The Phone in the Drawer

Tom looked at the message for a long time. He thought about his mother. He thought about 'M'. Then he wrote a message. He wrote: 'Hello. I am Tom. I am her son. She died in March. I am sorry.' He pressed send.

Tom did not reply that afternoon. He put the phone in his bag and drove home. That evening, after the children went to bed, he showed the phone to his wife. 'I don't know what to do,' he said. His wife read the message twice. 'You don't have to decide today,' she said. 'You don't have to decide tomorrow.' Tom nodded. He put the phone on the kitchen table, between them. They sat and looked at it for a long time, and they did not speak.

Tom picked up the phone again and sat down on the bed. He looked at the message for a long time before he started to type. He typed slowly, with his thumbs, in the careful way of a man who does not often write text messages.

He wrote: 'Hello. This is Tom, Maria's son. I am sorry to write to you in this way. My mother died on the 14th of March. I am clearing her flat and I have just found this phone. I do not know who you are, but it is clear that you cared about her. I thought you would want to know. I will not write again unless you reply. Tom.'

He read the message three times. He took out the comma after 'sorry' and put it back in. He took out the line about not writing again, and put it back in differently. Eventually he stopped editing.

He pressed send.

The small green tick appeared, then a second one. The message had been delivered. He waited, sitting on the bed, for the screen to change. It did not. He waited five more minutes. Then he stood up, and put the phone in the inside pocket of his jacket, and went back to the kitchen, where there was a cardboard box he had not yet finished filling.

He did not know what M would write back, or whether M would write back at all. He had decided that this, for now, was not the most important thing.

He picked up the phone again and sat down on the bed, in the small dent his weight had made in the duvet earlier, and held the phone in both hands, which was not how he ordinarily held a phone. He noticed that he was holding it as one holds an object one has not yet decided to use.

The message was still on the screen. He read it once more, and then he opened a new conversation, and he typed.

He typed slowly, with both thumbs, in the careful way of a man who does not write text messages often, and who, when he does, edits them more than is necessary. He wrote and rewrote the opening line three times. He left in a comma after 'sorry' and took it out again. He took out a sentence about clearing the flat and then put it back in, on the grounds that the explanation was a courtesy and he was not in a position to omit courtesies. The whole message took him eleven minutes to compose.

It read, in the end: 'I am sorry to be writing to you in this way. This is Tom, Maria's son. My mother died of a heart attack on the fourteenth of March. I am clearing her flat and I have just found this phone. I do not know who you are, and I will not write again unless you reply. I thought you would want to know. Tom.'

He read it three more times. He took out the last 'Tom' on the grounds that it was already in the body of the message, and then he put it back in on the grounds that some letters required signing.

He pressed send.

The small green tick appeared, and then a second one. The message had been delivered. He sat with the phone in his hand and watched the screen for some minutes. Nothing changed. He had not expected anything to change quickly. He had also not, he realised, expected nothing to change at all.

Outside, the woman had finished hanging out the washing, and was now bending, slowly, to lift the empty wooden basket. The light on the brick of the flats opposite had moved a little while he had been typing.

He put the phone in his jacket pocket and went into the kitchen, where the cardboard boxes he had been filling were still half-empty, and where the kettle, which he had switched on an hour and a half before, was now cold.

He picked up the phone again and sat down on the bed, in the small dent his weight had made in the duvet earlier, and held the phone in both hands, in the slightly delicate manner that he had now caught himself in twice and that he was, on a third notice, prepared to admit was the manner of a person trying to do better than usual.

The message was still on the screen. He read it once more, and then he opened a new conversation, and he typed.

He typed slowly, with both thumbs, in the careful way of a man who does not write text messages often, and who, when he does, edits them more than he probably needs to. He wrote and rewrote the opening line three times. He left a comma after 'sorry' and took it out again. He took out a sentence about clearing the flat and then, on reflection, put it back, on the grounds that the explanation was a courtesy and he was not, this afternoon, in a position to omit courtesies. He left in his name. He took out his name. He left it in.

The message took him eleven minutes to compose. It read, in the end: 'I am sorry to be writing to you in this way. This is Tom, Maria's son. My mother died of a heart attack on the fourteenth of March. I am clearing her flat and I have just found this phone. I do not know who you are, but it is clear that she cared about you. I thought you would want to know. I will not write again unless you reply. With sympathy, Tom.'

He read it three times. He noticed, on the third reading, that the sentence about her caring about M was either extraordinarily presumptuous or extraordinarily kind, and that he could not, for the moment, tell which, and that the sentence's both-at-onceness was probably the reason he was leaving it in. He understood that he was making a small ethical decision in including it — a kind of secondary act of theft, perhaps, on top of the primary one — but he understood, too, that the primary one had already been chosen, that the line of acceptable interference had already been crossed by the act of replying at all, and that having crossed it, the question of whether to cross it generously or stingily was not a hard one, in the end.

He pressed send.

The small green tick appeared, and then a second one. The message had been delivered. He sat on the bed with the phone in his hand for some minutes and watched the screen, although he knew there was no good reason to expect anything to happen quickly. He had, he realised, been holding his breath. He let it out, slowly. The light on the wall of the flats opposite had moved a little while he had been typing.

Outside, the woman with the wooden basket had finished hanging out the washing, and was now bending, slowly, to lift the empty basket. The clothes on the line moved a little in the small wind. Tom watched this for a moment. He thought that the difference between the right thing and the kind thing was probably, on most days, not as large as he had been treating it; he thought that the times when the difference was large were probably the times worth paying careful attention to; and he thought, finally, that he had, perhaps, paid more careful attention to this afternoon than he had paid to most of the afternoons of his life.

The phone, in his hand, was still silent. It was, he thought, probably going to be silent for some time. He put it in the inside pocket of his jacket — the same pocket that contained his mother's other phone — and stood up, and walked into the kitchen, where the cardboard boxes were still half-empty, and where the kettle, which he had switched on an hour and a half earlier, had long since gone cold.

The Note in the Coat Pocket

A note before the story. The events I am about to describe did not occur, in this configuration, in any single year. Pieces of them occurred to me; pieces of them occurred to a friend's father in Oslo in 2017; pieces of them I have invented because the configuration required them. I have written this story before, twice, with different objects. In the first version it was a key on a ring whose other contents she could not identify. In the second it was a small annotated map of a town her father had said, all his life, that he had never visited. I have settled on the note in the coat pocket because the note has the specific property — important here — of being addressed to no one and signed only with an initial, and because the problem the note creates is therefore exactly the problem I want.

Anna's father died in February, of pneumonia, in the small Norwegian town in which he had lived for the last forty years. She was thirty-seven, an architect, married, with one child. She flew over from London on the day of his death and stayed for a week. The week is not, in any direct sense, what this story is about.

In April she returned, to clear out the apartment. She had thought about asking her brother to come — her brother was in Oslo and could have come easily — but had decided, in the end, to do it alone. She told herself this was so that she could work without having to negotiate; she told herself, on the second evening of the work, that this was probably also so she could be the one to find anything that needed finding.

She had been clearing the wardrobe, which was a tall narrow one in the bedroom, on the second afternoon, when she found, in the inside pocket of his good winter coat — the one he had worn to her brother's wedding in 2019 and which she remembered him wearing, in photographs, to her own — a folded piece of paper.

It will be obvious to any reader of the relevant kind of contemporary fiction what kind of paper it was. I would like, here, to admit something. I considered, in earlier drafts, refusing to put a note in the coat pocket. I considered making the pocket contain only a tissue, or nothing, or a 1998 receipt for a coffee in Bergen — the ordinary, unsignifying matter that a coat from the 1990s could be expected, in fact, to contain. The story in which Anna finds nothing in the pocket is a story I would, on certain days, prefer to write. The story in which she finds the note is the one with the question I am interested in. I have chosen this version.

The note, when she unfolded it, was a single sentence, in handwriting she did not recognise, dated 11 March 2007: 'I will be at the small bench in the park, by the fountain, at four, on the days that you can come — and on the days that you cannot, I will be there anyway, just so that one of us is. T.'

Anna sat down on the bed. She read the note twice. She turned it over. The other side was blank. There was no envelope. There was nothing, in the inside pocket or the outer ones, that would have made the note part of a larger correspondence.

She sat for some time. She thought about her father, who had been a quiet man, and about her mother, who had died seven years before him. She thought about the bench in the park, by the fountain, which she had passed every day on her childhood walks to school and which was, in the afternoons of her memory, almost always empty. She thought about T, whom she did not know. She thought about the question of whether she wanted to know.

I would like, at this point, to make a small claim, and to admit that I am uncertain about it. The claim is that there are some pieces of information about the dead that one has the right to refuse. I am not certain this is right. The opposite claim — that the truth is owed to the living, and that to refuse it is a kind of cowardice — has, in much of the literature about the family, considerable weight. I will not arbitrate between the two. I will only say that Anna, sitting on her father's bed with the note in her hand, found herself, for several minutes, holding both at once, in a way she would not have expected to be possible.

She thought, eventually, that she could do one of three things. She could put the note back in the coat pocket and donate the coat to the charity shop, where someone unrelated would in due course find it. She could keep the note in a folder of her own, indefinitely, where it could be found by her own children one day in the same condition in which she had found it. She could go, on a Wednesday afternoon at four, to the small bench by the fountain in the park, and sit there for an hour, and see what, if anything, happened.

I am stopping here, with Anna sitting on the bed with the note in her hand, and the coat across her lap, and the small narrow wardrobe still half-full behind her. The reader will know, by now, what they would like Anna to do. The reader will also know what their preference is a sign of. I would like the reader to leave her there.