The Ham Radio

I lost my wallet somewhere between the car park and the chippy, which is the sort of thing you do when you're fifty-two and your sister keeps telling you to get one of those phone cases that holds your cards, and I want to say right here that I am fifty-two and I know it, I've made my peace with it mostly, but I still hadn't made my peace with standing in a strange Cornish town with no money, no bus fare, and no way back to my car until the evening coach came through at seven.

The tattoo parlor was the only place open that didn't charge you just for sitting down. Needles & Ink, the sign said, and there was a cat asleep in the window and a girl behind the counter, mid-twenties maybe, with green rings in her ears, who took one look at my face and said I could wait as long as I liked, no charge, she'd even make me a tea if I wanted one.

"It's just my wallet," I told her, sitting down in the back chair because it was the only chair. "I've got a coach at seven and four pounds fifty in loose change in my coat pocket, and that's the whole situation."

"Well, you picked a good place to be stuck," she said, and she meant the town, I think, not the chair, though the chair was honestly growing on me by then. It was one of those big padded ones, the kind hairdressers use, and I'd sat in a thousand of them over thirty years of doing other women's roots, so it felt like sitting in my own kitchen almost.

The shop shared a wall with a fishmonger's, which you could smell, and there was a door between the two shops, which you could hear, a bolted door with a strip of light under it, and every so often someone on the other side would shout something about haddock and the girl would roll her eyes and tell me that was Dev, he was loud, he was lovely, you got used to it.

So I sat and I drank my tea and I did what I always do in parlors, which is read the flash on the walls and think about the one tattoo I never got, a little swallow on the shoulder. I am fifty-two years old, and I didn't get it, and I've thought about it maybe twice a week ever since, which tells you something about me that I don't especially like.

I'd been in this town eleven hours, all told. I was on a road trip, the kind you take when your mum dies and you sell her flat and you decide you'll drive until you feel like someone else, and I'd made it as far as Cornwall before the car gave out, and the garage said two days for the part, and I'd found a guest house, and I'd had a pasty, and I was doing fine right up until the wallet went missing. The coach at seven was supposed to take me down to the garage in Penzance, because the part had turned up early, don't ask me why, nothing about this week had made sense.

That's when the side door opened.

A woman came through it with a ham radio under her arm, this big old thing with dials and a coiled cord, and she was talking before she looked up, saying something about how it still worked fine if you thumped it, and then she did look up, and she stopped. Right there in the doorway, radio under one arm, mouth open, staring at me like I was a ghost, and I'll admit I did the same thing back because it had been nineteen years and I'd have known that face anywhere.

"Maisie," she said.

"Becca," I said, and my tea was halfway to my mouth and I just held it there, suspended, like an idiot.

The girl behind the counter looked between us and said, "Oh, do you two know each other?" in the bright innocent way people say it, and Becca said, "Something like that," and set the radio down on the counter and told her it was for the boss, he'd asked her to drop it by, and then she should have left, and honestly I think she meant to leave, but she didn't. She stayed where she was, arms folded now, looking at me like I owed her money.

"Nineteen years," she said.

"Nineteen years, yes!" I set my tea down. My hands weren't steady and I hated that. "You look well."

"Don't." She said it fast, like swatting a fly. "Don't do the pleasantries, Maisie. You don't get to do the pleasantries."

"All right." I spread my hands. "What do I get to do, then?"

"Nothing. You get to sit there." But she didn't go. She pulled out the stool by the counter instead and sat on it, which I took as a bad sign for her, because it meant she wanted to fight more than she wanted to win. "What are you even doing here? Nobody visits here. It's the arse end of everywhere."

"My car died. I'm getting the seven o'clock coach to collect it from the garage in Penzance." I paused. "And I lost my wallet, so it's been a day."

"Lost your wallet." She said it like I'd made it up, like it was some con, and something in me that had been lying quiet for nineteen years sat up and took notice.

"It happens to people, Becca. It's not a scheme. You're not that important."

"Oh, charming!" She laughed, but it wasn't a nice laugh, it was the laugh she used on customers who tried to haggle, I remembered it, I remembered everything, that was my whole problem. "Still sharp, then. Still quick. You were always quick, that was the whole bloody trouble with you, quick out the door too."

The girl behind the counter had found urgent work to do with a tray of ink caps and was pretending very hard not to listen, and I felt for her, I honestly did.

"That's not fair," I said. "You walked out on me, if we're keeping score. I said I wasn't ready and you packed a bag."

"Six months, Maisie." She leaned forward on the stool. "Six months and you wouldn't say the word. Any word. I wasn't asking you to marry me, I was asking you to stop treating it like a nice weekend that had overrun. You'd have kept it going forever in that hotel room in Glasgow, wouldn't you, beds turning down at six, nothing real ever touching us."

"We were thirty-three, I was frightened, that's not a crime."

"It is if you do it to someone else."

And there it was, the old wound, straight out, and I didn't have an answer for it then and I hadn't had one in nineteen years, so I just sat with it, and she sat with it too, and the radio on the counter hummed faintly like it was embarrassed for both of us.

"I'm sorry," I said, finally. "That's the whole of it. I was frightened and I hurt you and I've thought about it more than I'd like anyone to know."

She looked away first, which I counted as something, and she rubbed her thumb along the edge of the counter, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped, gone flatter, less like a fight.

"Your wallet," she said. "What did it look like?"

"Brown leather, worn to bits, a magnet in the shape of a highland cow inside, my sister thinks she's funny."

Becca went very still, and then she stood up so fast the stool scraped.

"The fish shop. Ken brought a wallet in this afternoon, said he'd found it up by the car park, he's been asking everyone who comes in." She was already at the inner door, yanking the bolt back, and she turned once, hand on the frame. "Stay there. Actually, don't. Come here."

I came, of course. Nineteen years and one sentence and my legs just went, like there'd never been any gap at all.

* * *

The wallet was exactly where Ken had left it, in a plastic bag by the till, and it was mine all right, highland cow and all, and I wanted to cry over a lump of old leather like an idiot but I kept it together mostly. Becca handed it over without ceremony, watched me count the four pounds fifty in my coat pocket against it like it mattered, and then she did something that surprised me. She said, "Right, that's sorted," and then, "There's a café two doors up. It does decent tea and it's warm. Come and sit with me for a bit."

I should have said no. I had a coach at seven and a fish shop to sneak through and a whole lifetime of reasons, but she was already pulling her coat on, not waiting for my answer, the way she always did, and I followed her out through the side door into the grey evening like a woman in a film I'd seen too many times. The café had two other people in it and a pie cabinet and a radio playing something soft, and we took the table by the window because Becca pointed at it, and for a while we just ordered and ate and said nothing at all, and it wasn't even uncomfortable, which was the strangest part. Her hair had silver in it now, a proper streak of it over one ear, and she was broader through the shoulders than she'd been at thirty-three, and I caught myself cataloguing her like I used to catalogue everyone's hair, out of habit, and stopped myself too late.

"You went grey beautifully," I said, because apparently I hadn't learned anything in nineteen years.

"I went grey loud, is what I did." She stirred her tea. "Ken calls it my skua stripe."

"That's a bird, isn't it."

"It's a nasty seabird that steals from gulls, so yes, it fits." She almost smiled, and then the smile went away and she put the spoon down. "Right. I didn't bring you here for weather talk, Maisie. I brought you here because if I don't say this now I'll have thought about