The List on the Fridge

The list started with the lift. Bronwen came in shaking the rain off her coat and said the lift was broken again.

Chester, who had been in Cardiff for nine days, looked up from his laptop. “The what?”

“The lift. The box. The box that goes up.”

“Oh. The elevator.”

“The lift,” Bronwen said, and put the kettle on.

Chester wrote both words on a piece of paper and stuck it to the fridge under a magnet shaped like a sheep. That was the first Tuesday.

By the end of two weeks the paper had autumn and fall on it, and flat and apartment, and jumper and sweater, and a word for the thing you carry a baby in that neither of them could spell. The rule was simple. Whoever used a word the other one didn’t know had to write it down, and the question was always the same two words. “The what?”

Bronwen said Chester’s vowels got longer when he was tired. Chester said Bronwen used the word “lovely” about forty times a day, including once about a bus. Neither of them was wrong.

The dangerous words, it turned out, were not the ones that made anybody say “the what?”. They were the ones where both people were completely sure.

On the Thursday, Chester found a flat of his own to go and see, and Bronwen read the message out to him from the other side of the kitchen. Viewing at half past two, first floor, ring the bell marked three.

He got there at twenty past and waited on the first floor: the floor you walk into from the street, the one with the letterboxes and somebody’s bicycle. He waited twenty-five minutes. He checked his phone eleven times. The agent was one flight of stairs above him the whole time and left at three, and by six the flat had gone to somebody else.

Bronwen made tea when he got home and didn’t say anything clever, which Chester noticed and appreciated.

Then she took the paper off the fridge, wrote one more line at the bottom, and handed him the pen so that half of it would be in his handwriting.

ground floor / first floor — ASK.