A Man with a Tape Measure

The man with the folder returned on Wednesday.

He wore the grey jacket Mrs Pelling had described, though he had left it open in the heat. From behind the counter, I watched him take a tape measure from his bag and crouch beside the front window.

“Can I help?”

“You must be June. I'm here to see Agnes.”

“About the gutter?”

He looked up, puzzled.

“No. I'm Mr Carrow, from the property office.”

The tape measure clicked back into its case.

Agnes came down the stairs before I could ask what property meant when the property was ours.

“Thanks for coming,” she told him. “We'll start upstairs.”

She looked at me, saw my face and paused.

“It's a valuation. We'll talk when he's finished.”

A valuation was a number. I understood numbers. What I couldn't understand was why somebody needed to put one on the place where my whole childhood had happened.

For the next forty minutes, I served customers badly but not inaccurately. I found the right buttons, entered the right amounts and managed not to give a woman her repaired sleeve inside out. Every footstep upstairs sounded like an opinion about what could be removed.

Mr Carrow came down, measured the rear wall and asked whether the shop and flat had separate meters. Agnes answered. I concentrated on a packet of snaps until the words separate and access and potential arrangement stopped sounding like ordinary vocabulary.

When he left, she turned the sign.

“June.”

“Are you selling it?”

“I'm finding out what options I have.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“It's the answer that's true.”

The return box sat behind her, quiet for the moment. I looked at the blue mug, the chipped bells, the mark on the counter where Grandad had dropped a hot tool and pretended it had been there before.

“What kind of options?”

“Selling. Renting part of it. Reducing the shop. Keeping a workshop somewhere smaller. I don't know yet.”

“Does Mum know?”

“Yes.”

“Does everyone know except me?”

“No. A few adults who are helping me work out figures know that I'm looking at figures.”

Adults. She regretted the word as soon as she said it. I could see that, which didn't stop it hurting.

“I work here.”

“Yes. And I should have told you before someone arrived with a tape measure. I'm sorry.”

I wanted her to be sorry about the other part.

“What would Grandad think?”

Agnes's expression changed. Not anger, exactly. More like someone hearing the latch drop on a gate she'd spent a long time trying to open.

“I don't know,” she said. “And he isn't the person who has to decide how I spend the rest of my life.”

“He left you the shop.”

“Yes. A business. Not every day until I die.”

The room went very quiet.

I had never thought of Agnes as trapped. She was the person who knew where things belonged and which customer would try to argue about a receipt. She seemed fitted to the shop in the way the counter fitted the wall. I had mistaken how well she did the work for proof that she would always want it.

“Do you hate it?”

“No. That's part of why it's difficult.”

She sat on the stool behind the till.

“I'd like some time that isn't borrowed from an order book. I'd like to sail without carrying a list of what will go wrong while I'm away. I'd like to find out what I want before I become too tired to want much.”

“The boat trip.”

“Was lovely. Yes.”

I looked at the postcard beside the till.

“I didn't know.”

“I've only just started saying it clearly to myself.”

We didn't finish the conversation. A customer knocked, saw the closed sign and left. Agnes said we'd talk properly that evening, with the figures and no one needing a coat button. I nodded because nodding required less trust than speaking.

Dad arrived at five as promised.

I had forgotten. That made me feel worse, because asking him to come had mattered so much four days earlier. He stood in the doorway holding nothing that needed repairing.

“Bad time?”

I nearly said yes. Then I remembered that I had wanted him to visit my life rather than only the version prepared for his convenience.

“A strange one.”

He listened while I explained the valuation. He didn't tell me Agnes had every right, though she did. He didn't say the shop would probably stay, which he couldn't know.

“Show me the frame,” he said after a while. “Unless you'd rather not.”

I showed him. He asked why the supports folded in a different order from the first photograph, and I explained. His attention stayed with the object until I began to enjoy describing it despite myself.

When he left, he kissed my forehead.

“It's yours, that design. Whatever happens to the room.”

Eli came by ten minutes later to collect a measurement Agnes had promised Stan. He found me sitting on the floor, sorting thread I didn't need to sort.

“Want company?”

“I might be bad at it.”

“I can survive some quiet.”

He sat beside me. For a while we put the thread into boxes, not because it needed doing but because my hands did.

Eventually I said, “I don't know who I am if this place goes.”

He set down a spool.

“Maybe that's worth finding out when nobody's brought you anything broken.”

I leaned my head against the cupboard and let the question remain unanswered.