Greer had made eight copies, although there were only seven people in the workshop. The spare lay on her knees. By the time they reached the ending, she had pressed a crescent into the first page with her thumbnail.
“I thought it was brave,” said Ruth.
Greer looked down quickly, as though the compliment might require something of her.
“Leaving like that,” Ruth continued. “She doesn't owe him an answer.”
Across the library table, Ellis turned back a page. “I wanted her to take the mug. After everything he did.”
“What did he do?” asked Jo.
“Well. The message.”
The radiator knocked behind Greer. It had been knocking all evening, but now she could hear the separate ticks as the pipe cooled. She found the sentence before Ellis read it out.
“He had left a message asking for his mug.”
“It was their grandmother's,” Greer said.
Ellis held the page away from him. “Have I missed that?”
“No. I cut it. But that's why she keeps it.”
Jo's pen stopped above her notebook. “I thought she kept it because she still wanted him to visit.”
Greer began to describe the kitchen she had imagined: the mug on the high shelf, the grandmother's biscuit tin, a window that would not stay open. In the copy on Ellis's side of the table, the kitchen consisted of a counter and a door. Greer could see his eyes moving over it while she spoke.
“And he isn't meant to be cruel,” she said.
Nobody argued. Ruth nodded so kindly that Greer wished she had.
At the end of the meeting, they stacked the chairs in twos. Ellis was wiping a ring of tea off the table with his sleeve when Greer went back to him.
“Could you show me where you decided?”
“About the brother?”
She nodded.
He took his copy from under his arm and found the message. “Here, really. She says she's fine, and then he wants his cup back.”
“Mug.”
“Sorry.”
“No, I mean—” She stopped. Ellis waited, still holding the damp sleeve out from his wrist. “Could I keep that copy?”
He gave it to her. Beside the message he had drawn a small, angry arrow. On the last page he had written, in much gentler lettering, Good for her.
At home, Greer laid her spare and Ellis's copy on the kitchen floor. Her own cup had gone cold beside the laptop. She read the story from the beginning, sitting with her back against a cupboard because she did not want to sit at the desk where she had written it.
The brother appeared in three sentences. He left a message. He had once lived in the house. The woman did not call him back. Greer had spent a week deciding what he wanted. None of that week was on the floor.
She opened a new version and gave him a visit.
He arrived while the woman was boiling water. The kettle would not switch off. He pulled the plug and moved the kettle. Hot water slopped over his hand and onto the counter. His sister reached past the spill for a cloth. He caught her wrist.
Greer stopped typing.
She had intended him to protect her from the water. With his hand around her wrist, he looked as though he were preventing her from doing anything at all. She took his hand away. He put the cloth over the spill himself and said, “You need a new one.”
That sounded like him. It also sounded like a man finding fault with a kettle someone else could not afford to replace.
She left it for a while and made fresh tea.
When she came back, the brother was still standing beside the counter. He could pay for the kettle; she could make him offer. She tried the offer and deleted it. Then she gave the woman a reply.
“I know.”
He folded the wet cloth twice and hung it over the tap. The woman watched him do it. She had asked him not to come that morning; he had come with bread because he thought she would not eat. Neither mentioned the bread again.
Greer read the visit aloud under her breath, catching the places where she had explained what the sister would not say. She cut those sentences. On the last page, the woman took the old mug from the shelf. Greer had her pack it, unpack it, wrap it in a tea towel. Each version made the mug seem to know more than the woman did.
At half past one, she left it on the counter. The woman touched its handle, then put on her coat.
The next workshop was their last before the library closed for repairs. Someone had already taken down the children's paintings. Rectangles of brighter paint showed above the noticeboard.
“Changed pages only?” Ruth asked, taking the thinner bundle.
“That's all I could face printing.”
They read. Greer watched Jo turn back to the kitchen scene, then forward to the ending. Ellis rubbed the corner of the page between a finger and thumb. He was wearing the same jumper. There was a pale mark where the tea had dried.
“I liked it better before,” Ruth said.
Greer bent the spare copy across her knee.
“The earlier ending felt certain. This one feels as though she might come home.”
“She might,” Greer said. It came out more sharply than she intended.
Ruth laid down her pencil. “Of course. Your story.”
Now Greer had made it difficult for her to say anything else. She smoothed the paper against her knee, flattening the bend without quite removing it.
“What made it feel certain before?”
Ruth found the old copy in her folder. She had brought it back, every page, which made Greer ashamed of her irritation.
“This.” Ruth pointed to the last sentence. “You've cut it.”
Greer read it: Outside, she let the gate close behind her.
“The new one stops at the coat,” Ruth said. “I kept waiting for the rest.”
Ellis said, “I still don't like him much.”
Greer almost laughed. Then he turned the page round. “But here. With the cloth. He knows where things go.”
Jo tapped a line near the end. “When she touched the mug, I thought she was going to break it.”
“Did you want her to?” Greer asked.
“For a second.”
Greer wrote that down. Under it she copied Ruth's missing sentence. She did not write down anything about the brother being kind.
Afterwards, while Jo checked that they had left no papers under the table, Greer opened the story on her phone. She restored the gate. Above it, she found a sentence she had added that afternoon: For the first time, she understood that she could leave without deciding whether she would return.
It had seemed necessary on the bus. She deleted it, then read the last page once more before saving.
“Have you got everything?” Jo called from the door.
Greer looked beneath the table. Her spare copy lay face down beside the radiator. She picked it up, folded it around the others and followed Jo out.
No published comments yet.