Soon

By Thursday she had lived with it for two days, the second stool from the pillar, the world’s books saying seventeen, and the watch had done what the watch could do, which was enter it, and hold it, and keep an eye on the edits, and she had gone to work both mornings and answered the bell and taken the trolley down, because the daylight world did not know it had lost anybody, and somebody had to keep its hours for it.

Thursday night ran the way Thursday nights ran. Her stool. The usual, poured without asking. Jax between services at the quiet end of the bar with the notebook open, writing in his small square hand, the pen moving the way it moved, his thumb sitting in the worn place on the barrel the way a stone sits in a riverbed, and she watched him write and did not examine what watching him write did to her, and the evening was, for one hour, at the end of that fortnight, almost ordinary.

Then the stairs brought somebody down, and she knew the parcel before she knew the man.

Brown paper. String. Tied the way string is tied by somebody who has wrapped a great many strange decisions and never once commented on any of them, the ends trimmed, the knot small and sufficient, and her chest did something complicated and fast, because she had carried a parcel wrapped exactly that way across this city once, and there was only one pair of hands in London that tied that knot.

The shopkeeper came down into Nocturne the way weather comes into a valley, gradually, and entirely, and stood at the bar in his old coat with the parcel held in both hands, and looked around the room once, at the kept things, the waiting things, the bass keeping its patience under the floor, and nodded to it, as one institution to another.

“Evening,” said Jax, setting down the pen. “What can I get you.”

“Nothing, thank you,” said the shopkeeper. “I have a delivery.”

He set the parcel on the bar and unwrapped it, unhurried, string untied rather than snapped, paper folded back rather than torn, and inside the paper was a tobacco tin, old, dented at one corner, the paint worn to the tin along the lid’s edge where a thumbnail had opened it ten thousand times.

“This came in,” said the shopkeeper. “I believe it drinks here.”

The bar went on being a bar. Glasses somewhere, and the low music, and Cal sat very still inside her own chest and watched the tin change Jax’s face by exactly nothing, which was how she knew it had changed everything, and watched his hand come out and take the tin the way you take a thing that is owed somewhere, and turn it once, and stop, thumb resting on the dented corner, on the worn edge, on the whole grammar of a stranger’s hands.

“Is there anything owing?” said Jax.

“Nothing owing,” said the shopkeeper. “Returns are not sales.”

Nobody said the name. She understood, watching, that all three of them were not saying it, which was two more people not saying it than the world any longer had reason for, and her heart was going in her ears now, slow and enormous, because the man in the old coat had walked an unwritten man’s tin across London to the one roof that still kept his entry, and there was no way on earth he could have known to, and he had known to.

Then the shopkeeper’s eye came down to the bar, to the notebook, to the pen lying across the notebook, and stopped.

“Mm,” said the shopkeeper.

The tone of it went through her like cold water, because she knew that tone, she had heard it on a bridge on Sundays for a year, and it meant an annotation was being made somewhere no one would ever read.

“That’s from my shop,” he said, to the pen, courteously. “Some while ago now. It left with two others.” He looked at it a moment longer, the way a man looks at handwriting he recognises. “It appears to be wearing well.”

“It writes,” said Jax.

“They generally do,” said the shopkeeper, “when they land right,” and he gathered his string, and folded his paper into his pocket, and wished the bar a good evening, and went back up the stairs at the pace of a man who had never once been late for anything because he had never once been early, and the door let him out, and shut, and behaved.

The club rolled on. The tin sat on the bar between them, and Bill’s thumbnail-wear caught the low light along the lid, and Jax looked at it for a while, and then did the thing she had known he would do, and could not have borne him not doing. He carried it round, and set it at the second stool from the pillar, flush to the edge, the way you set a place.

Then he came back behind the bar, and picked up the pen, and did not write anything.

She watched his thumb find the worn place on the barrel. Find it immediately, without searching, the way it had found it the first night, in the flat, with the paper still on the floor. His thumb stayed there. He looked at where it was, for a long time, the way he looked at entries that refused to balance.

“Cal,” said Jax.

“Yes,” said Cal.

He turned the pen once between his fingers, the way he turned everything, and looked down the bar at her, and his face was doing what his face did, which was nothing, at a depth she had no sounding line for.

“The shop where you bought this,” said Jax. “What kind of shop is it?”

And the question sat on the bar between them, next to the tea, next to the tin’s small shine at the empty station, patient, unhurried, impossible to answer small.

“Not here,” said Cal. “Not tonight. But soon. I promise you soon.”

Jax looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and slid the pen back into his inside pocket, where it lived, the way a thing lives somewhere when it is being kept, not put away.

“Soon,” said Jax, “is entered.”