Kit: Parts We Had Kept

The bicycle shop had two kinds of quiet. There was the good quiet before opening, when everything was where Dad had left it. Then there was the quiet after a noise that should not have happened.

On Wednesday, Nell produced the second kind by knocking over a display of bells.

They went off at different pitches, one after another, like a very small emergency.

“I'm so sorry.”

Dad looked over the wheel in the repair stand. “You've demonstrated the range.”

She crouched to collect them. I joined her, separating the plastic labels from the bells themselves. Her hair was tied back with a blue ribbon that kept slipping. She had been at the museum again, interviewing Mum—her mum, I corrected myself, which was an odd mistake to make even silently—about opening hours.

“I didn't touch it,” she said.

“You caught it with your bag.”

“So my bag touched it.”

“Important distinction for the insurance.”

Our fingers reached for the same silver bell. Neither of us moved for a second. Then Nell picked up a red one instead.

I had spent the previous evening thinking about the sailmaker's room. I'd been careful not to replay it so many times that I invented what had happened. She had started a question. I had leaned closer. Jodie had come in. The rest was a collection of possible meanings, none of which could be established by checking a waveform.

“You two working upstairs?” Dad asked.

“If that's all right.”

“Your mum's made enough pasta for a conference.”

“I only came to drop off the opening-hours sheet,” Nell said.

Dad glanced at me. “Conferences are flexible.”

Upstairs, Mum was sitting at the kitchen table with a college timetable spread beside her plate. Somebody had scheduled two classes in the same room and then tried to solve the problem by making one of the room names smaller.

“Hasan,” she called when Dad came up, “tell me whether Room Four becomes two rooms if I write it in blue.”

“Depends what you charge.”

Nell sat beside me. She had eaten here hundreds of times when we were younger, often with a schoolbag balanced against her chair and one eye on the clock because her dad was coming off a late shift. She knew where the forks lived. She reached towards the drawer, stopped, and asked.

Mum told her nothing had moved except the mugs, which Dad kept relocating for reasons known only to him.

“They were nearer the kettle,” he said.

“They were in front of the fuse box.”

“Also near the kettle.”

We ate. Mum asked Nell about sixth form, and Nell described her English teacher's commitment to making nineteen people explain a curtain. Dad asked about the guide and got a detailed account of the demolished umbrella.

“We've a box of broken ones downstairs,” he said. “People leave them in the shop.”

“Is that a repair service?” Nell asked.

“No. They just leave them.”

He was very pleased with the idea of the sound activity. When I was small, he'd let me record the shop shutter, the tyre pump and the chain cleaner. I had put them together into a track that sounded, generously, like a washing machine learning to dance.

“You've still got it,” he said.

“Probably.”

“She made me listen to it in the car,” Mum told Nell. “For an entire journey to your uncle's.”

Nell smiled at me. Not the public smile from the library photograph. A smaller one that made me feel seen in a way I wasn't ready to describe over pasta.

After dinner, we went to my room to find an old folder of maps. We needed a sample that showed how a route could be drawn with landmarks instead of assuming everyone understood compass directions. I had offered to make a new one. Nell had asked whether I still had the silly ones we used to draw.

The folder was on top of my wardrobe. I got it down while she looked at the wall above my desk: photographs, a theatre call sheet, a Manchester tram map, a postcard from Luca featuring an extremely bad sculpture.

“You've already marked the college,” she said.

“And the hall they suggested. I'm visiting next week.”

“With your parents?”

“Mum. Dad can't leave the shop all day. There's a funding appointment as well as the tour.”

“Right.”

She read the map for a moment longer. I wondered whether she was calculating distance. I had done it on three different journey planners, though I didn't know what answer I expected the fourth one to give.

The folder contained pirate islands, a map of the school cafeteria in which the mashed potato was labelled unstable ground, and several attempts at designing houses with more slides than stairs.

Nell laughed at one of hers. “Why was the toilet in the conservatory?”

“You said natural light was important.”

“I was ahead of my time.”

At the bottom was the original survival map.

Neither of us reached for it immediately.

It looked younger than I remembered. My neat little desks. Nell's sharp arrows. A dragon asleep across the staffroom door. We'd spent most of a half-term afternoon on the compass rose and then almost no time deciding what to call it. Our names were in the bottom corner, joined by an ampersand I'd drawn to look like a snake.

“There,” Nell said quietly.

I didn't ask what she meant.

“I told myself it was stupid to make a fuss at assembly. That everybody knew anyway.”

“They didn't.”

“I know that now.”

“You knew it then. I told you.”

Her hands were folded between her knees. She was looking at the map, not arranging a defence on her face.

“Yes,” she said.

Outside, a delivery van reversed with three loud beeps. Dad called to somebody about a tyre. The ordinary world kept moving while an old afternoon sat on my bed between us.

“I liked being the person they were clapping,” Nell said. “I think that's the bit I didn't want to admit. The mistake wasn't mine at first. Then it was easier to leave it.”

I had imagined her saying sorry in lots of ways. In some versions she cried and I forgave her immediately. In others I said something devastating and left a room I apparently owned for the purpose. The real thing was less satisfying and more useful.

“Thank you for saying that.”

“I'm sorry, Kit.”

I looked at the snake-shaped ampersand.

“I don't want you to be sorry every time we use a pencil.”

“I don't think I'd manage that volume.”

I laughed, reluctantly. She smiled and then stopped, as if checking whether she was allowed.

I slid the map back into its sleeve. We weren't going to put it in the guide. Not because it had become too painful, but because it belonged to something else.

For the sample route, I drew the street between the library and the museum. Nell labelled the bakery very good emergency shelter, then crossed it out because it wasn't fair to promise a business would accommodate everybody in a storm.

“Can I keep that version?” I asked.

“The inaccurate one?”

“The funny one.”

She tore the corner from a scrap page and drew a person being blown down the street. The person had my hair, her bag and an umbrella that had given up.

“Joint liability,” she said.

When she left, Dad was closing the shutter. I stood beside her on the pavement while he struggled with a stubborn catch.

“Thanks for dinner,” she said.

“You're welcome.”

“And for showing me the maps.”

I nodded. It was getting cooler. She had brought the effective coat this time, but she hadn't put it on.

“You know,” she said, “you could ask me things too.”

“About what?”

“Anything.”

I watched Dad finally free the catch. There were questions I could ask in front of him and questions I couldn't. The important one did not belong on the pavement beside a shutter that squealed for twelve solid seconds.

“Are you free Friday?” I said.

Nell's mouth parted before she smiled.

“For the project?”

I should have said no. Instead I said, “We still need the picnic.”

“Right. Yes. Friday.”

She put on her coat and walked away. Dad locked the shutter, dropped the keys and picked them up again.

“Subtle,” he said.

“Please don't.”

He put both hands in his pockets. “Was talking to the shutter.”