We were wrapping the good plates in newspaper, badly. Sue kept using yesterday's paper, the wet bit from where the milk had leaked, and half the sheets came apart in your hand before you'd got the plate covered. Dad said just use the Radio Times, we've got three years of them in that cupboard, but nobody moved, because Uncle Terry had started talking again and once he starts you let him finish or he starts over.
"This was your Great-Nan Iris's house," he said. "Prospect Street. We cleared it the week after the funeral, same as we're doing now, and Iris still had the phone in, one of those cream ones on the hall table with the little answering machine plugged in underneath, the kind with the cassette in it. British Telecom sent someone to disconnect the line on the Thursday. Cut the wire at the box outside, we watched him do it. No dial tone after that."
He took a plate off Sue and wrapped it properly, corner to corner, the way you're supposed to.
"Friday morning the little light was blinking. New message. Your Auntie Pat thought it was a fault, some charge still in the line, and she played it back expecting static. It was your Great-Uncle Ronnie's voice, dead eleven years by then, saying happy birthday for a birthday that wasn't for another two months. Pat's birthday. Word for word what he actually said to her, two months later, standing in that same hall, because we hadn't cleared the phone out yet. We'd left it plugged into a dead socket because nobody could face unplugging it."
"So the tape knew before it happened," I said, mostly to move him along, because Dad had started doing that thing with his jaw.
"The tape didn't know anything," Terry said. "It just recorded what got said in that hall, whenever it got said. Only it recorded it a bit early. We tested it. Left a note by the phone, said something daft on purpose that nobody would ever say, and three days later there it was on the tape, in Pat's voice, her saying the exact daft thing, because she'd found the note and read it out loud to see if it'd work. It only ever played back what one of us was going to say anyway. It just heard it first."
"That's just a machine being early," Sue said. She'd stopped wrapping plates, though. Stood there with a sheet of newspaper going soft in her hand.
"It's not just that," Terry said, "because your Nan Iris's last message on there, the one nobody ever played because we didn't know it was on there till the house was empty and the removal men had gone, was her own voice. Saying the date she died. Two weeks before she said it."
Nobody said anything for a bit. Dad went and got the Radio Times out of the cupboard like he'd meant to do it before any of this started. My phone buzzed on the table, some notification about a parcel, and I turned it face down without looking at it properly.
"What happened to the machine," I said.
"Skip," Terry said. "Went in the skip with the cream phone and the cassette still in it. Council took the skip Tuesday. Wednesday, I want to say. Might've been Tuesday."
We kept wrapping after that, better than before, actually finishing the job properly. It was nearly six by the time we got to the hall. Nan's hall, this Nan, the one whose funeral was last Wednesday, not the one Terry had been talking about. The phone's long gone, has been for years. But the little answering machine's still there under the hall table where it's always been, the cream one, plugged into a socket that hasn't had a line running to it since 2003.
The light on it was blinking. One new message.