again?’

‘Might be.’

‘Look, then.’

Lena turned it over. An email from Noordhuis. Part of the text was already visible in the notification: until a consistent file could be established, her invoices would remain on hold. She was expected to refrain from sharing incomplete information with third parties.

She put down the phone. Jip waited. Tom wiped his fingers on kitchen paper.

‘They're holding back a payment,’ Lena said. ‘And they don't want me talking to other people about the file.’

‘Can they do that?’ Jip asked.

‘Someone who knows my contract needs to look at it. I'll ask for advice tomorrow.’

‘Who?’ Tom asked.

Lena named her contact at the professional indemnity insurer. She had looked up the number already but not rung. She had told herself she first needed to know what Eva had done. It sounded orderly. Mostly it postponed the conversation about her own mistake.

‘You know enough to ask what you should do,’ Tom said.

‘Yes.’

He seemed about to say more, then held back. Lena wrote call insurer on the timetable. It was not one of Jip's arrangements and did not belong there. She transferred it to a separate note.

‘What's actually happened?’ Jip asked.

Lena put her hands on the table. ‘A report says a house was empty. I went there when someone was still living in it. My own text says something different. Someone's put out another version under my name.’

‘You hadn't read it.’

‘Not the final version. I should have.’

‘Because I'd had my accident?’

‘That's why I left work to Eva. That's a normal decision to make. I'm still responsible for checking what goes out under my name. You don't have to put any of it right.’

Jip bent over her bag and took a loose sheet from a folder. She sat holding it. Lena could not tell whether she wanted to end the conversation or simply needed the paper.

‘So you're still going after that woman tomorrow.’

‘I'm trying to make it possible for her to get in touch. I've spoken to the police and a tenants' adviser. It shouldn't all go through me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she should be able to choose her own help. Because I don't know what's happened.’

Tom asked whether there had been specific threats. Lena described the pressure over the job and the instruction not to speak to third parties. She said a resident had died and there were questions about events in the same street. She used no words she could not have justified to Anouk.

‘The police are looking at what I've told them. I'm not going to follow anyone myself.’

Jip slipped the sheet under the folder. ‘But you keep going to see everyone.’

‘By arrangement. Sometimes for work, sometimes because someone wants to show me something. If that changes, I need to say so.’

‘To who?’

She looked at Tom, then back at her daughter. ‘Whoever needs to know where I am. And you, if it changes our plans. I don't want you checking for messages all day.’

‘I don't want half an answer because you think it'll keep me calm either.’

That landed harder than the question about payment. For days Lena had put bread rolls in front of Jip and organised lifts. She had talked about work in sentences that ended before her daughter could ask a question. A house was a file; an absent woman, a request for contact. Outside the unit, that language did not work.

‘You're right,’ she said. ‘If I don't know, I can say I don't know.’

Jip shrugged as far as she comfortably could. ‘I'd rather hear that than how it's all nearly sorted.’

They divided up the days ahead. Tom would arrange transport on Tuesday and stay available that afternoon. Jip chose when to eat at his place herself, to make the week less crowded rather than as a rescue plan for her mother. They would look again on Thursday. Lena did not write some sweeping commitment such as always available. They could not keep waiting in an empty stretch of her calendar.

After lunch, Tom walked with Jip to the bakery to see whether her Saturday hours still fitted her recovery. It was her job; she wanted to do the talking. Tom would wait outside unless she needed him. Lena tidied the kitchen, then stood beside the open dishwasher with her phone. The email from Noordhuis brought back the same tightness in her chest.

Now she read it in full. At the end they asked her to send a revised handover report on Monday morning, without the qualifications that would complicate assessment by third parties. No suggested text. She would have to decide for herself which sentences disappeared, then put her name to something the writer of the email did not want to put a name to.

Lena found the correspondence about her original report. Not to reply yet, but to collect the right documents for the advice she needed. She left closed every document containing residents' details. On a separate sheet she listed her questions for the insurer: reporting possible misuse, her own failure to complete the final check, conditions for further communication. She would not supply the answers in advance.

Then she wrote to Noordhuis saying her correction stood. Any change must rest on new, verifiable findings. If Marten Sloof wanted to speak, she could arrange a meeting with her own adviser present. She would not send a version that removed her observation that the house had been occupied.

She read the email aloud. She didn't like having to call in an adviser: she was the expert; she ought to be able to protect her own text. But that was where she kept missing something. She knew the technical content. A damp meter could not assess what people made of it in a conversation.

After sending, she left the phone charging in the bedroom and went back to the washing machine. Jip's programme had finished. The gym bag lay in the drum beside a towel twisted round itself. Lena put both in a basket and hung them outside. Dry enough for the towel, probably too cool for the bag. She left it out anyway.

Jip and Tom returned with a small loaf that had not been on the shopping list. Jip had moved her appointment at work to a time when her supervisor would have longer. She was not disappointed. She had asked for the change herself, she said; the lunchtime queue had stretched outside.

Tom noticed the phone missing from the table. Lena told him she would get advice and would not send the new version they wanted.

‘You could have sent it and put it right the next day,’ he said.

She looked up, surprised.

‘I'm not suggesting it. It's how you've sometimes dealt with work. Make sure nobody has to wait first.’

‘I know.’

‘Now someone's waiting for a home, or an answer about her home. She can't get that extra day back.’

Jip cut the bread with the little knife. She heard him but did not join in. Lena offered Tom more coffee. He pointed to his calendar; he had to drive. They agreed Tuesday's time once more, in a way that would not depend on a phone call afterwards.

After he left, Jip fixed the timetable to the fridge. Lena gave her a magnet from among the receipts. Below the timetable was the note about the insurer. Jip pulled it off.

‘This one's yours.’

Lena put it in her own diary. On Monday morning she would ring first, before walking into another office to try to lessen the damage with another document.