Short story · 5 min read · Set in Gold Street ·
The Columns of Gold Street
A streets clerk collates the words Gold Street has lost from its signs, one word a night, toward a register that seems to be reading her back.
Gold Street had always been a street that offices used, and the signs it lost were lost the way a ledger loses entries: one per day, neat and unarguable. Ferren Owler worked in the second-floor office of the street's own registration room, collating exactly this, because when the first three went — the tobacconist, the bath-house, the old chiropodist — the licensing officer said, in the flat tone she kept for such matters: somebody should keep a register. Ferren was the somebody with the freest afternoons.
He tailored the register on his own authority. A booklet, ruled like a shop's stock book: a column for the date, a column for the sign, a column for the shop it had named, and at the right a column for the wording, because wording was the whole value of a sign. THE BATH-HOUSE — OPEN TILL TEN. GILDING & SONS, PIPE-MAKERS. W. HARTNELL, CHIROPODIST — RING TWICE. He took the wordings from memory mostly, checked against the directories where directories had them, and initiallled each line at the right margin as was proper.
The first thing that went wrong with the register was small. He ruled the booklet for fifty lines and the street had lost nineteen signs by the time he needed a second booklet, which was expected; but the second booklet, when he ruled it, was already ruled — finer lines, closer spaced, a column cut at the right for his initials that was wider than his initials had ever needed. He thanked the stationer, who disclaimed the work, and went on. A register is a register. It wants keeping, not arguing.
The second thing was the order of the losses. They came off the street out of sequence, as losses of any type do: the bath-house first though it had been the oldest; the barber's pole (a pole, strictly, not a sign, but he included it in a note) gone one grey Tuesday, and the newsagent's OPEN ALL HOURS gone the same night, which no diagonal street logic could explain. He began to rule a column for sequence anyway, to see whether the register, considered as a closed system, would settle. It did not settle. It looked, if anything, like arithmetic being checked from the other end.
The third thing — and Ferren, who had kept ledgers all his working life, knew it for the one that mattered — was that the register began correcting itself.
He wrote the details loosely at first, the way you do when the register is for argument's sake. The gilder's sign he entered as merely PIPE-MAKERS — GILDING & SONS, though the pipe side was defunct for years and the whole of the sign had once said something longer; and a week later, opening the booklet to check a date, he found the line amended. GILDING & SONS, PIPE-MAKERS AND GENERAL TRADES, ESTD. 1908 — ring, he saw, at the day bell. He had not written it. The ink was his ink. The hand was his hand. He initialed nothing that line; the initials were already there, and were his.
No register on earth benefits from being argued with, and he did not argue. He went out over several evenings with a lap-board and a note pad and did the thing properly, wrote the wordings down at the kerb from the shopmen who remembered or half remembered, and entered only what could be entered as fact. The corrections stopped. This much was fine, and he was proud of the register — his afternoons had a use again, and he initialed each line, and there was always, precisely where the booklet required it, room.
The losses went on. By the spring the street stood bare over its doors, brick and enamel-strong spots of darker paint where brackets had been, and the register grew fat, and Ferren noticed that he had begun writing entries for signs that had not yet gone.
It was not that he invented them. It was subtler and worse. He would rule nothing one evening; he would stand at the kerb in the wet on his lawful way home and see, above the closed jeweller's, a swing sign he had never seen in the day, bearing letters he could not read from below, and — because when the register wants a line the register will get one from the nearest keepable source — the next morning the line was in the booklet, worded and initialled, and the jeweller's bare bracket was now holding a sign that had gone the night before, though no one on the street conceded the sight.
And here the register and the street, which had been keeping each other's score all along, began to close like a ledger balancing. The entries Preceding the losses: read those back now, in the ruled order, and you have the losses in advance, worded exactly. Follow the losses as they happen: catch the register, line by line, being confirmed. Ferren wrote in his final note, in the flat tone the licensing officer kept for matters of fact: the street is being read. Not by the register. The two are being read together, and by something that requires the pair to agree.
He did not, in writing, say who. He had a strong idea and never once set it down, and the reason he never set it down is in the register itself, on the last page, where a line sits ruled and ready for the final entry: the column for the sign, blank. The column for the shop, blank. The column for the wording, already filled, in his ink, in his hand, small as tolls:
GOLD STREET, WITH ITS SIGNS — KEPT.