Out of Season

Summer came to Nocturne the way everything came to Nocturne, which was down the stairs.

Up at street level the city cooked. The pavements held the day’s heat long into the evening, the plane-shade was contested territory, and the deliveries arrived earlier and earlier, drivers negotiating the morning before the morning turned hostile. Down in the club it stayed cellar-cool, old stone doing what old stone had always done, and the room in high summer became a different instrument: the crowd came later, stayed later, drank longer drinks more slowly, and the bass seemed to sit lower in the warm dark, like a dog that had found the one cold flagstone.

Jax ran the season the way he ran every season, by adjusting the provisions. More ice. More soda. The lighter glasses forward. The first-aid tin restocked for the summer’s characteristic casualties, which were sunburn regret and sandals meeting stairs. He moved the fan nobody remembered buying to the end of the bar where the air went stale on hot nights, and he watched his room settle into its summer shape, and he kept the minutes.

He kept more minutes than he used to. He was aware of that, in the way he was aware of everything, and he did not examine it, in the way he examined nothing about himself. The noticing had acquired bookkeeping over the spring, and the bookkeeping had acquired routine over the early summer, times and rotations and small clean columns, and if the book was thicker for it, well. Paper was cheap. Certainty was not.

The old crowd had mostly gone wherever old things summered. But the roof-law, it turned out, had a summer clause.

She came down on the first truly punishing afternoon, before opening, when the street above was a griddle: something old in a good hat, moving with the deliberate economy of the very elderly or the very other, and she stood at the foot of the stairs in the cellar-cool with her eyes closed for a long moment, the way you stand in a church you don’t believe in, and Jax, who had been doing the ice, said nothing at all, and drew her a glass of water with cucumber in it, and set it on the bar.

She stayed two hours in the coolest corner and left before the doors opened, and she paid with a coin he didn’t recognise and didn’t question, and it went in the till’s odd compartment with the others, and the entry went in the book: the date, the hat, the water. In winter they came down out of the cold. In summer, out of the heat. The roof did not ask what you were sheltering from. That had never been the roof’s business.

Thursdays ran warm that month.

That was the whole of what he permitted himself on the subject, even privately, even at the till at one in the morning: the Thursdays ran warm. She came, and the tea was terrible, and the pigeon dispute had entered its fourth week of hearings, and the rooms in the conversation stayed shut and the conversation had learned to be a whole house anyway, and twice he had looked up from the pumps to find her watching him work with an expression he did not have a column for, and had gone back to the pumps, and filed nothing, because some things you didn’t write down.

The stool at the end of the bar was hers the way the till was the till’s.

It was, all told, the best summer the room had run in years, and he knew better than to say so, even to the book, because naming a good season was how you ended one. He had been keeping roofs a long time. You banked warmth. You did not announce it.

The grey suit passed the top of the stairs on a Monday morning.

Jax was at street level signing for the gin, the right gin for once, a small miracle he had been prepared to note in its own column, and the morning was already white with heat, the street glaring, the launderette’s steam indistinguishable from the air, and he had the clipboard in one hand and the pen in the other when the edge of his attention, the part that never signed for anything, reported movement on the far pavement.

The grey suit went by on the other side of the road, in full summer daylight, at an unhurried walk.

It did not look at him. It did not look at the club. It did not, as far as he could tell in the four seconds it was in view, look at anything, which was its own wrongness, because everything that moved through a street at nine in the morning looked at something, traffic or windows or its own feet, and the grey suit simply went, level and cool in the punishing light, wearing winter like a diplomatic immunity, and reached the corner by the launderette, and was not there anymore.

Not turned the corner. He would have said turned the corner, if asked, because that was the available sentence. But he had watched a great many things turn that corner across a great many years, and all of them had done it by degrees, shoulder then side then gone, and this had been more like a page turning: there, and then the next thing.

The driver said something about the heat. Jax agreed with it, signed the last sheet, took his gin downstairs, and stood in the cellar-cool for a moment among the crates.

A winter thing. In summer. In daylight. Twice now, if the half-second outside the café in the spring had been what he had declined to conclude it was, and he had declined then because there had been nothing to conclude with, one glance and an empty pavement, and Cal beside him inventing a pigeon. She had not been here today. There was that. Whatever the pattern was, today it had walked past his door with no one to not-look at, which meant either the pattern was not what he had half-built it to be, or it was, and today had been about something else.

The door. The club. Him.

He did not have a why. He was not in the business of whys.

He went to the till, and took out the book, and found the grey suit’s page from the winter, the name at the top doing nothing, the three words from January below it, and beneath those, in the small exact hand, he added the summer’s first entry, one line, the date and the time and the street and the heat, accurate and complete and helping nothing.

Then he paused, the pen over the page, and after a moment he added a second line, which was not data, and was therefore against his own filing rules, and he wrote it anyway, because a keeper’s job was not to solve his room, but the book did not lie, and this was true:

Out of season.

He closed the book and put it in the inside pocket, and went back to the crates, and the day went on being white overhead and cool below, and that evening the room filled from the bottom up and ran warm and easy, the best summer in years, every glass where it should be, every regular in their place, the good-coat thing on its rotation, the stool at the end of the bar empty until Thursday and belonging to no one else regardless.

And at close, alone, he stood at the top of the stairs in the blood-warm midnight air and looked down the street at the corner by the launderette for a while, the way a man looks at a page he has read and will read again.

The corner behaved. The street was only a street.

“Mm,” said Jax, and locked up, and went home through the heat, and the summer held, the way good seasons do, right up until they don’t.