SORY - some things are better left in the oven

Part 1:
Everything is exactly where it needs to be

This book is best read in a German accent.

Chapter 1: Niamh


The woman was wearing something that might be called a dressing gown, even though neither dressing nor gown felt quite appropriate. And taking her sweet time shuffling to the door. She had probably anticipated that it would not be worth the effort.

“It’s cold,” she said, and shoved the floppy box right back at Niamh.

She did not even look angry. Nor disappointed. She looked like someone who had tried to do something nice for herself, only to find out that it had not worked out, because it never did.

Niamh turned around, taking the rejected pizza. She remembered reading that a long time ago a chemist, or maybe an alchemist, had constructed a special bed for himself to die in. The bed had been hung on a scale so he could be weighed before he died, and then again after, so his descendants could find out the weight of the soul he had breathed out.

Niamh had always wondered whether this story was true. But from the weight of the box in her hand, she could tell that the soul of the pizza she was carrying had left a long time ago.

She felt a bit sad for the woman. But then, what did you expect, ordering a pizza from a place called Wang’s Very Hot Pizza?

Standing in a row at the entrance to the estate were the bins. One had its mouth open, and Niamh threw in the soulless box.

Then she sat down on the front steps, pulled off one glove, and dialled.

If you have a medical emergency or a life-threatening injury, please hang up immediately and dial 999. Otherwise please hold while we connect you to —

She knew the message well enough by now that she’d stopped hearing it. She set the phone on the step beside her and looked at the bins.

Beside the third one, half-leaning against the wall as though it had long given up on being a plant, was a tiny thing inside a broken flowerpot. It was grey-green and flattened and had shed most of its soil during whatever had happened to bring it here. But the roots — Niamh leaned forward, listening with her hands — the roots were softly trembling.

She took the small torch from her jacket pocket and shone it at the base of the stem.

Zamioculcas zamiifolia. Nearly impossible to kill. Tolerant of neglect to a degree that most living things were not. Someone had overwatered it, probably, become discouraged by what happened next, and then solved the problem in the way people generally preferred to solve such problems, which was by putting it outside and walking away.

The broken pot had no drainage.

Niamh suddenly thought that it would have made a nice children’s book: a plant suffocating in her pot until she gathered all her strength and broke it.

But then, Niamh did not see things that way. She did not believe in miraculous strength and weak beings suddenly taking radical measures.

This was a dying plant and she might save it. With some luck and lots of care. End of story.

Niamh removed the rest of the shards and carefully wrapped the plant in the empty insulated sleeve from her delivery bag.

Then she put the phone back to her ear.

— all of our care navigators are currently busy. Your call is important to us and we will —

She got on her bike.

* * *

The shop was on Pearson Street, just off Kingsland Road. The flat was just above it, reached by a staircase off the side yard that was narrow enough to get one’s clothes dirty. The entrance smelled of pizza and smoke and something else she had never been able to name: not incense, not charcoal, something older and drier, like the accumulated breath of a building that had been absorbing heat for a very long time before the archaeologists finally excavated it.

That would be in the future.

For now, she lived here. It was an okay place. Meaning, it was better than any of the places she had ever tried to be alive in. She had tried several. This was the only place that had not, in one way or another, asked her to be a slightly different person.

To be more specific: Wang had never asked her to be a slightly different person. Wang, her boss, had, in the main, not asked her to be anything at all.

She locked her bike in the yard, came in through the side door, and dropped the evening’s cash on the kitchen counter without breaking stride. Wang was at the stove. Niamh was not sure if Wang had ever had any friends. Or a past. He was one of those old people who looked like they had been born old and stayed that way.

And he was a miserable cook. He really was. Which did not keep him from messing around with his stove all the time. That soup of his. Boiling forever. But then, once the pizza oven was out, that tiny burner was the only source of heat in the entire building, and winter nights in London could be miserable.

Not that she minded.

She opened the fridge, took a soft drink, filled a glass with ice.

Dialled again.

— please hold while we connect you —

Wang looked at the cash. His expression didn’t change, but his finger slowed on the last note.

“There is money missing again,” he said, without turning around.

“We need a better battery.” The e-bike’s battery had been cutting out since December. She had mentioned this five times. Each time Wang had agreed in a way that had not yet produced a new battery.

“Cold drinks make you slow.”

“Good.”

She headed for the side door.

“The plumber is coming tomorrow,” Wang shouted after her. “For your shower.”

Niamh stopped. She put the phone down and turned around properly, which she did not always do. Wang continued stirring.

“You know I don’t want anyone in my room.”

“If you never let anyone in,” Wang said, in the tone of someone sharing a fundamental observation about the nature of things, “nothing gets fixed.”

This was probably true. Niamh didn’t say so. Wang didn’t say so either. They had had enough of this particular conversation to know where it ended, which was with Niamh going upstairs and Wang going back to his pot, and the shower continuing to produce water at a temperature that suggested it was in sync with everything.

She went upstairs.

* * *

Her room was shady and cold and almost entirely given over to plants.

They were on the shelves, on the windowsill, on the floor in mismatched pots and cracked saucers and old glass jars. A grow light hummed over the healthier ones. Thin black irrigation tubes ran between the pots in a system Niamh had designed herself over two weeks of insomnia, fed by a tank on the top shelf and dripping at different carefully designed intervals into saucers and waiting soil below.

She liked the sound. It resembled something an avant-garde musician might have come up with on a rainy night and some moody drugs. Not relaxing, but irregular enough to shut down her brain when it started to run wild.

She set the ZZ plant on her desk.

Mask on. Lamp angled down. Tools laid out, disinfected: the small blade, the tweezers, the stainless-steel scissors. She examined the roots with the magnifying glass. Some were damaged. A few were beginning to rot. She made the cuts cleanly, without hesitating. The hesitation was where you lost things. You held back because you were afraid of hurting what was still good, and in doing so you gave the rot more time. She had once read something about roses. If you wanted them to live, you had to treat them like your worst enemies.

She set the plant on dry tissue, lined a pot with grit, prepared the soil mix. Then she put the plant in the corner and angled the lamp away.

Two days. Maybe three. Struggling roots needed air and darkness before they could go back into soil. They needed space to let go of the rot and the suffocation. The kindest thing she could do for it now was leave it alone.

She took off the mask. Changed into her sleeping clothes, a grey T-shirt belonging to someone she no longer spoke to, a pair of boxers. Got into bed.

She dialled.

— your call is very important to us and we will answer as soon as a care navigator —

She left it on the pillow and lay back to look at the ceiling.

* * *

Fifteen days off the clozapine. She needed to speak to someone.

She knew the timeline. Dr Shah had everything. New bloodwork, new prescription, a gap between the two medications because you couldn’t overlap them and the body needed time to recalibrate, let go of toxins.

Niamh had understood this. She had gone home and stopped taking the medication and begun waiting to see what it would be like this time. She could feel the metallic taste. The air was getting thinner.

Last time had been bad. The time before that, different bad. She’d learned by now that there wasn’t a consistent version of off the medication any more than there was a consistent version of herself. There was only this time, and what this time turned out to be.

Now she felt a bit like her own roots were in the air. Nothing bad. Just a bit windy.

She wasn’t sleeping. Not one bit. Not even with the dripping. As though something inside her that had been producing low-level noise for a long time had been switched off, and in its absence, she noticed everything.

The plants, for instance.

She’d always been good with plants. This had never seemed remarkable to her. You just listened. You noticed when someone needed water, or more light, or simply to be left alone. You learned the difference between a plant having a bad week and a plant that was giving up. That was all.

But in the fifteen days since she’d stopped the clozapine, the plants in the evenings had begun to feel different. Not strange. Noisier. More themselves. The cuttings in their glass tubes shifted in the grow light’s glow, moved by something that wasn’t wind. She had checked. The window was closed. And it wasn’t the vibration from the Windrush line nearby, because she’d put her palm to the shelf and felt nothing. The movement was small and unhurried and strangely weird.

But it was okay to feel a bit weird in between meds. Unrooted. Floating. She had calmed herself down in worse moments.

Then she felt the warmth.

It came up through the floorboards. This happened sometimes when Wang had decided to let the oven run overnight. He said it was good to keep it breathing sometimes. He sometimes said stuff like that. Maybe it was a Chinese thing to talk about things as if they were people.

But tonight was different. It felt as if the warmth knew exactly where she was. It felt as if the warmth was watching her.

Which was exactly the way things felt when you came off your meds. It was as if the entire world was personally related to her.

She waited and breathed and told herself she just had to sit it out. She was seriously sleep-deprived, after all, and without the medication there was nothing between herself and the world to take the edge off. First thing in the morning she would try to get through to Dr Shah and convince her to prescribe some sleeping pills.

She got up anyway. Something icy and sugary was the next best thing when you felt everything rushing into your head.

* * *

The third step creaked, but on the left side it was slightly less bad. She went down in the dark and pushed against the kitchen door softly, so as not to wake Wang.

The oven was still giving off some heat. Occasional flames lit up while the charcoal breathed its last red breath. Which was normal, which she was used to, which was simply the oven doing what an oven did before going out.

She went to the fridge. Found a soft drink. Turned around.

The oven was glowing. For some reason, it felt hotter than usual, which explained why she had felt it upstairs. There was nothing to be worried about, though. Everything was exactly as it should be, except that in the embers, deep inside the oven, barely visible, were a pair of slippers.

Old ones. Worn at the heel. The same kind Wang wore. Was this crazy man trying to burn his rubber slippers?

Then she looked up. There were the slippers, all right, and above them —

She dropped the bottle.

It hit the kitchen tiles and skidded, and she took a step back and looked at the oven, and the oven contained nothing but ash and the faint pulse of charcoal doing what charcoal did, and the slippers were gone, or had never been there, or had been there in the way that things were there when you were fifteen days off a medication.

She stood very still, desperately trying to breathe, while in her chest something was jumping like a crazy dancer.

Behind her, a door opened.

Wang appeared from his storage room in joggers and a vest, looking at the floor, looking at the soft drink spreading slowly across his kitchen tiles.

His eyes moved, just briefly, to the oven. Something crossed his face that was not quite surprise and not quite anything else she had a name for.

“Why,” he said, “do you always make messes?”

He pointed at the puddle.

Niamh got a cloth. She picked up the bottle, cleaned up the floor, rinsed the cloth and hung it over the tap. When she was done, the jumping in her heart had calmed down. She went back upstairs without saying anything to Wang. After all, what was there to say? The oven was just an oven and the slippers had never been there, because Wang had been standing right there wearing his slippers. The only thing she knew was that she was fifteen days off her medication and, with this, it all made sense.

She got into bed.

She looked at the ceiling.

The tubes dripped, in their own time, in their own sequence, and with great concentration she managed to close her eyes and pretend she was falling asleep, and the warmth from the kitchen below was exactly how it should be.