Chapter 4
The brass key with the tennis ball keyring doesn’t fit the front door or the back door, or anywhere else in the house. I guess it must be from a time before the locks were changed. I drop it into the key bowl by the front door. It must fit somewhere.
For our first meal altogether in the new house, I pick up Styrofoam boxes of fish, chips, and mushy peas from a chippie on Derby Road.
The dining room table is soon spread with paper plates and unwrapped meals, salt and pepper sachets strewn about; the air fills with the tang of vinegar as we eat, mouth-watering steam rising from freshly battered cod and salty thick-cut chips.
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was; lunch had been half a sandwich and an apple, wolfed down as I worked with the removals guys to bring in load after load from the lorry.
Everyone, it seems, is as hungry as me. Even Daisy tucks in without complaint, dipping chips into a large pool of ketchup as her older sister leans over to cut her scampi into bite-sized pieces.
Callum has discarded the wooden knife and fork from the takeaway, holding a piece of cod like a chicken drumstick as he devours it.
Jess stands at the head of the table, holding her phone up to capture a selfie for posterity.
“Come on then, everyone,” she says. “Cheese!”
Leah pulls a face. “Really, Mum?”
“First supper in our lovely new home.” She stands with her back to us to take a picture, then another. “This is a special occasion.”
Daisy gives her best cheesy grin while Callum leans around behind her, his tongue sticking out. I hold up my plastic cup of Prosecco in a toast at the far end of the table.
Jess takes a couple more then sits down and Leah leans over her, index finger swiping quickly through the pictures.
“Not that one,” our elder daughter says, swiping through the images. “Or that one. That one’s awful. You can post the last one if you absolutely have to but don’t tag me in anything.”
Jess smiles and gives our daughter a peck on the cheek. “I wouldn’t dream of it, darling girl.”
Daisy stands up in her seat. “Let me see, Mummy!”
Our youngest grins at the sight of her own smiling face on the screen, the novelty of a selfie still fresh and fascinating to her four-year-old eyes. The rest of us return to what remains of our fish and chips as Jess types rapidly on the phone before the chirruping ping of an uploaded post.
I study a stack of cardboard boxes as I sip my Prosecco, the sweet bubbles fizzing on my tongue.
Without curtains or carpets or any decoration, under a single bare bulb, the high-ceilinged room feels echoey and unloved—like a space that has been empty for a long time, waiting to be filled again.
Long cardboard boxes stamped with the black and yellow logo of Robinson Removals are piled halfway up the window that looks out onto the drive.
Coco, our golden retriever, has made a bed on a pile of old dust sheets stacked in the corner.
There is one solitary picture in the room: Jess has dug a framed wedding photo out of one of the boxes and put it in pride of place on the mantelpiece, the two of us looking ridiculously young on the steps of the registry office.
Jess laughing in a cream and scarlet silk dress and me in a three-quarter-length coat, waistcoat, and red cravat, an outfit that had been volcanically hot on that July day almost a decade ago.
Leah looks impossibly cute in the picture, our little bridesmaid in cream silk, clutching her mother’s hand.
Our eldest child had been a surprise, conceived only a few months after we first met and already seven years old by the time we got around to tying the knot.
She had loved every minute of the wedding and insisted on wearing her bridesmaid dress every day for the following week.
Jess had never been able to bring herself to sell it or give it to charity—as far as I know, the little dress is somewhere in the house now, among the dozens of boxes and crates and cases waiting to be unpacked.
Our cat, Steve, jumps up onto the chair next to her, his chin just at the level of the table as he stares hungrily at each of our plates in turn, his ginger nose twitching at the smell of fresh fish.
Jess slices off a chunk of cod beneath the batter, holding it out for him as he leaps off the chair to receive it, chewing noisily and purring at the same time.
“I thought the big lad was going on a diet?” I say.
“He’s had a stressful moving-in day.” She picks off another slice of the white fish and drops it down to him. “Haven’t you, Stevie? Particularly as he’s not allowed to go outside and explore for another week.”
“The vet did say he was chunky enough as he is.”
Jess gives me a mock frown. “Are you fat-shaming my ginger son?”
“He’s going to struggle to get through the cat flap if he gets much wider.”
She scratches the tomcat’s big blunt head.
“Don’t listen to the nasty man, Stevie. You’re perfect as you are.” Steve purrs in response, blinking contentedly under her hand. “It’s bad enough that you make him wear this collar.”
The red collar, with the words “Please do not feed me” stenciled along its length, had been a vain attempt to dissuade our old neighbors from giving him treats.
I grunt. “Not sure it made much difference to all the little old ladies he used to visit.”
“In any case,” Jess says, “he doesn’t even have a new cat flap yet.”
“It’s on my to-do list. Just need to dig the right tools out from whatever packing crate they’re in.”
“And how long is your to-do list?”
“Slightly longer than War and Peace.”
“Be quicker to tick things off if you spent less time in your new secret room up on the top floor.”
“I’ve hardly been in there at all,” I say, hearing the note of protest in my voice. “But it is curious.”
“Not a priority though, is it?”
I shrug; it’s hard to explain. And I know my smart, logical, pragmatic wife wouldn’t understand, but while the little hidden room is certainly not a priority, it’s instead that most frustrating thing: the unknown.
It’s an unanswered question, it’s disorder, it’s opaque—it’s all of these things.
With no obvious reason for being there, the obsolete phone offering a tantalizing hint of how long it has lain undisturbed.
It is the very definition of chaos, and it’s crying out for me to put it in some kind of order.
To make sense of it all. It’s just in my nature, I suppose.
It is how I have looked at the world for as long as I can remember.
“I’d like to figure it out,” I say. “That’s all. It’s our house now, our home, and I want to know everything about it. From top to bottom.”
“I like your cute new mobile, by the way.” She gives me a playful smile, indicating the little flip phone on a side table in the corner. “Very retro.”
“Found it upstairs.” I’d plugged in the old Motorola to charge earlier, more in hope than expectation. “It’s pretty much the exact same handset I had when I was nineteen. You had one too, didn’t you?”
She shakes her head. “Mine was a Nokia.”
“Thought I’d see if I could get this one working again, show the kids what our old phones were like, although I’m not even sure if it’ll switch on after the battery’s been dead for so—”
“It does,” she says. “I powered it up when you went out to the chip shop.”
“You got it working already?”
“Well.” She gets up and fetches it from the side table. “It switches on, but there’s not a lot to see, really.”
Daisy holds out a small hand, sticky with ketchup.
“Can I have a look, Mummy?”
Jess gives our daughter’s hand a quick wipe with a piece of kitchen roll.
“Used to love these old flippy phones,” she says, sliding the Motorola over. “First time your dad ever asked me out on a date was via text from one just like this.”
“Gross,” Leah says. “Don’t need to know the details, thanks.”
Daisy swipes at the screen with little fingers, frowning in frustration when nothing happens.
“It’s broken,” she says, tapping and swiping. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It has buttons instead of a screen, Daisy.”
“Why?”
“That’s how phones used to be, before your sister was born.”
The handset reminds me of a child’s toy and it must be five, six, seven generations old, like the great-great-great-grandfather of my iPhone. An old Ford Cortina next to a Tesla.
Daisy presses buttons at random. “Does it have Balloon Pop or Numberblocks?”
Jess shakes her head. “I shouldn’t think so. Let Daddy have a look.”
With a disappointed frown, our youngest goes back to dipping her chips in the small lake of ketchup on her plate. Callum picks the phone up instead, flipping it closed and open a few times before losing interest. He slides it between two Styrofoam boxes of thick-cut chips toward me.
The screen on the little Motorola shows a half-full battery icon and the time as 00:29—the clock resetting when it powered up, presumably.
Opening it up, there is a blue backlight behind the buttons that was probably incredibly high-tech when the phone first came out but now just looks quaint.
I know the SIM card will have long since ceased to work, but it has a nostalgic aura that I can’t quite put my finger on.
It’s like a little piece of my own history, stumbling across an old friend from back in the day.
There are nine icons arranged in a square on the home screen, basic options for texts, calls, settings, and so on.
There are no stored messages—sent or received—and nothing shows in the call log.
Did these things even have email? Nothing happens when I select the option marked with a blue and green globe; there is nothing in the Calendar option either and no high score recorded in a rudimentary game called Hungry Fish.
There are also no bars of reception, no network listed.
I assume it’s so old it would be 2G, or maybe 1G—far too primitive to connect to today’s modern 5G network.
If the contract was even still being paid, which it probably wasn’t.
“Bit of an anticlimax,” I say, returning to the main menu screen. “Looks like it’s never been used.”
Jess pushes her plate away and comes around the table to sit next to me, perching on a stack of plastic packing crates.
“I did find a couple of curious things on it while you were out,” she says. “Let me show you.”
She leans over, pushing small silver buttons.
The menus are choppy and slow and the home screen display has a lot more in common with the clunky display on our landline than any modern smartphone.
The media option shows one picture in the memory, but the screen is so small and pixelated it’s impossible to tell what it is.
It’s slightly blurred, maybe a hand, a thumb, or the side of someone’s face?
The camera is very primitive and the tiny square screen likewise, barely an inch across and painfully slow to load even this single picture.
“What is it?”
She shrugs. “Could be the previous owner? Here’s the other thing—it’s a bit cryptic.”
She clicks buttons to get to the phonebook, which lists a single number. But instead of a name it’s simply listed as USE THIS. Nothing that suggests who it belongs to.
“Maybe it was an unwanted gift,” I say. “A backup phone for a grandparent to contact their grown-up children? Just one number to make it as simple as possible instead of them having to scroll through pages of names or numbers.”
Jess nods. “Mum tried something similar with Grandad.”
Her grandad Eric had refused all efforts to join the mobile era, had never yet sent so much as a text message and only ever turned it on to make a very occasional phone call. After which he’d turn it off again and put it in the kitchen drawer, forget about it for another week or two.
“Perhaps it belongs to someone like him.” She had a particular soft spot for Eric, who had lost his wife long before I’d first met him, and had never remarried. “Do you think we should ring it and check?”
“Odds are the number’s probably out of service.”
She gives me a playful nudge. “Stop being so boring. Maybe it’ll still work.”
“How much do you want to bet?”
“Loser clears the dinner and puts the kids to bed?”
I raise an eyebrow. “High stakes. You’re on.”
She lays her own mobile flat on the table next to it and taps the number in before pressing the green dial button, switching it to loudspeaker as we both lean in to listen.
I’m expecting an automated message saying the number is not available.
Instead, there is a pause. A click.
And then it starts to ring.