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The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Three Hundred Rolls

The children's book, The Knots That Ran (ages 6-8), on Spark & Anvil

This is the same evening as "The Knots That Ran", the tenth book of "The Day Before". Lan's mother was not on the Green.

The phone went at a quarter to seven, which was never good news, because the bakery only rang her at home when something had gone wrong.

It was Dev, the night manager. He was polite about it, the way he was polite about everything, even at two in the morning.

"Just checking the school order," he said. "For the fair on Saturday. Three hundred and forty-two rolls, is that right? Only it's a lot of rolls, and I'd hate to be short."

Lan's mother stood in the hall with a tea towel over her shoulder and closed her eyes.

It was not three hundred and forty-two. It was three hundred and twenty-four. She knew, because she had taken the order herself, at the counter, from the woman who ran the school kitchen, and she had written it on the back of her hand because the order book was in the office and the office was locked. Then, because she was going off shift and Dev was not in yet, she had rung her sister, who worked the late shift, and told her, and her sister had said she would tell Dev when he came in. Her sister had said it back to her on the phone. Three hundred and twenty-four. She was sure of it.

It had been a good order to get. The school fair was the biggest thing the bakery did all year apart from Christmas, and the woman from the school kitchen had come in herself to place it, with her reading glasses on a cord and a list in her hand, and had stood at the counter while Lan's mother wrote it down. Rolls for the hot dogs. Rolls for the burgers. A tray of the little sweet ones for the cake stall. Three hundred and twenty-four in all, because the woman had counted the children and the teachers and the parents who always came, and added a few for the ones who always came twice. Lan's mother had said it back to her, and the woman had nodded, and that had been that. She had felt, writing it on her hand, the small satisfaction of a job done properly at the start.

Somewhere between her sister and Dev, the two and the four had changed places.

"Three hundred and twenty-four," she said. "Sorry, Dev. Twenty-four."

"Twenty-four," said Dev. "Got it." And then, because he was careful, "Do you want to check with your sister? She definitely said forty-two."

She said she would. She hung up and stood in the hall, with the smell of the fish fingers she had left under the grill beginning to suggest that they were done.

Here was the sensible thing. She would ring her sister, who would be on her break about now, and say it again, slowly, the way you would to a child. Three. Hundred. And twenty. Four. And her sister would ring Dev, or text him, and that would be that. It was only a number. People just had to listen properly.

She had her thumb on her sister's name when Lan came in from the Green.

Lan came in all at once, the way she always did, coat half off, her shoes leaving bits of the Green on the mat. She had been out since after school with Inkling, the girl from the lake houses, and she had that look again, the one that meant she had been somewhere further than the end of the road.

"Who was on the phone?"

"Dev. The school order. It's got muddled." She held the phone up. "I'm going to ring Auntie and say it again. People just have to listen properly—"

She stopped. Because she had said it properly. She had said it properly, and her sister had said it back properly, and it had still come out the other end wrong. Saying it again, more slowly, would send the same number down the same road. She did not, she realised, know where on that road the two and the four had swapped. Her sister might have said it wrong. Dev might have heard it wrong. It did not matter. It had been in two people's heads, and one of the heads had turned it round.

She lowered the phone.

Lan looked at it, and at her mother's hand, where the number had been written that morning and had mostly washed off in the bread dough. Then she went to the drawer under the phone, where the takeaway menus and the dead batteries lived, and found one of the old order cards from the bakery, the yellow ones, and a pencil.

"Don't make anyone carry it in their head," said Lan.

She drew three boxes on the card, side by side. Over the first she wrote hundreds, over the second tens, over the third ones. She wrote the letters very carefully, as if they might come undone.

"How many hundreds?" she asked.

"Three," said her mother.

Lan wrote a 3 in the first box. "Tens?"

"Two."

A 2 in the middle box. "And ones?"

"Four."

A 4. Lan pushed the card across. "Now nobody has to remember it," she said. "It just goes."

Her mother looked at the card for a moment. She had a list of things she might have said: that you would not normally write the boxes, that Dev was perfectly able to read a number, that this was a lot of fuss over some rolls. She said none of them. She took a photograph of the card with the phone and sent it to Dev, with the school order, from the card, sorry for the muddle, and after a minute the phone buzzed.

324. Got it. That's a better system than ours, tbh.

Tí, who was four and had wandered in to see what the fuss was, wanted to know if he could have one of the three hundred and twenty-four rolls. He was told he could have the one that came out wonky. He accepted this.

Later, when Tí was asleep, and Lan was supposed to be, her mother sat on the end of the bed.

"Where did you get the boxes from?" she asked.

Lan yawned. "A girl with a cord," she said. "She tied it in knots."

Her mother did not ask which girl. She had learned that some of the things Lan brought home from the Green came with a story, and some came without, and the ones without did not come with one if you asked.

She went back to the hall and pinned the yellow card to the corkboard by the phone, where she would see it the next time somebody rang with a number. Under it, in marker, she wrote:

Write it down. Send the card.

The question for your own table

What messages in your house get passed from person to person by word of mouth? Which of them would be safer written once and passed along as they are?

Something to do

Next time you take a number for someone else, a phone number, an order, a date, write it on paper and hand over the paper, not the memory.

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