19. Michael
— ? —
Michael
The western route came apart on a Wednesday, which is what always happens the moment a man arranges his life around being in one particular place.
Antwerp had a container opened by customs and then a second one, and then a third, and by lunchtime somebody in a uniform had decided the whole manifest was interesting. Ackroyd rang me twice. Prentice rang me once, Prentice does not ring, Prentice waits.
I had to go. There was no version where I did not go.
So I did the only thing I know how to do about anything, which is make a document.
Pia found me at the dining table with it.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a schedule.”
“Michael.”
“It’s the time I’m away. It’s what happens on each day of it.”
She picked it up by the corner, which is how that woman handles every piece of paper I have ever produced.
“You’ve initialled it.”
“There’s a box.”
“There’s a box for you to initial your own schedule. In your own house.” She turned it over. “There’s a second page.”
“There’s an appendix.”
“Michael.”
“It’s contact numbers. It’s one side.”
“You’ve made an appendix about your wife.”
“I’ve made an appendix about a lane with no signal in it,” I said, “and if you’d like to keep going I can show you the version I didn’t print.”
“There’s a version you didn’t print.”
“There’s a version I didn’t print.” I turned the page over for her. “See this column?”
“What’s this column?”
“That’s if she says no.”
Pia stopped turning it over.
“Say that again.”
“Every line has a thing to do and then a thing to do if she says no. Because she will say no to some of them and I don’t want anybody standing in that lane improvising.” I did not look up. “Levi improvises. I’ve seen it. He improvised at a christening and we’re still dealing with the fallout.”
“I was there.”
“Then you know.”
Pia put the schedule down on the table and read the whole of it standing up.
“Line four,” she said.
“Which is four.”
“Thursday. Sweet peas. Loose. Not wrapped. Leave on the wall, do not knock.” She read it out flat, the way you read a shopping list. “And then in the second column it says: if she brings them back out, take them, do not say anything, do not look sad about it.”
“That’s right.”
“Michael, why does that column exist?”
“Because if she hands them back and Levi makes a face, then she’s given me something,” I said. “She’d have given me a reaction, and I’d have taken it, and I’m not doing that anymore. Nobody in this family is doing that anymore.”
The heating came on somewhere in that house and made its noise.
“Right,” said Pia.
Levi put his head around the door.
“Are we having a meeting?”
“There’s no meeting.”
“There’s a document.”
“There’s a schedule.”
“That’s a document, Michael. I can see the columns from here.” He came in and read the top of it over my shoulder, which took a while, because Levi reads out loud with his mouth moving. “What’s Duck maintenance?”
“The boat wants charging Tuesdays and Fridays. The lead’s white, it isn’t the phone one, and if he puts it through the reeds there’s a spare propeller taped in the hatch.”
Levi straightened up.
“You’ve written a service schedule for a toy.”
“It isn’t a toy. It’s got a keel.”
“My car hasn’t got a service schedule.”
“Your car hasn’t got a keel either, Levi, and I’ve seen the state of it.”
“You’ve written a service schedule,” said Levi, with enormous slow pleasure, “for a toy,” and went out of that room to find somebody who had not yet heard, and I could hear him telling them from two doors away.
I went via Boston because I had to sign a thing for Ackroyd, and then I did a thing I had not planned.
Alicia Harvey’s office looks at a wall. I went in and paid the bill in person, which anybody with a phone could have done, and the girl at that desk very carefully did not ask why.
She came out with her glasses up in her hair.
“Mr. Folger.”
“I’m not here about anything.”
“People are never here about anything. They’re always here about something they’d rather not name.”
“I’m paying an invoice.”
“You are paying an invoice on foot, in a city you were passing through, and I’d like you to hear how that sounds out loud.” She took the card. “Is that all?”
“There’s an undertaking from Ackroyd. Nothing contested, nothing on the boy, nothing on the money. It’s four lines and I’d like it on your file rather than sitting in his.”
She read it standing up. Her face did nothing whatsoever.
“Who drafted it?”
“I did. Ackroyd tidied it.”
“Ackroyd did not tidy this.”
“Ackroyd tried,” I said. “He put in a clause about it being without prejudice and I took it out, because it isn’t. There’s no prejudice anywhere in it. That’s the entire idea.”
“That’s unusually clean.”
“It’s meant to be.”
“It’s meant to be seen,” Alicia Harvey said, and handed the card back. “Mr. Folger, you are the most organized man I have ever failed to advise. You have made a document about this. I would put money on there being a document about this.”
Do not answer that.
“There’s a schedule.”
“Of course there is.”
“It’s for my family. I’m away for a few days and I’d rather they didn’t invent things.”
“And is there a column,” she said, “for what happens if she says no?”
I did not say anything.
Alicia Harvey put her glasses down out of her hair and onto her nose and looked at me over them.
“That is the first sensible thing you have done since I met you,” she said. “Don’t tell her about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d be telling her in order to be seen doing it, and then it stops being the thing and starts being the telling.” She was already walking. “Go and lose your containers, Mr. Folger. Your invoice is paid.”
Antwerp took all of it.
I sat in rooms with men who wanted to talk about paperwork, and I was good at it, because that is the one thing that has never left me. Prentice got on a call at an hour designed to catch me tired and I was not tired.
“The western route was always a risk.”
“It was.”
He waited for the rest of it. There is always a rest of it. Your father took bigger risks. Your father would have had this cleared by Tuesday. Your father, your father, your father, and then a silence with my name in it.
“Anything else, Prentice?”
A pause on that line that I enjoyed more than I should have.
“No,” he said.
I did not say the rest of it either, which is the closest I have come to growing up in years.
I got the containers released.
Nobody clapped. Nobody has ever clapped. A man in a gray room stamped a form and another man wheeled a cart somewhere, and a route that feeds jobs went back to existing, and I walked out into a parking lot and stood there.
That’s the thing you’ve been away for. That is the whole of it, and you have missed a Thursday for it, and there is a column on a piece of paper at home telling your brother what to do about sweet peas.
And then I was in a hotel room in a city I do not like, at two in the morning, on top of a made bed with my shoes off and my shirt still on, holding a phone I could not use because she has my number in a list.
So I got the hotel paper out of the drawer.
It was not an apology. I have done apologies. I did one with flowers and one with a folder and one on a dock, and they cost me nothing, which is why they were worth nothing.
I wrote a list. On the left, a thing I had done. On the right, the thing I was going to do about it.
You told me about the chair and I said he is two, he puts things on things. I am going to be in the room at six o’clock. Every day I am on this island, and I am going to be on this island.
You asked me at a kitchen table to keep it professional and I told you what you were instead. There is nobody working for me now who knew you before I did, and there never will be again, and I did not do that for you because you had already gone.
You said the ferry did not freeze. You were right and I said she’d know, as though you were a source. You were standing on that dock. You are not a source. You were there.
You told me you eat what he does not finish, standing at a counter, out of the pan. I did not know that. I have been married to you since before that boy existed and I did not know what you eat.
I am not going to send anybody with food. You told me not to and I heard you.
That one sat on the page on its own for a long time and I nearly took it off and did not.
I got to the bottom of the second sheet and then I stopped, because the next line wanted to be a request, and the whole point of the thing was that there is no request on it. Not one. Nothing at the end that says and so, or which is why, or I hope.
A list of things I did and things I will do. She can read it and burn it and I will still do all of it.
I folded it and put it in the inside pocket of the jacket that was over the chair.
I did not send it.
I could have. There is a woman in that lane who would have carried it up herself and enjoyed doing it, and Sal would have driven it, and Dee Coffin would have posted it and told the island what color the envelope was.
But every single thing I have handed that woman this season has arrived with me attached to it. The flowers. The house. The number. The fifteen pages under her table leg. A man turning up at four with his hands where she can see them.
So the letter stayed in the jacket.
You could send it, I thought, at about four in the morning, with the ceiling doing nothing above me. You could have it in her hand before you land, and then whatever she felt about it, she would have felt it about a thing, not about you standing in a lane with your hands out.
And then I thought, that is exactly why you want to.
I put the jacket on in the morning and got on a plane and went back to the island, and I could feel the letter against my ribs the whole way, and there is nobody I can explain that to, least of all my brother, who would ask me why I did not just text her and would be, on the available evidence, correct.