We packed and numbered fifty four. Fifty five came off the lorry, in my wife's handwriting, in a marker we do not own.
We moved on a Friday in October.
It was not a dramatic move. Forty minutes up the road, three bedrooms to three bedrooms, a garden we wanted and a kitchen we could afford to leave alone for a year. Two men and a lorry from a firm my brother in law used. All of it ordinary.
We packed ourselves to save money. My wife is a project manager and she does not do anything by halves, so we had a system before we had a single box.
Every box got a number in black marker on three sides. Every box got its number and its contents written on a sheet as it was sealed. The sheets lived on a clipboard on the hall radiator cover and there is nothing on this earth that would have made her let a box out of the house without going on that clipboard.
Fifty four boxes.
The clipboard is in the drawer under the telly and I have had it out twice this week. It goes 1 to 54. Number 38 is crossed out and rewritten because we re-taped it.
They brought fifty five off the lorry.
I did not notice at the house. Nobody notices at the house. There is a man walking backwards through your front door with a wardrobe and your job is to say yes, that one's upstairs, and to keep the dog in the kitchen.
I noticed on the Sunday, unpacking the spare room.
It was under the window with three others. Big one, the double-walled sort you get for books, taped along the seam and taped again across, and on the side, in black marker, in my wife's handwriting: 55. KITCHEN. MISC.
We did not have a 55.
The handwriting is hers.
I have been married to this woman for nineteen years and I have looked at that box every day since October and it is her hand. The way she does a 5 with the top bar separate. The full stops after the words. The slight lean.
She says it is not hers. She said it the first time in a normal voice and by the fourth time she was crying, and we do not talk about the handwriting now, it is off the table.
The marker is the other thing.
We used a four pack of chisel tips from the supermarket, the ones with the grey barrel, and they run out and go pale at the end of a long session and every box we did on the last night has that pale grey look. Box 55 is done in a proper black, wet, the kind that sits on top of cardboard. There is not a marker like that in this house.
I rang the removal firm on the Monday.
The lad in the office was helpful and bored in equal measure. He said they load off a manifest, and the manifest was item counts by category, not numbers on boxes, and it said fifty four cartons.
I said fifty five came off.
He said they would not have carried a box that was not in the house.
And he said something that I have thought about more than he will ever know, which is that they are trained not to guess. If there is a sealed box in the property on moving day and it is not on the sheet, they load it, because the alternative is leaving somebody's things behind and the firm getting sued. They take everything that is boxed and taped and standing with the boxes.
So it was in the house. On the Friday morning. Standing with the others.
We did not open it for eleven days.
You will want to know why and I have three answers and none of them are good enough.
The first is that we were moving, and moving is a fortnight of being too tired to have a proper thought, and there was a box that was probably my mother in law's from the loft and it could wait.
The second is that my wife asked me not to. She asked in a way that did not invite a discussion.
The third one is the true one, which is that on the second night in that house I went into the spare room for a suitcase and the light was off and the box was where it was, and I stood in the doorway with my hand on the switch and did not turn it on, and went out again and got the suitcase in the morning.
I do not know what that was. I have never had that before or since.
We opened it on a Tuesday evening with the lights on and the radio on, which tells you what state we were in.
Kitchen things. Genuinely. That is the part nobody believes.
A stack of six side plates with a green band. A colander. Two pyrex dishes, the old glass ones with the ridges. A biscuit tin with a picture of a harbour on it. A bundle of cutlery held with a rubber band. Tea towels, folded, four of them, and one of them had been ironed.
All of it wrapped in newspaper, and the newspaper is where it stopped being a story about somebody else's box.
The paper was the local one. Our old local one, from the town we had just left.
The dates ran across about a fortnight in the June of that year, which was four months before the move, and I know the dates because I flattened every sheet out on the dining table and put them in order like an idiot.
And in the middle of them was our house.
Not a picture of it. It was in the property section, in the listings, the little half column entries with a thumbnail. Three bed semi, the road name, the agent, the price we paid. The listing we answered. The one my wife found on a Tuesday and sent me at work with three exclamation marks.
Somebody had wrapped a colander in the page our house was advertised on, four months before we moved into it, and put it in a box numbered one past the end of our own list, in my wife's handwriting, in the wrong marker.
The plates are not ours and they are also not new.
They have that faint grey crazing you get on old glaze, and the bottom one in the stack has a chip. The biscuit tin has a shopping list in it in pencil on the back of a torn envelope. Milk, bin bags, batteries, and then a word I have looked at for a long time and I think is a name.
The tea towel that was ironed still smells of somebody's iron. I know how that sounds.
We took the box to the police, which felt stupid in the doing of it and I would do it again.
They were kind. A woman came out and looked at it and wrote things down and asked whether anything was missing rather than added, and when I said added she nodded like that was a thing that happened. She said it was almost certainly a mix-up at the firm, that boxes get put on the wrong lorry, that it was probably somebody else's kitchen and there was a family somewhere without their plates.
I said the handwriting is my wife's.
She looked at it for a while and then she said that people's handwriting is more similar than they think, and she gave me a reference number, and that was the end of it.
We have the reference number. I have never used it.
It is in the loft now.
Taped back up. Not with the original tape, that came off in the opening, so it is my tape over her tape, and if you look at the seam you can see the two.
I go up there about twice a year for the Christmas things and the suitcases. It is where I left it, under the eaves on the left with the water tank behind it, and it has that grey fur of loft dust on the top now, which took about two years, and I find the dust comforting, which is probably the single strangest sentence I will ever say about my own house.
That was six years ago.
We are still here. The kitchen did not get done in a year, it got done in four. The dog died. My daughter has left for university and her room is an office now and we are the sort of people who say the office.
Last month I went up for the suitcases.
The box is where it was. The dust is where it was.
And there is another one next to it, the same size, taped along the seam and taped again across, and on the side, in a proper wet black marker, in my wife's handwriting:
56. LOFT. MISC.