Left on Read

The boiler died three weeks after Laila Miah left the only heating engineer she knew on read. She woke up because her nose had gone cold enough to have opinions.

She lay very still under two duvets and the faux-fur jacket she had apparently thrown over the top at some point in the night, and she watched her own breath leave her in a small grey cloud and drift towards the ceiling. It was ten past six. The bedroom was dark except for the orange of the streetlight through the gap in the curtains, and the air had the particular hard, clean edge of a room that had given up.

"No," she told the ceiling. "Absolutely not. We don't do this."

The ceiling, which had a crack in the plaster shaped like the Isle of Man, did not argue.

She found her phone by feel, and the screen lit up her own fingers, which looked bloodless. Minus six outside. She did not want to know the number inside. She got up in one movement, the way you get into the sea at Blackpool, and pulled on the cashmere cardigan from the chair, the oatmeal one that had cost more than her share of the gas bill and was, right now, the most sensible thing she had ever bought.

The hallway floorboards were like walking on a fridge shelf. The boiler lived in a cupboard in the kitchen, behind a door that never quite shut, and she opened it with the dread of someone lifting a sheet in a mortuary.

The little screen was blinking a code at her. Next to it, the pressure gauge had a needle, and the needle was lying flat on its back at zero like it had been shot.

"Right," Laila said. "Right. Okay."

She pressed the reset button, because that was what you did. The boiler clicked, thought about it, made a noise like a sigh in a church, and went back to blinking. She pressed it again. She held it down, which she was fairly sure was not a thing, and counted to ten. Blink. Blink. Blink.

"Is that a mindset problem I'm hearing?"

Bertie Carr filled the kitchen doorway, which was something he did with most doorways. He was six foot four, built like a fridge-freezer with a degree in sports science, and he was wearing a hoodie, thick walking socks, and shorts. Navy shorts. In January. In a flat where you could see your breath.

"Bertie, it's broken."

"It's not broken. It's resting." He came over and peered at the screen with the solemn interest of a man who had never once read a manual. "Cold's a mindset, Lai. Your body's an engine. You just have to tell it it's warm."

"My body is telling me it's dying. My body has filed a complaint."

"Shorts all winter, me. Never had a cold."

"You had a cold at Christmas. You had a cold you described to me as 'biblical'."

"That was emotional," Bertie said, and started filling the kettle, which was, she had to admit, the only useful thing anyone had done so far.

Laila went back to the boiler and looked at the flat little needle and felt the morning reorganise itself around a problem. She was a freelance makeup artist. In June she would be standing in a bridal suite in Cheshire at half six in the morning with a brush in each hand and a bride crying in front of her about her mother-in-law, and she would fix it, all of it, the face and the mood and the general sense of doom, in an hour and a quarter. In January she had nothing in the diary until a hen-do trial on the twenty-somethingth, which meant she was home all week, in this flat, with this boiler. The prospect of seven days of breath-fog made her want to lie down on the lino.

She got her phone out and started ringing.

The first three were voicemails. The fourth was a real person, a woman with a voice like a cigarette and a heart of gold, who laughed at her for a full two seconds before she remembered her manners.

"Love, I've got people who've been without since Friday. Earliest I can do you is Thursday week."

"Thursday week," Laila said. "As in, the Thursday after this Thursday."

"Every plumber in Greater Manchester's booked solid. It's the cold. Old boilers, they all go at once, like budgies."

"Do budgies all go at once?"

"Mine did," the woman said darkly, and rang off.

The fifth was voicemail. The sixth had an answerphone message that announced, with real pride, that they were not taking on new customers until February. The seventh picked up, listened to her describe the needle, and said "Combi?" in the tone of a doctor saying "Smoker?", and then told her he could do a week on Wednesday if she didn't mind paying for the privilege.

By the time the kettle boiled she had worked through the first two pages of results and started on the third, which was where the companies with clip-art logos and no reviews lived. She was sitting on the kitchen counter with her feet tucked under her and both hands round a mug of tea she was using mainly as a radiator.

Tash Pennington came in narrating.

"So this is day one," Tash said to her phone, which she was holding up in front of her face at the angle of a woman who knew her own good side. She had her blonde bob shoved under a bobble hat and a jumper on with a knitted reindeer that had been, in December, festive, and was now just a reindeer. "The boiler has died. We are living like the Victorians. Laila's on the phone to every tradesman in the North West and none of them love her."

"Don't put me on your story."

"You're not on it, you're in the background. You're texture." Tash turned the phone slightly. "That's my flatmate Bertie, he's in shorts, he's a lunatic."

"Mindset," Bertie said to the camera.

"Tash, please. I haven't got my face on."

That was the real emergency, if Laila was honest, and she was trying very hard not to be honest before seven in the morning. She did not let people see her before she was done. It was a professional thing, she told herself, like a chef not eating out of a bin. Her face was her portfolio. It was not at all to do with being looked at properly by someone who might, given a clear view, find something to be disappointed in.

"Speaking of not saying goodbye," Tash said, lowering the phone and giving her the look.

"Nobody was speaking of not saying goodbye."

"I'm speaking of it now. Our Christmas drinks. Our own Christmas drinks, Laila, in our own flat, that we organised. You were here. And then I turned round to do the crackers and you'd gone. You'd left your glass on the windowsill like a ghost leaves a candle."

"I was tired."

"You went to bed in the same flat. You didn't even have to travel. You did an Irish exit from your own living room."

"It's not an Irish exit if you live there," Bertie said. "That's just going to bed."

"It's an Irish exit if you don't say goodnight to the people who bought the Prosecco."

"I bought the Prosecco," Laila said.

"Then you should have stayed and drunk it," Tash said, quite reasonably, and went back to filming the boiler cupboard with the air of a war correspondent.

Laila let it go, which was what she did with most things. She was low-maintenance. Everybody said it. She was the girl you could invite to anything and she'd come and be brilliant and you'd never have to worry about her, because at some point in the night she'd simply not be there any more, and nobody had to deal with the long goodbye, the third hug at the door, the "we should do this again" that nobody meant. It was a service, really.

She scrolled her contacts while the eighth number rang out. A, B, the bride from Didsbury she still owed an invoice to, the cake woman, the cousin who only rang about weddings. S.

Sam (Maisie's boiler).

Her thumb stopped, which was annoying of it.

She had saved him like that at the party, the Saturday before Christmas, in Maisie's flat with the fairy lights and the mustard sofa and the music too loud for anyone to hear what anyone was saying, so you had to lean in. He'd been introduced as the man who had fitted Maisie's boiler, which was how Maisie introduced people, by what they had done for her, as though she collected them. Laila had typed it into her phone as a joke, standing very close to him by the kitchen door, and he had watched her type it and said, "Is that what I am?" and she had said, "For now," and he had laughed, a sudden whole-face laugh she had not expected, and that had been more or less that.

There was no thread under his name any more. There had been one message, once. She knew exactly what it had said. She knew the little word that had gone under it, too, the one that told the sender you had seen it.

He was a heating engineer. He fitted boilers. He was, in the most literal sense available to her, the man for the job.

She scrolled straight past him and rang the ninth number on the third page, a firm with a cartoon of a smiling spanner, and got a voicemail that told her to have a blessed day.

"Download the app," Tash said, appearing over her shoulder. "The callout one. You post the job, they bid. It's like Tinder for plumbers."

"I don't want Tinder for plumbers."

"Everyone wants Tinder for plumbers. You put a photo of the boiler up and somebody swipes right on it."

It was twenty to seven. Laila downloaded the app, which wanted her email, her postcode, her date of birth and, for reasons it did not explain, her star sign. She photographed the blinking screen and the dead needle and typed Combi boiler, no heat, no hot water, pressure at zero, keeps locking out, Chorlton, URGENT and then, after a moment, please, because her mum had brought her up properly even if it had not taken in every area.

She posted it. A little animation of a spanner spun round and round. Nobody swiped.

Bertie made porridge, standing at the hob in his shorts, and talked about the fundamentals of thermoregulation. Tash filmed the porridge. Laila sat on the counter and refreshed the app with her thumb until her thumb went white.

At five past seven, the phone buzzed in her hand.

Your job has been accepted! Kellett Heating will be with you by 8.00am. Out-of-hours rate applies.

She stared at it. There was no photo, just a little logo, a blue flame in a white circle, and a line of text: Gas Safe registered. Domestic boilers, servicing, emergency callouts. South Manchester and Stockport. Thirty-something reviews, all five stars. She did not recognise the name. Nobody she knew was called Kellett; it sounded like a firm with three vans and a receptionist called Sandra.

"Somebody loves me," she announced.

"Is he fit?" Tash said instantly.

"It's a logo. It's a flame."

"Flames can be fit."

"By eight," Bertie said, impressed. "That's before the school run. Not that I'm on it. Late start today."

"Out-of-hours rate," Laila said, reading it again, and felt her bank account flinch somewhere in Oldham. She thought about January, about no weddings until April, about the money she had put by and the money she had already taken out of what she'd put by. Then she thought about another night under two duvets and a fur coat, and accepted the quote.

Which left her fifty-five minutes.

There were people, she knew, who would answer the door to a tradesman in their dressing gown. There were people who would do it with yesterday's mascara gone to bruises under their eyes and their hair in a slept-on knot. Those people were braver than her and she wished them every happiness. She was not going to meet a stranger looking tragic. Not in her own home. Not on a Monday.

The bathroom was so cold the mirror didn't even steam. She washed her face in water that came out of the hot tap at exactly the temperature of the cold one and made a noise she was glad Tash hadn't recorded. She did her base with her fingers, quickly, warming each product on the back of her hand first because everything had gone thick in the cold. A bit of bronzer high on the cheekbones, where the light caught; brows brushed up; her lashes she left alone because they had never needed help. Then the liner, the one part of the morning she did not hurry. She pulled the wing out and up, clean, one pass each side, and the steadiness of her own hand did what it always did, which was to make her feel like a person in charge of her own life.

Hair up, high and sleek, scraped back and wrapped, the long black length of it falling glossy down her back. She took the gold stud out of her nose, polished it on her cardigan for no reason, put it back in. Then she stood in her bedroom and looked at her options like a general looking at a map.

She settled on the silky cami, the champagne one, because it was the nicest thing she owned that could be called a top, and the oatmeal cardigan over it, long and soft and slipping off one shoulder however often she pulled it up, and her black jeans, the fitted ones, and her ankle boots with a little heel, indoors, because she was not answering the door in slipper socks to a man who wore a flame on his logo. Her shoulder came up in goosebumps straight away. She ignored it. Beauty was pain. Beauty was also, at this moment, a mild hypothermia risk, but it was a matter of principle.

A swipe of lipstick, a deep berry red. She blotted it on the back of a receipt.

"You look like you're going on a date," Tash said from the hallway, filming again.

"I look like a woman with a functioning boiler. I'm manifesting."

"Is that what we're calling it."

"Lai's always done at eight," Bertie said loyally, through porridge. "Even when she's dying."

"Especially when I'm dying. If I'm going to die I want to look nice in the photos."

The doorbell went at seven fifty-three.

It was the old kind, a real bell that rang somewhere in the walls, and the sound went through the cold flat and stopped all three of them where they stood. Tash looked at Laila. Bertie looked at Laila. Laila looked at the door at the top of the stairs, then remembered she was the one who had paid the out-of-hours rate, and went down.

The stairwell was colder than the flat, which she would not have believed possible. The front door had frosted glass in the top half, and through it there was the shape of a man, tall and broad in a dark jacket, standing with his weight on one leg and something heavy in his hand. Behind him, on the street, a white van idled, its exhaust smoking in the streetlight.

She put on her professional face, the one that said I am delighted to see you and I have everything under control, and opened the door.

The cold came in first. Then the man.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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