The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Borrowed Tins

This is the same evening as "The Notched Bone", the fifth book of "The Day Before". Lan's mother was not on the Green.

The tins had gone out on Saturday, which had seemed like a generous thing to do on Saturday.

Lan's mother owned twelve good baking tins, the deep square kind that the supermarket did not sell and she had bought one at a time over eleven years. For the fair on the Green, people had needed tins for the cake stall, and she had said yes to everyone, because she was standing in the middle of the Green with a clipboard someone had handed her and it was easier than saying no. Some went to the Okafors. Some went to the flats over the launderette. Some went to the vicarage, where the cakes had been made in a kitchen the size of a church hall.

The fair was over. The cakes were eaten. And on Wednesday evening the phone had rung with a wedding order, a big one, three tiers and a hundred and twenty little ones, to be started at five tomorrow morning before her shift. She needed all twelve tins on her own counter by then.

She knew she had lent twelve. She did not know who had how many.

She had tried, standing at the sink. Four to the Okafors? Or was it three, and the fourth was the one Mr Okafor had come back for? The flats had taken some, she was fairly sure, because she remembered carrying them up the stairs. The vicarage had taken the rest, unless the vicarage had passed some to the scout hut, which the vicarage did. She had already been round to the Okafors once this evening and come back with two tins, and then gone back because she thought there might be another, and there had been, and then she had lost count of how many she had carried home and had to go and look in the cupboard.

It was nearly eight. Her feet hurt the way they always hurt at eight. The sensible thing, she thought, was to put her coat back on and go round the Green and knock on every door, every single one, and ask everybody whether they had a tin of hers, and keep going until there were twelve on the counter. It would take an hour. It would be embarrassing. It would work.

She had her coat half on when Lan came in from the Green.

Lan came in the way she came in when she had been somewhere with Inkling, quietly, as if she had walked a long way and her mind had not finished walking. She looked at the coat, and at the seven tins stacked on the counter, and at her mother.

"Which houses have them?" said Lan.

"I'm going to ask everyone," her mother said. "Every door. Somebody's got—" and she stopped. Because she had asked the Okafors twice already, and she still did not know whether she had all of theirs, and asking everyone was only the same thing she had been doing, done more times.

She took her arm out of the coat.

Lan went to the shopping board by the fridge, the little blackboard where they wrote milk and bin day and Lan dentist Thurs. She wiped it with her sleeve, which her mother let go. Then she took the chalk.

"How many to the Okafors?"

"Three. I think. Three."

Lan drew three short strokes, side by side. Then a gap. "The flats?"

"Four. Definitely four, I carried them up."

Four strokes. A gap. "The vicarage?"

"The rest. Five."

Five strokes. Lan stood back. Three, gap, four, gap, five. Twelve marks, in three little families, on the board.

"Now," said Lan, and looked at the tins on the counter, "which ones are back?"

They went through them. The Okafors' three were all back; Mrs Okafor had scratched an O on the bottom of each, which her mother had never noticed. Lan drew a line across each of the three Okafor strokes. The flats: four back, the ones with the dent. Four lines. That left the vicarage. Five strokes, and on the counter, nothing from the vicarage at all.

"Five at the vicarage," said her mother, slowly.

"Five," said Lan, and went to get her shoes.

They walked across the Green together in the half-dark. The trestles from the fair were still stacked against the war memorial, waiting for the council, and somebody had left a single bunting flag tied to the bench, flapping at nothing. Lan walked with her hands in her pockets and did not talk, which was unusual, and her mother did not make her, which was also unusual. She was thinking about the board. She had expected to feel silly, going through tins with a piece of chalk like a game for a seven-year-old. Instead she felt the thing she felt at work on a good morning, when the ovens were all up to heat and the trays were lined up in order and she could see from the doorway exactly what was done and what wasn't. She had not felt that at home in a long time. At home everything was in her head, and her head was always full.

At the vicarage door the vicar, in socks, was very sorry. He had been meaning to bring them round. He went to look, and they heard him calling to someone upstairs, and a long conversation about which cupboard, and the sound of a great many things being moved to get at a few.

It was a quarter past nine when they came back from the vicarage with four tins, and the vicar's apologies, and a tin of shortbread that was not one of hers. Lan drew four lines. One stroke in the vicarage family stood on its own, uncrossed.

Her mother looked at it for a while. Then she said, "The scout hut," and went, on her own, to the one door, and knocked once, and came back with the twelfth tin and a story about the scouts having used it for frogspawn, which she decided not to think about until it had been through the dishwasher twice.

All twelve strokes on the board were crossed.

She found Lan on the sofa afterwards, half asleep with the television on.

"Where did you get that from?" she said. "The lines on the board."

"A bone," said Lan, and closed her eyes.

Her mother did not ask whose. There were things Lan brought home from the Green that came with explanations and things that didn't, and she had learned, mostly, that the second kind were not improved by asking. She looked at the board again. Three, four, five. She would not have drawn it in groups. She would have drawn twelve strokes in a row, and then crossed off eleven, and then stood there wondering which house the twelfth one lived in. The gaps were the clever part. The gaps were where the houses were.

She stood in the kitchen with the twelve tins and the crossed-out board and thought about how many times in eleven years she had tried to keep a count in her head that would not stay there, and how she had always thought the answer was to try harder.

At five the next morning, flour on her wrists, she wrote on the board under the tins, in small letters: THIS IS HOW YOU LEND.

The question for your own table

What are you carrying in your head right now that would be lighter written down where everyone can see it?

Something to do

Next time you lend something out, make one mark for each thing, in groups by who has it, somewhere you will see every day, and cross each one through when it comes home.