Weather Reports

Friday was entirely normal, and Cal spent most of it failing at it.

She was at her desk by nine. She answered enquiries. She retrieved the postgraduate’s cursed journal from its latest hiding place and pinned it, temporarily, to the light of day. By any external audit it was an ordinary Friday, conducted by an ordinary librarian, in an ordinary building full of rescued silences.

The clocks were the problem.

There were four of them on her usual routes through the building, and she found herself consulting all four, repeatedly, for no reason she was prepared to enter into the record. Half nine: he’d have closed at four, so, five hours, if he slept at all, which she had no data on, because in all these weeks she had never once asked him a single question about sleeping, an omission that now struck her as a scandal. Eleven: the club’s deliveries came in the morning, probably; buildings had needs. Ten past two: nothing. There was no reason to check a clock at ten past two.

She checked it anyway.

At lunch she went out for air she didn’t need, and her feet took the long way, and the long way, it emerged, now went past Mare Street, which was news to her. She did not stop at the café. She glanced in, without meaning to, in the way one means things without meaning them, and saw the back booth, empty at midday as it was entitled to be, and the karaoke machine dark in its corner, and walked on at a pace that dared anyone to draw conclusions.

Nobody drew any.

Except one.

Margaret was at the repairs desk in the workroom, rebinding a damaged book, the biro casualty from the trolley, chapter six still arguing with its dead annotator down the margins, and Cal was passing with a stack of returns when Margaret said, without looking up:

“You worried yesterday.”

Cal stopped.

“I was late back.”

Margaret shook her head. Drew the thread through, unhurried, another stitch in the binding.

“No.”

Stitch.

“Different sort.”

Cal stood there, holding her returns, in a workroom that smelled of glue and old paper, being read by a woman with a needle, and understood that there was no version of this conversation she could win, because Margaret did not converse. Margaret verified.

“The trolley wants taking down,” said Margaret, to the book, subject closed.

Cal took the trolley down.

It was, she reflected in the lift, becoming something of a theme: everyone in her life had apparently been issued the full briefing except her.

She got home at six. Made tea. Stood at the window with it while the light went down over the roofs, she noticed herself noticing the roofs, all of them, the whole staggered wet geography of them, and filed that too, and at some point between one sip and the next, without transition, without a door, home dissolved quietly, and the Empty Room simply was.

Cal sat down. Or the room decided she had.

She wasn’t surprised. That was the thing she noted, distantly: the arriving had stopped surprising her. She had come home carrying something too heavy for the drawer, she’d known it all day, felt it shifting in there, catching on the runners, and the room, apparently, had opinions after all about where heavy things should be carried.

She sat with her tea in the colourless quiet for a while.

Then:

“…You can come in.”

Footsteps. Measured. Unhurried.

Grigori arrived exactly where she expected him to, grey coat, three books, and stopped, and looked at her, properly, the way he looked when he had already read the whole page and was deciding which line to quote back.

“You’re frightened,” he said.

“No.”

Grigori nodded.

“Good.”

Silence.

“That means you’re frightened about the right thing.”

He sat, in the way he had, and produced his own biscuit from his coat despite the plate she had, she noted this with dignity, actually provided, and unwrapped it with ceremony.

“There are biscuits,” said Cal. “Right there.”

“I can see that.”

“You’re eating your own.”

“Trust,” said Grigori, selecting a book, “is rebuilt slowly.”

They drank tea. The room did what it always did, which was nothing, beautifully, although tonight, Cal thought, the nothing had a slightly attentive quality, like a butler pretending not to listen.

She lasted longer than usual. Nearly nine minutes.

“He missed Thursday.”

Grigori said nothing.

He turned a page. He waited, with the specific patience of a man who had waited out empires, and let the sentence stand there in the middle of the room until she could hear it herself.

Then:

“Did he?”

She frowned.

“He wasn’t there.”

“Where did you spend Thursday?”

“…Nocturne.”

“Then he kept it.”

Cal opened her mouth to explain the difference, the booth, the pot, the forty minutes, the size of the forty minutes, and found the explanation dissolving as she reached for it, because there wasn’t a difference, not really, or rather the difference was entirely inside her, and Grigori had known that before she’d said a word, which was why he’d answered the question underneath instead of the one she’d asked.

Technically infuriating. Emotionally accurate.

“I hate it when you do that.”

“I know,” said Grigori, warmly, and turned another page.

The quiet came back. She turned her mug a quarter, and caught herself doing it, and left it turned.

“He couldn’t leave,” she said, at last, to her tea. “The club needed him. And he stood in the doorway and said I don’t break Thursdays as if…” She stopped. Regrouped. “He was in the right place. He’s always in the right place. That’s the whole…”

“Mm,” said Grigori.

“I sat in front of an empty booth for forty minutes and it felt like…”

She didn’t finish it.

He didn’t make her.

After a while, Grigori set his book down, and rose, and crossed the room, not toward her, and not toward the place where the door would have been, but toward one of the walls. The smooth ones. The unbroken ones. The empty ones, at least, as far as anyone had ever said.

He stood in front of it for a long moment.

He raised one hand, and did not touch it. He never touched anything in here; she realised she had known that for years without ever once marking it down. His hand stopped an inch from the surface, the way you’d hold a palm to a window in winter, feeling for the cold on the other side.

“Roofs leak,” said Grigori.

Cal looked at him.

“Even impossible ones.”

She waited for the rest of it.

There was no rest of it. He lowered his hand, and collected his books, and his biscuit wrapper, which he folded into quarters because he was, above all things, a guest, and crossed to the place where she’d decided the door was.

There he paused. Without turning around:

“He kept Thursday, Cal.”

A beat.

“Try to notice what it cost him.”

And he was gone.

Cal sat alone in the colourless quiet with her cooling tea and her reorganising drawer and a sentence standing in the middle of the room where he’d left it, because that was what Grigori did, he never took his sentences with him. He left them behind like coats, and you kept tripping over them for days.

What it cost him.

She had spent an entire evening, an entire chapter of herself, on the forty minutes. On her side of the empty booth. It had not once occurred to her, not for one filed and cross-referenced second, that two streets away a man who did not break things had stood in his doorway all night with a scarred door at his back and a café in his mind’s eye, keeping one promise at the price of another, and that for the only person in London whose word was structural, the price might have been the heavier of the two.

There had been two right places.

She had only counted the cost of one of them.

Cal looked at the wall Grigori hadn’t touched. It looked like a wall. It went on looking like a wall with the perfect composure of something that had been practising.

“Roofs leak,” she said, to the room.

The room, as always, offered no opinion.

She finished her tea, all of it, cold, which counted for something, and went to bed in the ordinary world, and slept.

And that night she dreamed of the door again, the plain one, the patient one, in the wall she couldn’t place.

This time, it was raining on the other side.