A woman moving through Denmark Hill and Coldharbour Lane finds that chance, memory, and place are harder to separate than they first appear.

Even on Saturdays, Nina hurries by that alleyway. The back alley linking London’s Denmark Hill, the road for ever choked with ambulances for Kings’ Hospital, with Coldharbour Lane. A Mothercare bag, caught in the gusts from cars racing to Brixton, clings to her ankle. She kicks it free, and it twists, ghoul-like along the pavement.

As Nina glances at her shopping list, she notices a scratch card, caught in the cracks of the flagstones. She picks it up, hating how she’s always quick to grab at signs of random fortune.

As if a fortune found cancels a misfortune past.

It’s unused, warm too, as if the hands in the logo on the nearby façade of Book Aid International have just dropped it there for her. Book Aid. She imagines teams busy in the basement packing up pre-loved copies of The Secret Seven and The Wind in the Willows to dispatch to children, bright-eyed, in all corners of the globe. Her smile drops fast. She rubs her arms despite the afternoon June sun.

She gets out her house key, scratches off the silver strip. She notices the spare key still on the keyring. Mark’s long gone, she doesn’t need reminders. “Why don’t you move, come across the river?” her best mate in Stoke Newington pleaded. Maybe it would be a clean break, Nina admits for the first time.

Blowing the scratch card, she rushes to the newsagent’s, the one that’s stood at the head of the alleyway since she moved here a decade back. Newspapers on the outside table are arranged with care, so each masthead is visible. And a stand of magazines waiting to be twirled, if only she’d stop to try.

“Lucky day, madam,” the smiley shopkeeper says. “£50 prize.” He hands her a crisp fifty which she keeps in her fingers, afraid she might lose it. That’d cover the leccy this month. Since he’d walked out – no discussion like adults, just following his needs – she’d drained her savings on bills. Even though she loved her job at the Croydon charity against loneliness, running all kinds of clubs – Knit and Natter, Book Lovers and Chair Exercise – she was considering moving to corporate, maybe Nestlé or EDF, a different world.

Inside the tiny newsagent’s, the owner, stooped, serves two girls, not more than nine or 10, giggling, counting out their pocket money for Fanta and Love Hearts. She wishes her money worries revolved around what sweets to afford. Her feet lead her out of the shop before her head catches up. Opposite, she sees the open-all-hours barbers. Her body drifts towards the huddle of young Black men spilling out of the doorway. They clink squat brown bottles of malt, heads thrown back, wide smiles and finger snaps punctuating the air. Loose and free. How she used to be. The cinnamon smell of the bakery next door, Spice N Nice, reaches Nina’s nostrils. She’s back there – eight, nine, 10 – on the yellow fields of summers long gone, weaving through the stalls of yesterday’s fairgrounds in La Grande Fortune Park. Home, her childhood home, the tiny island of Guernsey. Smells of doughnuts in cinnamon sugar, briny hot dogs, and children’s laughter, up and down, up and down, with each jump on the bouncy castle. Life was so simple then, so un-hurt. Leaving primary school, Harry, who sat next to her in maths, told her that they’d get married. She said she wanted two kids.

Like all it took was a wish.

She joins the noisy queue snaking out of the bakery. A steely blue Acadia, roof down, slows at the lights, pumping out Sean Kingston, and the street jives to the beat. The chorus bubbles up happier times. Mark used to love going down Paddy’s on the Old Kent Road, an African bar, and dance while the whole place would sing along.

“Come on, beautiful girl!” The bubble floats, pops. An elderly Black man in the queue in front yells, holds his hand out for a dance. Nina shakes her head, saying no to joy a lot these days. But he takes her hand, and she feels his instructions through his chapped fingers. She sways a little, looks down, finds her feet remember the beat.

The woman serving mops her brow with the back of her blue latex-gloved hand. Nina feels woozy from the heat, freer and looser from the music. As she gets served, her dancing partner does a swirl of his hand as if doffing his cap. She orders two spice buns, not sure who she’d share them with, and a portion of rice and peas. In the tubs in the hot display cabinet, the rice is streaking pink-red like blood seeping through cloth.

Her breath shortens. That day again, in Kings, prone on the hospital bed, the sun full in the sky.

A miscarriage. A missed miscarriage. The nurse informed her.

“It’s a higher probability than you might expect,” she added, as if to reassure.

What are the chances of the next one surviving? Nina choked back the tears. There was no next one. Mark had gone.

Clasping her blue carrier whose handles are about to give way, she makes her way down Coldharbour. She notices the small coffee shop has changed hands. Derelict for months and now brought back to life as, what’s that say, Ganapathy’s Telephony? Displays of mobile phone cases, rainbow colours like an artist’s palette, entice her in.

A base note of bitter coffee – is it remnant or memory? – makes Nina grimace, which she covers with a fast smile. The shop assistant, small, delicate-nosed and melted-chocolate-eyed, beams back, mistaking Nina’s grin, probably, as joy at being inside his mobile phone emporium. He stands behind the display cabinet of chargers, earphones and plug heads.

“And what is madam looking for today?” he asks, in that Southeast London Indian-sounding lilt, like a friendly pat on the arm. The spotlights above his head make his shiny hair look blue-black. Lights that used to glow on the round marble tables, which were sandwiched, higgledy-piggledy, between the tall chill cabinets of cakes. After what happened, Nina would sit and watch the revolving tiered cakes spin and spin, like the pink ballerina tucked safely inside her childhood jewellery box.

“How long have you been here?”

“Six months, nine really. Had to do a lot to this place before we could open.” His smile drops, his brow pinches. Nina is shocked by how time’s warped. He bends down, opens a bottom drawer, pulls out what look like bills. The sound of the drawer opening is the same whoosh of the old café’s dishwasher, gliding on its rollers. As Ganapathy gives a couple of kicks to shut the drawer, Nina half expects to see the barista thwacking the portafilter against the trash can.

“Nine months – ” Nina’s voice vaporises, like steam from the steam wand.

The wand-waver, at the scan that day, turned off the machine. Her face darkened, as if the sun had gone behind the clouds, when she whispered to Nina, “I’m sorry.”

Nina gazes at the corner window, spots the chair next to the counter. A blue velvet cocktail chair, the same kind Mark and she would sit on. They’d take the corner table in the window every Sunday for brunch, armed with bundles of broadsheets. They used to tell each other what they’d just read, offer opinions, swap sections. He’d pinch a triangle of toast off her plate. After, when she’d realised he didn’t want to talk about what had happened, she saw how they hid behind the papers, how they buried themselves in the catastrophes of the world but couldn’t face each other in their grief.

And that New Year’s Eve, she’d watched Mark watching the crowds swelling at the 345 bus stop opposite, looking anywhere but at Nina. His phone had vibrated, unanswered in his pocket.

“Not important,” he said, but his face said other. Nina had put her cup down too swiftly, clanking the saucer and knocking the teardrop-shaped spoon onto the table.

“Going to the barbers,” he said. “They close early on New Year’s Eve,” he added, as if Nina’s expression showed she remembered he’d had his haircut two weeks before. She’d looked at that empty blue velvet chair and waited.

The phone rings, the shop assistant mouths something to Nina and speaks into the handset in Tamil. Nina knows several words from her colleagues at work. Helping others, feeling useful, feeling wanted, that’s what keeps Nina going. She picks up a pink phone case from the display, a soft brushed cover which she clutches to her torso.

“Madam, sorry, had to take care of something urgent,” the shopkeeper says, stuffing a letter with a red stamp across the top back into its brown envelope. Nina nods, still hugging the case, her eyes pricking from not blinking. An ambulance siren sounds and the coffee bar-cum-mobile phone shop flashes blue.

“Would you like a tea?” His words release the tears. “Or … coffee?” His face puckers as if a memory flashed across his path.

Nina nods. He brings one of those foldaway slatted chairs. She sits down, too low to get comfy behind the counter, now doubling up as a makeshift table. He turns off the flashing blue and pink LED OPEN sign hanging on the door and sets down a large teapot with a chipped spout. He pours tea with milk and cardamom and plops two sugar cubes into his cup. Nina blows on her tea, rocking back and forth, back and forth. The raindrops skittering on the windowpane soothe her. He heads out the back, jangling the red-beaded curtains, which slow to a halt. When he returns, he’s carrying a tray of pillow-shaped cookies, sesame balls and a pyramid of white cubes, dusted with sugar and desiccated coconut.

“My wife made them for Pongal, our harvest festival.” His voice cracks. “To new riches,” he says, popping a sesame ball in his mouth.

The cinnamon in the cookie takes Nina back there. Back there to New Year’s Eve, to their kitchen, where she stirred the hot spiced wine in the pan. The cinnamon sticks bobbed, softened, disintegrated, turned the drink bitter.

After the miscarriage, she’d wanted everything to be right, to go back to how things were. She’d sprinkle extra cinnamon on his coffee. She’d bake loaves of bread, make Guernsey gache, a fruit loaf she hadn’t made in decades. She’d make toffee popcorn that would jump and scatter all over the floor. She’d filled their flat with sweet, too-sweet aromas. And still the aftertaste remained. That New Year’s Eve. He never came back from the barbers.

At midnight, before the chimes, he texted.

“You’ll be pleased I did this in the long run.”

Ganapathy pours more tea. When he mentions his failed family visa application to bring his mother from Sri Lanka, Nina offers to help. He’d pay her, it’d take a lot of time, he said, poring over documents, wording the appeal just right. They clink teacups, smile and nod.

Nina, brighter, lighter, gets up from the wooden chair. She looks around, smiles, as if she’s made peace with the shop, the ghosts that stopped her coming back. No, she can’t move away. This is what feels like home now.

She feels the crisp note still in her pocket and sets off to The Sun and Doves, a shelter, a roadstead on Coldharbour. She goes out the back into the beer garden, surprised at how the fir trees now overhang the corner table. They – Mark and her – would spend long summer Saturday afternoons here, under stripey parasols. Afternoons that’d spill into evenings, they’d watch the pink grapefruit sun drop over the rows of houses. Loose and free then, she’d guzzle pints of fizzy, tangy lager and lime, clink cheers against his bottles of Guinness. His face, soft and keen, lit up by the mellow glow from the fairy lights looping along the garden walls. Nina loved how he loved this secret garden, and knowing she’d introduced it to him. She needs to make fresh memories here. She orders Chef’s Special with extra stilton sauce and enjoys a lager and lime in the sun.

“Honey, I’m home,” she calls out to no one, kicking off her Skechers in the hallway. She giggles, a full-on giggle, like she hadn’t in ages.

She puts the rice and peas in the fridge and goes to stick the kettle on. Before she knows it, she’s unplugging the espresso maker, winding up the flex. Mark’s Nespresso machine. Ready for the charity shop tomorrow, ready for a new home.

She’s glad to sit down on the sofa and smiles, thinking of helping Ganapathy’s mum, back in Colombo, willing to start again in a foreign country for family. She plops a coconut ladoo, whole, in her mouth, and tries to dislodge a coconut flake stuck in her teeth. From the sugar rush she feels giddy, giddy like she did with the tangy lager, giddy like she did with the saccharine candy floss, giddy like she did when she won a space hopper at the coconut shy.

Before she settles in to watch Dragon’s Den, she knows there’s one thing left to do. Opening the hallway cupboard, she rootles through the pile of barrel bags from lifetimes and fortunes past.

Deep in the bag full of photo albums, she finds it. Her vintage copy of The Wind in the Willows.

She reads out the inscription.

Harry + Nina = love.

Nina smiles.

Harry. What are the chances he did something with maths?

She opens the little gilded book.

“The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home,” she reads. She leans her head on the headrest, feeling the late afternoon sun on her face.

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