There but for The Read Free

me know that you have received this message even if you can’t actually help in this instance.
Very many thanks indeed and I/we look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
Gen Lee
(Genevieve and Eric Lee)
    Who was Miles Garth, again?
    Miles.
    Yes.
    When we went to Europe.
    Anna read it through again.
    He is refusing to speak to a singe soul.
    Later that evening she found that instead of thinking (as she did every night as the dark came down and every morning as the light came up) about work, and about the faces, one after the other, of the people she had failed, she was preoccupied with this notion, a lightly burnt soul, its scent of singed wool.
    Before she went to bed she tapped out the following, and sent it.
Dear Mrs. Lee,
Thank you for your email. What a strange predicament. I’m afraid though that you might be on to a wild goose chase with me, since I don’t really know Miles Garth or anything about him, having met him only very briefly and quite a long time ago now, back in the 1980s. I am not at all sure I can help you. But if you think I can, I’m willing to give it a try. What would you like me to do?
All my best,
Anna Hardie.
    Now it was two days later.
    Miles, she said to whoever was behind the door. Are you there?
    Where exactly was Anna, then, who had travelled in on the packed train that morning next to a man in a Gore-Tex jacket who was watching porn on the screen of his phone? She’d crossed the capital past the posters on the tube station walls advertising This Season’s Atonement and under the ads in the tube carriage with the picture of the kitchen bin with the speech bubble coming out of its mouth saying It’s My Right To Eat Tin Cans and the words beneath which said Deny Your Bin Its Rights. She’d gone for a walk between stations and seen St. Paul’s rise to the surface on the riverbank like a piece of old cartilage. She’d ridden a train through a place that looked like the future had looked when she was a child. Now she was walking up a hot summer street of beautiful buildings and shabby-chic houses trying to remember what Greenwich meant again, which was something to do with time. When she got to the right address, a child wearing a bright yellow dress over the top of a pair of jeans was sitting on its top step picking little stones out of a fancy border of pebbles at each side of the door. She was whistling a repetitive strip of tune a bit like the Judy Garland song from The Wizard of Oz and throwing the stones at a drain in the road, presumably trying to get them down the grate of it. The drain cover and the road around it were dotted with little white stones.
    Hello, Anna said.
    I’m broke, the child said.
    Me too, Anna said.
    Really? the child said.
    Yes, Anna said. Almost totally. What a coincidence. Aren’t you hot in all those clothes?
    Nope, the child said reaching up to the doorbell. Because I feel that I am not doing myself full justice if I don’t wear them all.
    But it was a white woman, dressed in summer whites and beiges, who answered the door. She pushed the child to one side and held her hand out to shake Anna’s hand.
    Genevieve Lee, she said. Call me Gen. Thank you so much for coming.
    She led Anna into the lounge, still holding her by the hand. When she let go Anna folded her jacket and put it on the arm of the couch, but Genevieve Lee stared at the jacket there for an unnaturally long time.
    I’m sorry. It makes me afraid, Genevieve Lee said.
    My jacket does? Anna said.
    I now have a horrible fear that people who take their coats off in my house might never leave my house, Genevieve Lee said.
    Anna picked her jacket up at once.
    I’m so sorry, she said.
    No, it’s fine, you can leave it there for now, Genevieve Lee said. But as you can tell. We really are at the end of our tether with your friend Miles.
    Yes, well, as I said, he’s not really my friend, Anna said.
    I promise you, we can’t take much more of our oh you tea, Genevieve Lee said.
    Sorry? Anna