The Roasting Tin

Esther gave Imran the shopping list at eight on Saturday morning, and Imran read it on the outside stair and came back in.

“You’ve put how many grams of mince.”

“Twelve hundred.”

“And you’ve put not the lean, underlined.”

“The lean’s no good for it. It goes dry.” She took the list back and looked at it, in case she had written anything she would have to defend. Potatoes, two and a half kilos, floury. Onions, carrots, a swede if they had one. Butter, the salted. Worcestershire sauce. Strong cheese for the top. Flour, sugar, eggs, a jar of jam, the cheap kind, raspberry. “And a roasting tin. The deepest they’ve got. There isn’t one in this kitchen that’ll do.”

“What are you making?”

“Cottage pie,” she said. “My mother’s. The way she made it for three hundred children every Tuesday for twenty-six years. And a jam sponge after, because you can’t have one without the other, it’s the law.”

Imran looked at the list, and at her, and at the kitchen with its one small oven.

“For how many?”

“Everyone,” she said. “It’ll keep.”

He went. Aled, at the counter with the log, said nothing at all, and she did not look at him, and knew he was looking at the list she had left on the table, and at roasting tin, and she wondered whether he knew why.

· · ·Scene break

She knew why.

Four corners. A round dish had none. A deep roasting tin, the kind her mother had pulled out of the school ovens with a folded tea towel in each hand, had four corners where the potato went brown and hard at the edges and caught on the tin, and every child in the queue had wanted one.

He took the corner piece. He always had. She had it in the notebook. Imran’s sandwiches at the cottage, the Wednesday of the list: the board had four corners and he had taken the one nearest him, which was a corner. The pastries the detective brought on Monday: he had taken the end. Her mother’s sponge in Weston: the end slice, the one with the crust on three sides. The rolls Imran bought on Tuesday, which came in a tray, joined: he had broken off the corner roll, every time, three days out of three.

It was not much. It was the kind of thing nobody would ever write down, and she had written it down, and that was the difference between her and everybody else he had ever stood behind.

She peeled the potatoes at the table. The strip light hummed and the blind was at the second slat and down in the yard the rain came and went. At eleven he did the round, and she heard him whistle, once, faintly, in the yard below, when he moved the car. She did not look up. She put a tick in the margin of her head.

· · ·Scene break

At one o’clock the tin came out of the oven and it was right.

She knew it was right the way she knew a column was right before she had added it: the potato ridged where she had run the fork through it, the ridges burnt at the tips, the cheese gone into it in brown blisters, and at the edges, in all four corners, the crust standing proud of the tin. It smelled of her mother’s kitchen and of every school corridor she had ever walked down at twenty past twelve, and for a moment, with the oven cloth in her hand, she had to stand still.

Imran came in and said, “Oh, my days,” with feeling, and she gave him a plate with a great deal on it, and he took it into the front room with the monitor and shut the door with his foot.

That left the kitchen. The table against the wall. Two chairs. The tin.

Aled had come in behind Imran. It was his meal break, one o’clock, as it nearly always was. He stood inside the door.

She cut the corner piece. She did it without looking at him, and put it on a plate, with the crust on two sides and the potato burnt at the tips, and held it out.

He looked at it. Then at her.

“That’s the corner,” he said.

“It is.”

He took the plate. He took the fork she held out after it. And he went to the counter, where he always went, and stood with his back half to the window and the plate in one hand, and ate.

She sat at the table with hers.

The other chair was a yard from her. It had its back to the wall and its front to the table, and it was not in anybody’s way, and it would have taken him one step and no time to sit in it. She had watched him not sit in it for eleven days. She had watched him not sit in any chair in any room she was in for nineteen days, and she had filed it, in the first week, as an anomaly, and gone looking for the reason as she would have for anything that consistent.

She understood the reason now. She had understood it slowly, and then all at once, on Wednesday, in the hall.

If he sat down, it would be a meal.

That was all. Not a lunch break, not a man eating in a kitchen because the kitchen was where the food was. A man and a woman at a small table with two chairs and a cottage pie she had made, for him, with four corners in the tin so that one of them would be his. If he sat in that chair it would be the thing it was. It would look like what it was, to Imran if Imran came in, to Jas, to anybody who ever had to write down what had happened in this kitchen; and to them. It would be a look that meant it, which was the one thing she had asked him on Tuesday morning not to give her.

He was keeping her terms standing up.

She did not ask him to sit. She ate her cottage pie, which was very good, and he ate his at the counter, which he finished, and he scraped the plate into the bin and ran the tap on it, and said, to the tap, “That was the best thing I’ve eaten in a year.”

“It’s my mother’s.”

“Then that was the best thing your mother’s eaten in a year,” he said, and she laughed with her mouth full, which she had not done since she was about nine.

· · ·Scene break

At three she showed him the schedule.

She had not been sure she would. She had turned it over all morning with the potatoes. It was not about the case, and it was not about them, not in any way she could have been made to account for; it was about him, and nobody had ever told her she could not notice him. And she had noticed him, for nineteen days, with the only instrument she had.

She opened the notebook at the page and turned it round and pushed it across the table, the way she had pushed the list across the table at the cottage.

“It’s not evidence,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s you.”

He came to the table and looked at it without picking it up, standing, his hands at his sides, the way he had read the list.

She had ruled it in four columns, in pencil. Item. First observed. Instances. Stated or observed.

Tea: milk after, no sugar, bag out quick. 9 Feb. Daily. Stated.

Corner piece (sandwich, pastry, sponge, roll). 10 Feb. Seven. Observed.

Car radio: up for the shipping forecast, down for the news. 22 Feb. One. Observed.

Whistles only when reversing. (Parks facing out, therefore reverses in.) Tune not identified. 11 Feb. Four, incl. today. Observed.

Times to the minute. “Ten past, not quarter past.” 8 Feb. Too many to count. Observed.

Tries a handle twice, and once from outside. 8 Feb. Too many to count. Observed.

Reads the back page of a newspaper first. 10 Feb. Five. Observed.

Stands at a window to one side of it, never in the middle. 11 Feb. Every window. Observed.

Will not take the last of anything. 13 Feb. Three. Observed.

At the bottom she had drawn a line and written the totals, the way she would have at the foot of any schedule. Stated: 1. Observed: 8.

He read it all, and then the top again. She watched him get to the whistling, and the corner of his mouth moved, and he put it back where it had been. She watched him get to the totals.

He did not say anything for a long time.

“Nine things,” he said at last.

“Nine that I’m sure of. There are others I’ve not got enough instances for yet. I don’t put a thing in a schedule on one sighting.” She heard herself and stopped. “The radio’s only one. I nearly left it out.”

“It’s right, though.”

“I know it’s right.”

“The tune’s Calon Lân,” he said. “My dad whistled it backing the van into the yard. Every night for thirty-one years. I didn’t know I did it.”

She wrote it in. She did not ask whether she could. She wrote it in the margin in small square capitals, CALON LÂN, and asked him how to spell it, and he told her, and she put the little roof on the a, and he watched her do it.

· · ·Scene break

He told her about the coffee while she was washing the tin.

She had not asked. She had not asked on the Thursday at the reservoir with the receipt on her knee, and she had not asked on the eighteenth, at the kitchen window, watching him pour it into the drain. It was on the schedule by its absence: it was the one thing she knew about him that she had not written down, because she did not know what it was.

He was at the counter with a tea towel, drying the plates she handed him, which he had never done before and did as if he had done it all his life.

“His name was Dennis Pollard,” he said. “He drove for a minister. Four years, the same minister, the same car, and I was in the front of it next to him. Every Thursday we did the run west to the constituency, and every Thursday we stopped at the same services at quarter past six in the morning, and I bought the coffees, because he’d bought them the first week and after that it was my turn for ever. He had white with two sugars. He said the sugar was for the minister, so he’d be sweet with him.” He dried a plate. “He never was.”

She rinsed the tin and did not turn round.

“He died on a Wednesday night. In his sleep. Fifty-eight. His wife rang the office at five, and they rang me, and the run went ahead anyway, because ministers don’t stop. There was a driver from the pool I’d never met, who drank tea. And at quarter past six we pulled into the services, and I went in, and I bought two coffees, because that’s what I did on a Thursday at quarter past six.” He put the plate on the pile. “I stood in the car park with his till the minister came out of the gents. Then I poured it away.”

“And the next Thursday.”

“And the next Thursday, and every one after. When I came to the unit here, the flat I found was twelve miles from those services.” He took the tin from her, and dried it, the corners with a fold of the towel. “I didn’t choose it for that. I don’t think I did. Nine years. I’ve never told anyone. Siobhan never knew I went.”

Esther turned the tap off.

She thought of him on the Thursday before last, standing in the yard with his hand still out over the drain as if something might come back up; and of a man of fifty-eight who said the sugar was for the minister, whom she would never meet and would now never forget.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’d read the receipt,” he said. “It was yours already. I’ve only given you the rest.”

· · ·Scene break

She dried her hands. He put the tin away in the cupboard that it did not fit, at an angle, and closed the door on it.

She thought about the schedule, open on the table behind them. One stated. Eight observed. She thought of all the questions she could ask him that were not about the case and not about them, which was, she had begun to understand, an enormous number, a whole life’s worth of questions, and she chose one.

“What would you want,” she said, “if you were allowed to want something? Not now. Not anything to do with this.” She did not say what this was. “Something that’s just yours.”

He had the tea towel in his hands. He folded it in half and in half again, and put it over the rail of the oven door, and straightened it, as her mother did.

He took his time. She had watched him give questions the time they needed since the pavement in Totterdown, and this was the longest she had ever seen him take, longer than the rota, longer than the phone face down on the table. She thought he was not going to answer. She thought, for a moment, that there was nothing there to give, and that that was what he was finding out, standing at the oven door in a kitchen that was not his.

“A door,” he said, “with my name on it.”

She did not move.

“My dad had one. Pryor, on a card by the bell, in my mam’s writing. Thirty-one years in the same house. I’ve lived in nine flats since I left and I’ve never put my name on any of them. I never saw the point. There was nobody going to come looking.” He looked at the tea towel, not at her. “That’s what I’d want. A door somebody could find.”

She did not say anything, because the thing she wanted to say was not allowed, and it was not the thing he would have expected. It was not so would I, though it was that. It was that it was the same want. Her own name, on her own door. She had never told anyone that, not Kofi, not her mother. She had written it on the last page of the thirty-second notebook, a line on its own, the week she was let go, and had never read it since.

She went to the table and turned the schedule round towards her and picked up the pencil.

Under the nine items she wrote a tenth, in small square capitals.

A door with his name on it. 27 Feb, 15:52. One. Stated.

Then she rubbed out the total at the foot of the column, and blew the rubbings off the page, and wrote it again.

Stated: 2.

He was watching her do it. She did not look up. She did not need to; she could feel where he was, at the counter, a yard and a half away, not sitting, not moving, reading it upside down across the table the way she had once read his name on a rota.