Chapter Fourteen — The Number

The card had been in the kitchen drawer under the spare keys and the dead batteries and the rubber bands gone hard with age for as long as Lieselot could remember, and she had not once taken it out to look at it, which was its own kind of looking, the way you can know to the centimetre where a sore tooth is by the path your tongue takes around it.

It was a business card, which was the strange thing. Not a letter, not a photograph. A card for a hairdresser's in Genk — Salon Christiane, Coiffure Dames — with a phone number printed on it in curled gold letters, and on the back, in a hand Lieselot would have known anywhere because it was half her own, three lines in blue biro: the salon was where she worked Tuesday to Saturday; the home number was the other one, ring after six; and underneath, the thing that had sat in the drawer for four years going soft at the edges like the funeral tin, Bel maar. Wanneer ge wilt. Call. Whenever you want.

Whenever. As if want were a tap you could turn.

She'd carried it down the Pastoorstraat in the pocket of the anorak with the logbook page folded flat in the other pocket against her hip, because she had not been able to make herself leave the logbook in the house with Bram in it, and because she had not been able to make herself put it in the loft either, where the tin already was, under the board, as if the two halves of the thing oughtn't to be kept too close together in case they finished saying what they meant. So she'd carried both. The proof of one robbery against one hip and the proof of another against the other, and walked down to the phone box at the end of the dead high street, where the call could be a thing that happened away from the house, in glass, where she could leave it when she left.

The box stood on the corner by the shuttered frituur and the bank that had become a place that sold curtains and then become nothing, just a window with the gold lettering of the bank ghosting through the whitewash, the way the king and queen ghosted through the lid of the tin, the way everything in this town was a thing with an older truer thing showing through it if you stood at the right angle. The box had its panes, most of them. One was starred where someone had put a fist or a head through it years ago and never finished. The light inside came on when she pulled the door to, a buzzing yellow light that made the glass go to mirror so that the street disappeared and there was only her, narrow and grey, with the receiver in her hand.

She had a fistful of francs, the old ones, Baudouin still on them, the dead king. She fed two into the slot and they went down with a sound like a clock taking a tooth, and she dialled the home number off the back of the card, ring after six, and it was twenty past, and she stood in the box in the buzzing yellow with the south of the sky going down behind her in the smeared glass and listened to it ring in a town she'd never seen.

It rang four times. Then it stopped, and there was the small particular hiss of a line opened a long way off, and a voice said, "Ja, hallo?"

And Lieselot found she had nothing ready. She had thought she'd had a thing ready. She'd had it ready the whole walk down. But the voice was a real voice, warm and a little tired, a woman who'd just come in from somewhere and was standing in a hall in her coat, maybe, the way Wendy stood in doorways, half gone already, and the voice was hers, half hers, the half that wasn't Maes, and Lieselot stood in the glass and said nothing for a beat too long, the way she'd said nothing too long at Wendy, the way the receiver in 1958 — no. There was no 1958 in this. This was hers.

"Hallo?" the voice said again, and then, careful, the way you are with a silent line, "Wie is dat?"

"It's me," Lieselot said.

The hiss changed. You could hear a thing happen in it, a held breath let down a wire.

"Lieselot," her mother said. Not a question. She'd known on it's me. That was the part Lieselot hadn't braced for, that a woman four years gone would know her on two words, would have kept the shape of her voice all this time the way Lieselot had kept the path around the tooth. "Lieselot. Amai." A small wet laugh, gone as soon as it came. "I'd nearly — I thought it might be. I don't know why. I had a feeling, this week."

"Opa died," Lieselot said.

A silence. Coins counting down in the slot, that small steady eating.

"I know," her mother said. "I heard. Someone — I heard." She didn't say who. There was a whole town behind that someone, a whole net of who-tells-who that ran out past the edge of the map and found a woman in a hall in Genk and told her the old man was in the ground, and hadn't told her in time, or she'd not have come, or she'd not been asked, and none of that got said. "I wanted to ring you. I had the — I sat with the phone. I didn't know if you'd want." A pause. "I'm glad you rang."

"He left me the birds," Lieselot said.

She hadn't meant to lead with it. She'd meant to say nothing about the birds. But it came out of her like the held breath off the wire, because it was the true centre of everything now and she had no one to say the true centre to, not Wendy, not Bram, not Jules even, who knew the craft of it but not the rot, and here was a voice four years gone that owed her nothing and would carry it nowhere, a voice in glass at the end of the dead street.

"The birds," her mother said, and there was the old thing in it at once, quick, before she could put it away — a flinch, a curled lip you could hear down a wire. "He left you his birds. Not — " She stopped. "Not the house?"

"The house went to Bram."

"Of course it did." A breath. "And the birds went to you. Tuurlijk." And then, lower, almost to herself, "He never gave that man one thing that mattered in his whole life and he gave the girl a shed full of pigeons. That's — " She caught it. "Sorry. Sorry, schat. I shouldn't. I'm glad he — he loved you. He did love you. He'd lift you up to that window, you won't remember—"

"I remember."

"—to the window, so you'd see his bird come in. You were tiny. You'd shout when you saw it. Daar, daar. He'd have walked into the sea for you." She said it the way you say a thing you've decided to be at peace with and aren't. "He couldn't say a kind word to a grown person to save his life and he'd have walked into the sea for you. That's the Maes of it. They love down and they don't love sideways. There's no room in them for sideways."

The coins ate. Lieselot fed another in without looking, her eyes on the smeared glass, on the last of the light going behind the curtain-shop window, behind the ghost of the bank.

"Come here," her mother said.

It came so quietly Lieselot almost missed it under the line-hiss.

"What?"

"Come here. To me. I've a flat, it's small, but there's — you could have the back room, it's small but it's yours, it gets the morning. There's a school, a good one, a real school with a — they do the languages, the sciences, the lot, not like the — there's a future in it, Lieselot. You could finish there. You're clever, you were always the clever one, everybody said. You don't have to be — " She stopped on the edge of saying what. "You don't have to stay there. You don't have to be the one that stayed. Sell the birds. Whatever they're worth — and they're worth something, I know what they're worth, I lived with it long enough — sell them and come, and you'd never have to look at a pigeon or a slag heap or that café full of dead men again in your life."

And there it was. Laid out clean on the wire. The list, her own list, the one she'd built herself for fifteen years: a train that went past the city, a school with the sciences, a room that got the morning, out — the whole of it, offered, free, by the one person in the world who'd done it, who'd got out, who was proof you could. Lieselot stood in the glass box and looked at her own grey narrow face hung in the mirror the light made, and waited to feel the thing she'd spent fifteen years sure she'd feel if this door ever opened.

She felt the logbook against her hip.

That was the thing she felt. Not the offer. The folded paper at her hip with Frans Bery's neat dead pencil-hand on it, the time of a win that never got written down anywhere it counted, and the tin under the board with the other half of it, the clock that lied and the book of money sent forty years to a man who knew and couldn't prove and got smaller every year. Sell the birds. You could. You could sell the birds and the bloodline went south to some loft up by Antwerp or east into Holland and the line of the 58 flew on under a stranger's name and nobody ever had to say whose win it was built on, and the town kept its legend, and Frans Bery stayed second in the only book the world keeps, forever, and Lieselot got the back room that got the morning. You could buy your way out with it. The price was just leaving the lie exactly where it was.

Her mother had done that. Not the lie — her mother didn't know the lie, her mother had walked out years before the tin ever told Lieselot anything. But she'd done the other thing. She'd looked at the whole of it, the dead town and the dead king and the men who loved down and never sideways, and she'd weighed it, and she'd left it exactly where it was and walked, and got the flat that got the morning, and was, four years on, standing in a hall in her coat ringing nobody, waited on by no one, known to one girl who hadn't called in four years and called now only because there was a thing she couldn't carry and needed a voice that would take it nowhere.

She'd got out. She just hadn't got free. You could hear it down the wire, under the warmth, the thin place in it — the sound of a person who'd left the weight where it was and found out the hard way that leaving a weight is not the same as not carrying it; that some weights you carry by the very act of leaving them, that they go where you go, lighter only in the way a stone is lighter when you throw it, for exactly as long as it's in the air.

"You hear me?" her mother said. "Lieselot? Say something."

"I'm here," she said.

"Will you come? You don't have to say now. But will you think — "

"I can't sell them," Lieselot said.

It came out flat, the way the true things came out of her, no weight on it, and her mother heard the no in it and was quiet a moment.

"Why not," she said. Not unkind. Tired. A woman who'd thought she was holding a door and felt it not swing.

And Lieselot stood in the glass and looked for the answer and found she didn't have it in words, not the real one, not the one with the tin in it and the logbook and the handful of minutes and a dead man's neat pencil hand. She had only the shape of it. She had the thing she'd felt at her hip instead of in her chest. So she gave the small true wrong thing, the armour, the way she always did, because the real one wouldn't come.

"There's a season on them," she said. "In the will. They have to be flown or they go to the club. There's a — it's complicated."

"That's him," her mother said at once, and the flinch was back, sharp. "That's him to the bone. Reaching up out of the ground to put a leash on you. He couldn't just give you a thing, could he, he had to tie it to you, he had to — God, even dead. Even dead he's got his hand on the back of your neck steering you down the garden." A breath. "Don't let him. Lieselot. That's what I'm — that's the whole of what I'm saying to you. Don't let a dead man's birds be the thing that — I let this town put its hand on the back of my neck for years and the only thing I ever did right was take its hand off. You take its hand off. You're fifteen. You take the hand off now and you never have to learn how heavy it gets."

And it was good advice. That was the worst of it, standing in the box with the coins eating down: it was good, clean, true advice, the advice Lieselot would have given herself a month ago, the advice that matched her list line for line. Take the hand off now. And a month ago she'd have taken it. A month ago there was no logbook at her hip and no tin under the board and no Frans Bery in the back of any room, knowing, and no morning at the loft window with a cock snapping home out of an emptied sky like a held breath let go, and no Jules saying voel with two fingers along a keel, none of it; a month ago the birds were just the smell from childhood she meant to leave behind, and the hand on the back of her neck was just the town, and you could take a town's hand off and walk.

But it wasn't the town's hand now. That was the thing she couldn't say down a wire to a woman in a hall in Genk. It wasn't the town that had its hand on her. It was the truth. The truth had its hand on the back of her neck, steering her down the garden, and you couldn't take the truth's hand off and call it freedom. You could only walk out from under it and call the walking freedom and find out, four years on, in a flat that got the morning, that you'd carried it the whole way after all, lighter only while you were in the air.

"I have to go," Lieselot said. "The coins are nearly — "

"Wait. Wacht. Lieselot. Have you got a pen, write the home number again, the salon's on the — "

"I've got the card."

"You've got — " Her mother stopped. Lieselot heard her understand that the card had been in the house four years, in the drawer, under the keys, and that her daughter had known to the centimetre where it was the whole time and not touched it, and that this was the first call and might be the last for a while, and that she could not make it be otherwise from a hall in Genk with her coat still on. "You've got the card," she said, quieter. "Right. Then you've got the number. You ring it. Whenever you — you ring it, Lieselot. The room's there. It's a small room but it gets the morning, and it's yours, and the offer doesn't have a season on it, you hear me? There's no season on my door. You come whenever. There's no clock on it."

There's no clock on it. Lieselot stood in the glass with the receiver gone warm against her ear and the last francs counting down and looked at her own face in the mirror the light made, and thought, with a flat clear cold she'd carry out of that box and down the dead street and not be able to put down: that's the difference, then. That's the whole of it. Her mother's door had no clock on it because nothing was riding on it. You could walk through a door with no clock any day of your life and it would change nothing, ever, because the thing on the other side of it asked nothing of you and was owed nothing by you and would be there the same whether you came at fifteen or fifty or never. A door with no clock was just a way out. And the loft — the tin, the logbook, the season counting down to a race across the sea, the choice with a date on it — the loft had a clock on it the way honest things have clocks on them, because something was riding on it, because it would matter forever exactly when and how she walked through, because it was owed and owing both, and you could not get a thing like that for free, and you could not leave a thing like that and be free of it, you could only choose it or carry it, and either way it had its hand on the back of your neck.

She had wanted out her whole life. She had built herself for the door with no clock.

She stood in the glass and understood she wasn't going to walk through it, and could not have said why in any words her mother would not have heard as the town's hand on her neck, the dead man's leash, the very thing her mother had spent her one brave act getting free of — and so she said none of it, and that was the loneliest part of the call, lonelier than the hiss, lonelier than the dead king on the coins: that she had finally understood the difference between getting out and getting free, and there was no one on the wire who could be told it, because the one person who'd know it in her bones was the one person it would sound, to, exactly like a fifteen-year-old being steered down a garden by a dead man's hand.

"I have to go," she said. "Dag, mama."

"Lieselot — "

The last coin went down with the small sound of a clock taking a tooth, and the line gave a tone, flat and even, the sound of a thing finished, and Lieselot stood with the dead receiver warm against her ear a moment longer than she needed to before she hung it on the hook.

The light buzzed. Her grey face hung in the mirror the light made. She pushed the door and the box let her go and the light went out behind her and the glass gave the street back — the shuttered frituur, the ghost of the bank, the curtain-shop, the winding-gear black at the end of it all against a sky gone the colour of the inside of a shell. The receiver, she found when she put her hand back to the door to steady it, the receiver behind the glass was still warm where she'd had it, holding the heat of the call after the call was dead, the way a thing holds the shape of what's left it for a little while before it lets go, and then lets go.

She walked back up the dead high street with the logbook against one hip and the card against the other and the south of the sky going out behind her, and she did not look back at the box, and she did not feel free, and she understood now that she never would, not the way her mother had meant it, not the door-with-no-clock way; that the only freedom on offer to her now was the other kind, the kind with a clock on it and a price and a date, and that she had just, standing in a glass box on a dead corner, declined the only version of out she'd ever wanted in her life, and not for the birds, and not for Staf, and not even for the truth exactly — but because she had finally seen what was on the far side of the door with no clock, a woman in a hall in her coat, four years out and not one ounce lighter, and known it for what it was.

Not a way out. Just a way to be gone.