The Night before the Fair

By Friday evening, the cinema smelled of clean floors, cake and a faint amount of panic somebody had tried to disguise with flowers.

The new carrying handles worked. People moved the display boards without scraping their knuckles or requiring me to appear at every doorway. I watched one volunteer adjust a grip for her height using the label I'd rewritten after Dad's test. She didn't look around for help. I felt a satisfaction so quiet I almost missed it.

Bex arrived with her costume in a bag and asked whether I could check one fastening before she put it on the rail.

“Check or improve?” I asked.

“Check. Improvement requires a separate application.”

I found a loose stitch, reinforced it and handed the costume back without considering the hemline's potential.

She inspected it.

“Perfect.”

“Functional.”

“Fine. Very emotionally moving functionality.”

We hugged in the narrow space between the rail and the wall. This time neither of us mentioned September. It was still coming. We didn't have to invite it into every room to prove we hadn't forgotten.

Mae rehearsed quietly at the piano while Peter listened to the repaired action. A keyboard stood ready beside it for the pieces that needed one. Mrs Vale checked entry lists, then checked that someone else understood the lists so she would be able to use the toilet during the event. Nora put copies of the schedule in three places because people reliably lost information when it occupied only one.

Mum and Tess worked together at the refreshment table. Dad carried boxes under their direction and seemed relieved to be given tasks whose success could be seen. Pip sat in a high chair in the staff room, testing whether pieces of banana would return if dropped often enough. Ollie had been appointed official sign holder for the children's activities and was taking the authority poorly.

The whole arrangement was ordinary and slightly strange: the people from different parts of my life sharing a room without anybody requiring the room to make us one uncomplicated family.

I set up the demonstration frame and checked the samples with Agnes. Single captures only. Each labelled, measured and previously tested. Trays in place. Clear space around the release. No demonstration if the room's conditions changed beyond the limits we'd written down. I could explain the construction without opening anything at all.

“If the roof falls off?” Ollie asked.

“Then the demonstration is cancelled,” Agnes said.

He wrote this on his clipboard.

“Useful contingency.”

At the shed, the coat waited in its holding tray. The return frame had been checked, the yard cleared and the dry rehearsal repeated. Stan would be there from early morning. Agnes and I would inspect the actual airflow before deciding whether to begin. Eli had arranged to help with the first setup at the cinema, then join us if the release went ahead.

The forecast still showed a shifting wind before the front passed. We could not schedule that into behaving.

When the hall was ready, Hazel turned off most of the lights. The torn screen had been secured back against its support. We had not hidden the old damage. Beneath it, the cleared floor waited for chairs, voices and wet shoes.

I stood in the doorway longer than necessary.

“What?” Agnes asked.

“I used to think saving a place meant making it look like the best time you had there.”

“And now?”

I looked at the refreshment table, where somebody had left a packet of paper cups open at the wrong end.

“I think it might mean letting people have a different time.”

She nudged the cups into their box.

“That seems less exhausting.”

We walked home under a sky too cloudy for stars. My assessment was on Monday. The fair was tomorrow. The coat might finally become a coat again, or we might spend another day making careful notes about why it wasn't ready.

For the first time in weeks, I had completed the thing due next and left the thing after it in a state someone else could understand.

At home, I set out dry clothes, checked my phone alarm and put the portfolio confirmation in a folder where I could find it. Then I went to bed.

I lay awake for a while. Not organising, not solving. Just listening to the first rain begin against the window and hoping the people I loved would have somewhere to come in out of it.