The Last Key

The back door stuck exactly as it always had. Mila pressed her shoulder against it while Grandma turned the key. Inside, the house smelt as though it had been holding its breath too long.

‘Don't push it with your shoulder,’ Eva said behind her. ‘Lift the handle a bit.’

That worked. Mila was rather disappointed. She'd thought the door still knew her.

Three moving boxes and a broom stood in the hall. Above them were pale rectangles where the pictures had been. Grandma put her shopping bag beside the stairs and checked her watch.

‘The handover's at three. Those boxes, the sewing box and a quick sweep. Then we're done.’

Mila went ahead into the kitchen. Without curtains, it was much brighter than the one in the cloth at the community hall. The table was still there, but the chairs had gone. A greasy little mark showed where Grandma's kitchen timer had been against the wall. Mila touched it. Just a mark. Yesterday she'd stepped through a window of light to get here; now she had to cross a doorstep someone had protected with cardboard.

She slid her hand under the edge of the table. There it was. A dried drop of glue, hard as a pebble.

‘From the lighthouse,’ she said.

Grandma set a bucket on the worktop. ‘Which lighthouse?’

‘The kitchen-roll one. That kept falling over.’

‘Oh, yes. With the revolving light we couldn't get to revolve.’

She smiled briefly and turned on the tap. The pipes thumped. Mila waited for her to say something else about the lighthouse, but Grandma was rinsing out a cloth.

‘Couldn't we take this table?’ Mila asked.

‘We've talked about that.’

‘If you put it away from the wall a bit. In the new room. Then you could get round it.’

Grandma squeezed the cloth over the bucket. ‘Then I couldn't open my cupboard.’

‘A different cupboard?’

‘Mila.’

Eva appeared with two empty carrier bags. ‘Can you take these? For the loose bits upstairs.’

Mila took them without looking at Mum. It was much too easy to decide a cupboard mattered more than this table. A cupboard didn't have glue under its edge from a lighthouse they'd made together.

Two curtain hooks lay on the upstairs landing. Mila put them in her trouser pocket. Perhaps there was another one. She looked behind every open door.

The sewing room was smaller than the room of light she'd seen on Sunday. Of course it wasn't really. But this room had no cool glow round its edges. There was only a wooden sewing box on the windowsill. Its lid opened in two wings; inside were a compartment full of buttons and a pair of steel scissors with a black handle.

Mila lifted it by the handle. Something rattled in the bottom.

‘Keep it level,’ Grandma said from the doorway. ‘That handle's mostly meant for when it's empty.’

They carried it downstairs together. Mila held the bottom and Grandma took the other end. Halfway down, Grandma had to stop and change her grip. Only half of one foot fitted on the stair.

‘See?’ she said when they reached the bottom. ‘I shan't miss that.’

Mila looked at the stairs. She used to slide down them on her bottom. They'd been just the right steepness for that.

In the kitchen she started to put the sewing box on the table, but Grandma pointed to a clean towel on the floor. The table belonged to the new people now. Mila set the box down and lifted the two wings a little. The top compartment swung outwards. An old bus ticket lay among the buttons.

‘Why've you kept that?’

Grandma looked. ‘No idea. Perhaps it had some thread wound round it.’

‘Can it go?’

‘The ticket can. Check there's nothing behind it.’

There wasn't. Mila put the ticket with the waste paper. Just to be sure, she checked again.

Eva was collecting the boxes in the hall. Grandma had written KITCHEN on one of them. Mila bent to get her hands under it.

‘That one's heavy,’ Eva said.

‘I can carry it.’

‘I'm sure you can. But I'm going that way too. Let's do it together.’

They carried the box to the car. In the boot, Mila pushed it beside the shopping bag. It seemed ridiculous that a whole kitchen could fit in one box. She looked through the back window at the house. Across the road, a man was locking his bicycle, just as he might on any other Monday.

When they came back, Grandma was standing by the table with a tape measure.

Mila stopped in the doorway. ‘Are you going to try after all?’

‘I'm measuring how deep the drawers are. For a new table.’

The yellow tape snapped back into its case. Grandma wrote a number on the back of an envelope.

‘Three of us can work at this one,’ Mila said.

‘And I have to bend my knee round that leg. My knee doesn't fold up as easily as yours any more.’ Grandma pointed towards the worktop. ‘Get the broom, will you? There are still some screws in that corner.’

Mila swept. A little cap came out from under the worktop, then a scrap of green paper. Perhaps a leaf from one of their flowers. She held it up between two fingers.

‘You can take that,’ Grandma said.

‘It's only a scrap.’

‘You're the one holding it.’

Mila put it in her pocket anyway, with the curtain hooks. Then she carried on sweeping.

At five to three, the bell rang. A woman with a folder came in, followed by a man and a little boy. The boy had a plastic lorry. While the adults went through the rooms, he drove it into the skirting board in the hall. Rrrrr. Bump. Rrrrr.

Mila looked at the clean kitchen. Soon there might be somebody else's homework on the table, or a newspaper with a coffee stain that wasn't Grandma's. The boy drove his lorry over the doorstep. Nobody stopped him.

By the back door, Grandma looked once more at the handle. ‘Lift it a little,’ she told the man. She showed him.

Then she put the key in his hand.

Mila had expected to hear something. A click, perhaps, or the clock suddenly ticking louder. But the clock had already gone. The key slipped between the man's fingers, and he said he'd get the door seen to.

They went out through the front door. Eva carried the sewing box; Grandma had the envelope with the measurements. Mila followed them with the broom. She'd forgotten to leave it in the hall.

‘That's ours,’ Grandma said, looking back. ‘Good job you brought it.’

In the car, the box with KITCHEN written on its side rested against Mila's knee. She held it steady so it wouldn't slide when they went round a corner.

‘Can we go to the kitchen again on Tuesday?’ she asked.

Eva glanced in the rear-view mirror. She knew about the rooms, but hadn't seen them yet.

‘At the community hall, you mean?’

Mila nodded.

‘We're trying it with our guests tomorrow evening,’ Grandma said. ‘First this box needs to go upstairs. Then I want a sandwich.’

Mila took the scrap of green paper out of her pocket and laid it on her open palm. She still didn't know whether it had come from their flower. She didn't want to ask Grandma. At the next corner, she closed her fingers round it.