Delayed in Manchester

The delay was announced in the flat voice of somebody reading a screen. Ada was rebooked onto a flight twenty-six hours later, given a hotel voucher and a paper bag with a sandwich in it, and released into a city she had never once meant to visit.

She is a translator. Her working life is arranged around being somewhere for two days and leaving, and an unplanned day is not, for her, a gift. She spent the first hour in the hotel answering messages she could easily have left until Friday.

In the lining of her bag, where it had been travelling for eleven years, was a receipt from a chemist's with an address written on the back in her mother's handwriting: 14 Sowerby Terrace, and underneath, in brackets, the words "top floor, cold".

Her mother had taken lodgings there for one academic year and had spoken about it perhaps four times in total, always briefly, always with a small amount of amusement that Ada had never been able to place.

The map on her phone offered a Sowerby Close and a Sowerby Way, both of them in an estate built in the nineteen-nineties, and no terrace at all. Having nothing better to do, she took a tram to the nearest stop and walked from there in a thin, patient drizzle.

Where the terrace should have been there was a roundabout, a car showroom and a strip of grass with three young trees on it, each still tied to its stake. The whole street had been demolished at some point that nobody in the newsagent's could date more precisely than "years ago".

It ought to have been the end of the errand. Ada bought a coffee, stood under the awning and considered going back, and then, mostly because the alternative was the hotel, asked where the library was.

The local studies room was on the second floor and was staffed by a librarian who brightened visibly at being asked for something. Told the street name, he produced a directory from 1968 within four minutes and laid it open like a man presenting a dish.

The directory listed the occupiers of every house on Sowerby Terrace, number 14 included: a Mrs E. Hartnoll, and beneath her name, in the way of such books, the single word "apartments". So there had been a landlady, and the landlady had had a name.

There were photographs too, in a box in the archive: the terrace from the corner, wet, in about 1971, with a van outside and a cat on a wall. Ada looked at the top windows for longer than she had intended and could not have said what she was hoping to see there.

Had the aircraft been repaired that morning, none of this would have happened, and the receipt would have gone on travelling in the lining until it fell apart. It is an uncomfortable thought, and she has not decided what to do with it.

She walked back along the canal because the librarian said it was quicker, which it was not. The water was the colour of weak tea, the drizzle had stopped, and two men were fishing without any apparent expectation of fish.

At the airport the next morning she took out her phone twice to ring her mother and put it away twice. The photocopies are in the bag now, folded inside the receipt. She will probably mention the delay first, and see where the conversation goes.