Short story · 4 min read · Set in The Cranmere Branch ·
The Market Stall of My Mother's Trolley
On the Cranmere Branch barrow row the day's working float is paid out of the first customer's pocket, and the stallholder counts the change twice, and the second count has never once been for the shop's benefit.
The barrow row at Cranmere Branch stands on the cobbles behind the old halts, six barrows in a line under one gutter that never mended, and trading opens when the first customer opens it — not before, whatever the clock says. The stallholders lift their canvas tarps at half past five and stand behind the scales with their hands folded, and the whole row waits. Put it the way the row puts it: the day's coin comes off the first customer. That is the rule at the first barrow especially, the greengrocer's, where Bernard Quayle sells what he sells with the weighing can hanging off one hand. Whatever the first customer buys, that transaction settles the row's morning: he rings it, chalks it, and will not weigh a second order until the first is counted through.
And the count is done twice. That is his mark and his manners both: the change goes from the tin into the customer's palm once, at speed, like any market; then he starts again, slower, coin by coin, the same coins back into the same palm, and says the sum over as it lands. Both counts agree. They have agreed every trading morning, said the row and meant nothing by it, and the second count took long enough that the first customer had time to arrange the trolley handles and get her gloves right.
My mother was the first customer. That was her place and she held it the way other people hold a job. Up before the stopcock lamp went off, queue of one on the cobbles from about the hour of six, trolley between her knees with the brake rope wound round her fist. Her saying to me, said often enough to wear a groove: never be second at Quayle's. Whatever he pays double for, want it. I went with her on Saturdays and stood by the wheel, and I heard the counts — the quick one and the slow one, same coins, same sum, into the glove, and the tin heavier or lighter per the day and none of that ours to notice.
What I noticed — what it took me to my teens to notice, which is the age I stopped going — is the second count was not the same count. Same sum, mind. Same pile. But there was a coin in the slow count that was not in the quick one: a worn old bit, a shape no counter took by then, thinner than it ought to be, cool in the palm like something kept in a drawer. The quick count paid the shopping. The slow count paid the shopping and a fraction over, and the fraction over was always that coin, and my mother always palmed it back to him with the brake rope hand, the way you'd hand back a dropped farthing, and he always took it and set it under the scale weight with a nod, counted, and the morning was over.
She kept it up eleven years past when I left the row. Then she took to her bed and the trolley stood in the passage and there was nobody first at Quayle's of a morning, and the row — Renie from the fish barrow told me after — stood waiting it out past eight, tarps frozen, nothing weighed, because the rule is the rule and the row does not open on sympathy.
So I went. Which is the whole of what I have to file down here. Took the trolley out of the passage, wound the brake rope round my fist where hers had been, and stood on the cobbles at six in the dark as a substitute, and was counted first. Quick count into my glove for the order. Then he began the slow one, and I watched the coins come, and the sum was the sum for what I took. And in the slow count, level with the last of the pence, worn and cool, there came the fraction over — her coin, the drawer coin, landed in my palm under the proper change, counted, mine.
I palmed it back with the rope hand before I had decided to, and he took it under the weight, every motion as the eleven years. And the morning opened, and the row traded, and that was Tuesday.
I have been first every trading morning since, her stand, her trolley, and the count is always twice into whoever holds the rope, and the fraction over always comes back under the weight. My question is not his manner, which I have given up on. The question is the tin's: the change is counted twice and agrees twice, and the slow count carries one coin more, so which of the two counts is the paying one — and who, before the row opens, is it Quayle is paying.