Three Books

The supplier had sent the wrong gin again.

Jax stood at the end of his own bar in the late afternoon with the invoice in one hand and the offending bottle in the other, and considered, not for the first time, that the modern world had made a religion of the almost-right.

The order said one thing. The box said nearly that thing. The invoice, with genuine creativity, said a third thing, and charged for it. Somewhere a warehouse was rounding every request in London to the nearest convenient truth, and it fell to men with bars to hold the line item by item, and he made a note in the margin in his small exact hand, and set the bottle in the returns crate, and went back to the glasses.

Nobody else polished them properly. This was not a criticism of the barman, who did everything else properly.

It was simply a fact about glasses, and about what a person could and could not delegate.

The club around him was in its shallow hour, the stretch between opening and mattering. Spring had thinned the old crowd; the weather-season regulars had dispersed to wherever old things went when the nights loosened, and the room breathed easier for it, half-empty, low-lit, the shadows drowsing in their corners like dogs in sun that wasn’t there.

The bass was off.

The quiet had furniture in it.

He did not hear the street door.

That was the first thing, though he did not rank it as a thing until later. The stairs told him about everyone; the stairs were honest; he knew the weight and rhythm of every kind of arrival before it reached the light. But he looked up from the glasses and there was simply a man at the bar, settled mid-way along it as though he had been issued that exact stool at birth, an old man in a grey coat with three books under one arm, waiting with the unhurried patience of furniture.

“Evening,” said Jax.

“Evening,” the old man agreed.

“What’ll it be.”

“Coffee.”

Jax looked at him for a moment.

“The coffee here is terrible.”

“So I’ve heard,” said the old man.

There was nothing to object to in any of it.

Jax made the coffee, which at Nocturne meant a process with more honesty than art in it, and set it down, and the old man wrapped both hands around the cup like a man greeting something, and drank some, and considered it with the seriousness of a tribunal.

“Well?” said Jax, against his own policy of not asking.

“Terrible,” the old man agreed.

And there was something in the way he said it that Jax noted and could not place, because it was not disappointment, and it was not politeness.

It was the tone of a man who has walked a long way to check on an old landmark and found it still standing, exactly as bad as ever, and been moved by that beyond anything a good cup could have managed.

He drank all of it, too. That was the other thing.

He stayed an hour, and the hour was, by every measure Jax kept, unremarkable.

They talked the way men talk across a bar when neither needs anything from the other, which is the best way and the rarest.

The building came up; the old man asked its age, and Jax said older than it looks, and the old man glanced around the room, the arches, the vaults, the scarred old bones of it, and said,

“Most things are,” and drank his terrible coffee.

The weather came up, the way it did, the spring arriving in fits, the light stretching.

The old man had opinions about the canal, of all things, its locks and its history and the vanished trades that had run on it, delivered in small dry instalments, the way you’d feed a fire you didn’t want to draw attention to.

He watched the room, too, between instalments.

Jax noted that, because Jax noted everything: the old man watched the room the way people look at a house they used to live in.

Not longing.

Checking.

As though confirming the walls were where he’d left them.

Jax noted it, and left it with the harmless strangenesses of old men, of which the world held a rich supply.

At some point, apropos of the canal book riding on top of his stack, the old man said:

“Do you own many books?”

“Some.” The glass turned under the cloth. “The ones that stayed.”

“And how does a book earn that?”

“It doesn’t lie.”

“Mm. Not a great deal of fiction on those shelves, then, I’d imagine.”

“Less than most people’s.” Jax set the glass down and took up the next one.

“Some stories manage to be true anyway.”

The old man looked at him then, one beat longer than the sentence needed, something in the old blue gone very still, and for a moment Jax had the sensation, unfiled and unfileable, of having been read cover to cover by a professional.

“Mm,” said the old man, at last, to his coffee. “So they do.”

He paid in coins, counted right to the penny, and stood, and gathered himself into the grey coat with the thoroughness of a man for whom leaving was also a craft.

“Terrible coffee,” he said, in the tone other men used for thank you.

“Come back when we’re terrible at something else,” said Jax, and the old man’s eyes did the dry thing again, and he went up the stairs, which reported him faithfully this time, step by step, into the evening, and was gone.

The room resumed.

The barman came on.

The evening filled from the bottom up, the way evenings did, and Jax worked it, unhurried, and everything ran the way everything ran.

And twice, in the lulls, he found himself at the till with the pen already in his hand.

That was the thing he could not settle.

The notebook was for what he could not afford to forget: records, names, debts, the facts a room full of lives stood on.

A pleasant old stranger who drank one terrible coffee and paid exactly did not qualify under any heading the book had ever had.

There was nothing to enter.

There was no category.

And still his hand had gone to the pen, twice, on its own authority, the way a tongue goes to the gap where a tooth was, and both times he had stood there with the book shut and the pen out and absolutely no entry to make, and put it away again, and served the next person.

He was not a fanciful man. He filed the impulse under tiredness, where he had been filing a number of things lately, and noted, in passing, that the file was getting thick.

He found the book at closing.

It was on the bar where the old man had sat, pushed slightly into the shadow of the pumps, which was why it had lived there all evening unclaimed: a library book, entirely ordinary, plastic-jacketed, spine-labelled, The Cut: A History of London’s Canals, with a date-slip inside the cover stamped in fading institutional purple and the particular smell that library books carried, of a thousand hands and municipal patience.

Jax stood with it under the low lights for a while.

Three books under the arm. He could see them; he saw everything; the man had arrived with three and he had watched him gather himself to leave and he could not now say, checking the record, whether three had gone back under the arm or two, because he had been watching the coins and the coat and not the books, and the gap in the record sat there, small and modern and infuriating.

Careless, though.

That was the part that didn’t sit.

The old man had not seemed, by any light, a careless man.

He was a man who counted his change to the penny and folded himself into his coat like a letter into an envelope, and men like that did not, in the ordinary run of things, leave books on bars.

In the ordinary run of things.

Jax turned the book over once, and did not open it beyond the cover, because it was not his, and looked at the date-slip.

Due back Thursday.

Well, then.

There was no address to return it to but the obvious one, and no question at all of not returning it, because a library book belonged to a library the way a name belonged to its owner, on loan to the world and trusted back, and a fine was a small dishonour a man could spare a stranger for the price of a walk.

Books belonged where they belonged. That was the whole of the reasoning, and it took him four seconds, and it did not feel like a decision any more than locking the door felt like a decision.

He set it by the till, beside the notebook, the two of them shoulder to shoulder under the low light, an ordinary borrowed history and a worn leather ledger, and if there was anything to notice in the pairing he did not notice it, because he was a practical man at the end of a long shift, and he turned off the lights, and locked the club, and went home through a city that was learning to be warm again.

Thursday, then.

He kept Thursdays anyway.