The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Kitchen-Drawer Map

This is the same evening as "The Map Made of Sticks", the sixth book of "The Day Before". Inkling's grandad was not on the Green.

Dennis had driven the number nine for twenty-six years and could find any stop on it with his eyes shut. He could not, it turned out, find the lake houses.

They had worked together at the depot for most of their lives, Inkling's grandad on the engines and Dennis at the wheel, and they had kept meaning to see each other since they both retired, the way people do, until Dennis's wife had said on the phone that if they didn't fix a date she would fix it for them. So it was fixed. Tomorrow, two o'clock. Dennis would drive out for a cup of tea and a look at the famous plum tree.

The trouble was the lake houses themselves. They sat at the end of a lane off a lane off the main road, and the last mile had no signal at all, which was one of the things Inkling's grandad liked about it. Satnavs sent people into the reservoir car park. Delivery vans arrived at the wrong end and reversed the whole way back, beeping.

He had explained it on the phone that evening. Three times. "Left at the shelter, then you'll see the farm, not the first farm, the second farm, then it bends, keep going past the bend, there's a post box but don't turn at the post box, keep going—"

"Hang on," Dennis had said, "which farm?"

The third time, Dennis had read it back to him from the back of an envelope, and it had come out as a different road altogether, one that went to a garden centre. They had both laughed, and then they had both gone quiet, the way men their age go quiet when they can see a small embarrassment coming and no way round it.

So he had decided. Tomorrow, from half past one, he would stand at the end of the lane where it met the main road, in his good coat, and wave. However long it took. Dennis would see him. It was not dignified, but it was certain, and he had always preferred certain.

He was looking for his good coat on the hooks when Inkling came in from the Green.

She came in slowly, the way she always did, looking at the room before she walked into it, and she had sand on her shoes that was not from anywhere near here. She looked at the coat in his hand.

"Where are you going?"

He told her. Dennis, the lane, the signal, the three phone calls, the half past one.

"What will he see?" said Inkling. "On the way."

"It doesn't matter what he sees," her grandad said, "I'll explain—" and he stopped.

He had explained. Three times. He knew every inch of that road and it had not helped Dennis at all, because Dennis could not see what he was seeing. Every word of it had come out of his head and gone into the phone and arrived at the other end as a garden centre.

He hung the coat back on its hook.

Inkling took a page off the kitchen calendar, the month that was nearly over, a photograph of a lighthouse on the front, and turned it over on the table. She took the pencil from the jar.

"Where does he start?"

"The bus shelter on the main road. The old one with the bench."

She drew a small box at the bottom of the page and wrote SHELTER. Then a line going up. "What's next?"

"The farm—"

"What can you see from the road," said Inkling, patiently, "that doesn't move?"

He thought about it properly then, the way he would have thought about an engine. Not what he knew about the road. What the road showed you. "Gates," he said. "Field gates. Three of them, on the left, before the post box. Then two more after. Then the plum tree, you can't miss the plum tree."

Inkling drew three little gates along the line. A post box, a red dot. Two more gates. A round green tree at the top, with the lake houses round it like ducks.

"And the turn?" she said. "The one he got wrong."

That was the bend. Everyone got the bend wrong, because there were two lanes off it and they looked the same. He had never been able to explain which one. You just knew. He tried to think what you saw when you knew.

"From the right one," he said slowly, "you can see the church tower over the hedge. And you can still see the shelter behind you, if you look back. Both at once. From the wrong one, the hedge hides the tower."

Inkling drew the church tower off to one side, a little square with a cross, and drew a faint line from it, and another faint line from the shelter, and where the two lines crossed the lane she put a small ring and wrote, in capitals, TURN HERE: YOU CAN SEE THE SHELTER AND THE TOWER.

She pushed it across to him. It was not to scale. The farm was missing altogether. The plum tree was larger than the church.

He looked at it for a long time.

In the morning he did not stand at the end of the lane. He drove into town with the map and posted it through the door of Dennis's flat behind the old depot, which took twenty minutes, and then he came home and put the kettle on at a quarter to two and sat in the kitchen with the door open, listening.

At four minutes past two a car he did not recognise came round the plum tree and stopped. Dennis got out holding the calendar page, lighthouse side out, as though it were a ticket.

"Five gates," Dennis said, before hello. "Three, the post box, two. And I looked back at the turn and there was the shelter, and there was your tower. Who drew this?"

"My granddaughter," he said, and found that he was proud in a way he had not expected, as though he had drawn it himself and also had not, and both of those were better.

That evening he found Inkling on the jetty.

"Where did that come from?" he said. "Drawing it. The tower and the shelter."

"Some sticks," said Inkling, and did not explain.

He did not ask whose. He had spent forty years being the one who knew how things worked, and he was beginning to suspect, at seventy-one, that knowing how a thing worked and being able to hand it to someone else were two different trades, and that he had only ever been apprenticed to one of them.

He put the calendar page in the kitchen drawer, lighthouse side down, for the next person who could not find the lake houses.

The question for your own table

When you give someone directions, are you telling them what you know, or what they will see?

Something to do

Draw the way to your home for a visitor using only things that don't move, and mark the one place where two of them line up.