Analogue

The Envelope Nan had kept the instruction booklet for every appliance she had ever owned, including a toaster that had stopped working before Lena was born. The booklets were in a biscuit tin beneath the kitchen sink, arranged by size, and when Lena tipped them onto the table a handwritten note fell out with them. It said, in Nan’s round, stubborn writing, ASK DANIEL ABOUT THE DRIPPING TAP. ‘Did Nan ever ask you about the dripping tap?’ Lena said. Daniel was standing in the doorway with a cardboard box against his hip. He had been looking at the same small patch of plaster for the past minute, distracted by something on the screen in his hand. ‘Sorry?’ ‘The tap. Nan left you a note.’ ‘Oh, that. Yes. I changed the washer in March.’ He put the box down. ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s dripping.’ ‘Is it?’ Lena turned the cold tap on and off. A bead of water gathered at the end, hung there, then fell into the sink with a tiny metallic knock. Daniel watched another drop form. ‘I’ll add it to the list.’ ‘The list of things you fixed already?’ ‘Very funny.’ He touched his screen and the kitchen’s inventory appeared in its tidy columns above the photograph he had taken of Nan’s cupboards. ‘We can get a plumber in before the agent comes. Are those all manuals?’ ‘Unless she had a secret career selling kettles.’ ‘Recycle the manuals for anything that’s gone, then. Keep the others with whatever they belong to.’ Daniel nudged the keep box towards her with his foot. ‘So I have to find all the appliances you’ve already put somewhere else?’ ‘Brilliant. A task requiring thought.’ Lena gave him a look he didn’t see. His screen had changed again. It was the first proper day of the summer holidays, and they were spending it clearing a house that still looked as though Nan might come home from the shops. Her brown cardigan was on the back of the dining chair. There were three eggs in the fridge, one of them dated more than a month ago, and a shopping list stuck to the kitchen calendar beneath a magnet from Weston-super-Mare. Daniel had said they should leave the furniture until somebody came to value it, which meant their job today was to empty drawers and cupboards, throw out food, and separate the things the family wanted to keep from the things nobody did. There were only the two of them doing it. Lena had asked why they couldn’t hire someone, and Daniel had told her there were certain things you did yourself. He hadn’t explained what those things were. Neither of them had been especially good at them so far. Lena took a photograph of the note about the tap and sent it to him, even though he was standing six feet away. His screen chimed. He glanced at it, smiled faintly, and went back to whatever he’d been looking at before. Her own stream was waiting in the small transparent pane at the right edge of her glasses. It had learned during the funeral that she didn’t want anything featuring mothers or grandmothers, and had stopped offering those stories without needing to be told why. Today it was running an adventure she’d been following for weeks, in which the characters remembered every choice she made and adjusted their behaviour to it. At the moment a boy called Niko was standing on a narrow platform above a flooded chamber, waiting for her to decide which of two valves to open. The story had held that decision for her since the drive from Coventry. It could wait for another minute. She picked up a manual for a food processor, found the corresponding processor at the back of the cupboard and put both into the keep box. By the time she turned around Niko had been joined by another character, a woman with a torn sleeve, who said something urgently about pressure building behind the wall. Lena flicked a finger against the side of her glasses to hear the line again. The scene adjusted to her hesitation, offering a third possibility she hadn’t considered. That was clever. She could solve it quickly and get back to the cupboards. ‘Lena.’ She blinked. Daniel had taken the manual from her hand. ‘What?’ ‘You’ve put a keep sticker on the bin.’ The kitchen pedal bin had a green label across its lid. Lena looked at it. The food processor was beside the recycling pile. She couldn’t remember putting either thing there. ‘Oh. Right.’ She peeled the sticker off, taking some of the bin’s finish with it. ‘Sorry.’ Daniel looked from the bin to her glasses. ‘Can you put that away for an hour?’ ‘I’m doing it.’ Lena recovered the food processor from beside the recycling pile and put it in the correct box. She could still see the adventure waiting in the corner of her glasses. ‘I didn’t say you weren’t doing anything. I asked whether you could do it without that running the whole time.’ ‘It’s not the whole time.’ ‘You just labelled a bin as a family heirloom.’ She tried not to laugh, because he would take it as proof that the joke had worked. ‘You fixed a tap that isn’t fixed.’ ‘All right. Fair.’ He glanced at his screen, pressed something and held it up to show a little timer. ‘An hour. I’ll do the same.’ ‘Since when do you need a timer?’ ‘Since I discovered I had a daughter who likes arguing with simple requests.’ He put his phone in his back pocket. His earpiece remained in. Lena could see the small pale curve of it when he turned towards the sink. She thought about pointing that out, then switched her own stream into the background. Niko and the woman with the torn sleeve dissolved from her view, but the service kept their position. She knew exactly where she’d find them. They worked through the kitchen until the smell from the fridge became too much for Daniel, who insisted on tackling it himself. Lena moved into the front room with a box of envelopes, utility bills and birthday cards that Nan had kept in the drawer beneath her television. The room had always seemed large when she was little. Now, with the curtains tied back and the side tables cleared, the furniture was too close together. Daniel had taken the cushions off the sofa to look for loose change and left them piled on the floor. Nan would have hated that. Lena opened a card with a little boat on the front. Inside, someone called Sheila had written, Hope the knees are behaving themselves, followed by three kisses and a date from five years earlier. There were cards from former neighbours, people from church, a woman who signed herself Pat from bowls. Lena knew Nan had stopped bowling, but she hadn’t known that she’d once played in a team. She set that card aside and opened another. After six or seven of them the messages began to blur, affectionate remarks addressed to somebody who had answered them, apparently, by keeping the cards in a drawer. Her glasses gave a discreet pulse. The hour Daniel had requested had lasted fourteen minutes; the stream was offering to resume at a natural point rather than beginning the adventure in the middle of Niko’s predicament. A notification above it showed that three friends were now in a shared challenge, with a place held open for her. She checked the time. Daniel had not noticed how much of the hour was left, and she’d been doing what he’d asked. It wasn’t unreasonable to take a few minutes. She joined the challenge, which involved identifying a traitor among an evolving cast of characters. One friend had already accused the wrong person. The system supplied a small, perfectly timed piece of information that made Lena certain she’d found the answer. When she sent it, the other players’ reactions arrived in quick succession, followed by a new development she hadn’t expected. The satisfaction was instant and rather wonderful. She had been thinking about nothing but the challenge for the last several minutes. ‘Are you coming upstairs?’ Daniel called. Lena looked at the room. The envelopes were still scattered across the carpet, and she had been holding the same birthday card since the challenge began. ‘In a sec.’ ‘Bring the tape, would you?’ She dropped the card into the box, gathered the others and followed him, with the challenge continuing quietly at the edge of her vision. Upstairs, Nan’s bedroom smelled of the lavender drawer liners she bought in packs of twenty. Daniel had pulled the curtains open and was standing in front of the wardrobe with both doors wide. Her slippers were side by side beneath the bed. On the dressing table were two hairbrushes, a shallow dish for earrings and the small round mirror Lena used to steal when she was six because it made everybody’s face look enormous. ‘There’s a bag of things your aunt wanted,’ Daniel said. ‘Scarves mostly. Could you go through the dressing table? Anything personal, put it on the bed. We can decide together.’ Lena sat on the stool. There was a photograph of her mother between two blue ceramic birds, all three objects coated in the same thin film of dust. Her mother was standing on a beach with her trousers rolled above her ankles, one hand trying to hold her hair down against the wind. Lena had seen the photograph before, although she couldn’t remember whether it had always been here. She was very young when her mother died. For most of her life she had known the woman in photographs much better than the woman who had been able to pick her up and put her to bed. She took the frame down and wiped its glass with the hem of her T-shirt. ‘Dad?’ He came over. ‘What have you found?’ ‘Do you want this?’ He looked at the photograph for longer than she’d expected. ‘You can have it, if you like.’ ‘Nan had loads of pictures of Mum.’ ‘She did.’ ‘This one’s nice.’ ‘It was taken in Norfolk. We’d only been together a couple of months. She was freezing and refused to admit it.’ Lena tried to imagine her parents being together for only a couple of months. It made them seem like different people. ‘Did she like the beach?’ ‘She liked telling me I had chosen the wrong beach.’ His mouth moved towards a smile. ‘I’ve still got the photographs from that weekend somewhere.’ She handed him the frame, and he held it without putting it into either box. An incoming message lit the edge of his display. His eyes moved down. He read it, tapped a response with his thumb and put the frame carefully on the bed. ‘Take that home,’ he said. ‘I can show you the others.’ ‘Okay.’ He returned to the wardrobe. Lena opened the top drawer of the dressing table and found a strip of unused stamps, two birthday candles and a little velvet pouch with a broken clasp. She sorted them into their respective piles. At the back of the second drawer was a bundle of envelopes held together with a ribbon. All the envelopes had names on them, although most of the names belonged to people Lena hardly knew. One said DANIEL. Under it was another, written in Nan’s familiar blue ink, with LENA across the front and nothing else. She held it up. ‘Dad?’ Daniel turned, a sleeve of Nan’s winter coat still in his hand. He saw the envelope and came closer. ‘Where was that?’ ‘In here. With some others.’ He put the coat on the chair. ‘She must have written them when she knew she wasn’t coming home.’ The last time Lena had visited Nan in hospital, Nan had been mostly asleep. She’d opened her eyes once and asked Lena whether she’d remembered to bring a jumper, even though the ward was warm. Lena had said yes, and Nan had patted her wrist as if that settled the matter. Lena had spent most of the visit with her stream running silently, pausing it whenever the nurses came in. There hadn’t seemed to be anything she could usefully do. ‘Should I open it?’ she asked. ‘Well, it’s got your name on it.’ Daniel’s answer was gentle. He was still looking at the handwriting. ‘Of course you should. Whenever you want.’ Lena slid a finger beneath the flap. Nan had sealed it properly, running her thumb along the gum until the paper buckled. The envelope gave with a soft tearing sound. Inside were three folded sheets of cream writing paper. She unfolded the first one. The writing was slightly less steady than it had been on the note about the tap, but every letter was recognisably Nan’s. My lovely Lena, She read the words again. The little pane at the edge of her glasses flickered, almost too faintly to notice. A message from the shared challenge had arrived: they’d found another clue and wanted to know if she agreed. She ignored it and returned to the paper. I have been meaning to sit down and write you a proper letter for ages, so if you are reading this you can tell your father I finally managed it. Nan would have said that. She was always promising to write to people and then announcing, triumphantly, that she had done it at last. There was another line. Lena began it, lost her place, went back to the beginning. The message pulse came again, followed by a brief sound that signalled her friends had begun voting without her. She pulled her glasses off and laid them on the dressing table. The silence in her ears was abruptly uncomfortable, although she could still hear Daniel sorting hangers behind her and a car moving along the street outside. She looked at the letter. Her eyes were wet. That annoyed her; she’d hardly read anything yet. She folded the sheets once, badly, and reached for the envelope. ‘Everything all right?’ Daniel asked. ‘Yeah. I just—’ She tried to fit the papers back inside. One corner kept catching. ‘I’ll read it at home.’ ‘You don’t have to do it in here.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Your nan put a lot of thought into those things.’ She stopped trying to fold the paper. ‘I said I’d read it.’ ‘I know you did, love.’ He went back to the wardrobe, perhaps deciding that nothing useful could come of continuing. Lena laid the envelope flat against the photograph of her mother and put both in her own bag, where the letter could stay uncreased until she was ready. A little later Daniel brought them each a cup of tea. He’d found Nan’s old mugs in the kitchen, washed them and made the tea with milk that was just within its date. Lena sat on the bedroom floor beside a heap of scarves while he worked out which coats were worth keeping. They argued mildly about a fur-lined hat that she’d once made him wear during a family Christmas walk. Daniel insisted there was no photographic evidence. Lena knew perfectly well there was and promised to find it. They took two loaded boxes to the car and came back for a third. Daniel forgot the tape twice. Lena made him carry the heaviest box because he’d claimed it was light. It was after six when they finished, and there were still cupboards left unopened. At home Daniel ordered supper because neither of them wanted to cook. They ate at the kitchen table while he dealt with messages about Nan’s house and Lena resumed the adventure she’d abandoned earlier. Niko was still waiting above the flooded chamber. Her friends had completed their challenge without her, but the system supplied a private version that retained the interesting parts of the decisions she’d missed. It took her less than a minute to become involved again. Once, halfway through eating, she remembered the envelope in her bag. She even pulled the bag closer with her foot. Then Niko spoke to her by name, his voice lowered because he was telling her something the other characters couldn’t hear, and the letter remained where it was. Daniel went upstairs shortly after ten, telling her not to stay up too late. She said she wouldn’t. When she eventually went to bed, the clock above the hob said twelve fifty-three, although she would have sworn Daniel had gone upstairs twenty minutes earlier. Her bag remained beside the kitchen table, with Nan’s photograph and letter tucked safely inside. She meant to take it up with her, but the next part of Niko’s story had already begun, and she’d left it there.