Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
My Father's Cufflinks Arrive
Every year a book-post parcel comes for a man who stands on no list anywhere, addressed plainly to his hands, and the drawer now holds nine pairs.
- dated: "after the exchange dinner"
- narrator: "Mona Tibbs, telegraphist"
Sunday, after the Exchange dinner. The dinner overran the way it does; the last tram never came and I walked the long way home, in at the gate inside the thin hour, our street's lamps going out together at the thirty-third minute with nobody about to see them go. I said in my speech at the dinner that I had kept the exchange's traffic book eleven years without a misposted line. I said it in fun. It was the truest thing I said all night.
Monday. Book post at the door before I was dressed. Brown paper, printed band, the corner clipped the way the Post Room clips the second-class. Addressed neither to me nor to the house, but: FOR THE HANDS OF ALBERT TIBBS, AT THE DOOR. What weighed closed like a book rode up in the paper as a pair of cufflinks, twin ovals, chased with a clock face that has stopped short of its numbers. I set them in the drawer with the others and left the string tied as it came. Ninth year running, always the week after the Exchange dinner, always to the day.
Thursday. Looked where lists are kept. The electoral roll — the registrar's girl is my cousin Vi — he is not on it. The exchange staff book — carried off at the reorganisation with no leaving line entered, and no one enters a leaving line where there was never a joining line. Parish registers, rate book of the street, the works club: nothing. My house stands taxed to me alone. I keep the traffic book for the whole exchange, every message in and out of this district passes under my hand, and he is not in my book either. A man not on any list, and book post finds our door every year to the week.
Friday, late. Counted the drawer on my way past: nine pairs laid flat like coins in a purse, each in its own paper, none ever opened past the first inch of string. Nobody's hands in this house are his size; my cuffs take the smallest of the nine and slip. The Post Office counter tells me book post must be signed for by the party named. No party is named but his hands, and hands, the counter agrees, do not sign. So the parcels wait at our door of an evening and are inside the house by morning, and I have kept the one question off my phones and off my counters and kept it here instead, where it will hold its line: whose hands does the day read at our door each autumn, that no list in this city has ever learned to spell.