Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Coin That Comes Back to Me
Every Friday I pay the harbor a coin and by Monday it is back in my coat, and the habit of checking has become the habit of being checked.
- perspective: first
I throw a coin into the harbor every Friday evening from the second mooring post past the fish hut. This is not devotional, whatever it looks like. It began as a fare. I worked the ferry season of thirty years ago and the man before me kept a habit of paying the water at the end of each week's crossings, and when he was pensioned off I was handed his coat, his ledger, and his habit, all three, and I kept only the habit.
The coin is always pre-decimal, always a penny when I can get them, which is getting harder. I keep six in the tin on the sill above the sink, arranged heads up, and on Friday I take one, the leftmost, and the right end closes up, and on Monday it is back in my coat.
Back in my coat. That is the part I need written down, because there is a version of this where the coin falls back on the apron, or a boy finds it and the mother brings it round, and that version is livable. A pennies do not come back into a coat pocket. I have found it in the left inside pocket every time, in among the receipts and the folded notices, where I never put coins, and it lies there heads up, and the other payments in the pocket have shifted around it during the weekend as if it was always there and had been counted in.
I check on Monday mornings standing up, coat off but still held, before the kettle. The check is the part of me that works properly. Kettle filled, coat lifted, left hand in, find the rim, turn it, feel the date. A 1936, mostly. It is always the same date now. Early on the years wandered, and I told myself I could not remember which pennies I had put in the tin, which was the sane reading. But the tin is six deep and I write the year next to Friday's line in the ledger, because I inherited the ledger too and boredom does the rest, and the ledger stopped agreeing with the coin long ago.
I have started writing the year the coin gives me when I find it, under Friday's line, on Monday, in a second column, and I let the two columns disagree, and there is nothing in the arithmetic that lets me choose which column is the record of what actually happened. The ledger of a ferryman is supposed to be the one place his word is worth something.
The other payments in the pocket bother me more than the coin does. There is a bus receipt, a notice about the library's Tuesday closures, and a squared slip from the chemist. These shift. Monday, the bus receipt is at the top as it always is, but the creases face the other way, and the chemist's slip has been under instead of over, and twice the notice about closures has been there a week early — before it was issued. I do not open it on Monday until I have to. Opening regulations about a closure that has not been announced felt like reading mail that is not mine, and it is mine, that is the trouble, it arrives in my own pocket, addressed to no one, dated ahead.
Friday's throw grows longer the harder I look. I used to stand at the post and drop it from waist height. Now I stand and open my hand at arm's length over the water and watch it go down, and I say a number as it drops — the year, always, saying the wrongness out loud makes it no worse — and the medal ribbon of it going down is the last I see of a coin I can account for.
What I cannot make tally is the direction. A fare is paid to go somewhere. The coat came back from somewhere, contents rearranged, a week further along the timetable than the week it was paid in. If the habit is being kept on my behalf now, then somebody is doing the keeping — and I do the keeping, I am the ledger, I am the one who writes the columns — so I do my round and my coat does its round, and they meet each Mondays, and we compare years, and one of us is early, and I have stopped asking which.
The coin is in the tin now, heads up, 1936, right end of the six. It is only Thursday. I have not thrown anything yet.