Come Quick — the voice a father keeps for fire, and spends on first snow

Come Quick

On Saturdays her father rings to say he has bought a chicken too big for one. He has never asked her to come round. On Sundays she comes. At half past four he says, "You'll be wanting to get back," and she fetches her coat, and they both behave as if the idea was hers.

This Sunday she is at his kitchen table with her laptop open, eating cold chicken straight out of the dish and answering the messages she has been putting off. It has rained on and off all afternoon. The gutters tick. Her father is out in the garden, deciding whether the washing can be saved. She hears the back door stick and give, and him say "Sorry" to it, and the slap of wet slippers. Then nothing, for long enough that she goes back to her sentence. The light on the table turns yellow and low. The screen gets harder to read.

Then, from outside: "Come! Come here, come, quick—"

The voice goes up and stays up. She is on her feet before it ends. The chair goes over behind her and she doesn't turn. Her mind reaches the door ahead of her body and runs the whole thing: two steps down, wet; his hip; the grass. Her phone is in her back pocket and she pats it, running. She is already on the call in her head, and the operator is asking for the name of his road, and she has two years of Sundays and no name to give, only the walk up from the station: a bakery, a hedge with a gap in it.

He is standing on the wet grass in his slippers with a tea towel over one shoulder. Upright. Alive. Pointing.

She stops in the doorway with the fork still in her hand. At first she can't see what he is pointing at. The legs believe the voice straight away. The eyes take longer. Then the fear goes out of her all at once, and there it is: a rainbow, a whole one, with one foot on the neighbour's steaming roof and the other somewhere behind the poplars. Above it there is a second, fainter bow with the colours in reverse. The washing hangs underneath, sheets and socks, still dripping.

"Can you see the second one?" her father calls.

He asks it like a man leaning out of a burning house to check that she has noticed the second one.

She says she can, keeping her voice level, and goes down the steps and stands beside him, nearer than they stand in the kitchen.

The voice is the one he used the day the oil caught fire in the pan. She was nine. The fire was small and out in seconds under a damp tea towel, and she has forgotten most of it. What stayed was the sound he made before the towel: one high word with no gaps in it, come-come-quick, and nothing to say what for. He didn't say fire. Saying it would have taken a second, and nobody had a second. She was in the doorway before she had decided to move.

"There," he says, in the same high voice, and takes hold of her sleeve without turning his head. He shifts her half a step to the left, until the rainbow comes down where it does for him. "Look. Look at the top one now."

The voice has come perhaps a dozen times since that day, all of them in the old house. Once it was the first snow of one particular year; the rest were rainbows. In this house he types it instead. The phone in her back pocket keeps the texts: Rainbow over the poplars, ten past four. Big one. Gone now.

She looks at the fainter bow, at the washing, at his face, back at the sky, and it is only a wet afternoon, already going flat. She can't say when the rainbow went. She can say when he stopped. The voice comes down and the level one comes back, and he lets go of her sleeve as if he had only just noticed he was holding it. "Well," he says. "That's that."

He turns and looks at her properly for the first time since she came out. Then at her hand. "You've got a fork," he says, and looks at it a moment longer than a fork needs.

She opens her mouth. It is the sentence she says to the bakery window and the hedge with the gap in it: Dad, when you call like that, I think you've fallen.

"I was hungry," she says.

He laughs, one short breath, and shakes out the tea towel, and they go in.

The chair is still on its back in the kitchen. Her father looks at it. "Sorry," he tells it, and stands it up. At the sink she rinses the fork. Her legs have not finished believing him. His post is on the sill behind the tap, where it always is, and the top envelope is a gas bill: his name, and under it the name of his road. She says it under her breath. Twice. She has it.