The Next Column

The photograph was too wide for the space. The right-hand side of the shop had disappeared off the screen, precisely the bit that showed there was another window beside the door. Mara dragged the image to the left. Now the door had gone.

‘Just make it smaller,’ Ada said.

‘Then you get white borders.’

‘My shop has edges too.’

Mara zoomed out. She had chosen the photograph at home yesterday, between a load of washing finishing and a phone call she hadn't answered. There was no car in front of the shop, no sunlight reflected in the glass, and the painted lettering was legible. Only in this small, awkward space did it look like a photograph of a shop about to close down.

She turned the laptop a little. ‘Like that?’

Ada leaned towards the screen. ‘Yes. At least people can see where to ring.’

‘You've got a doorbell.’

‘That's what I mean.’

The bell rang. A woman wanted to know whether Ada still stocked hands for a kitchen clock. All she had brought was a photograph on her phone. Ada explained which measurement she couldn't get from the picture. The woman spread two fingers across the dial, as though enlarging it brought the part itself closer. Mara waited with her hand on the trackpad. At nine that morning she had told the office she would be out for a bit at lunchtime. It was now twelve minutes past twelve.

An empty cup stood on the windowsill, a ring of dried milk inside it. Mara picked it up and took it to the little sink. On her way back she noticed the notebook lying open beside the telephone. Her mother had written the names in a list, some with the amount crossed out beside them. One had only a question mark. A till receipt marked the page.

Mara moved the cup aside and read the first few entries without touching the notebook. Thursday. Call. Part not here yet. Beneath that was a date when a clock had been brought in, well before the Wednesday she had taken her case away.

‘So you're saying I need to bring it in?’ the woman at the counter asked.

‘If you want to know whether I've got the right one, yes.’

‘I don't live round here.’

Ada paused. Then she wrote two measurements on the back of her business card for the woman to take at home. It took her almost as long as the whole conversation up to that point. The woman tucked the card into her phone case.

Once the door had shut, Mara said, ‘You could put that on your website.’

‘What?’

‘What people need to bring. When they want parts.’

Ada sat down. ‘We were doing the photograph.’

‘It's done. You just need to click Save.’

Her mother put on her glasses and clicked. Mara had her open the public page. Ada enlarged the window and studied the picture. Outside, a branch of the tree in the street stirred in front of the real shop window. In the photograph it was still green. Little had changed inside, except that there was no longer a clock case on the customer's chair.

‘There. It's up.’

‘I can see that.’ Ada went to turn the screen back, but Mara had already opened her own planning file.

‘There was something else I was thinking about. Not the accounts.’

Her mother's eyes went first to the notebook beside the phone.

‘Just how the work comes in,’ Mara said.

The file was a copy of a spreadsheet she used at the office. She had removed all the project names and changed the People column to Customers. Each row had spaces for Received, Needed, Ready and Collection. The headings were shaded sea-green. One cell was pale orange because she had left it without a date.

Ada pulled the customer's chair closer. ‘What's that under Ready?’

‘You fill that in yourself. It's just an example.’

‘It says the fourteenth of October.’

‘To show you how it works.’

Mara cleared the cell. A red corner remained, warning that the date no longer matched the row above. She clicked elsewhere. The corner stayed.

‘I don't want all that popping up every time,’ Ada said.

‘You can turn it off.’

‘You can, perhaps.’

Mara looked at her. Behind her mother, a clock ticked with a small hurry between beats. She didn't know whether it was meant to sound like that. She didn't even know whether it was the clock above the door or the one without a case on the back shelf. In the spreadsheet a repair had a beginning and an end. You could divide up what lay between them.

‘You can use it on paper too.’ She pointed at the columns. ‘At least then you can see what you've already promised.’

‘I'd like to see that. But I'm not keeping it in two places.’

‘You don't have your notebook everywhere either.’

‘No. That's why it stays here.’

Ada turned a page. One clock had a fresh note beside it, in ink darker than the name. On another line an arrow pointed towards the inside cover. Mara wanted to lay a ruler beneath it. Her mother would only carry on writing somewhere else.

She took her own sheet of paper out of the laptop sleeve. On the top half she had copied the shop's fixed costs from what Ada had told her. Below were blank lines for this week's repairs. Ada would have to enter the hours herself. Mara had set it up so that nobody needed to do any sums.

‘What do you need this for?’ her mother asked.

‘You said you wanted to know what closing on Wednesdays was costing you.’

‘Yes.’

‘This is what you've got coming in against it.’

Mara rested a fingernail beside one line. Two clocks, not yet assessed. She had seen them on the shelf behind the curtain, each in a bag with a name attached. One had a plain round dial; the other had a wooden top that didn't fit properly. She had put them down as small jobs. She hadn't invented a price, only entered roughly what the last two small repairs had brought in. Ada leaned so far over the sheet that her glasses swung forward on their cord.

‘Where did you get this from?’

‘Those two on the shelf. You said last week you hadn't got round to them.’

‘That's right.’

‘If you could do them one after the other—’

‘I don't know what needs doing.’

Mara laid her hand flat on the table. ‘It's an estimate.’

‘I'd still need to know something before I could estimate.’

There was no emphasis in her voice. It was the same voice she had just used to explain to the woman why the photograph wasn't enough. Mara looked at the two amounts. She had made them expected income because otherwise the bottom of the sheet looked so empty. Not because her mother had said she was going to do the jobs.

Ada crossed out the figures. She kept hold of the pen.

‘Those clocks belong to other people. If there's nothing to be done with them, they'll have them back.’

‘I do know they're not stock.’

‘Why are they on here, then?’

The telephone rang before Mara could answer. Ada picked up and gave her surname. She listened. Her face didn't grow angrier; she only shifted her fingers to the cap of the pen.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don't know that yet.’

Mara closed the planning file. The screen asked whether she wanted to save her changes.

‘Who told you that?’ Ada asked.

She looked at her daughter.

It was a man who had come in last Friday while Ada was unpacking a delivery at the back of the shop. Mara had told him it might be possible by the following Friday. He needed it for a dinner party, he had said. She hadn't called her mother over: Ada had a knife in a large box, and she wouldn't have been able to tell anything about a clock in a tied-up bag anyway. ‘Might’ was supposed to have left the arrangement open.

Ada covered the receiver with her hand. ‘Did you tell this gentleman he could collect on Friday?’

‘That he might be able to.’

Her mother held out the receiver.

Mara didn't get up at once. She could see her own name on the white screen, behind the little Save window. As though there were someone else at the table who wasn't responsible for anything.

‘I'll tell him myself,’ she said.

Ada handed her the phone. She pushed her chair back so that Mara wouldn't have to stand against her knee. That small movement made it harder.

‘It's Mara. We met on Friday.’

‘Yes. I'm just ringing to make sure.’

The man didn't sound angry. Anger might have made the conversation shorter. Mara pressed the receiver closer to her ear and turned away from the table.

‘I gave you a date before my mother had even looked at your clock. I shouldn't have done that.’

‘You said it ought to be possible.’

‘I thought it would be. But I'm not the one doing the repair.’

‘I understood that.’

In the silence she heard him breathe out, not quite a sigh. A cupboard door sounded at his end of the line. Perhaps he was in his kitchen. For him there was no Monday afternoon, no photograph to put on a website. He wanted to know whether he could take a clock off a shelf on Friday.

‘My mother needs to assess what has to be done first,’ Mara said. ‘I can't promise you Friday.’

‘She's had it a while already.’

‘I know.’

Ada shook her head. She took a job sheet and slid it across the table. On it was the date the clock had actually arrived. Mara hadn't known. She had said it because she didn't want the man to have to explain again why he was ringing.

‘I mean, I can see now when you brought it in. I didn't have the job sheet in front of me on Friday.’

The man asked whether he would be better off taking the clock back. Mara looked at Ada. Her mother reached for the receiver, but she held on to it for another moment.

‘You can discuss that with her. I'll put you back on. The date was my mistake.’

Ada took over. She asked if she could ring on Thursday once she had examined it, without promising to repair it by Friday. Something the man said made her underline the job sheet. Then she repeated what they had agreed and hung up.

‘He just wants to know where he stands on Thursday,’ she said.

‘I heard.’

Mara wished it had come out more gently. She sat down again. Her sandwich was still in the laptop sleeve, between a printed working drawing and her spare pen. She wasn't hungry, but she knew she would end up getting a bar from the vending machine later if she didn't eat now.

Ada looked at her sheet of paper. ‘That Needed column could be useful.’

Mara turned towards her.

‘On my own job sheets,’ her mother said. ‘What's still missing. Not just Part on order, but who I still need to call.’

‘I could change the form—’

‘I'll write it underneath.’

With the same pen, Ada drew a short line beneath the old note. Below it she wrote the arrangement with the man. No colour, no drop-down list, no red corner. Mara noticed how little space she had left for a longer answer. She said nothing.

Her phone vibrated. Lotte wanted to know whether the images for the first venue really were the version in the shared folder. Mara read the question twice. She wanted to send a quick yes. They had been the images in that folder when she had got them ready yesterday; that wasn't necessarily the same thing.

I'll check as soon as I'm back, she wrote. Before two.

Ada got up to let in a customer who had been looking through the window. Mara put her paper away. The sheet no longer folded neatly: she had trapped the right corner under the laptop. She smoothed it against her thigh, closed the sleeve and waited for her mother to look at her.

‘I'll take the spreadsheet away. You don't have to keep anything in it.’

Ada nodded. The customer put a plastic bag on the counter, took out a small box and laid the bag underneath to protect the wood.

Mara lingered by the door. ‘Ring on Thursday,’ she said.

Her mother looked up.

‘I've written it down.’

Outside, two bicycles leaning against each other had narrowed the pavement in front of the shop. Mara had to squeeze between them with her bag held against her stomach. Across the street, someone was photographing a jacket in a shop window. She opened the website on her phone. The picture looked right on this screen: the door in the centre, a strip of frontage on either side. Below it were the hours Ada had saved herself.

She checked nothing else. At the corner she ate her sandwich, her phone still in her free hand.