The 472

Chapter One: Six Days Without Hot Water

The boiler had been dead for six days, and Tunde Nwosu had begun to take it personally.

He knelt on the kitchen floor in a T-shirt gone thin at the collar, a torch clamped between his teeth, one hand inside the casing where the pilot light should have been. Rain came at the window in gusts, the kind of February rain that did not fall so much as lean. Outside, the back gardens of Ravensbourne Road lay flat and grey under it, wheelie bins glossy, a child's plastic slide half-collapsed against a fence two doors down.

He found the thermocouple with his fingertips. Cold. Of course it was cold.

"Dad." Amara stood in the doorway with a hoodie over her pyjamas and her hair tied up in a scarf. "Dad, it's half nine."

"Mm."

"You said last night you'd stop at ten and you stopped at one."

"Mm."

She came in, filled the kettle, set it on to boil for the fourth time that morning. That was the system now. Kettle plus the big saucepan plus the smaller one, carried upstairs, poured into the bath, four inches of water that went lukewarm before you could sit in it. Amara had adapted to the system with the resigned efficiency of a thirteen-year-old who had decided that complaining was beneath her. She had, however, started writing things down.

"Have you noticed," she said to the kettle, "that you say 'mm' when you don't want to answer, and 'ah' when you don't want to argue?"

"Mm."

"See."

Tunde sat back on his heels. He was forty-six, a compact man with a heavy jaw and a way of holding stillness that people sometimes mistook for coldness. His hands were scarred across the knuckles from a hundred small collisions with metal. He looked at the boiler the way you look at a colleague who has let you down.

"The man is coming Tuesday," he said.

"You said Tuesday four days ago."

"A different Tuesday."

Amara poured. Steam swallowed the window. "I'm putting that in the book."

"What book?"

"Nothing."

She went upstairs with the saucepan held out at arm's length, and Tunde listened to her negotiate the stairs, that particular creak on the fourth step he had been meaning to fix since 2016. The house was three bedrooms and a box, mid-terrace, bought in 2009 with a deposit built out of nine years of double shifts and a loan from a man in Lagos who had refused to take interest. Every room in it had been painted by his own hand. He knew where the damp came through in the front bedroom in November, knew which floorboard by the bathroom door announced itself at three in the morning when Grace came off nights.

The phone rang in his pocket. He knew before he looked.

"Grace."

"Are you still on the floor?"

"I am standing up," he said, standing up.

"Liar." Behind her voice: the flat hum of a hospital corridor, a trolley, a distant buzzer. Grace Nwosu had been a midwife at Queen Elizabeth for eleven years and could conduct a whole conversation while walking, signing, and thinking about someone's blood pressure. "Tunde, listen. I've got two minutes and I need you to listen properly, not the way you listen."

"I listen."

"You wait for the end of sentences so you can start fixing things. That is not listening." A door. Quieter now. "Your mother phoned."

Something in his chest did a small, precise thing, like a lock turning.

"When?"

"Eleven last night. She rang the landline, then she rang my mobile, which means she wanted to speak to me, Tunde, which means she wanted to be the one to tell me."

"Tell you what."

"She's coming. She's booked. She lands on the twentieth."

Tunde looked at the calendar on the fridge, held by a magnet shaped like a red bus that Solomon had bought him as a joke eight years ago and which had never stopped being funny to anyone but Tunde. February. The twentieth had a small ring around the fourteenth for Amara's dentist and nothing else.

"That's ten days."

"Ten days."

"For how long?"

"She didn't say."

"She didn't say?"

"She said, and I want to get this right—" the sound of Grace shifting the phone, "—she said, 'Tell my son I am coming to see the house I have paid for in prayer.'"

Tunde put his hand over his eyes. "Ah."

"There it is."

"Grace—"

"Seven years," Grace said, and now the flatness in her voice was not tiredness. "Seven years since she stood in my kitchen and told me that of all the things her son had done, choosing a Jamaican wife was the one she could not forgive. She said it while I was cutting a pineapple, Tunde. I remember the pineapple."

"I know."

"Do you know? Because you didn't say anything."

The kettle clicked off upstairs somewhere in his mind; the room was very quiet. "I said something."

"You said, 'Mama, that is enough.' Four words. I counted them for years."

"Grace."

"I'm not starting," she said. "I've got a woman in room four who is nine centimetres and terrified and I am not starting a fight with my husband at half nine in the morning. I'm telling you she's coming, and I'm telling you I will be gracious, because I am always gracious, and I want you to understand what that costs."

"I understand."

"Fix the boiler," she said. "If she comes into this house and there is no hot water, she will take it as evidence."

"Evidence of what?"

"Everything," said Grace, and hung up.

—

Tunde had driven buses for the same operator for nine years and eleven months. Before that: a warehouse in Charlton, three years of nights; before that, a security job that involved standing in the rain outside a building nobody wanted to enter; before that, a plane from Lagos at twenty-two years old with one suitcase and a phone number written on the back of a receipt.

He drove the 472. Thamesmead to North Greenwich, out past the ferry terminal, along the river's shoulder, through the flyover's shadow, into Woolwich and down. He knew the route the way other men knew music. He knew that the man with the two shopping trolleys got on at Nathan Way and never had the right money and that you let him on anyway. He knew the school surge at eight-ten, the nurses at six, the cleaners at five, the boy who cried silently on the top deck every Thursday for a month in 2017 and then stopped, and Tunde had never found out why and thought about it still.

In nine years and eleven months he had never missed a shift. Not the winter of the burst pipe. Not the week Amara had chickenpox. Not the morning after his father's brother died and he had sat in the depot car park for twenty minutes and then signed on. He had once driven a full duty with a molar so infected that he could feel his own pulse in his jaw.

He did not think of this as heroism. He thought of it as the floor. You put a floor under your family and you stand on it, and if you stand on it long enough, the children can jump.

He went back to the boiler.

—

Solomon came down at eleven, which was early for him, in the black tracksuit he'd worn every weekend since October, and stood by the toaster looking at his phone with the particular stillness of a person reading something they had read four times already.

"Morning," said Tunde.

"Yeah."

Solomon was seventeen and had come out of childhood taller than either parent, with Grace's long hands and Tunde's inability to say anything he had not first tested twice in his head. He had four A-levels in progress, a conditional offer from Cambridge to read engineering — A*AA, Churchill College, the letter still on the fridge under the bus magnet — and a way of leaving rooms that had recently started to look like an opinion.

"Your mother says the boiler man is Tuesday," Tunde said.

"You say that."

"I say it because it's true."

"You've said it about three Tuesdays." Solomon put bread in the toaster. "Just get someone in, Dad. There's a guy on the corner does boilers. Forty quid callout."

"Forty pounds to tell me what I already know."

"You clearly don't know, though."

There was a version of this conversation they could have had, and both of them chose the other one, which was silence. The toaster ticked. Rain moved across the window in sheets.

"Grandma's coming," Tunde said. "The twentieth."

Solomon's head came up. "Grandma Folu?"

"Do you have another one?"

"For how long?"

"That," said Tunde, "is the question everyone is asking."

Solomon laughed, actually laughed, and for a second the kitchen was easy. "Does Mum know?"

"Your mother knew before me."

"Oh no." Solomon buttered his toast in silence for a moment. "Is she going to be — you know. Like last time."

"Last time," said Tunde, "was a long time ago."

"That's not an answer."

"Mm."

Solomon took his toast and went up. Halfway to the door he stopped. "Dad. Can I have Maisie over one night? Like properly. Dinner."

Tunde considered the boiler. "When your grandmother is here?"

"Not necessarily."

"Then when?"

"I don't know. Some night."

"Some night," Tunde repeated. "Yes. Fine. Some night."

After Solomon had gone, Tunde sat down at the kitchen table with the boiler manual open at a page he had already read. He thought about Maisie Winterton, whom he had met twice — a polite, quick girl with a heavy fringe and a habit of asking him questions about the bus route that were, as far as he could tell, sincere. Her father was Edward Winterton, a Labour councillor for one of the Blackheath wards, a man Tunde had seen on a leaflet through his door and once in the flesh at a school open evening, standing beside the headteacher with his hand on the small of the air.

He was not against the girl. He was against speed. He had watched his brother love fast his whole life and it had cost everyone around him.

The rain went on. Upstairs, the water pipes knocked as Amara ran the cold tap.

—

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AMARA NWOSU, 9 FEBRUARY 2019

Boiler: still dead. Day 6.
Baths: 4 inches, lukewarm.
Dad's mood: 6/10, going down.
Mum: night shift, 3 in a row.
Solomon: on his phone, weird about it. Has been weird about it since Thursday.
Grandma Folu arriving 20 Feb. Length of stay: unknown. Mum's reaction (reported by Dad): "gracious." Note: when Mum says she will be gracious it means she is furious and has decided to be excellent instead, which is scarier.

Things nobody in this house says out loud:
1. That Grandma said the thing about Mum in 2012 and nobody ever apologised.
2. That Solomon doesn't want to go to Cambridge.
3. Something else, I don't know yet.

How I know about (2): he keeps not talking about it. When Solomon actually wants something he goes quiet in a certain way, like the way water goes still before the kettle screams.