Short story · 6 min read · Set in The Old Quarter ·
Going Once
In the Old Quarter an auction opens at 03:03 and sells what still belongs to the living. A night porter finds her own name in the catalogue under a lot she can see from her desk.
Agnes Toal had been a night porter long enough to know what three o'clock in the Old Quarter is like, which is to say not like anything. The trams stop over on Calder by then, the fog horn counts the hour out at the water, and the alleys between the old warehouses give off the smell of brine and wet brick, and nothing moves, and you like it that way.
The first paddle turned up in a guest's fist. She found it making the rounds at four, room 9, a commercial traveller who could not be woken short of shaking — and when he did wake, at 06:40, twenty minutes too late for his appointments, he swore he had slept eight hours and was cheated, and could not be persuaded he had been asleep at all.
The paddle was cardboard, a number 77 stamped on it in a currency of marks and dashes she did not recognise, and it was warm. Not room-warm. Hand-warm, held-length warm, in a fist that had not touched it. She kept it in the office drawer under the incident book.
A paddle came up most nights after that. Always warm, always from a sleeping guest, always numbered in that same stamp-dress. Then, on the Thursday of the fog, the catalogue came. It was pushed through the service door with the milk, sixteen pages, thin paper, print so fine it was better read sideways, and it hurt her pride as a professional that she stepped back from the desk before picking it up, the way you step back from a dog you have decided not to trust.
Lots to the millions, and the numbering was off somehow, spaced wrong, as though the catalogue had been copied from an older one and could not say which. The lots themselves, read down the page, were small and specific, and all of them, she understood slowly, in her hand on the desk edge, were things that still had owners walking about.
Lot 61: one wristwatch, stopped at a time it will not say. Owner living.
Lot 112: a set of door keys, four, one unidentified. Owner living.
Lot 209: one tin, rectangular, painted, moss green, contents Miscellaneous. Owner living — the records show the owner still answers rolls.
She had her cardigan off before she knew she was moving. The tin was on the office shelf between the burnt-out torch and the cache of soap. It was her grandmother's sewing tin — the green one, corner-dented, lid that needed two thumbs. It had come to the Old Quarter with her when she took the porter's room, one box in one suitcase, and it had never left the shelf, and there it sat.
Owner living. The records show the owner still answers rolls. Rolls. She had signed the villa book that morning at seven. Someone, somewhere, was checking.
The catalogue gave a hall and an hour, and the hour was 03:03, and the hall was one she knew — the old auction rooms off Pinfold Lane, boarded since the sixties, its gates chained. Agnes was sixty-one years old and a mule about her sleep; she could no more stay awake to three than fly. So she did the only thing the terms allowed, and the terms were on the last page, in the fine print, written like a menu:
Bids are taken from the sleeping only. Bidders are asked to hold their paddle. Falling asleep attends the sale. The house thanks you.
She sat in the office chair at ten to three with the paddle in her hand, wristwatch set, telling herself that a woman could fall asleep holding a piece of cardboard without disappearing, and the fog horn counted her down at the water, and the last thing she saw before she went was the clock above the door, which had no hour hand, only two, and could not tell her anything she wanted.
The hall in the sleep was tall and warm and smelled of carpet. Rows of sleepers sat in their coats, paddles up in their curled fists, breathing in levels. Nobody's face stayed quite the length of a look. At a lectern under the one lamp stood a man in a striped waistcoat, cheerful as a wedding, with a gavel whose head was wrapped and muffled so that it landed the way a word does through a wall. He called Lot 214, and the lot was a lady's biscuit tin, and he praised its condition and its weight, and said, pleasantly, that the owner, the little gran, had carried it two cities, and that such things fetch a good night's sleep, ladies and gentlemen, a good night's sleep — and the room bid, a whole room of raised fists rising like grass.
Agnes raised her paddle. She heard her own voice in her own dream bid what she had, and from somewhere the waistcoat man smiled down the rows at her, did not take the bid, because — she had it, in that neat chirpy patter — bids from the awake are never taken, madam, and you, madam, are sitting up in your own dream like a wallflower at a hanging.
The hammer fell. She heard it land like a word through a wall, and the tin passed into the dark at the back of the hall, and the buyer she never saw, only heard — a breadth of breath in the dark, deeper than the crates, satisfied, and taking.
She woke at 06:40 with the paddle still in her fist and a receipt on the blotter that had not been there. Thin paper. Fine print. Sold: Lot 214, one tin rectangular, painted green, contents miscellaneous. Hammer: one hour — clear. Below the price, in a column with no heading, in a chirpy business hand, was written: the hour of Wednesday. Nothing in it, madam. You were seen not to use it.
The tin was gone. The service door was still chained from the inside, the window keyed and the key in her boss's coat across town. On the shelf there was a ring in the dust where the tin had stood, and the dust was unbroken all around it. Nothing had been carried out through the room. It had been taken out of the room.
She has not slept properly since, and she is not sentimental about the tin. What she minds is the receipt, and the way the catalogue, which she has kept, has since reprinted itself twice — the lots reshuffled, the numbering still wrong — and the way that, however she searches the list for her tin, the lot numbers keep walking down toward hers, one page a fortnight, patient as fog.
Lot 1 in the catalogue reads only The first hour, and is marked withdrawn. She has started, against every professional instinct she owns, to wonder who can withdraw anything from that man, and what it must have cost them — and whether what was paid to do it is the same currency the house is charging her.