What Dorus Made

The side door would not open when Vera tried the handle. She saw movement behind the frosted glass and stepped back. A low voice told her to wait a moment.

Dorus appeared in the doorway with a sheet of paper in his hand. He held it away from his jumper as though it were still wet.

‘Come in. I need to put this down first.’

Vera followed him past a narrow shelf full of boxes which need not have had anything to do with Anouk. Printer paper, by the look of it, and some packaging containing empty holders. A large table stood under a lamp in the workroom. A band of soft light from the window fell across a row of framed photographs leaning against the wall.

‘I’m Vera. From the café.’

‘I know. We spoke on the phone.’

He laid the sheet in a space he had cleared. It was a colour photograph of a row of low houses. At one window the curtain was almost the same colour as the front wall. Beside it lay another print of the same picture, in which the curtain was much lighter.

Dorus looked from one to the other. He slid the first a little way out of the light and back again.

‘The photographer wants the colour he sees on his phone. He’ll have to send the phone along, then.’

He said it to the print. Vera took off her coat before he had mentioned a place to hang it. There was an empty hook by the door. Dorus pointed to a chair.

‘Not that one. There’s glass on it.’

She only saw it once he had said so: a clean sheet of glass on the seat, almost invisible against the dark upholstery. She took the other chair.

‘Coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’

Dorus moved the colour prints further from the table’s edge and went to a cupboard. He was not looking for the receipt yet. He studied a stack of small folders held together with an elastic band, picked one up and put it back.

‘Anouk sent you.’

‘I’ve come about what I took delivery of myself.’

‘I explained that to her.’

‘She sent me a picture of a piece of paper with my signature on it. That’s what I want to talk about.’

He pulled open a drawer. Small folders stood upright inside it between two books. He took one out and laid it on the clear part of the table, away from the prints.

‘I don’t file everything the day it comes in. But I can find it.’

Vera thought of her own shelf and said nothing. Dorus leafed through the thin stack. She saw bills, a list of measurements, a printed email. He took out a sheet with nothing printed on its lower portion.

The same image. Her V at the bottom, and above it the lines Anouk had forwarded. At the top the copy ended on a slant. The sheet itself was whole. Part of the image had not been copied.

‘Is this the complete receipt?’ she asked.

‘This is what I have.’

‘The top’s missing.’

He bent over it. ‘It got cut off when it was copied.’

‘What did it say there?’

‘I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head.’

Vera laid her fingers along the edge of the sheet to keep it still. She wanted it closer to her, not to show the paper who was right.

‘I took in one flat folder. Not five boxes.’

Dorus sat on the chair beside the lamp. ‘I wrote down how it was returned.’

‘Through the café. That Tuesday. With Erik.’

‘Yes.’

‘All five boxes?’

‘That’s what it says.’

He was looking straight at her now. It was not a threat. She only noticed how strange it felt to hear someone confirm a line which did not fit what she had held in her own hands.

‘Then I need to speak to Erik,’ she said.

‘You can do that.’

‘Have you got his number?’

Dorus picked up his phone. He kept it beside him while he searched, then wrote a number at the bottom of the sheet. He added the business name: Rondrit. The pen would not write at first. He drew three short lines until the ink came through.

‘He delivers other things for me. Not just photographs.’

Vera read the number back to make sure she had every digit right. He nodded, then laid the pen on the folder, parallel with its edge. She could have ended the conversation with the paper in her bag. That would have been easiest. But behind Dorus stood photographs she thought she knew as Anouk’s, and besides his account of her delivery, there was what he had offered as though it belonged to him.

‘I’ve been to the foundation,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘There are two boxes there. Of mounted prints.’

Dorus nodded as though this was not news to him.

‘Anouk’s looking for her material.’

‘I did a lot of work on it.’

‘She says that too.’

He looked up at that. He rested his hands on the edge of the table.

‘She said that?’

‘That you did a lot of the printing. And took two photographs.’

He turned towards the frames against the wall. He did not pick one up, but pointed to a smaller folder behind them.

‘Those two were mine. Taken on the same day. Anouk had to be further along and I had the camera with me. That doesn’t make them any better. But I took them.’

This time he did take a small copy out of the folder. A man stood halfway up a ladder beside an open door, with a cloth over his shoulder. Vera recognised the pose from the series, though not that particular picture. Dorus laid it on the table and took out another. The same place, but without the ladder. The door was still open.

‘That light there,’ he said, pointing to the shadow beneath the eaves. ‘If I make everything equally light, the door closes in the photograph. All you see is a flat building. That isn’t what you saw when you stood there.’

Vera leaned closer to the small copy. The door was open. On first looking, she had indeed seen it as a dark patch. Now there was space behind it.

‘Did you make those little proofs as well?’

‘Yes. I did that work.’

‘Anouk paid for that.’

‘Some of it. Storage, copies. You can’t put everything on an invoice. You know that.’

She did. She had given people glasses of water and lent them a phone cable, kept soup warm for someone who was late. That had not made her the owner of their bags. She did not put it like that. Dorus was looking at the picture again, waiting for a comment on what he had actually shown her.

‘The door does show up better like that,’ she said.

He nodded. He did not put the copies away at once. Vera let him talk for a while about paper that had been out of stock and a print they had had to make again together. Not all of it was needed to find the boxes. He seemed to need to give her more than that one crooked receipt.

Someone knocked on the outside door. Dorus called that it was open, forgot about the lock and went into the passage after all. A man had brought back a framed photograph with a problem at the back. The hanging eyelet was not secure. He wanted it on his wall this weekend.

‘I can put another one on,’ Dorus said.

‘Now?’

Dorus looked at Vera. ‘Can you spare five minutes?’

She nodded. The man waited in the doorway, explaining that he had already tried a screw himself. Dorus turned the frame over on a soft surface. The screw had made the hole wider. He did not say it was the customer’s fault; he showed him and fetched another eyelet.

Vera moved her chair back a little. She watched him work with the short screwdriver, carefully but without a show. It took longer than five minutes because he could not use the same spot again. The customer began looking at the colour prints and said the lighter one was nicer.

‘That’s not the same question,’ Dorus said.

The man laughed as though Dorus had made a joke. When the frame was ready, he asked what he owed. Dorus said it was included. He had supplied the photograph in that frame.

The outside door banged shut. Dorus stood for a moment with the broken fitting in his hand, then dropped it into a small tray rather than the bin.

‘You can spend a whole morning on things that don’t go on the bill,’ he said.

Vera looked at her watch. She would be back for Yasmin’s break if she left now. Dorus moved the delivery receipt with the phone number towards her.

‘My studio costs haven’t gone down because everyone can print at home. I’ve had to catch up on payments. Then there’s a discussion about colour on top of it.’

‘Can you make a living from this?’

The question was out before she thought that it had nothing to do with the receipt. Dorus apparently minded it less than the others.

‘Just about. Work comes in. A few small jobs at once. I’ve got a hundred and fifty left at the moment that isn’t already spoken for. When that man pays his bill there’ll be a bit more. If anything goes wrong with the printer, it’s gone.’

He said it without showing her his banking app. She had not asked to see it. The amount stayed with her because it sounded small in a room with so much work lying about. Not because she now knew what else was in his account.

‘I need to get back,’ she said.

Dorus did not get up at once. Vera put on her coat. She slid the cropped copy with Erik’s number into the separate sleeve she had brought for her own notes. She must not put any more creases through the V.

‘May I take this?’

‘That’s what I got it out for.’

‘Thank you.’

At the door he glanced towards the colour prints, still lying side by side. She could find her own way out. He only unlocked the door for her.

‘I’m not a stranger to that work,’ he said.

‘I’ve seen that.’

She did not want to say she now understood what had happened to the boxes. She did not. The man who replaced a hanging eyelet and the man who had described five boxes as returned stood in the same room. One would not disappear because she had seen the other.

On the pavement she did not call Anouk. She only sent a message saying she had a copy and the delivery driver’s number. She would tell her more later. An answer came straight away: good, followed by a question about whether the crop was still the same.

Yes, Vera wrote.

She put the phone away. Across the road a young man was reversing a van while someone outside directed him with broad sweeps of his arms. Vera waited until the van had stopped, then crossed.