Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Nettle Lane ·
The Man Who Paints Already
A decorator is issued his colours at the depot in the morning and finds one house in the lane already wearing them, wet.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Cyril Dane, painter and decorator"
I am Cyril Dane, painter and decorator, thirty-one years on the council's painting round, and I set this down once, as it was taken down from me, so that the sheet and the page agree.
On the Thursday past I was issued for 41 Nettle Lane: semi-detached, two coats all round, the card in my pocket. At the depot stores the clerk mixed me off two gallons of Moonstone, Series 4, batch 4/41, and told me those two were the last of that batch on his shelf and the first out of it that morning. I trundled the barrow down Nettle Lane at the half-hour before eight.
41 and 47 are a matched pair, mirror semis put up in one dry summer with the arched porch-heads and the cast cresting to the bays, and 47 stands three doors along my card's house. 47 was done. Topcoat wall to wall, eaves to the damp-course, in a grey I did not have to look at twice. I put the back of my glove to the head of the downpipe and it came away wet. The laid-off strokes ran into the light long and level, and a tradesman knows his own lay-on the way he knows his own step on his own stair. I know my own: into the light, off the right hand, no going back over but the once at the cills. It was mine. I have taught it to nobody in thirty-one years, not even the apprentices, who learn their own.
The house has stood empty since the family were rehoused in the spring. The letterplate is boarded over, and the boards were painted too.
I went back to the depot with the glove. The clerk confirmed the batch on his own stock cards: two gallons of Series 4, batch 4/41, in the world that morning, both to me, none out before me under his eye. The stores chit for the second two gallons of that same batch was already passed, dated the Wednesday, issued out and signed for, and the clerk laid the chit on the counter for me to see — and the signature on it is mine. I had not seen that chit in my life before Thursday. I did not sign it. The foreman then confirmed that no man of ours had been sent ahead of me onto Nettle Lane, and drove down himself and put his knuckle to 47's cill, and wrote wet on the job sheet in front of me while I watched him do it.
The job sheet had me down as started on the Wednesday, before the colour was out of the batch, and a round wants balancing or the whole street's card goes back to the office, so I signed the completion on the Thursday for a start I did not make and a finish I did not lay, and the card balances. Mrs Aldous at the corner number, who takes her mornings at her step, confirmed the smell of fresh paint coming up her entry since the Wednesday, strong enough to fetch her indoors early, and she confirmed it to the foreman and again to me with her clock standing behind her.
So yes: it has been confirmed, all of it, by other people — the batch by the stores clerk's cards, the wet by the foreman's knuckle and his own hand on the sheet, the smell by a neighbour and her clock. It is on file and the file is satisfied. What nobody on file will confirm is the hand on Wednesday's chit, because that hand is mine, and I never held the pen that made it. The record stands confirmed from top to bottom and carries one signature too many, mine, twice. My two gallons sit unopened in the shed as heavy as the day they were mixed, and the question I take home to my tea now, nightly, is not who painted 47 before the colour existed in my pail. It is whose hand carries my name round the lanes — and which house on the card it means to sign me into next.