The Wrong Jacket

1. A bag for everything

Sarelunia had promised to return the keys before ten. At twenty past two they were still on the table, beside a bag she could not quite finish packing. It contained a charger, a cookbook neither of them had used and a grey scarf. The scarf was hers. She took it out and left it on a chair.

Darío’s message arrived while she was looking for the second glove. “I can come now.” He did not ask whether she was awake. All afternoon she had been telling herself that exchanging their things would take five minutes. They could talk downstairs. He would not need to come up. There was no reason to rehearse a speech. She had rehearsed several. Each began reasonably and ended with a question whose answer she no longer wanted.

A song drifted up through the courtyard, interrupted by someone asking for less volume. Then laughter. Sarelunia opened the wardrobe and found her coral jacket hanging inside out. She put it on with one hand still occupied by the phone, missed the sleeve, pulled too hard and said something that would have made Darío laugh. That annoyed her more than his message.

Another line appeared. “Tell me where you are.” She typed “At home”, deleted it and put the phone face down. She was hungry. Hours earlier she had eaten a piece of bread standing up. Every dish from a dinner she had never actually cooked remained in the kitchen. She opened the fridge. A mandarin rolled towards the edge and she caught it with her foot.

Someone knocked. She stood still with the fruit in her hand. Two minutes could hardly have passed. Through the peephole she saw a forehead, an eye and the handle of a saucepan.

“Have you got a spare colander?” Vera asked. “Ours has disappeared during a fairly serious operation.”

Vera lived on the second floor. They had borrowed tools and accepted parcels for each other, but had never shared a meal. She was wearing odd socks. Sarelunia found the colander and handed it over.

“There’s pasta downstairs. And too many people expressing opinions about it.”

“I have to wait for someone.”

Vera glanced at the bag. She did not ask who.

“I’ll keep you a plate. The colander has to come back too, so there’s your excuse.”

2. The second floor

Ten minutes later Sarelunia went down carrying the small saucepan Vera had forgotten. She had put her phone on airplane mode. It seemed an excessive precaution for a journey of two floors. For that very reason, she slipped it into her inside pocket. She did not want to go back up and change her mind.

The door was open. A man on the floor was repairing a speaker with tape. In the kitchen, Vera held two plates under her arm while arguing with a young man about salt. She pointed towards a gap at the table.

“The chair wobbles. Warn us if you move left.”

There were six diners and cutlery from three different sets. Nobody asked her to introduce herself until she had finished her first plate. The man with the speaker was Óscar. He was helping clear a room because Vera’s new flatmate would arrive tomorrow. Dinner was a farewell to furniture. A small bookcase had already gone downstairs; the sofa had been stuck by the door all evening.

“It won’t get round the angle,” Óscar said.

“It will if you stop calling it the angle and lift your end,” Vera replied.

Sarelunia laughed with her mouth full and covered it too late. Vera passed her a napkin without interrupting the argument. The phone pressed against her ribs, although it had not vibrated. She could still picture messages accumulating. Perhaps Darío was downstairs. Perhaps he had decided she was making a scene. She took the phone out to check the time, then put it away without lighting the screen.

Someone asked if her jacket was waterproof. She shook her head. She had bought it for the pockets, which looked large until you tried putting anything inside. To demonstrate, she reached for her keys and produced a clothes peg.

“That explains where half my washing went,” Vera said.

The peg travelled round the table. Óscar clipped it to his sleeve to remind himself to clear the drying rack before moving the sofa. Sarelunia told them about the mandarin. She did not tell them about Darío. She discovered she could finish an anecdote without the conversation finding its own way towards the subject she was afraid of.

Before they got up, Vera offered her the leftovers. Sarelunia found a container like the one she still needed to recover from Darío. She stood holding it. Vera asked if the lid fitted; the blue-edged one did not. They tried three before finding the right one and wrote the contents on a piece of tape. This parcel was ready almost immediately. Sarelunia left it by the saucepan. Later, both bags would stand in her kitchen, and she would have to look inside to remember which one was leaving.

3. The coat rack

After coffee they pushed the table aside. The speaker repair had worked on one condition: nobody could touch the blue cable. Óscar marked out a safety zone with two shoes. The first song stopped after twenty seconds. The second played all the way through.

Sarelunia was washing a plate when Vera asked her to choose something. She said she did not know what music they had. Vera showed her a long list and went to dry the floor. Sarelunia half-recognised a title, confused it with another and pressed before thinking. The opening was entirely different from what she expected. She raised a hand to apologise, but Óscar was already tapping his foot.

They danced round the shoes. There was not enough room to do it properly, and nobody seemed interested in correcting that. A low lamp required everyone to duck as they crossed the middle. Sarelunia was still wearing her jacket. She tried to take it off, missed the sleeve again and started laughing before she could free her arm. She hung it over another, almost identical, on the rack by the door.

Vera spoke into her ear. The music swallowed half the sentence.

“What?”

“You don’t have to play the same one again.”

Sarelunia had left the song on repeat. She looked at the player and began laughing again. For the first time that night, the phone she wanted to touch was the one connected to the speaker, rather than the one she was carrying.

Later, as they prepared to take the sofa out, someone handed her a coral jacket. She put it on without looking. Its pocket held a folded note, two sweets and a key with a green cover. No phone. No clothes peg either.

She stopped on the landing. Her phone was in somebody else’s jacket, and somebody could leave with it. She went back, moved scarves and lifted a black coat. Her jacket was beneath a backpack. In the room beyond, a woman she had not met was searching among the chairs.

“I think we’ve swapped,” Sarelunia said.

The woman was Julia. They checked the labels: same make, different size. Julia had spent months convinced the pockets were a fraud. Sarelunia returned the sweets and accepted one when offered. When she finally took out her phone, the small airplane was still there. Her finger stopped over the button.

She could reconnect. The evening did not depend on keeping it switched off. Even so, she had no answer she wanted to send from that landing. She put it away.

4. Delivery in the morning

The sofa came out on the third attempt. By then daylight was beginning to appear. Vera picked small clumps of fluff from the entrance hall floor. Óscar tried to photograph the group and captured only the ceiling and the edge of an ear. Julia sat on the sofa’s arm, now outside, while they discussed who needed sleep first.

Sarelunia went up for the bag. Her kitchen looked smaller in the morning light. She found the second glove inside the cookbook, where she had used it to mark a recipe. She sat down and turned airplane mode off.

Four messages. Darío had never reached the building. He had asked about the keys, then the bag, then said he would come after lunch. She read everything twice. She could not find the accusation she had spent hours preparing for. There was no invitation to return either.

She replied that she would leave his things with the caretaker and needed her glass container back whenever possible. She added “No rush”, then deleted it. There was no rush, but she did not want another conversation devoted to proving that.

Before closing the bag she noticed the charger had caught around the bag’s handle. She freed it carefully. The keys went on top of the book. She carried everything down with a note bearing Darío’s name. The caretaker’s office was still closed. She took it upstairs again. Even small decisions could wait half an hour.

On the second floor Vera was collecting glasses. Sarelunia looked in and asked after the colander.

“It’s drying. Come in. There’s coffee.”

The same song began somewhere. Óscar still had not managed to turn repeat off. Sarelunia left the bag by the door and went to help with the plates. A line was moving through her head, though she did not yet know what followed it. She hummed while turning on the tap. Vera answered with a different tune. Neither bothered to correct the other.