Page 5

FIVE MARCH

Two days after Ash’s twenty-sixth birthday, a parcel arrives.

Ash sees it on the front step as she arrives home from work.

It’s not an Amazon parcel, it’s in a smart box with a handwritten label, and at first she assumes it’s for her, a late gift.

But she looks closer and sees that it’s addressed to her mother, so she scoops it up and brings it into the kitchen.

“Mum,” she calls out. “There’s a parcel.”

“I know,” Nina replies from her office at the top of the landing. “I asked the guy to leave it. I was in a Zoom.”

“Looks interesting. Can I open it?”

“If you like.”

Ash unloops her bag from across her chest and pulls off her teddy bomber jacket and oversized scarf. She gets scissors from a drawer and slices through the tape. As she folds back the arms of the box, she sees another box inside, pale antique pink with a teal satin ribbon.

“Er, Mum. I think you should open this. It looks like a present.”

“Give me a minute.”

Nina appears a moment later, taking AirPods from her ears and pulling a cardigan on over her work shirt.

“Ooh,” she says, glancing at the pretty box. She looks at the writing on the address label and shrugs. “Don’t recognize that.”

Then she pulls the lid off the box and peels back some tissue paper to reveal a scuffed-up copper Zippo lighter and a note in a small envelope.

She glances at Ash, and Ash shrugs. Then she opens the small envelope and reads out the note:

Dear Nina,

I was going through old boxes the other day, looking for some letters from my late mother, when I came across this.

It belonged to Paddy. He left it at the restaurant one night and I took it home to make sure nobody else snaffled it.

When I mentioned it to him, he told me to keep it.

I think he was intending to give up smoking, but I’m not sure that he ever did.

Anyway, I thought you might want it. A little bit of history.

I do hope you are holding up OK?

All my very best, as before,

Yours Nick Radcliffe

“Wow.” Her mum holds the lighter in the palm of her hand and stares at it.

Ash can see tears glistening across the surface of her eyes and touches her arm gently.

“That’s wonderful,” she says. “Isn’t it?

” She picks up the letter and sees that Nick Radcliffe’s email address is written under his signature.

He clearly wants a response. “Can I?” Ash glances at the lighter in her mother’s palm.

Her mother passes it to her, and Ash is taken aback by the weight of it in her hand.

“Everyone had these in the eighties and nineties,” says her mother. “The smell of them—it takes me back.”

Ash lifts it to her nose: a hit of butane, burnt metal, smoke. “Will you write to thank him?”

“I suppose so,” Nina replies, her chest going up and dropping down with a heavy sigh. “Yes. I should.”

“He wrapped it so nicely too. Do you think he’s gay?”

“Ash!”

“Just joking! But it is so beautiful. The tissue paper. All of it.” She hands the lighter back to her mother, who curls her fingers around it. “Can I keep the box?”

“Of course,” says her mother. Then she sighs again and says, “I’ve got another stupid Zoom in a minute. But I’ll be down after that. Maybe we could light the fire and watch some trash?”

Ash smiles and nods. “Yes. That would be nice.”

Ash takes the box up to her room. She puts it on her dressing table.

She’ll fill it with something. With trinkets.

Mementos. She goes to the window of her room, which overlooks the sea.

The sun has just set, the sky through the bare trees is a dark, haunting gray, lacy with pale clouds catching the ends of the daylight.

She feels the thud and canter of time running by as her early twenties bleed into her late twenties and thirty appears heavy on the horizon.

She hears the drone of her mother’s tired, end-of-the-week professional voice talking about staffing issues with the people who run her dead father’s restaurants, the restaurants that her mother now has to run, even though she has another job, albeit a part-time one that she can do in an hour or two a day, but still, it’s a lot.

Her mother is tired and sad and alone. And so is she.

Four months and eight days since her dad died.

She thinks of Arlo, her baby brother, far away from here, living a life unaffected by the echoes of devastation that still ring around their home.

He has his big, messy house full of friends, his high-paying job, his pub nights and club nights, his girlfriends (a different one every week), his weed, his tattoos, his normal life.

He has the same freewheeling, formless starter life that Ash had been living up until eight months ago, but while Arlo takes it in his stride, hers had nearly broken her.

She flops onto her bed and goes onto Hinge, scrolls mindlessly for a while, thinking that a boy might save her, but they all look ugly to her, stupid and ugly.

Then she goes onto Airbnb and looks at expensive apartments in stunning European cities that she can’t afford to visit.

Then, and only then, does she go to her camera roll, scroll backward through February, through their hideous Christmas, past the funeral and into the summer before, when she was lost and broken by a sequence of events that she still can’t explain, and back further again until there she is, a year ago today, before any of the bad things had happened, and she stares at herself, that girl with slightly shorter hair, with a mouth wide open in the throes of laughter, her arm around her father, his arm around her, a glass of wine in his other hand, an apron tied around his waist, and a smile, that smile, the one he always had when it was sunny, when there was food, and especially when he was with her and Arlo, because he loved them both so much.

She lets her phone drop onto her chest, and she cries.