27 September 2026 · fiction: 2030

2030: Frankham Street

Fiction. The people and the places in it are invented; the arrangements they live inside are the ones this site argues about. One instalment a day, a longer one on Fridays, and the story carries on.

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.