Nell: Your Turn, My Turn

For the final outing, the readers had asked us to take turns showing someone a place they had never properly noticed. It was a good idea, which meant my first instinct was to make it unnecessarily elaborate.

I considered a clue trail. I considered envelopes. I considered asking Mum whether the museum possessed a stamp I could borrow to make the envelopes look important. Then I imagined explaining all of this to Amina, who had specifically liked the activity because it needed almost nothing, and put the envelopes away.

Kit met me outside the library at two. We were being careful with each other, but not in the brittle way of the previous week. More like people carrying something repaired that they still wanted to use.

“No equipment?” she asked, looking at my empty hands.

“I'm experimenting.”

“Bold.”

I took her to the covered passage beside the old post office. She had been through it hundreds of times. So had I. Until Mum mentioned it while we were checking the museum's history notes, I hadn't realised the narrow brass lines set into the stone showed the town's old flood levels.

I stopped beside the lowest marker.

“There,” I said.

Kit crouched to read the date. Then she looked at the next one, higher up the wall, and the one above that.

“I thought those were repairs.”

“Same.”

We stood in a place we'd treated as a shortcut and imagined water where our feet were. The passage was dry and full of ordinary afternoon sounds: a delivery trolley, somebody laughing, the soft clink of cups from the café at the far end. That made the old marks stranger, not less real.

“How did people get out?” Kit asked.

“I don't know. I found a short account in the local history folder, but it mostly lists damage to businesses. Mum said the archive might have more.”

“You want to find out.”

“Yes.”

“That's a good article.”

I smiled. “Possibly. After I know the answers.”

We read the markers without making them into a dramatic photograph. I showed Kit the small information plaque I'd walked past for years. It explained less than I wanted and more than I'd bothered to look for before.

For the guide, we would not send everybody into this particular passage. The activity was about looking, not copying our exact afternoon. We made a note to suggest public places with room to stop, and to avoid treating working doorways as attractions.

Then it was Kit's turn.

She led me behind the row of shops near the bus station, along a path I usually used only when I was late. At the end, a low wall overlooked the service yard of an old warehouse. I opened my mouth to ask whether this was revenge for the brass lines.

“Listen,” she said.

I closed it.

At first I heard traffic. Then a rattling shutter. Then, from somewhere below us, a sequence of clear notes that seemed too delicate for the bins and brickwork.

“What is that?”

“Rain chain.”

A length of small metal cups hung from a gutter at the corner of the building. Water left from an earlier shower moved through them slowly, each cup catching and passing it on. The sound wasn't musical in the organised sense. It was irregular and gentle, with little changes when the breeze moved the chain.

“I found it waiting for Dad,” Kit said. “He was collecting a part from the supplier. I thought somebody had a radio on.”

We stood against the wall. The warehouse owner came out with a box, saw us looking and explained that his daughter had given him the chain after he complained about the old drainpipe. He seemed pleased that somebody had noticed it. We thanked him and didn't ask for a performance.

When he went inside, I said, “Yours is better.”

“It isn't a competition.”

“Everything is a competition if you lack emotional maturity.”

Kit laughed and nudged my shoulder with hers.

I stayed where I was. A week earlier, I would have tried to turn the contact into a larger event. Now I let it be an elbow against an elbow, sunlight coming back into the yard, water making small sounds beneath us.

On the way to the library, we discussed the instructions. Keep the distance manageable. Ask whether the other person is comfortable going there. Choose somewhere public. Don't assume a place is free to use because you've never been asked to leave. You can show a view, a sound, a detail on a building, a tree that grows in a strange direction. It does not have to impress anyone.

“That last part is aimed at me,” I said.

“It can be aimed at all of us.”

“Very diplomatic.”

At the crossing, Kit took my hand. Not tentatively this time. Just because the light was red and we were standing beside each other.

I looked at our hands, then at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“You're smiling.”

“I've heard people do that.”

She rolled her eyes, but her thumb moved over my knuckles.

Back at the library, Jo had put out the final feedback sheets. Amina's suggestion was credited in the way she'd chosen. We checked the wording together, then wrote the last paragraph of the activity.

I drafted three sentences about discovery. Kit read them and pointed at the middle one.

“This is the bit.”

The sentence was simple: Take your time when it's their turn.

I deleted the other two.

That evening, I told Dad about the flood markers. He remembered a photograph his mother had owned of the market square under water. We spent half an hour looking through a box of family pictures and didn't find it. We did find one of him at nineteen with hair he refused to discuss.

I sent it to Kit with his permission.

She replied: Strong architectural choices.

Dad laughed so hard he had to sit down. I watched him, pleased by the joke and by the fact that Kit was part of this ordinary room again without anybody needing to announce it.

Before bed, I opened the publicity folder. The corrected article was there, along with the first version. I kept both. Not because I needed to punish myself by rereading the mistake, but because deleting the evidence would have been another way to make the story cleaner than it was.

Then I closed the laptop and called Kit. We talked until Mum knocked on the wall to remind me that not every person in the house was having a romantic summer.