By the time the van comes at four, the flat will have been empty for two hours, and he will have spent one of them sitting on the top step with a tape measure in his hand, and before that it will have held only the wardrobe, which will not have gone down the stairs, having gone up them thirty-one years earlier in the same weather; and before that the chair, which will have been carried out by a man who does not know whose it was; and before that the boxes; and before that, for a little while in the middle of the morning, everything at once, in the middle of the floor, in the light from the one window that was never curtained.
He starts with the drawers. The drawers are where the paper is. The license, the receipts, the renewal stubs in their rubber band, four years of them, thin as a deck. The certificate with its two stamps. He puts the paper in a carrier bag and the carrier bag by the door.
The kitchen he can do. He is good at kitchens. The plates go into newspaper one at a time and he does not look at any of them. He puts two aside without deciding to and finds them later in his own bag.
Before the newspaper, the plates will have stood in the rack since Thursday, and before that they will have held a meal he did not come to, and before that, going back and back, one thousand and ninety meals he did not come to and eleven he did; and before all of them they will have been unwrapped from newspaper by a woman with a knife, in this room, in a week when the rain was not on any schedule.
The renewals started the winter after. He signed the first one himself, at the desk, with her sitting where the good chair used to be, and he remembers thinking that the price was reasonable, which is a thought he has not been able to get rid of.
For four years the license ran, and the service was good. On the third or fourth visit he stopped bracing at the door. By the second year he had a way of coming in that let him hear her before he saw the room. By the third he was arguing with her again, properly, the way they always had, about money and about his brother, and the argument was better than the silence had been, and he knew that too, and did not stop. Once, in the second winter, mid-argument, he reached across to take her plate, the way you clear as you quarrel, and his hand closed on the cold of the table, and neither of them said anything about it, and the argument carried on above his open hand.
Before the license lapsed, the standard voice will have said the four sentences it says. Before that there will have been a letter, and before the letter a call he took at work with his hand over his other ear, and before the call a Thursday he forgot, and before the forgotten Thursday one thousand four hundred and sixty days on which he did not forget, and before all of it the desk, and the reasonable price, and a man signing a thing at a counter with his mother in the room.
The wardrobe will not go down the stairs. He takes the door off and it makes no difference. He measures the turn on the half-landing with a tape and the tape agrees with him, and he sits on the top step with the tape in his hand.
The men from the van are polite about it. They have seen it before. One of them says his own mother’s went out through the window on a rope in the end and that the window is always the answer, and looks at this window, and says nothing further. The other one tells him about a place in the eastern lanes where they do a breakfast until eleven, and how it used to be until twelve, and that the woman there is from the same town as his wife, or near it, one of the two, and that the eggs are all right. He tells it with his hands still. Neither of them answers and he does not appear to need one. They tell him what everyone gets told: it can stay, and the estate can be charged for the removal at the end of the tenancy, or it can be broken up on the landing at cost, and either way there is a form. They give him the figure for breaking it up. He writes it on the back of the hardship schedule, which is the only paper in the bag with a clean side.
Before it is broken up, it will have been photographed for the file, with a folded rule laid against it for the scale, which is the trade’s way of proving a thing was too big. Before the photograph it will have stood thirty-one years against the same wall with the same coat inside it, and before the coat another coat, and before that, for one winter, nothing but a wedding suit and a boiler manual; and for the nine years before the wardrobe there will have been a rail across the alcove and a curtain in front of it, which is what people did. And before that it will have come up these stairs, sideways, on a Sunday, between two young men — one of whom is now a photograph on a stone, and the other of whom has just measured a half-landing with a tape and got the answer his father got.
The last thing left was the shelf by the window. Nothing had stood on it since the license lapsed — the little host had sat there and hummed one note and made a room feel occupied — and there was no dust on it at all. Somebody had been dusting a shelf with nothing on it. For eleven months, on the second Sunday, that somebody had been him, without ever once deciding to.
His father had known it would not go down. He had said so at the time, on the Sunday, halfway up, with his shirt out; and the woman with the knife had told him to be quiet and lift.
Before the flat is signed back it will have been swept, and before it is swept the walls will have been washed where the pictures were, and before that the pictures will have come down and left their shapes, and before the shapes forty years of light will have done what light does to paint. And before any of it — before the wardrobe, before the plates in their newspaper, before a young couple stood in an empty room and found there was only one wall the bed would fit — this will have been a room, unlet and unlicensed, costing nobody anything, with the window open to dry the paint.
That is the state the city has no form for: a room after the last person and before the first.
His hands have gone the color of the tape by then, and the print of the roll is on the pad of his thumb where he has been holding it closed. He hands the keys in at five. The clerk is kind and quick, and keeps him back four minutes past her own hour to do it, and asks him to confirm that the details below are true, and he reads them, and they are, every one, and this is the worst part of the day. He goes down the stair street with the carrier bag of paper. Behind him, on the second floor, the wardrobe stands in the empty flat with its door off, where it will stay until the estate is charged for it, and where it will be photographed by somebody who will not know what it is a photograph of.