The Rooms Above

My father braces the refuse hatch with his shoulder while I work the broom handle upward.

Something has lodged in the bend. We can hear it breathing against the metal, a soft settling sound like paper being folded in another room. The basement smells of coal dust, boiled cabbage, and the lavender soap Mrs. Clune uses on the third floor.

“Again,” Father says.

I drive the handle up. The chute gives a small cough.

A wooden horse drops into the bin.

It lands upright among the eggshells. One red wheel continues turning.

Father picks it out. The paint is worn from its nose, and a child has written LEO beneath the belly in green pencil.

“There’s no Leo here,” I say.

“Not at present.”

He says this absently, examining the horse. Our building has six floors, two flats to each, and Father knows every tenant by the sound of the rent pushed under our door. No one has a child called Leo.

Above us, a lid opens. We hear Mrs. Clune humming as she empties her tea leaves. They strike the chute walls long before she lets them go. Then they fall past us dry and warm, smelling faintly of oranges.

Father sets the horse on the boiler ledge.

I raise the broom handle again. This time it touches nothing. Yet the obstruction moves. We hear it descending slowly through the building, stopping at each floor as though invited in.

A cracked plate arrives first, wrapped in a strip of flowered curtain. Then a man’s shoe, whitened with age. Then three envelopes tied with black thread. The addresses are written in hands I nearly recognize. One bears our flat number, though the building’s name is different.

Father does not open them.

The next thing is his cap.

It falls crown first and rolls against my boot. His own cap remains on his head, dark with sweat along the band. The one on the floor is softer, almost grey, with a neat square of blue cloth sewn over the tear above the ear.

I know the cloth. It comes from the dress I am wearing.

Father takes off his cap. He looks from the tear to my sleeve.

“You’ll mend it badly,” he says, and smiles.

“I can mend.”

“Eventually.”

The chute knocks once above us.

I feel, with complete certainty, that I remember sewing the patch. My fingers ache from pushing the needle through the band. Father sits by a window I have never seen, holding still while sunlight lies across his knees. He is older there. I am not.

The memory leaves when he touches my shoulder.

A smell comes down the chute, warm milk scorched in a pan. Father closes his eyes.

My mother used to scorch milk. Even after she became too weak to cook, the flat would sometimes fill with that smell at night. Father blamed the pipes. I blamed Mrs. Clune.

Now, from somewhere high above us, a woman laughs.

It is not Mother’s laugh exactly. It is mine, later.

Father lifts the battered cap from the floor and places it on his head. It fits more comfortably than the one he has worn all winter.

The obstruction resumes its slow descent. We stand aside.

Nothing visible enters the bin. Still, the rubbish sinks beneath an unseen weight. Orange peel, ash, a broken comb, all pressed gently down.

Then the wooden horse rolls from the boiler ledge by itself. It crosses the concrete and stops beneath the open hatch.

A child calls from inside the wall.

“Granddad?”

Father looks at me, not frightened, but with the tender astonishment of a man hearing his name spoken in a country he has not yet reached.

He kneels and pushes the horse into the dark.

For a moment it does not fall. Small fingers, hidden above the bend, receive it.

The red wheel turns once.

Then every lid in the building opens, one after another, climbing past the roof.