The last box

We agreed on Saturday at nine, because Saturday at nine is the hour of people who want to get something over with quickly that should already have been over with.

It had ended in May. This was August. In between there were four messages about an electricity bill, one about a parcel delivered to the wrong address, and none about anything else.

Flat 62 has two bedrooms, a good window in the front room and a parquet floor that creaked at one particular spot in the hallway, always the same one, which we had learned to step around without noticing we were stepping around it.

We both still had a key. That is the fact that explains everything that follows.

Fourteen boxes. We bought fourteen and used thirteen, which is the only recorded instance of anybody overestimating a house move.

The system was straightforward and had been agreed by text: two piles, one by the door and one by the balcony. Whoever wanted an object put it on their own pile. Anything nobody wanted went into a charity box.

It worked until halfway down the bookcase.

The books were easy. Each of us recognised our own by the spine and the state of it, and the two or three borderline cases were settled with that faintly aggressive generosity we used on each other whenever one of us was trying to prove something.

"Take it."

"It isn't mine."

"Take it anyway."

Then came the box of cables, which is the box every household has and nobody opens. We opened it. There was a charger for a phone neither of us owned any more, an HDMI lead, and a cinema ticket from 2021 folded up at the bottom for no reason whatsoever.

Neither of us said anything about the ticket.

It went into the charity box, which is not a thing anybody gives to charity.

At half eleven we stopped to eat.

There was nothing in the flat. The fridge was already switched off with the door propped on a tea towel, the way you do, and the shop on the corner sold us two pasties and a two-litre bottle of lemonade because it had nothing smaller.

We sat on the front room floor with our backs to the wall and the bottle between us.

It is a stupid detail, but we both sat against the same wall. There were three other empty ones available.

The conversation held up for about fifteen minutes. Work, her sister, a friend's dog that had died. Then there was a silence, and in the silence it became extremely clear that the flat was empty, that it was Saturday, and that nobody had agreed a finishing time.

"We were good today," he said.

"We were always good at this."

"At what?"

"Tasks. We're excellent at tasks."

That was true and it was the entire problem, and we both laughed because laughing was cheaper than the alternative.

The bedroom was left until last on purpose, and we had both known that since nine in the morning without either of us saying so.

The mattress was staying. That had been settled by text: the mattress was hers, but she was going somewhere furnished, so it stayed for the next tenant or for the building manager to deal with.

It was on the floor, with no bed, because the frame had already come apart and was leaning against the wall.

We stood there looking at it for longer than was reasonable.

"I'll take the sheet," she said.

"Take it."

"Not today, though."

Nobody said anything after that, and the loose board in the hallway didn't creak, because neither of us left the room.

If anyone asks how it was, we'll say it was the way it always was, and that is a lie.

It was better. It was a great deal better, and the two people involved know exactly why: because there was nothing afterwards. No pending conversation about the weekend, no argument being postponed, no arithmetic about which of us was more tired.

A flat with no curtains in the afternoon is a very bright place. We closed nothing, and the block opposite has thirty windows, and at three in the afternoon in August that mattered to neither of us.

At one point she laughed at her own knee, which slid on the plastic of the mattress, and he laughed with her and the pair of us stopped for a good thirty seconds without letting go.

In four years we had never once laughed in the middle. That is information too.

At twenty past five the removal van messaged to say it was forty minutes out.

We got dressed with the speed of two adults who were once teenagers and remember the technique.

We took the boxes down in four lift journeys. On the third she held the button while he stacked, and he said thanks, and she said no bother, and the two of us behaved like competent colleagues.

The van took everything at ten past six.

That left him, her and an empty flat with an unmade mattress in the middle of the bedroom.

We stopped at the door, on the inside, with the keys in our hands. One each.

"Leave it at the desk," she said.

"I will."

"Monday."

He said he would. She said goodnight, and didn't say goodbye, and took the stairs instead of waiting for the lift, which in a six-storey building is a decision about something else.

Both keys were handed in at the desk. Hers on the Monday, at eight in the morning. His on the Thursday.

Three days apart, in an empty flat, with a mattress in the middle of the bedroom.

We have never discussed the Thursday.