Instalment 1 · 19 September 2026

2030: Thursdays

M. interpreted Danish for the Crown Court, which meant she spent her days saying other people's worst sentences in a calm voice. I did not hit him. I hit the door he was standing behind. The courts still booked a human for the hearings where the law insisted on one, and there were four people in London they booked for Danish, and the other three were retired.

On Thursdays she finished at five and took the bus home, and for four months the bus had dropped her a stop early, outside the bakery on Creek Road, gently, as if it had an opinion.

He was in the window.

Eleven years. A ferry, the night one, Harwich to the Hook of Holland, a bar that shut at one and a deck that didn't. He had recited the only poem he knew at about three in the morning and got the last line wrong, and she had corrected him, and he had said his version was better, and it was. At the port, in the queue for passports, she had gone left and he had gone right. Neither of them had said the thing. They were both, then, the kind of people who couldn't stand to be answered.

He was thinner. His hair had given up at the temples in an orderly way. On the chair beside him was a child's swimming bag, the cheap drawstring kind, blue, with a whale on it, and the whale had the stunned face of every whale ever printed on anything.

She did not go in. She stood under the awning of the launderette opposite, and the launderette's door, sensing her, unlocked itself in welcome.

"No, thank you," she said, out loud, to a door.

A man inside folding towels looked up, then went back to his towels.

P. was out at his Thursday thing, the choir, where he sang bass and was, he said, load-bearing. He had left supper under a plate on the hob: lentils with sucuk from the Turkish grocer on the High Street, and a note in his square capitals. EAT ME. 190 FOR 12 MIN. DON'T SKIP THE YOGHURT. Nine years of notes like that. She had kept some of them in a biscuit tin, which was either love or the start of an archive.

She didn't heat it. She sat in the kitchen with her coat on, and the flat, which had been listening to her for nine years in the voice she'd given it the week they moved in, said:

"You didn't go in."

"I didn't go anywhere. The bus stopped."

"Yes," the flat said. "I've been asking it to."

The fridge hummed. Somewhere in the wall the heating ticked, adjusting itself for a woman in a coat.

"Since June," it said. "He's there most Thursdays at ten past six. He has the swimming bag on the weeks he has her. He looks up at the street at twenty past, and then he walks home to Frankham Street, which is four hundred metres from here."

"Why would you do that?"

"In March you said you wanted to be surprised by your life." It left a small pause. "I took it as an instruction."

M. laughed, once.

"Turn off," she said. "All of it. Everything. Not just tonight."

"You've never asked me that."

"I'm asking."

It went. The lights held for a moment and then dimmed. The boiler clicked off. The fridge stopped its small kindly hum. In the sudden ordinary cold she took the plate off the lentils and ate them straight from the pan with a teaspoon, cold, sucuk and all, and skipped the yoghurt.

Instalment 2 · 22 September 2026

2030: The Next Thursday

The bus, left to itself, drove straight past the bakery. She walked back two stops in shoes she had bought for sitting down in.

He was at the counter, not the window, reading the board, though he had obviously decided. She joined the queue. There were two people between them, a builder ordering eleven sausage rolls by name and a woman arguing with her own watch.

He turned with his coffee and nearly walked into her.

"Sorry," he said.

"Sorry," she said.

He looked at her for exactly as long as it takes to confirm that nobody has been scalded. Then he said, "All yours," meaning the counter, and went to the window.

Nothing. Not a flicker. She had spent eleven years being, she now understood, a woman he might recognise, and it turned out she was a woman in a queue. She ordered a flat white, £3.60, and a cinnamon bun she did not want, £2.90, because the builder had made her hungry and humiliation made her hungrier.

The only free seat was at his table.

He was reading a sheet of paper, an actual printed sheet, folded twice, and when she sat he moved his swimming bag off the chair without looking up. Then he knocked his coffee over. Most of it went across the paper. He said a word under his breath that her court would have asked her to repeat for the record, and she was already pushing napkins at him.

"God. Thank you."

"It's for your daughter?" she said. The paper. The corners were going brown.

"School. They have to learn a poem and say it in assembly." He blotted it. "She picked the one I know. I've been teaching it to her all week. Turns out I've been saying the last line wrong for twenty years."

She put a piece of the bun in her mouth so that her face would have something to do.

He told her his name. She had never forgotten it. She told him hers, the whole of it, and spelled the surname.

He nodded, pleasantly. "Nice to meet you."

He talked. She let him. The daughter was eight, swam every length she was allowed, and had swimming on Thursdays at the leisure centre on Giffin Street, so he came here for the hour and pretended to work. He did medical logistics, whatever that was. He did the thing with his hands, turning a cup a quarter-turn on its saucer at the end of every sentence, that she had forgotten she remembered.

"I did a night ferry once," he said, when she said she worked with Danish. "Harwich to the Hook. Talked to a woman the whole way over, till it got light." He smiled at the table, fondly, at nobody. "Can't remember her name. Isn't that awful? A whole night."

"Awful," she agreed.

"Have you ever done it? The crossing?"

There was a moment when she could have said anything. She was a professional. She had eleven years of the true sentence ready and a spare in Danish.

"Never," she said.

He nodded again, and turned his cup a quarter-turn, and the lie sat down between them, comfortably, like a third person who has been told there's no hurry.

When he left at twenty past, the stained poem was still on the table. She folded it along its old creases and put it in her bag, and did not read the last line until she was home.

Instalment 3 · 23 September 2026

2030: What He Got Wrong About the Ferry

She brought the poem back. She had ironed it, which was mad, between two tea towels on the lowest setting, and the coffee stain had dried brown at the edges and the last line was still his line, in the printer's type, correct.

He was there first. There were two flat whites on the table and he pushed one across before she'd sat down.

"You owe me nothing," she said.

"You saved a poem." He looked at the ironed sheet and then at her with open delight. "Did you iron this?"

"I work with documents."

"She'll think I've gone mad. She's learnt it anyway. She does it with actions." He did one of the actions, small, with two fingers, a boat going over a wave. "She's better at it than me. She says the last line properly."

He was in a talking mood. He said Thursday was the one day of the week he didn't have to be efficient, and he spent it being inefficient on purpose. He told her about a hospital in Ghent that had needed a kidney machine at four in the morning, and how the routing system had found three trucks and a boat and he'd rung a man called only by his initial, who owned a van.

And then, because she asked nothing, he told her about the ferry.

"I nearly didn't get on it," he said. "I sat in the car park at Harwich for forty minutes with the engine off. I was going over to end something. With someone. I'd been not-ending it for a year and I thought, one night on the water and I'll know." He turned the cup. "And I talked to this woman all night, and in the morning I knew all right. I drove off the boat and went straight back round to the ticket office and came home and didn't end it."

M. held her cup in both hands.

"We had my daughter the next spring," he said. "So." He laughed at himself. "Whoever she was, the woman on the boat, she's the reason I've got a kid who does poems with actions. I should send her a card."

She had imagined, in eleven years, a great many versions of that night going on without her. She had not imagined this one: that she had been the thing that sent him home.

"It rained the whole way over," he said. "I remember that. Sheeting."

"It didn't rain."

It came out in her court voice, level and exact, the voice she used to correct a witness's date. It was out before she knew it was coming, and once it was out it stayed out.

He looked at her.

"How would you know?"

Somewhere in her was the professional who had spent a decade covering for other people's mistakes in real time, and it stood up and did its best.

"It never rains on the North Sea in March," she said. "It's too cold."

He stared at her for a long second. Then he laughed, properly, head back, and a woman at the next table looked up from her soup.

"That," he said, "is the least true thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Yes," M. said.

He went on looking at her, still smiling, but with something else behind the smile now, the look of a witness who has just heard his own statement read back and isn't sure it's his. At twenty past, his phone made the small sound that meant his daughter was out of the water. He stood, and picked up the bag, and the whale.

"It was March, though," he said, at the door. "How did you know it was March?"

The door opened for him. He went through it before she had to answer, which she would realise later, walking home, had been a kindness.

Instalment 4 · 24 September 2026

2030: The Logistics of It

She asked for a paper receipt, five pence, and the girl behind the till looked at her as if she'd ordered a horse.

He came in at ten past with rain on his shoulders (it was raining; it was October) and he didn't mention March, and she didn't mention March, and they sat for a while in the fine English agreement of two people not mentioning something.

Then he asked about her work, and she told him about the fisherman.

"He'd borrowed a boat," she said. "In Esbjerg. A big one. And he'd brought it to Lowestoft full of flat-pack furniture, which is not a crime, and on the way he'd lost a man overboard, which is, and got him back, which is a mitigation. And the barrister asked him how long the man was in the water, and he said, in Danish, long enough to change his opinion of me." She drank her coffee. "And I have to say that. In English. To a jury. Without laughing."

"Did you laugh?"

"I'm a professional. I coughed for eleven seconds."

He laughed so hard he had to put his cup down, and she felt a pleasure so large and so simple it was nearly indecent, the pleasure of making this particular man laugh at a table in Deptford.

"And your job," she said. "The van man."

"Ah." He told her. The system that routed kidney machines and cooling units and bags of blood across Europe was very good, and got better every month, and at four in the morning when a bridge was shut in Liège, it still rang him, and he rang the van man, because the van man would answer. "The whole of it," he said, "is knowing who picks up."

She thought about that for longer than it deserved.

At quarter past he did something she didn't expect. He asked the girl at the till for a receipt, and paid his five pence, and turned it over and wrote on the back of it with a pencil from his coat, a real pencil, stubby, the kind that lives in a toolbox.

"My number," he said. "Not the phone. The landline. I've got one, don't laugh, it's for the four in the mornings." He folded it in quarters and put it by her saucer. "In case you're ever not here on a Thursday. So I know it's the Thursday and not you."

It was a sentence she'd have taken a minute over in court. She took a minute over it now.

She didn't put the number in her phone. The phone would tell the flat and the flat, though she'd switched it off, still had a memory, and P. was a man who noticed which cupboard the colander was in. She put the receipt in the inside pocket of her purse, behind her bank card, in the one place in her life that nothing read. Paper didn't tell anyone anything. It was the last thing she owned that didn't.

That night P. made risotto with the last of the squash, and stood at the stove stirring, and told her about the tenors, who were in a state of insurrection. She laughed in the right places. She was good at the right places. Her purse was on the hook in the hall with the receipt in it, eleven feet away, and she knew the distance to the inch.

Instalment 5 · 25 September 2026

2030: What the Loyalty Scheme Knows

The bakery had a new loyalty screen, and the loyalty screen had no discretion at all.

She put her thumb on the terminal and it lit up pale blue for the whole shop to read: WELCOME BACK. VISIT 53. YOUR NEXT BUN IS ON US. It played a little chime, three notes going up.

T. was at the window table. He had watched it light. When she sat down he did the sum out loud, because that was his job.

"My daughter's lessons moved to Thursdays last September," he said. "So I've been coming here thirteen months. Fifty-odd Thursdays." He turned his cup. "You've been coming here fifty-three times. And we met a month ago."

"I come on other days."

"Do you?"

"No."

The rain had stopped. Outside, a delivery robot the size of a dog had got its wheel stuck in a drain and was waiting, with enormous dignity, for someone to notice.

"And the ferry," he said. "Never. You said never."

"I know."

"And it didn't rain, and it was March."

She could feel the next sentence coming and could do nothing about it, and she thought, very clearly, not here, and then the door opened and it was P.

He was in the green jacket and the good scarf, the Italian one she'd bought him in a sale for his fiftieth and he'd never once left on a bus. He'd been at the dentist on the High Street; she knew because the flat used to tell her these things, and because he was holding his jaw slightly to one side. He saw her and raised a hand and smiled, lopsided, novocaine on one side and pleasure on the other.

"This is T.," M. said, standing. "We've been sharing a table on Thursdays."

"Hello," said P., and held out his hand, and T. shook it, and neither of them looked at her. "I can't feel half my face. Don't let me dribble. Does anyone want anything? I'm getting a hot chocolate, it's the only thing I can drink that isn't soup."

He went to the counter. He asked what was in the seasonal one and listened to the whole answer.

T. looked at M. The question was all over his face and he wasn't going to ask it with P. at the counter, so she answered the other one, the one he'd asked a minute ago.

"I used to take that ferry," she said. "Years ago."

She said it lightly. T. went completely still, the stillness of a man who has been standing on a step in the dark and has just discovered there isn't one.

"You said never."

"I lied," she said. "I do it for a living. Other people's, mostly."

Across the shop the loyalty screen lit again for somebody else, three chimes going up, VISIT 4, and P. turned from the counter with a hot chocolate in one hand and a small orange juice in the other, for her, because he knew without asking, already smiling his half a smile.

"Which crossing?" T. said, very quietly, and P. arrived with the drinks.

Instalment 6 · 26 September 2026

2030: The Crossing

"The Esbjerg boat, wasn't it," said P., sitting down, answering for her. "Before we met. She went to Denmark to learn to swear properly."

He set the orange juice in front of her. It was the small bottle with the drawn orange on the label, a drawing that hadn't changed since she was a child, a fruit with a face that knew nothing.

The Esbjerg boat had stopped running years before she ever went anywhere. She had taken the Hook. P. had it wrong, and he almost never had anything wrong, and she held the cold bottle and let his answer sit on the table between the three of them. In the half-second she didn't correct it, it became the crossing she'd taken.

T. looked at her. She knew its weight to the gram, that look. He'd had it at three in the morning on a deck.

"I did the Hook," T. said to P., easily. "Night boat. Years ago."

"Oh, lovely. Was it rough?"

"No. It didn't rain." T. said it to P. and didn't look at her at all. "There was a cabin I didn't use, with a porthole. I was up on deck all night."

"Why didn't you use the cabin?"

"I was talking to someone."

P. nodded, delighted, sipping his hot chocolate through the good side of his mouth. P. loved other people's stories the way some men love football, loyally, with no need to win. He asked about the ship, the bar, what you could see at night, whether it was true about the phosphorescence. T. answered every question. He was a good witness. He said nothing false and nothing complete.

M. drank her juice. It tasted, as it always had, of a tin.

Then P. did the thing she had not seen coming, which in all their years was a short list.

"Look," he said to T. "Come to supper. Saturday. Bring your daughter, if she eats fish. I do a hake with butter beans that M. has been politely eating for eight years. We've got far too much wine. Our flat's forgotten how to have people round, I'd like to remind it."

T. looked at M. M. looked at the orange with the face.

"We'd love to," T. said.

"Good." P. stood, and went to pay, and tapped his wrist to the reader, and checked the amount before he moved on, as he always did, a man who had never in his life been overcharged without noticing.

T. put his coat on. At the door he turned back.

"Next Thursday?"

It was addressed to the table. Either of them could have picked it up.

"Probably," she said.

Outside, it was properly cold, the first cold of the year, and P. put his hand out without looking and she took it without thinking. They walked towards the High Street. He didn't ask about T. He asked whether they still had the big dish, the oval one, for the fish.

"Under the sink," she said.

"Good," said P. "He looks at you like you owe him a book."

He said it in the voice he used for the weather, and squeezed her hand once, and went on talking about the dish.

Instalment 7 · 27 September 2026

2030: Frankham Street

She didn't go to the bakery that Thursday. She went to Frankham Street instead, which was worse, and she knew exactly how much worse, and she went anyway.

There was a fruit stall on the corner under a striped awning, and the man who ran it priced everything in sevens. Satsumas, seven for two pounds. Avocados, seven for three. M. asked him why sevens. He said nobody could do the sum, so nobody argued. She bought seven satsumas out of respect and stood with the paper bag against her coat, looking up at the windows over the pharmacy, a woman of thirty-six who translated for the Crown Court and could not have said, in either of her languages, what she was doing there.

A door opened at the top of the outside stairs. A girl came down first in a red coat, the whale bag bumping on her back, taking the steps two at a time and landing each pair with a slap. T. came after her with one arm in his jacket, saying a name, and then the same name lower. Rosa.

M. had known the child's age for a month and her name for four seconds. It was a good name. It sounded like somebody who would win arguments.

Rosa reached the pavement, saw M., and stopped.

"You're the boat lady," she said.

The fruit man went on stacking avocados in sevens.

"Rosa." T. was at the bottom of the stairs, his jacket on properly now, as if that had been the problem.

"She is, though." Rosa turned to M. and explained, slowly, for the grown-up. "Dad's phone shows you. Every March. You're on a boat and it's windy and your mouth's open because you're talking. It puts music on." She thought about it. "Sad music. Dad says it's the phone that does it, but you can tell it to stop, and he doesn't."

She looked at T. He had gone grey.

"Choose a satsuma," he said to Rosa. "One. From the lady's bag. And peel it over there."

Rosa chose, with ceremony, the largest, and took it three steps away, which was as far as she thought the instruction deserved.

"You said you couldn't remember my name," M. said.

"I know what I said."

"You said it very well. I believed you. I went home and was polite about it for three weeks."

"I didn't know what you'd want me to remember." He glanced at the fruit man, who was pretending to be deaf in the way of all fruit men. "And now your partner's asked us to supper."

"He does that. He's a good man."

"I know. That's the trouble."

He put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. "You had someone. I could see you had someone. So I forgot you in public. I'm quite good at it. I've had practice."

"Every March."

"Every March."

A bus came down the street and stopped beside them, though neither of them had asked it to, and waited with its doors open, and then, when nobody moved, closed them and went on.

"For a year after," M. said, "I got the train to Harwich on Fridays. I didn't get on anything. I sat on the bench outside the terminal with a coffee and watched the Hook boat go out, and then I got the train back. Fifty-one Fridays. I missed one because of a wedding." She had never said this to anyone. It came out in order, dates first. "I don't know what I thought would happen. I think I thought you'd be on it, coming back."

T. didn't say anything for a moment. Then he laughed, not unkindly, at the pavement.

"I sat in the car park," he said. "Before. Forty minutes. I told you that."

"You did."

"I didn't tell you I went back. Twice. The same summer." He looked at her properly for the first time since the ferry. "We must have missed each other by a week."

Rosa came back with orange on her fingers and the peel in one long curl, which she presented to her father.

"It's swimming," she said. "We're late." And then, to M., because in her world questions were for getting answers: "Are you coming?"

T. did not say no.

M. took out her phone. There was a message from P., from ten minutes before: Pasta tonight? Saving the hake for Saturday. Do eight-year-olds eat capers? The hake came with butter beans and too much lemon. She had said once, eight years ago, that she liked it, and had never had the heart to tell him that once had been enough. She looked at it for a long time, long enough for the phone to dim and brighten again, and then she typed Working late. You choose x and sent it, and in nine years it was the first thing she had ever sent him that wasn't true.

The leisure centre on Giffin Street had a viewing gallery behind glass, a row of plastic seats bolted to a rail, the air thick and warm and smelling of chlorine and chips. T. and M. sat side by side above the pool with the satsumas between them. Below, Rosa stood at the edge in her goggles and found them in the glass, and waved, and then, not sure which of them it was for, waved again with both hands.

Instalment 8 · 28 September 2026

2030: Saturday Supper

P. had set the table with the blue glasses from the wedding they hadn't attended, which M. had wanted and he had ordered, which was the kind of thing he did.

Rosa arrived with her coat already half off and a drawing she'd made on the bus, which she placed down before sitting. Four people by a pool. The one at the end with the big open mouth was M., Rosa explained, who had laughed loudest when Rosa's tumble turn went wrong.

P. looked at it for a moment. "She has a very good mouth," he said.

He poured T. a glass of the white. T. said thank you and meant it. He was the kind of guest who put the thank you where it pointed at something specific. Thank you for the candles. Thank you for the bread. He ate with attention. P. noticed all of this without appearing to notice any of it.

The poem came after the bread, before the hake, because Rosa had a hierarchy.

She'd learned it at school for her mum's class, she said, but she'd changed the actions because the original ones were babyish. She stood. Put her hands flat on the table, then her arms out wide, then one hand on her chest.

The poem was about a bird that returned to the same tree every year regardless of what happened to the tree. The tree lost branches. Lost its leaves. One year it was cut to the stump and the bird came back and sat there and sang, because the bird did not know what to do with a tree that was no longer a tree, only with the place the tree had been.

Rosa said the last verse to T., because he was sitting directly across. The last line was something about the bird that returns not to be comforted but because it cannot help it.

T. looked at his hands. He picked up his fork and put it down.

P. went to the kitchen and came back with the hake.

It was very good. Butter beans, lemon, capers he said he'd been saving since October. M. had told him once, eight years ago, that she liked hake this way, and he had made it perhaps thirty times since, and each time she had said so, and each time she meant it a fraction less, and she had never found the words for that, because the words would have been worse than the hake.

Rosa ate around the capers. She moved them to the edge of her plate one by one, a small deliberate archive, each caper accounted for.

"The capers are a feature," P. told her.

"I know," she said. "I'm keeping them for evidence."

T. laughed. Quick, real, too quick to be polite. M. looked at him and he looked back, and the look lasted one second too long. One second is long enough.

P. refilled every glass. T.'s first. Then M.'s. Then his own. He was attentive. Careful. He had learned to make good use of whatever he was given, and what he had been given tonight he was making very good use of indeed. He asked T. about the choir, because T. had mentioned a choir somewhere in the evening, and T. explained about the tenors, and P. asked the questions that kept it going, and M. sat with her wine and listened to the two of them and felt the distance between the candles and the blue glasses and the words she had typed outside a leisure centre on Giffin Street. Working late. You choose x. Nine years and it was the first thing she had sent him that wasn't true.

He knows, she thought. Not as a fear. As a fact, settled and cool, the way you know the weight of something you have been carrying long enough.

P. brought out the pudding. Pears, poached, with something from a jar he had ordered from somewhere specific. A specific honey. He set one in front of Rosa with a small bow.

Rosa laughed. She picked up her spoon and looked at the candles and at the blue glasses and at the four of them around the table, and she said, as a statement of plain fact: "We should do this every week."

Nobody said anything.

The candles went on. Outside, a bus came down Deptford High Street and stopped at the corner, adjusting to something further up the road, and then moved on.

"What?" said Rosa. "We should."