Mr Ashe buys a photograph
I take the kettle off them. Let them make the tea. It gives the hands something, and a person with a cup has decided to sit, and the sitting is half the sale.
This one had a shoebox. They mostly do — Welt was the same last winter, Dray will be next — the dead held on the lap like a cat. She passed it across the table the way you pass over a child you have tired of holding.
I am good to them. I don’t haggle a grieving woman down; I name a fair price, warmly, and let her feel she could have asked more. That small dignity costs me nothing.
The photographs disagreed. That is what I buy. A birthday, the table laid, three children in the one frame and two in the next, same cake, same hats — and the mother’s thumb on the empty chair as though to warm it. She didn’t see. They never see the one they can’t count. I can, because I am not from here. I counted the heads, then the notes out onto the cloth, end of the row back to the start, the only thing in that kitchen that came out the same twice.
I carried the box out past the bins, down the thin flank where the draught is, to the corner and the road.
In the car I went to write the street down, so as not to work it twice. I had it in my mouth, and then the shape of it and not the word, the way you reach for a step that isn’t there, and I could not say where I had just been.
I put the pen down. I’ll know it when I see it.
I always do.
Pull a thread:
- what Wick said at the corner — Wick, who also travels
- she is one — the family he buys from
- from the far side of the corner — the other streets, Dray and Welt