The notice had gone up weeks ago, on the street door, at a height that had once been out of reach. The seal, the block number, the word demolition, a date. The date was this week. The hour beside it was six in the morning.
The flight had been booked that same night — 7:45, the only one that day, landing after dark. The bag had stood by the door since: a change of clothes, the prescription folder. The key had gone across the landing, and the neighbor had the flight number on the calendar.
Two days of leave, the weekend after. The morning stayed open. A record on, low. The laptop woke to the folder.
The street was in some of them, from before the trees along it filled out. The house. The door, before the notice. These lived on the screen now. The printed ones had been at the house. Years back, in a move, the frames with the keeper in them had been taken and the rest stayed; the taken ones were lost in the moves after. That week a call home had gone looking — an old photograph, the two of them together, from before. The other end had looked; none had survived.
One of them had been a year gone.
The block had been coming down for longer than that, and none of it had gone by wanting; there was only the date, and leave had been taken for the last of it.
The interior doors had glass then, small panes in a wooden grid. A ball indoors on a wet afternoon, school friends, one pane gone to the floor. The scolding came from the kitchen and reached every room in the flat. Some of it was still there to be heard.
At one the phone rang. It could not be left, and it could not be handed to anyone else, because there was no one else. There is always said to be someone else. There was not.
The bag went to the door. The pier would wait; the far side of the city came first.
By four it was done.
The routine broke there. The train from the corner would have run straight to the airport — five minutes’ walk, no change. From this side the water lay between, and the short way over it was the ferry. The slope down to the pier ran along the park.