Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Observations Notebook
The launderette hummed at two in the morning like something alive and dreaming. Sixteen washing machines lined the left wall, fourteen dryers on the right, and between them a linoleum floor the colour of weak tea, scuffed in patterns that Elodie Sefton had long ago memorised. She sat behind the counter on a stool she'd padded with a folded towel, her posture upright, her hands resting on a hardback notebook, and she watched the single customer of the hour feed coins into Machine Eleven.
Machine Eleven had a temperament. It accepted fifty-pence pieces only if you pressed them in with your thumb at a slight leftward angle. Elodie had considered placing a small instructional note on its face, but she'd observed that people rarely read signs, and when they did, they resented them. Better to let them struggle and then offer assistance. It preserved their dignity.
The customer—a woman in her fifties with a quilted jacket and paint-stained tracksuit bottoms—slapped the coin slot with her palm.
"Might I be of assistance?" Elodie said.
The woman turned. There was that look. Elodie had catalogued it many times. It was the look people gave when they heard her speak, as though she had addressed them in a foreign language, or as though they suspected she was making fun of them. She was not making fun of them. She simply spoke the way she spoke.
"It's not taking my money," the woman said.
"Machine Eleven can be particular." Elodie came around the counter with the unhurried precision of someone who had performed this task several hundred times. She took the fifty-pence piece, pressed it into the slot with her left thumb at the correct angle, and the machine swallowed it with a satisfied click. "There. She merely requires a gentle hand."
"You talk like you're in a period drama," the woman said. It was not unkind, the way she said it. More bewildered.
"So I've been told," Elodie replied, and returned to her stool.
The woman loaded her washing and left, the bell above the door chiming thinly as it closed behind her. Elodie opened her notebook.
*Thursday, 14 March. 2:07 a.m. Woman, approximately 55. Paint on clothing suggests artistic pursuit or recent redecoration. Wedding ring present but turned inward—fidgeting habit or ambivalence? Wore one earring (left ear, small gold hoop). The other may have been lost, or she may have dressed in haste. Brought washing in a bin bag rather than a proper laundry bag. This suggests either a temporary arrangement or a permanent lack of concern for the niceties of laundry transportation. She smelled faintly of turpentine and Parma Violets.*
Elodie closed the notebook and placed her pen—a black Muji 0.38, the only pen she used—precisely alongside it. The notebook was her forty-third. The previous forty-two sat on a shelf in her grandmother's flat, arranged chronologically, their spines labelled in the same careful hand. She had begun them at sixteen, the year after Suki died, and she had not missed a shift without filling at least one page.
She did not know, precisely, why she kept them. Dr. Farooq, whom she had seen for eleven sessions before the funding ran out, had suggested the notebooks were a way of maintaining connection to the world without the risk of genuine intimacy. Elodie had considered this and replied that she found it a reasonable hypothesis but that she also simply enjoyed noticing things. Dr. Farooq had smiled at that, which Elodie had noted in her book later that evening.
The launderette was called Suds & Spin, a name Elodie found both inelegant and inaccurate, since the machines did considerably more than spin, and "suds" implied a frothiness that the establishment did not possess. It occupied the ground floor of a narrow building on Lodge Lane, sandwiched between a halal butcher's and a boarded-up betting shop. It had been twenty-four hours since 1987, which meant it had been open without interruption for longer than Elodie had been alive. She found this comforting. The constancy of it. The fluorescent lights that never went off, the perpetual warmth, the reliable slosh and tumble of other people's clothing going round and round.
Her shift ran from ten at night to six in the morning. The owner, a man named Terence Boyle who was seventy-one and had a magnificent moustache and opinions about everything, trusted her completely. He had hired her six years ago, when she was twenty-three and had just lost her grandmother and could not hold a conversation without her hands shaking. He had not asked her to be normal. He had asked her to be reliable, and she was.
At 2:45, the machines finished their cycles and the launderette fell silent except for the buzz of the fluorescent tubes and the distant sound of a taxi idling on the street. Elodie folded the woman's forgotten sock—it had fallen behind Machine Eleven—and placed it in the lost property box. The lost property box was a shoebox that Elodie had covered in brown paper and labelled in her careful script: *Items Awaiting Reunion With Their Persons*. Terence had looked at it and said, "You're a strange one, love," which was, Elodie knew, his way of saying he was fond of her.
She made herself a cup of tea from the kettle she kept behind the counter. Loose leaf, Assam, brewed for exactly four minutes. She did not use the powdered instant that Terence left in the cupboard. She had explained to him, once, that instant tea was an affront to the very concept of civilisation, and he had laughed so hard he'd had to sit down.
The tea was good. The night was quiet. Elodie sat on her stool and listened to the nothing, and she thought about Sunday.
Sunday was letter day.
---
The flat was on the fourth floor of a tower block in Toxteth, and it had not changed in four years. This was not an accident. This was policy.
Elodie let herself in at quarter past six, as she did every morning, and hung her coat on the third hook by the door—the first two hooks held her grandmother's raincoat and her grandmother's church cardigan, respectively, and they were not to be disturbed. She removed her shoes and placed them on the rack, beside her grandmother's orthopaedic sandals and her grandmother's good shoes, the ones with the low heel that she'd worn to funerals and christenings.
The hallway smelled of lavender, because Elodie refreshed the potpourri every fortnight. It was the same brand Jean had used. Elodie ordered it from a shop in the Lake District that still made it the old-fashioned way, with actual lavender rather than synthetic fragrance. It cost more than it should, but some things were not negotiable.
The kitchen was small and yellow—Jean had painted it herself in 1998, a colour she called "sunshine" and Elodie called "optimistic custard." On the table, beside the salt and pepper shakers shaped like Scottie dogs, lay a folded newspaper open to the crossword page. It was the Liverpool Echo, dated 7th November 2019—the day Jean had died. She had completed fourteen of the twenty-four clues. Elodie knew them by heart. Seven across: PERSEVERANCE. Twelve down: NIGHTINGALE. Jean had been stuck on seventeen across, a six-letter word meaning "to give up entirely." The answer was RESIGN, but Elodie had never filled it in.
She boiled the kettle—a proper kettle, not electric, because Jean had distrusted electric kettles on principle—and made toast with marmalade, thick-cut, from a jar she bought at the same corner shop Jean had used. She ate standing at the counter, looking out the window at the city waking up. Liverpool in March was grey and damp and beautiful in a way that Elodie suspected only people who had grown up here could appreciate. The Mersey was out there somewhere, behind the buildings, wide and brown and tidal. She tried not to think about water.
After breakfast, she washed up, dried the plate and knife, and returned them to their places. She went to the sitting room, where Jean's armchair still bore the impression of Jean's body, where the remote control still sat on the arm where Jean had left it, where the shelves held Jean's Mills & Boon novels and Jean's collection of porcelain thimbles and, on the top shelf, forty-two hardback notebooks in a neat row.
Beside the notebooks, in a wooden box that had once held cigars, were the letters.
Seven hundred and fourteen of them, at last count. Each one written on cream-coloured Basildon Bond stationery, each one addressed in Elodie's careful hand to *Miss Suki Abara*, each one sealed in an envelope that would never be posted. They were organised by year, secured with ribbon—a different colour for each year. The earliest ones, written when Elodie was sixteen, were short and uncertain, the handwriting less steady. *Dear Suki, I don't know if this is mad. Probably it is. Gran says talking to you might help, even if you can't hear me. I don't think you can hear me. But I'm going to pretend you can, because the alternative is that you're nowhere, and I can't have that.*
The recent ones were longer, more assured, full of the small details of a small life rendered with the attention of someone who believed that smallness was not the same as insignificance.
*Dear Suki, A man came into the launderette at midnight wearing a tuxedo and carrying a cello case. He did not explain himself, and I did not ask, because Victorian etiquette dictates that one does not interrogate a gentleman about his evening attire unless one has been formally introduced. I washed his cummerbund on a delicate cycle. It came out beautifully.*
Elodie did not sleep immediately. She rarely did. Instead, she sat in her grandmother's armchair—she still thought of it as her grandmother's, never as her own—and she read. She was currently working through a book on the social customs of the Victorian middle class, which she had ordered from a second-hand bookshop in York. She was particularly interested in the chapter on mourning etiquette, which was elaborate and specific and, Elodie thought, vastly superior to the modern approach, which seemed to consist of telling people to "move on" as though grief were a traffic jam.
The Victorians understood. They wore black for years. They kept locks of hair. They photographed their dead. They built entire rituals around the simple, devastating fact of absence, and they did not apologise for it.
Elodie fell asleep in the chair at half past eight, the book open on her lap, and dreamed of nothing she could remember.
---
Sunday came, as it always did.
Elodie sat at the kitchen table at precisely ten o'clock in the morning, with her stationery laid out before her: the cream Basildon Bond paper, the matching envelope, the Muji pen. The salt-and-pepper Scottie dogs watched her with their painted eyes. The half-finished crossword lay to her left. Outside, church bells rang from somewhere—St. Patrick's, probably, or the one on Park Road whose name she could never remember.
*Dear Suki,* she wrote.
*It has been an unremarkable week, which I suspect you would appreciate, as you always had a fondness for the unremarkable. You once told me that your favourite sound was the noise a fridge makes when the kitchen is otherwise quiet. I have never forgotten this. I listen for it sometimes.*
*The launderette continues in its usual fashion. Terence has developed a new theory about the government, which he shared with me at length on Monday evening during the shift handover. I will spare you the details, as they involve both the royal family and fluoride, and I know your tolerance for conspiracy was limited.*
*A woman came in on Thursday with paint on her tracksuit bottoms. I believe she may be an artist, though it is equally possible she is simply redecorating. I helped her with Machine Eleven. She told me I talk like I'm in a period drama. I chose to take this as a compliment.*
*The weather has been grey, which suits me. I have been reading about Victorian mourning customs. Did you know that widows were expected to wear full black for two years, followed by half-mourning in grey and lavender? I find this civilised. Modern grief has no uniform, which means no one can see it, which means everyone assumes you are fine.*
*I am fine, in the way that I am always fine, which is to say: I am here, and I am managing, and I miss you in the way that one misses a limb—constantly, and with occasional phantom sensation.*
*Your friend always,*
*Elodie*
She folded the letter, slid it into the envelope, sealed it, and wrote on the front: *Miss Suki Abara*. No address. There was no address to write.
She carried the envelope to the sitting room and placed it in the cigar box with the others. Seven hundred and fifteen.
Then she made herself another cup of tea, and she sat in her grandmother's chair, and she waited for the week to begin again.
