A Door Everyone Used

Val had a physiotherapy appointment at the health centre, which meant he was in a bad mood before we met and a worse one when he came out.

“She wants me to do the stairs,” he said.

“Is that bad?”

“The stairs are the reason I went.”

We sat on the low wall outside. Mum had come with me and was getting three teas from the kiosk. Val watched her through the glass.

“Your mother's going to tell me I ought to listen to the woman.”

“She probably is.”

“You can keep her.”

His walking stick had a rubber ferrule patched with tape. He caught me looking.

“New one on order,” he said. “Before either of you starts.”

“You said you remembered the jacket.”

He turned the stick between his hands.

“I remembered where I found it. Not who was in it.”

“All right.”

“Important distinction.”

“I know.”

Mum arrived with the teas and took the space on his other side. She asked about his appointment. He gave her a shorter and much more reasonable account than he had given me.

The jacket had belonged to the centre before it belonged to Sam. A navy work coat with reflective strips, donated when a building contractor changed its logo. Sam wore it for carrying bins and moving things through the maintenance yard because the kitchen's white coats looked ridiculous outside and got ruined.

“There were three of them at one point,” Val said. “One went missing ages ago. One was in the laundry. Your lad's was the one with the torn strip on the sleeve.”

Sam had caught it on a metal shelf. I remembered Mum refusing to sew reflective plastic with her good needle.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“On a chair behind the little sound desk. After the first set. Gareth asked whose it was because he wanted the chair.”

“What time?” I asked.

Val gave me a look.

“After the first set. That's what I've got.”

“Was it wet?”

“Bottom of one sleeve was. Damp, anyway. It had been a warm evening. People were carrying drinks. There's a sink by the passage. I'm not telling you it came out of the channel.”

“I wasn't going to say that.”

“You were thinking loudly.”

Mum blew across her tea.

“Did you tell the officer?” she asked.

“Yes. This morning. I rang the number they gave me. I wanted Bea to know because I told her I saw a jacket like Sam's, and I don't want that growing legs without the rest attached.”

I looked at my trainers. A pale thread had come loose near the toe.

“Finn told me he borrowed a work jacket,” I said. “To move dusty equipment.”

Val nodded slowly.

“He might have. People borrowed things. We weren't running a museum.”

“Did you see him take it?”

“No.”

“Put it back?”

“No.”

He took a careful sip and winced because the tea was still too hot.

“The trouble with remembering an evening afterwards,” he said, “is you keep meeting things you wish you'd looked at.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

Mum asked him about the teaching pool, and he became more himself. He had opinions about the repairs. He had opinions about the repairs before those. The channel had carried runoff beneath the road since the place was built, and the service opening existed so workers could clear branches and rubbish after heavy rain. There should have been a secured cover and a barrier when it was being worked on. There had been a temporary barrier during the week. He did not know who had moved it.

“I'm not telling you what happened there,” he said. “They'll work that out. I'm telling you what the place was supposed to be like.”

Mum nodded.

A small boy came out of the health centre holding a sticker in each hand. He stopped in front of Val's stick and asked whether it was a sword.

“Only on Tuesdays,” Val said.

The boy considered this, accepted it, and followed his father towards the car park.

When they had gone, Val said, “I keep thinking of him at that age.”

“Rowan?”

“He used to sit on the steps outside the office and draw everybody's shoes. Didn't like faces. Said they changed too much.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Well. You weren't there every minute.”

He said it gently. It still reached somewhere sore.

After Mum put him on his bus, we walked along the public path on the opposite side of the road from the centre. The entrance was closed. A printed notice had curled inside its plastic sleeve. Beyond the fence, the new green line along the maintenance gate looked almost cheerful.

There was nothing to learn from staring through it. I knew that. I still stopped.

Mum stood beside me without asking what I expected to see.

I had an old photograph on my phone from the previous autumn, taken when we were planning camera positions for the documentary screening. It showed the passage from inside the hall: office door on the left, storeroom on the right, the outer door at the end. I opened it, not to find a person who was not there, but to remember how close everything was.

From the donation table to the passage was perhaps twenty ordinary steps. From the passage to the yard, a few more. You could leave the room and be out of sight before a song finished. You could also go to fetch batteries, wash a spill from your sleeve, or move a case into storage. The door had not belonged to one explanation.

“Show me,” Mum said.

I held out the phone.

“That's where my camera was pointed,” I told her. “From above. You only see the edge of that bit.”

“And the band colours?”

“They were meant to control who went through. But the office was open while people were setting up. Volunteers had different colours. Finn had gold, then black over it.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Could you get another band easily?”

“Yes.”

“Then it tells you he got another band.”

I let my hand fall.

“You make everything sound smaller.”

“Sometimes it is smaller.”

I hated that answer for about three seconds. Then I remembered how large a grey camera case had become in other people's stories about Sam.

A man on a bicycle slowed near the fence. He looked at the flowers by the main gate, took a photograph, and cycled on.

Mum touched the back of my arm.

“Come on.”

We were halfway home when Gareth called. Val had told him we had spoken, and Gareth wanted me to understand that he had not watched anyone put the jacket on the chair.

“It was just there when I needed somewhere to sit,” he said. “I stuck it on the back of the spare speaker. Val took it from there.”

“Did you see Finn near the desk?”

“Loads of times that evening. He helped tape down a cable. So did you.”

“During the break?”

“I was under the desk swearing at a recorder during most of the break.”

The stopped mixing-desk file. The gap I had already spent too long wishing out of existence.

“I remember,” I said.

“There's one thing I did think of. Not about the jacket. Someone sent me a clip asking what the horrible noise was. From the sound check in the break. I haven't found which message it was in. Too many groups.”

“What sort of clip?”

“Phone video. Ten seconds, maybe. Mostly their drinks. I told the officer it might still be somewhere on my phone. I'm looking.”

My whole body seemed to lean towards the call.

“Could it have sound from the passage?”

“Could have sound from somebody eating crisps directly into the microphone. Don't build a castle yet.”

“All right.”

“I'll send it to them if I find it.”

When we ended the call, Mum was waiting by a crossing.

“What?” she asked.

“A possible recording. Not the desk. Somebody's phone.”

“Possible.”

“Yes.”

The crossing changed. We walked with a woman pushing a buggy and a man carrying a mop still wrapped in plastic. Halfway over, I realised I had not eaten since breakfast. The milkshake yesterday seemed closer than anything I had done that morning.

At home Mum made scrambled eggs. I set out three plates, then remembered Sam was at an appointment and put one back.

“Leave it,” she said. “He'll want something when he gets in.”

I left it.

The phone lay beside my fork. Nothing arrived while we ate. No recovered sound, no answer about the jacket, no message that changed the shape of Friday. Mum asked me to pass the pepper, and I did.