Merging

Kamal had turned the heating down. Ada only noticed once she had taken off her coat and felt cold air against her forearms. Her cardigan was at home, over a chair. She had thought of going back for it, but that would have meant going upstairs for the third time. Once for her glasses, once because she had gone looking for her bag with the shop key in her hand.

‘Too cold?’ he asked.

‘It's all right.’

She pulled her sleeves down. Kamal noted the time and shut the folder. His pen cap lay on his knee. He put it in the tray in front of the gear selector. She knew the order now. Seat, mirror. No helping him close his folder. She drew the seat belt across her chest.

At the first junction a bus had stopped with its back end almost on the zebra crossing. Behind it Ada could see only the top of a pushchair. She waited for the bus to pull away. Kamal said nothing. A scooter came through two cars on the right and stopped in front of them. The boy put one foot on the ground. A tuft of blond hair stuck the wrong way out of his helmet.

She watched his rear wheel. When it started turning she wanted to move too.

‘Wait a moment,’ Kamal said.

The pushchair emerged, pushed by a woman who wasn't looking at them. Ada pressed the brake harder than she needed to. They were already stationary.

‘I did see her,’ she said.

‘Good.’

There was something in that good she wanted to argue with. As though he didn't believe her but had no time to make the distinction. She drove into the junction when he told her she could. Her foot felt for the pedal with a caution she had lost last week.

Today they went beyond the wide road behind the supermarket. Past the furniture shops, towards the roundabout with the iron horse. There were two lanes there that became one after the lights. Ada knew it from her bicycle. On a bike you went alongside, past a fence where you sometimes had to wait for a lorry reversing.

‘We'll get into the right-hand lane up here,’ Kamal said. ‘Then merge with the through traffic.’

She repeated it to herself. Right, through, merge. The horse's tail was made of loose strips of metal. She had never noticed the red plastic ribbon caught among them. Now it drew her eye as she waited for the light to turn green.

A van was beside her on the left. The driver turned towards her. Ada looked in her own mirror. Through the rear window she could see too little of the road. She wanted to adjust the glass.

‘Leave it for now,’ Kamal said. ‘Get moving first.’

The light was green. The van pulled away and so did she. She knew the right-hand lane came to an end. Yet the white line drawing closer to the car still took her by surprise. A grey car was almost level with her. She eased off the accelerator.

‘Look ahead for your gap,’ Kamal said.

Ada looked left. The grey car passed her. Behind it came a black one; beyond that she didn't know. She waited for a break to present itself as an empty space. Kamal said her name. His hand briefly touched the wheel. He guided the car into the gap behind the grey car and told her to keep going. It was so smooth that the woman driving behind them didn't even brake.

A hundred metres further on, Ada could still feel that touch in her hands.

‘I hadn't found a gap there yet,’ she said.

‘There was one. We'll have a look in a moment.’

‘If you take the wheel I can't learn what's happening.’

Kamal let that stand for a moment. He asked her to take the next right into an industrial estate. A green building had five closed roller doors. They parked in an empty bay. Ada put the selector where he told her. The engine went on running quietly.

‘You can ask me what I'm doing,’ he said. ‘I want you to ask. But we can't let the car reach the end of that lane and discuss it afterwards.’

She looked at the closed doors. Two white sacks stood on a pallet in front of the second. One had a brown footprint on it.

‘I was waiting for that black car.’

‘That was behind us. Did you see the grey one move ahead?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was your gap. You slowed right down, so the black one caught up. Then the gap gets smaller instead of bigger.’

He drew it in a corner of his notepad. No proper cars, just rectangles. At first Ada didn't recognise the place. There was no horse. Then she saw her own rectangle almost at an angle across the edge.

‘I thought going slower would be safer.’

‘You need to know what you're slowing down for. We'll try it again. First I'll show you where to look for your gap.’

They came back to the same lights by another street. The red ribbon was still in the horse's tail. This time Ada kept her eyes on the road ahead. On her left a woman was lifting something off the back seat with one hand. The lights changed. The woman pulled away briskly. Ada kept pace, looked in her mirror and towards the place Kamal pointed out. She let the car join the traffic. His hand stayed by his knee.

Afterwards she couldn't have said at what moment she had managed it. There had been no click. Suddenly both cars were in the same lane.

‘That's what I mean,’ he said.

‘That's almost what I did the first time.’

‘Almost, yes.’

She laughed despite herself. Kamal asked her to take the next turning. They went round again, without her being awarded a better mark.

At quarter past two Ada hung her bag on the wrong hook in the sports hall. It wasn't anyone's hook, but the bench beneath it was full. A red-faced man moved along so she could change her shoes. He said he had started early to warm up. Ada looked at his sweaty hair and wondered how much warmer he was planning to get.

Leonie was already by a net. She had a different racket, dark with a white edge.

‘Borrowed,’ she said when she saw Ada looking. ‘I've broken a string.’

‘Mine's borrowed too.’

‘Yes, I noticed.’

She meant the sports hall sticker on the handle. Ada turned the racket to hide it. One edge was sticky and kept catching her thumb.

They played with two other people first. Her first serve went straight into the net. The man opposite picked up the shuttle and threw it back. Ada wanted to explain that she had been rushing about with her coat and hadn't warmed up properly. He was already waiting. She served. This time it went over, but so high that the woman behind him had plenty of time to come forward.

‘You take the back,’ Leonie said.

Ada stepped backwards. A sole squeaked. The shuttle came straight to their right, nearer Leonie than her. She went for it anyway. Their rackets met with a dry knock.

‘Mine,’ Leonie said.

‘I thought you hadn't seen it.’

‘I was underneath it.’

The next shot fell short. Ada stayed back as agreed. Leonie reached it in two strides and managed to return it. Then it came over Ada's head. She swung too late. The shuttle landed behind her on the blue line.

Leonie put her hands on her hips. ‘I'm not running for two today.’

‘I haven't asked you to.’

‘Then you'll have to move as well.’

Ada looked at the other players. The woman opposite held her racket loosely in front of her stomach. There was a scrape in the paint. Ada suddenly detested the way Leonie was looking at her, as though she were paying for lessons here to be judged. She wasn't any good. Everybody knew that already.

‘We're playing for fun,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Leonie said. ‘Exactly.’

After the game Leonie asked if she could swap with the woman opposite. Ada said that was fine. She sounded more generous than she felt. The other woman was called Ria. She spoke softly and hit the shuttle so far that Ada had to go all the way to the wall to fetch it. Three feathers from old shuttlecocks lay between the racks of gym mats. She picked one up and threw it away. Then she had to run again.

Afterwards Leonie sat on the bench holding her laces. Ada could have walked past. There was plenty of room between her knees and the bag.

‘I should have moved for that one behind me,’ Ada said.

Leonie pulled one lace tighter. ‘I'm just tired as well.’

She had been at a birthday party the night before, she said. Three hours standing in a kitchen because the oven kept setting the smoke alarm off. Ada asked what was in it. An enormous lasagne. They talked for a while about an oven dish that wouldn't fit in any cupboard. Ada almost said she had once made a shelf for one at home. She hadn't made a shelf at all, she remembered. She had meant to, then left the dish in the oven.

On Friday she sat with the bookkeeper at a table big enough for three lever-arch files and not a single clock. The office was above a hairdresser's. Every few minutes a smell came through the gap in the door that reminded Ada of an old coat: hairspray with something damp beneath it.

She had brought her own notebook. No daughter, no printout with coloured boxes. The bookkeeper laid the statement beside it. He held the two sets of pages down with a heavy glass paperweight. There was a bubble inside that looked bigger when you peered through it.

‘You want to know how much Wednesdays brought in,’ he said.

‘I know what came in.’

‘That's a good start.’

He pointed to a hundred and seventy-four euros. Ada remembered the clock: a dark little case with a crooked patch of veneer she hadn't touched. The customer had paid on a Wednesday. The work had been done on Monday. She had spent most of that afternoon on it, between the shop bell and two phone calls.

‘So I've put that under Wednesday,’ she said.

‘For the payment. Not for the work.’

‘I thought so.’

It wasn't how she had counted it. She had used those twelve columns to allow herself to close on Wednesdays. Eight low figures, sometimes more, an average of a hundred and forty-eight euros. The average had looked more solid than the separate amounts. Now she had to admit there were no hours alongside them.

The bookkeeper didn't ask why. He took a blank sheet and wrote next week's dates across it.

‘Don't try to reconstruct it all. Start recording it now. What you actually do on a job. And what you still need to buy in or have somebody else do.’

‘Even when I'm interrupted five times?’

‘Especially then. But don't spend fifteen minutes recording two minutes' work.’

Ada took her pen. She wrote Monday at the top, then the name of the clock she meant to start on underneath. She hesitated. She hadn't opened that clock yet. She could write down when she began, but not when she would finish.

‘You can leave that blank,’ he said.

She crossed out the question mark she had already put down. A telephone rang on the other side of the office. He didn't answer it while she wrote. She only noticed when the sound changed.

They went through September. The rent was now seven hundred and ninety, no longer seven hundred and forty-two. Ada put the confirmation beside the other papers. Everything on the same basis, he said; keep the money set aside separate. Receipts had been two thousand nine hundred and ten. Against her usual outgoings she was ninety short. She had felt richer when she had taken cash out of the drawer last week.

‘I can do that for a month,’ she said.

‘That's for you to decide. It just has to be the same ninety in your figures.’

She wrote it beside her available reserves. Not under customer money. Paul Hoving's ninety stayed on the separate list. She had promised he would pay nothing if she couldn't repair his clock. When she had taken it in, it had seemed a pleasant arrangement. Now the words seemed to go on working even after she shut the notebook.

Outside, she pushed the folder so far into her bag that the handle bulged. The hairdresser downstairs was smoking in the doorway. She told Ada there was a hairgrip on her sleeve. Ada looked down, pulled the little black clip out of the wool and put it on the windowsill beside the ashtray. She had no idea how it had got there.

Back in the shop she didn't start work at once. She moved the notebook to the side of the bench and laid a working pen beside it. On the job sheet for Saskia's mantel clock she wrote the time she began. Then she turned the lamp towards the movement.

A customer came in before she had put on her loupe.