Chapter 150: Informed

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 150: Informed

They flew home on the Tuesday and the argument started before the plane landed.

It was Dana who started it, out loud, in row 34, in a voice pitched for the engine noise.

"I want to call a house meeting."

"We live in a house. We have meetings constantly."

"No." She had her tray table down and nine pages on it. "A proper one. Everybody. Including Trina, including Dov, including Elena, and I want it minuted, and I want Cole to say every single thing he knows at the start of it before anybody else speaks."

Cole turned in his seat.

"Say that again."

"You heard me."

"I heard you. I want you to say it to my face at cruising altitude so neither of us can walk out of it." He had his elbow on the armrest. "You're asking me to empty out."

"I'm asking you to go first," Dana said. "And then everybody else does, and then we decide what to do as a group with all of it on the table, and whatever gets decided, we do."

"Even if it's wrong."

"Especially if it's wrong," Dana said.

He said yes.

That was the thing nobody had planned for, including him. He said yes on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic without negotiating a single condition, and Dana had eleven arguments prepared and got to use none of them and was, by her own account afterward, thrown by it for two days.

It happened on the Thursday and it took five hours.

Nine people in a flat built for three. Mia on the floor. Dov on the arm of the sofa. Trina, who had asked four times whether she should be there and had been told yes four times, on a kitchen chair brought through from next door.

Dana at the table with a pad.

"Cole. Everything."

He started with the alley and the fire door.

Then the two seconds in November. Then the thing outside the east annex — Not this one, in his own voice, with no feeling attached, and standing outside a chemist's asking which one, then and getting no answer.

Then the corkboard card, and the third number that was never scratched out.

Then the roof.

Then Barrowgate: four seconds in a plant room he cannot account for, and a hall in Inwood eleven days ago, and the fact that there have now been six such gaps and he has counted them and written the dates down and never shown anyone the list.

He put the list on the table.

It took forty minutes and nobody interrupted him once.

The worst part was not the content. It was that four people in that room had known pieces of it and had each assumed they were the only one — and watching a list get read out loud, in order, with dates on it, did something to the room that none of them had expected.

Reeve worked out at about the twenty-minute mark that the alley thing had been eleven months ago.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"You've had that since October?"

"Yes."

"I was there—"

"Reeve, if you interrupt we'll be here until Sunday," Dana said, and he shut up, and Cole kept going, and it was Dana's flatness that got them through the next twenty minutes rather than anything Cole did.

When he finished, Mia said: "Is that all of it?"

"Yes."

"Cole."

"That's all of it," he said. "There's nothing I'm holding. If I think of something at two in the morning I'll write it down and read it out at breakfast, and that's the arrangement, and I'd rather have said that in front of nine people than to you on a fire escape."

Then everybody else went.

Vesper: the three wrong-handed pages, and the one dated before she met him, and the fact that she had understood four separate people in a language she has never learned.

Reeve: nothing, and he apologised for it, and Mia told him to shut up.

Dana: the card folder. Nine cards. She read all nine out and the ninth one was the 2001 review that does not exist.

Trina: everything about her mother's letters, again, in front of her brother, which cost her about eleven minutes.

Elena: that she had been sitting on something since the consent form and had not said it because it was not a memory. Somebody read me terms. And then a second thing, which nobody had heard: that she had been counting, since the ward, and she was fairly sure there had been three other people in that building for at least part of her four years.

Then they decided.

And the decision went against Cole immediately and by a margin.

The question was Agnes.

Not whether to help her — everybody wanted to help her. The question was how, and Cole had a plan, and he had had it since a stairwell in Inwood, and he laid it out in about ninety seconds.

Get her out. Private arrangement, Iris's money, a flat in a city nobody has a reason to look in, new documents. He had costed it. He had talked to Iris about it on the Monday.

"No," Walt said, on speakerphone, from New Jersey.

"Walt—"

"No, and I'd like to be the one who says it because I'm the one who's known her longest." The line crackled. "Son, she's ninety-one. You're proposing to take a woman who has lived in the same four rooms since 1991 and put her somewhere with no neighbours, under a name she didn't choose, for her own protection."

"They came to her door."

"They came to her door with a letter."

Dana said: "He's right."

"Dana—"

"He's right and I've been thinking about it since Friday." She put her pen down. "Cole, what you've described is the best-resourced version of exactly what was done to her in 1985. Somebody decided she'd be safer somewhere else and moved her, for good reasons, and she has spent forty years without a husband or a sister or a name."

"That's not the same."

"It's not the same and it's the same shape," Dana said, "and she's the one who gets to decide, and you haven't asked her."

They rang her.

She was on speakerphone in a kitchen in England at half nine at night and she listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which took four minutes.

"No thank you," Agnes said.

"Agnes—"

"I'm going to Yonkers." Her voice came out of the phone entirely steady. "It's eleven miles. Walter can drive it in half an hour. There's a garden and I've seen photographs and there's a woman there I knew in 1994."

"You'd be—"

"I'd be findable. Yes." A pause. "I've been findable for a fortnight, love, and I've had a question for the first time in forty years, and I have decided that I would rather be an old woman in Yonkers who knows something than an old woman in a flat in a strange city who's safe."

Cole did not argue.

That was the thing that everyone in the room noticed, and that Mia would bring up eleven weeks later in a different argument.

He said, "Okay."

"Just okay?"

"You asked me to put everything on the table and let the room decide, and the room's decided, and Agnes has decided." He had his hands flat. "I think it's wrong. I think in four months somebody's going to come to a care home in Yonkers. And I'm not going to do it anyway, because the whole point was that she gets to be told and then choose, and I don't get to only mean that when it goes my way."

Agnes, from the phone: "Thank you."

"Don't."

"I'll say it once and then we'll never do it again." Eleven miles of phone line. "In 1985 somebody made that decision for me and I have never once been able to find out who, and tonight a boy who could have made it made me a cup of tea instead."

"I didn't make you a cup of tea."

"You did it metaphorically," Agnes said, "and at ninety-one I'm entitled to a metaphor. Goodnight, all of you."

The line went.

Nobody moved for a moment.

Then Dana turned a page of her pad and said, "Right. Item two," and the meeting carried on for another hour, and at the end of it there were four decisions written down and Cole had lost three of them.

He went out onto the fire escape at midnight.

Vesper came out four minutes later, as she always did, and sat down, and said nothing for a while.

"You were right," she said eventually.

"About what?"

"Agnes. In four months somebody's going to go to that care home. I think you're right and I voted against you anyway."

"Why?"

"Because being right isn't the same as being allowed," Vesper said, "and that's the first time in a year I've believed you actually understand that."

[End of Chapter 150]