The Five Good Places

The Green Car

"…to be carried to the five good places, and left there, in order."

Rosa heard the sentence land in the small grey office and thought: she had spent her whole life carrying things in order, and not once been thanked.

The solicitor was a young man named Pengelly who kept touching the corner of the document as if it might lift and fly. Behind him the window gave onto the high street of the town they had all grown up in and all, by separate roads, left: a chemist, a charity shop, the boarded front of what had been the amusement arcade their father once ran into the ground. The light through the glass was the colour of weak tea. Late September. The off-season already shutting the place down room by room, like someone going through a house turning off lamps.

"I'll read the operative clauses again," Pengelly said, "as there are — questions of construction."

"There are no questions," Rosa said. "I drafted half the wills in my chambers before I left the law. I can read."

"Then you'll appreciate this one is unusual."

Across the table Dan made a small sound that in childhood would have been the beginning of a joke and was now just air. He had arrived eleven minutes late with rain on the shoulders of a coat too thin for the season, said sorry to the receptionist, sorry to the chairs, sorry to Rosa with his eyes before he sat. His hands were doing the thing his hands did — turning a teaspoon over and over that he had carried in from the corridor for no reason either of them could have named. Forty-three years old. He looked like a man who had been recently and quietly emptied.

Cleo sat apart, against the wall rather than at the table, with her knees up and a black sketchbook open on them and a pencil moving across it in short strokes. She had not spoken since hello. She had, Rosa was fairly sure, very nearly not come at all; there had been a voicemail two nights ago, Cleo's voice flat and careful in the way it got when she was holding something level, I don't know if I can do the actual room, Ro, the room with all of you in it, and then nothing, and then this morning a figure at the back of the church car park who turned out to be her, thinner, steadier, fourteen months of something Rosa hadn't earned the right to ask about. The pencil never stopped. It was, Rosa understood without wanting to, how Cleo stayed in a room she couldn't bear: she drew the door.

"The estate," Pengelly said, "comprises the house — which carries a charge that will more or less consume it — a modest sum, certain personal effects, and a quantity of, ah." He looked at the page. "Stored works."

"Stored what?"

"It's not itemised here. There's a separate schedule held by a third party." He moved on quickly, a man stepping over a hole in a floor he didn't want to discuss. "The material conditions are these. The three of you, together, are to convey your mother's cremated remains to five locations along the western coast, named in a document I'll hand you, and to scatter a portion at each, in the sequence specified — not in any other sequence. At each location you'll open one of five sealed envelopes, numbered, which you are not to open in advance, or out of turn." He paused. "You are to complete all five within seven days of today."

"And if we don't," Rosa said.

He had the grace to look at her directly. "If any one of you withdraws before the fifth is completed — declines to continue, fails to attend, leaves — the gift fails. The estate and all effects pass to a charitable trust named in a sealed schedule, and none of the three of you takes anything." A breath. "It's an all-or-nothing condition. Survivorship of the project, you might call it. I advised against it. She was — firm."

There it was. Rosa felt it go through her like cold water through a pipe, the old sensation exactly: of being arranged. Their mother had arranged them their whole childhood — chores on the back of the door in her small upright hand, the rota of who fetched the coal, the list, always the list, Rosa to mind the little ones, Rosa to see to tea — and had now reached out of a box of ash to do it one last time, to bind the three of them together against their wills and make them prove, on a deadline, that they could be in a car for a week without flying apart. Firm. That was a word for her. There were others.

"That's grotesque," Rosa said, and was pleased that her voice came out level. "She's making us audition. For our own —"

"You don't have to take it," Cleo said, from the wall. The pencil stopped. "Any of it. We could just say no."

For a moment no one answered, because all three of them were doing the same private sum, and all three were ashamed of doing it, and Rosa most of all because she was the one who could not stop totting. Dan's flat. Dan's job, which she'd heard from no one and known anyway, the way you know weather. Cleo, who had nothing, who'd had nothing for years and was only now in a position to be ruined by it. And herself — not the money, she told herself, never the money, James earned and she earned; but the finishing. She had spent thirty years closing this woman's open accounts. She was not going to leave the last one unsettled because she couldn't sit in a car.

"We take it," Rosa said. "We do it, we do it fast, we do it properly, and then we are done." She squared the edges of her own untouched copy of the will against the table — tap, tap, two sides true. "Where's the car?"

Pengelly blinked. "The — yes. There's that as well. Transport is specified. You're to use her vehicle, and only that. It's in a lock-up off Fore Street. The keys—" He slid an envelope across, and a second, fatter one, soft-cornered. "And these. The route, and the five. I'm told the map is — annotated."

"Of course it is," said Rosa.

—

The lock-up smelled of damp brick and old engine and, underneath, something sharp and clean that stopped all three of them in the doorway at once.

"Turpentine," Dan said.

"Her tea," said Cleo, very quietly, and something crossed her face and was gone.

It had been a family joke so worn they'd forgotten it was one. The smell that came off their mother on her bad days, her away days, the days she got in the green car with the green flask and was gone down the coast and came back at dark with her mouth shut: the children had decided, somewhere in the long ago, that she drank some terrible herbal stuff out of that flask, some bitter solitary tea, and that the smell was that, and that the smell meant don't. It meant her shoulders up. It meant Rosa minding the little ones. They had laughed about the tea for forty years to keep from asking what it was.

The car was a green estate, the deep green of a holly leaf gone matte, older than Cleo and barely. It crouched in the dark of the garage with its tailgate to them like an animal that had got used to waiting. Rosa had not seen it in — she counted, helplessly — nine years. It had carried them all to school in it and to the beach in it and away from this town in it, one by one, until there was no one left to carry but their mother, who had apparently kept driving it somewhere, every week, all this time, alone.

Dan got the up-and-over door the rest of the way open and grey light fell in. He patted the wing as he passed it, a small involuntary hello, the way he'd say sorry to a chair. Of the three of them only Dan had ever loved this car. Only Dan had ever fixed it, lying under it on a board in the cold with their father nowhere, getting no credit then and expecting none now.

"She kept it running," he said, surprised. "Listen to it. Someone kept it —" He turned the key Rosa had handed him and the engine caught first time, low and even, and his face did something it had no business doing at a parked car. "Hm," he said, and looked away.

In the boot, on a folded tartan blanket, sat the things.

A biscuit tin. Square, dented at one corner, the lid showing a faded Highland scene, a stag in heather, the kind of tin that lives in a cupboard for a generation holding buttons and dead batteries and one foreign coin. Rosa lifted it and knew at once by the weight what it was, and put it down too fast.

"Tell me that's not —" Dan started.

"It's the ashes." Rosa wiped her palm on her coat without deciding to. "She's put — she's in a biscuit tin."

"There was supposed to be an urn." Dan's voice climbed. "You pay for the — there's a whole thing, you choose a — I saw the brochure, Ro, there were urns —"

"She didn't want an urn."

"How do you know what she —"

"Because there's no urn, Daniel, there's a tin of shortbread with our mother in it, that's how I know."

"It's right," Cleo said.

They both looked at her. She had come to the tailgate without a sound and was standing with one hand not quite touching the lid, her sketchbook clamped under her other arm, and she was looking at the stag and the heather with an expression Rosa couldn't read and didn't like, because it was the closest thing to tenderness anyone had shown all day.

"She hated waste," Cleo said. "She'd have thought a hundred and forty pounds of pot to put in the ground was — she'd have used a tin. It's right." She took her hand back. "Don't put her on the blanket like shopping."

Rosa moved the tin to the seat. She told herself it was practicality.

The rest: a flask. The green flask, of course, the same one, dented twin to the tin, its tartan long rubbed to grey, the cup-lid screwed on crooked. Rosa unscrewed it before she could stop herself, expecting the bitter tea of the legend, and got instead a ghost of that sharp clean reek, spirit and pigment, faint now and decades deep in the metal. Empty. She screwed it shut. She did not say anything and neither did the others, but something passed between the three of them in the cold garage, some first hairline crack in a story they had all held identically for forty years, and then it closed over and they let it.

And the envelopes. Five, in a rubber band, cream paper gone slightly soft at the edges, each with a single number in the upright hand they all knew from the chore lists, from the school notes, from Rosa to mind the little ones. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Dan reached and Rosa got there first and took the band off the world's slowest, and slid them into the inside pocket of her coat, all five, against her chest, where she could feel the small thick weight of them when she breathed.

"We open them in order," she said. "She'll have a fit if we don't." She heard what she'd said. None of them laughed.

Last, from the glovebox, the map.

It was an Ordnance Survey of the coast, soft as cloth at the folds, and it had been written on. Not marked — written on. Their mother had covered it. Crosses at five points up the western edge, each ringed, each with a date beside it in faded biro — old dates, some of them very old, one of them, Rosa saw, the year before she herself was born. Arrows. A wandering pencil line that was not the fast road, that ignored the fast road, that went up and round and out to headlands and back, the long way, the slow way, a route drawn by someone who wanted the driving and not the arriving. And names, in the small hand, beside the crosses, names Rosa read once and then again because they meant nothing to her at all.

"Mor Haven," she read. "St. Brennoc's. Pellan Cove. Gwasworn." A gap. The last cross, lowest on the coast, was ringed twice, hard, the biro gone through the paper. "Maenstrand."

Silence in the lock-up. The engine ticking as it warmed.

"Mor Haven," Dan said slowly, tasting it. "Did she — do you remember her ever —"

"No."

"Cleo?"

Cleo had her sketchbook open again. She wasn't drawing the door now. She was looking at the map over Rosa's shoulder, and her pencil had stopped against the page, and when she spoke it was almost to herself.

"I've never heard a single one of those words in my life," she said. "And she's marked them like she went there every week." She looked up, and for once she met Rosa's eyes straight on, the sober steadiness in her that was new and that Rosa had not yet decided whether to trust. "Ro. Where did she go."

—

Rosa took the wheel. No one questioned it; no one ever had. She drove because she was the one who got there, who didn't drift the lane or miss the turn, who'd been driving the three of them places since she was seventeen with a provisional licence and a mother who couldn't or wouldn't, depending which day you asked. She adjusted the seat forward — it had been set for someone shorter than she remembered her mother being, and that small wrongness sat oddly with her, the seat remembering a body she'd stopped picturing as small — and the mirror, and she pulled the dented green nose of the car out of the lock-up and into the failing afternoon.

Dan rode beside her with the map on his knees and the first instruction, which the will had supplied on its own slip of paper in Pengelly's careful type, held up to catch the light. Cleo sat behind, in the middle of the back seat where the small ones used to sit, with the biscuit tin belted in beside her like a fourth passenger, which no one had suggested and no one undid.

"It says north," Dan said. "It actually says — go north. Out past the bypass and keep on. To Mor Haven first." He turned the slip over. "That's mad. Maenstrand's twenty minutes that way." He pointed south, behind them, towards the long beach none of them had said out loud they remembered, the one with the double-ringed cross. "If you were doing it by the map, by the coast, you'd start at the bottom and go —"

"We're not doing it by the coast," Rosa said. "We're doing it by her."

The town let them go. The chemist, the charity shop, the dead arcade with VALE'S still faintly legible in ghost-paint above the shutter where their father's name had hung for the years it took him to lose it. Then the bypass, then the last roundabout, and then the road narrowed and lifted and the houses ran out, and the land opened on the left into the great grey going-on of the sea.

The light was going. It went the way it went here in late September, low and long and the colour of brass, laying itself flat across the water so the whole western half of the world turned to hammered metal and the gulls in it to sparks. The radio, when Dan turned it on, was already tuned to the one station their mother kept, and the shipping forecast came up out of the dark of the dashboard in its slow level liturgy — Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, southwesterly gale eight, decreasing five, occasionally rough, becoming poor — and none of them turned it off, because it was the one sound from childhood that had never once been unkind, the sound she'd let them fall asleep to, the only litany in that cold house that asked nothing of them.

Rosa drove north into it. The flask rolled once in the door pocket and settled. The five envelopes lay against her chest, warming to her warmth. Behind her, very softly, she could hear the scratch of Cleo's pencil starting again, and in the mirror, when she glanced, she could see that her sister was no longer drawing the door. She was drawing the road ahead of them through the windscreen, the way it ran out and up and away from everything they knew of their mother, towards a harbour with a name not one of them could place — and Rosa understood, with the clean cold drop of a verdict she had not seen coming, that the route was not taking them through their mother's life at all.

It was taking them somewhere she had gone without them.

Every week. For years. While they grew up and grew apart and grew sure of exactly who she was.

Not one of the three of them could name a single one of the five good places.

And up there in the brass light, in a harbour town she had never once spoken aloud at home, a woman who had loved their mother for forty years was, just then, setting a table for guests she did not yet know were coming.

Mum's Handwriting

The chips had gone the temperature of the night by the time Dan accepted he was going to eat them anyway. He sat in the back of the green estate with the paper opened on his knees like a small grease-spotted map, and through the windscreen he watched his sisters not speak.

It was a thing they did better than anyone he'd ever met. Rosa in the driver's seat, both hands still at ten and two though the engine was off, her face lit blue by a phone she wasn't reading. Cleo against the far door, knees up, looking out at a chip shop that had shut its shutters an hour ago, at a layby where the only other light was a vending machine humming to no one. Two women who had come out of the same cold house and could go forty minutes without a single word landing between them, and Dan in the middle of it, chewing, the hyphen. That was the word he'd always had for himself. The little stroke that lets two words that don't want to touch pretend to be one thing. Brother-in-law. Off-season. Half-remembered. You stopped seeing the hyphen the second it did its job.

"There's a fork in the vinegar one," he said, holding the paper forward over the seat. "If anyone."

Cleo took three without looking. Rosa said nothing, which was Rosa for no. He drew the paper back, ate the fork himself.

The thing he was not saying sat in his coat pocket and weighed about as much as a folded letter and a set of keys to a flat he was three weeks from losing. He'd done the maths on the drive down the way other people hummed. Eleven hundred a month and the agency had let him go in March with a fortnight's grace and a handshake from a man younger than Sam would be now — no, that wasn't right, younger than Dan had been when Sam was born, and there it went again, the small lurch of the arithmetic he couldn't stop running. The redundancy had paid April. A card had paid May. June was a door he was walking towards with his eyes politely shut. And under all of it, low and constant as the engine ticking itself cool, the thought he was most ashamed of: that the biscuit tin in the boot — the ashes, she'd left them in a biscuit tin, the same shortbread tin with the tartan lid she'd kept the good thread in — might, by the end of this week, turn into enough. Enough to make a phone call. Enough to be a man with a fixed address again. He hated that the hope had a number attached to it. He hated more that he knew the number.

"We should push on," Rosa said, to the windscreen. "There's a place an hour up. I booked it."

"You booked a place." Cleo's voice came out of the dark flat as a fact read off a wall.

"One of us had to."

"I'm just saying I didn't know we were stopping."

"We're not stopping. We're sleeping. Different thing."

Dan folded the chip paper into a square, then a smaller square, then a square that wouldn't fold. "I'll drive the next bit," he said, "if you want a—"

"I'm fine."

"—break. Right. You're fine."

He got in the front because the alternative was three more hours of being furniture, and Rosa let him, which was a kind of treaty. He found the headlights, the wipers, the heater that only worked on full or not at all, and under his hand the gearstick was worn smooth in the exact shape of a hand that wasn't his, and the whole car smelled the way it had always smelled, the way it smelled in 1991 and the way it smelled now: turpentine. Sharp and clean and chemical under the salt. Her tea, they'd called it as kids, the green flask wedged in the door pocket that she carried on every absence, the flask that supposedly held tea so strong and so foul that none of them would touch it, and the smell that came off it nothing like tea at all, and not one of them, in thirty years, had ever once asked the obvious question.

He didn't ask it now. He pulled out onto the coast road and the dark came up on both sides like water.

—

The fight started, the way they all did, over something that wasn't the thing.

"Take the left here," Rosa said. The satnav suctioned to the windscreen disagreed in a calm robotic woman's voice, in four hundred yards, turn right, and Rosa said "no," to the device, "the left," and Cleo said from the back, "it says right," and Dan, who had the map open across the wheel because he'd seen it in the glovebox and something about it had stopped his hand, said:

"Map says left."

"The map's forty years old."

"The map says left and it's got her writing on it." He didn't know why he said the last part. It came out before the gate. There was a silence in the car of a particular density, the kind that has a temperature.

Rosa took the left. Not because of him.

"She marked it," Dan said, quieter, because now he was looking. Under the dome light, which he'd flicked on and which buzzed, the road map of the western coast was furred soft at the folds, and along the coast road, at five points, somebody had drawn a small star. Not a tourist's star. A careful one, eight-pointed, the kind you learn to draw once and keep drawing your whole life, and beside each star a little cluster of marks he couldn't read in the moving light — a symbol like a wave, a symbol like a key, numbers that might be dates, '62, '64, a number with a question mark someone had answered and then crossed out. And the place names underlined. Mor Haven. St. Brennoc's. The others he couldn't make out without stopping, and he wasn't going to ask Rosa to stop.

What stopped his breath wasn't the stars. It was the hand. He had, in his life, perhaps thirty pieces of his mother's handwriting, and he could have told you the contents of all of them. Dan — gas man Tues, be in. M. A birthday card, age nine, signed Mum and nothing else, the M like a portcullis coming down. Notes that read like receipts. This was the same hand and it was not the same hand at all. Here it was loose. Here it leaned. Here it had drawn a tiny boat by one of the stars with a sail filled out and the sail had a little squiggle of wind behind it, somebody enjoying the pen, and he thought, with a feeling he had no name for and didn't want one, she was happy when she wrote this, and then, hard on its heels, the colder thing: she was happy somewhere.

"Dad would've loved this map," he said. He hadn't planned that either.

"Don't," Rosa said.

"I'm just saying he liked a—"

"I know what you're just saying. You're always just saying." Her hands moved on the wheel. "You went to his funeral, Dan. You don't get to be the expert on him forever because you went to his funeral."

"Somebody had to go." It was the chip-fork conversation again, the same sentence in a different coat. One of us had to. Somebody had to. The family had two of those and they'd each taken one.

"He left." From the back, low. Cleo, who almost never came into these. "That's the whole thing, isn't it. Dad left, and then she went—" she stopped. The word the family used was cold, and even Cleo wouldn't put it in the air tonight, in the car, with the tin in the boot. "—and that was that. We don't have to relitigate it on the A-road."

"Relitigate," Rosa said, almost warm. "You've been talking to me too long."

"God forbid."

And there it was, the only thing they all owned in common, drawn up around the empty middle of the thing none of them would name. Because there was a year, and there was a beach, and there was a day at that beach, and Dan was eight and Rosa was eleven and Cleo was five, and after the day Dad was a man who lived somewhere else and Mum was a woman made of weather, and the family that drove home from Maenstrand was not the family that had driven out. Nobody said Maenstrand in the car. It was the fifth star. He'd seen it. He'd watched his own thumb cover it on the map and leave it covered.

He looked back down at the boat with the filled sail and the little wind, and he thought: somewhere, before us or beside us or in spite of us, she had a pen in her hand and she was glad.

—

The B&B was one bed short.

"You booked a twin," Rosa said to the woman, who was in a dressing gown and had clearly been asleep and was being magnificent about it.

"I've a twin and a single. The single's the box room, mind." She looked at the three of them on the step, three middle-aged strangers and a holdall and, Dan saw her clock it, the biscuit tin that Cleo was carrying because Cleo had quietly taken it from the boot at the last layby and not let go. "Family, are you?"

"Apparently," Dan said, and the woman laughed, and it was the first laugh any of them had earned all day so he gave her the rest of it. "Sisters in the twin. I'll take the floor of the single. I'm low-maintenance. Like a houseplant."

"There's a camp bed somewhere," the woman said doubtfully, and there wasn't, and he ended up on the floor of the box room with the spare duvet and his coat for a pillow and the radiator that knocked like a man asking to be let out, and that was fine, that was genuinely fine, he'd slept worse in the flat he was about to lose, on the sofa, the bedroom let to a lodger who paid the part of the rent Dan couldn't.

He couldn't sleep.

He lay with the phone on his chest, screen-dark, and felt the cold of it through his shirt, and then he turned it on because that was the disease, and the light made a tent of his own face in the black room, and his thumb went where it always went, the way a tongue goes to the gap.

Sam.

Fifteen now. Fifteen in March, and Dan had texted happy birthday mate at 11:54pm because he'd nearly let the day go entirely, and the message had sat there with one grey tick and then two grey ticks and then never the blue, never read, the boy's phone in a house Dan didn't have the address of anymore, a house in a town Dan had left, swearing — and here was the part, here was the joke God told at his expense — swearing he would never do the thing his own father did. He'd done it slower. He'd done it with maintenance payments and a clean conscience for almost two years and then a missed weekend and then another and then the missed weekends became the shape of it, and you don't leave in a single afternoon at a beach, you find out one day you already left, you left in instalments, you left the way you lose money, a card paying for what the last card couldn't.

He typed: Hey Sam. I'm on a trip with your aunts. Long story. Your grandmother

He deleted it.

He typed: Sam — I know I've been

He deleted it.

He typed: I think about you and looked at it for a long time, three words, true, useless, and deleted them one at a time so he could feel each one go.

He put the phone face-down on the carpet.

Through the wall he could hear his sisters not speaking in a different room now, a more comfortable not-speaking, the breathing kind. He thought about the boat with the wind behind it. He thought about the flask in the door pocket that smelled of turpentine. And then he thought about the envelope.

It was in his coat, which was under his head. Number One, MOR HAVEN in her hand — the warm hand, he knew it now — and below that, smaller, underlined twice, the only instruction: Open at Mor Haven, not before. He'd carried it because Rosa carried everything else and someone should carry the first thing, and he'd told himself that was why, and it wasn't why.

He sat up in the dark. He took the coat from under his head. The envelope was good paper, heavier than the notes, and there was something inside it besides the letter — a small hard shape, slid to one corner, that moved when he tilted it. He held it up to the strip of streetlight under the curtain. Open at Mor Haven, not before. It would be so easy. A finger under the flap. No one would know; she was ash in a shortbread tin and she would never know, and he wanted — God, he wanted to hear her say one true thing to him in a voice that wasn't a portcullis, even if it was only addressed to all three of them, even if it wasn't for him at all. His thumb found the corner where the glue had gone slightly soft with the day's warmth in his pocket.

Not before.

He stopped. He sat there with his thumb on his dead mother's instruction and thought about a one-grey-tick message and a blue tick that never came, about the small cruelty of making someone wait for a thing you've already written and won't send, and he understood — sideways, the way the true things always reached him, never head-on — that he was about to do to her what he was furious had been done to him: take the thing early, on his own terms, in the dark, and call it love.

He put the envelope back in the coat. He folded the coat. He lay down.

It took the rest of the night to not open it. He counted it a small victory and was ashamed of how much of one it was.

—

They left before the others were up, because none of them could sleep past the gulls, and the road climbed out of the trees onto the open headland with the dawn coming in low and gold off the water, the kind of light that makes even three people who have wronged each other for thirty years go quiet and look.

The car crested the hill.

Below them the land fell away into a harbour Dan had never seen and somehow knew — knew the way you know a song from the first two notes — a harbour full of boats, masts and reflections doubling them, the tide in, the water a sheet of beaten copper, smoke going up straight from a chimney in the still cold air. Mor Haven. The first star. He felt Cleo lean forward between the seats; he heard the soft graphite scratch of her pencil already going, already, before they'd even stopped.

And on the quay, where no one should have been at this hour, a woman stood. Small, in a man's jacket, grey hair loose, a mug in both hands. She watched the green car come down the hill the way you watch for a thing you've been told is coming. And as they reached the bottom and slowed, she lifted one hand — not a wave, a recognition, an old and patient gesture — and her mouth moved, and through the cracked-open window, in the gull-loud morning, Dan heard her call to them across the cobbles, clear as the bell on a buoy.

She called the car by its name.

"Wren's old girl," she said, coming towards them, smiling. "I'd know her anywhere. You've finally come."