Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Victoria Street ·
Mended, but Not as It Was
A night porter on Victoria Street keeps finding the street's small breakages sealed by morning along fine gold seams, and one closing time a hand rests on the ledge outside, catching its breath.
Perry Nowak does the night porter's round on Victoria Street, the flats above and the café at street level, and for a year he has kept, in the porter's day book, a loose-leaf page of *repairs of unexplained origin*, which is his own heading, in biro, because he liked the way it sounded.
It started with the saucer. Dot Ferris runs the café below the flats. On a Tuesday in October, opening up, she knocked a saucer from the dishwasher rack and it went across the tiles into the skirting in two pieces, and she swept both pieces into the bin with a baker's economy and felt nothing about it, and at closing that night Perry found it whole in the dish rack, and set it down in the light, and got it under the good lamp. The break had been joined along a seam of fine gold, hair-thin, even, laid by a hand that knew what it was doing. Dot, to her credit, asked one question — *did I do that?* — and then not another, and poured two teas, and has since referred to the saucer as its third.
Victoria Street is a street of small breakages, and the page filled in over the year. A windowpane cracked by a gull strike, whole by the following light, gold in the crack. A stair banister Marie in the top flat leaned on too hard in her slippers, picked clean of splinters and laced up the grain. A bell-push sprouted back onto its wall. Perry's method is to look during the round, not touch anything, and log the seam's width and colour, and the seams are always the same: the same gold, done in the same way, along the line of break, never across it. It has been verified in his hearing by a visiting insurance assessor, who gave a little noise at the join on a defective kitchen step and put in his report only the words *repair: excellent, but not by us.*
Two things do not mend, and the page says so, so Perry does not get his hopes up. The telephone box at the top of the street, smashed with a hammer by the lads off the night bus, stands broken still, glass out, receiver gone, in the way of things broken on purpose — whatever does this work will not touch it. Dot's good mug, which she broke herself on the wrong birthday off the wrong man, is still her good mug in two careful halves in the grate drawer. Nothing joins them.
Perry had not put a maker to any of it until last winter. Coming off the last tram up the street at the end of the light, he stopped at the florist's window, where he always stops, and in the lit window's reflection caught the third-floor flat across the way — the one with the room that is always at dusk exactly dusk-lit, curtains never drawn — and inside it, in the reflection, was an older woman asleep in a chair by an open window. Her wrists, where the sleeves fell back, ended clean and cool in seams of gold going around them in rings. On the outside sill, leaning on it the way a navvy leans on a wall at the end of a shift, were two hands, knuckles dusted over with gold, held very still, like a person getting their breath. It is not a thing Perry liked seeing, and he did not see it again that winter, once.
The flat belongs, the porter's book says, in a hand that predates Perry by eleven years, to *M. Dix, ceramics restorer, retired,* and the entry beneath, in the same old hand and never repeated by anyone since, reads: *wrists seamed also; no injury on record; ask her nothing.* Nobody asks her anything. She is spoken of on the street with respect, the way live wires are.
The hand on the sill came back the following autumn. Perry was turning the sign at closing. He saw it plainly this time, three feet from him, one hand flat on the ledge outside the café's side window, gold-dusted at the knuckles, breathing — there is no better word; the fingers rose and settled slightly, like shoulders. He said good night, quietly, the way you would to a colleague's back. The fingers stilled. Whether that was answer Perry could not say. He photographed it, since he keeps records: the print came back soft, out of focus at the hand entirely, and sharp only on the crack in the window glass behind it, which was sealed, he saw when he took the photo down, along a hair of gold.
He has never met her, and hopes not to; the hands do the visiting. But the day book carries the question now, and Perry is not paid to solve it: the person to whom the forty-first, the six-hundredth, the four thousandth gold seam belongs was herself broken once, long before the leaving began, and put back together — by whom? The wrists carry fine ringed seams, and she has never broken a thing she could name, and every night her hands go out into the dark over the rooftops as if looking for the one join left in this city that is still open.