Phaedra Patrick - The Secrets of Sunshine

‘Evening,’ Carl said, looking grateful to have someone to talk to. He rested his arm on top of his mop. ‘You two are out late. Do you have school in the morning, young lady?’

Poppy gave him a tired smile. ‘Yep.’

Carl reached into the breast pocket of his overalls and passed a tiny green paper crane to her. She cupped it gently in her hands. His eyes then swept down to Mitchell’s socked feet. ‘Why are you carrying your shoes, Mr Fisher?’

Mitchell flexed his toes, too fatigued to reply properly. He groaned inwardly as he saw the Out of Order sign on the lift.

‘I have a letter for you.’ Carl darted eagerly across the lobby towards his tatty oak desk. He moved a few origami frogs to one side and picked up a pink envelope. ‘A lady on the third floor asked me to give you this. Is it your birthday?’

‘No.’ Mitchell reached out to take it, but Carl kept it pincered to his chest.

‘I can see hearts through the paper,’ he said. ‘Very romantic.’

Mitchell whipped the envelope from Carl’s grip. He placed a hand on Poppy’s back and urged her towards the door to the stairway. ‘Thank you.’

Carl called after him, ‘I have another letter here, too, Mr Fisher. This one’s for me. I wonder if you could just—?’

However, Mitchell had already opened and closed the door behind him. He looked up the stairs spiralling above them.

Poppy glanced back towards the lobby. ‘I think Carl wanted you to look at his letter, Dad.’

‘Why would he want me to do that?’

She shrugged a shoulder. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Well, I’m sure he’ll find someone else to do it,’ Mitchell said as he mounted the first step.

After reaching the apartment, Mitchell panted as he unlocked the door. Even though the sun was almost down, the apartment was still baking hot. The small rooms were sparsely furnished, with stripped wooden floors. He’d bought the bare minimum of sleek Scandinavian-style furniture to kit the place out. In his sitting room, there was a three-seater sofa with a textile print featuring block-printed stags, and a coffee table that looked like a tree stump with rings in the wood. In Poppy’s bedroom, there was a shiny white bed, desk and wardrobe that he’d hastily bought and assembled from Ikea.

When Poppy dropped her schoolbag on the floor of the hallway, pieces of paper pinned to corkboards on the walls fluttered like butterfly wings – recipes, an exercise itinerary, Poppy’s school timetable and the diary of their activities he’d planned for the school holidays. Whenever Mitchell thought of new plans of action, he wrote them out neatly and pinned them here. After Anita died, he’d become obsessed with planning his and Poppy’s lives. There was a beauty to structure, like mortar between bricks, holding things together.

‘That’s not the right home for your bag, is it?’ he said.

Poppy picked it back up, huffing as if it was really heavy. She pushed it onto its allocated labelled shelf in the storage cupboard. ‘Okay?’ she asked blearily.

‘Good. A tidy house is a tidy mind, even though it’s technically an apartment.’

‘ Yes , Dad.’

The handwriting on the pink envelope was indigo, with large looping letters. Mitchell opened it up and winced when he saw the hearts on the card that Carl mentioned.

Dear Mitchell,

My name is Vanessa and I live on the third floor. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you, but I saw you online, on the local news, and recognized you from our apartment block. What you did is totally admirable. Bravo, you!

If you’d like to pop over for a bottle of vino or coffee sometime, feel free to knock on number 25.

Love,

Vanessa xx

Poppy peered at it excitedly over his shoulder. ‘That’s nice of her.’

‘It’s kind of weird,’ he said. ‘How does she even know my name?’

‘Maybe from Carl?’

Mitchell felt prickly at Vanessa’s attention. She’d put two kisses and used the word love.

He often thought he’d been born in the wrong era and belonged to a more old-fashioned time instead. He couldn’t understand why hooking up with someone you’d only just met was called getting lucky. What was lucky about having a stranger in your home and being intimate before you even knew their surname?

He’d been on only a few dates since Anita died and throughout them he felt as if he sweated guilt through his every pore.

He knew Isobel through work, and she was obsessed with Spain. They’d met for tapas and, although the dishes of food were tiny, Mitchell couldn’t eat a thing. Isobel didn’t notice and devoured his portions anyway.

Beatrice was an intellectual. She wore black-framed glasses that made her look like a 1950s scientist. Her favourite word was existentially and she had learned her periodic tables at the age of seven. She said Anita’s death was lamentable and, at the end of the night, invited him back to her place.

Mitchell still felt ashamed that he’d succumbed to her offer.

After eighteen months without Anita, his body had ached to be close to someone else. He wanted the comfort of listening to another person’s breathing as they slept beside him, even if it was for only a few hours.

Afterwards, in bed, he and Beatrice talked sleepily about their favourite seasons and things they liked to do on Sun days. But a voice in his head told him he shouldn’t be here, that it was far too soon.

After napping for a while, Mitchell had sat up in bed and pulled on his shirt. ‘Sorry,’ he said into the darkness of the early morning. ‘I have to dash. I had a lovely time.’

‘Me, too,’ Beatrice murmured with a smile in her voice.

Mitchell paused, wondering what the etiquette was here, if he should ask to see her again. But Beatrice spoke first. ‘Please make sure the front door is closed properly when you leave.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘It sticks sometimes.’

‘Sorry,’ Mitchell whispered, stubbing his toe against her bed as he slipped out of her room. And when he hurried away from Beatrice’s apartment, he said, ‘Sorry,’ once more, this time to Anita.

Now he gripped Vanessa’s card in his hand. ‘I won’t go around for coffee. She might be a serial killer,’ he joked at Poppy, trying to get her to agree. But she shook her head at him very slowly.

‘She might just be lonely, Dad,’ she said. ‘Like you.’

Mitchell stared at her for the longest time. ‘How can I be lonely when I have you?’ he said and kissed the top of her head.

Later that night, Mitchell moved stiffly around Poppy’s bedroom, putting her books away, reminding her to put her worn clothes in the laundry basket and to choose her clothes for the next day. As she changed into her pyjamas in the bathroom, he picked up his favourite family photo of him, Anita and Poppy at the top of Conwy Castle. Poppy had insisted they climb each of its towers, and afterwards they’d rewarded themselves with huge ice creams.

After Poppy finished cleaning her teeth in the bathroom, she jumped up onto her bed. ‘Hop on, Dad,’ she said, and Mitchell placed the photo back down.

Poppy’s bedroom had ceilings that met in a point, so it resembled the shape of a tent. A large window built into the slope of the roof opened outwards, so she could stand on her bed and poke her head and shoulders through it.

They stood on the bed next to each other and looked out of the window at the night sky and the twinkling lights of the city. Laughter rang from the late-night cafés below, and at the edge of the silvery rooftops a pigeon lay huddled in the nearby gutter.

After they’d breathed in the night air for a while, Mitchell said, ‘Come on, Pops, it’s bedtime.’