Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Photograph of Tomorrow's Takings
She counts, she photographs, she files, and one evening the rule is kept for her a fraction too well, producing a print of takings for a day she has not yet served.
- perspective: close-third
Same lamp, same cloth, half past nine. Eileen Sowerby said it to herself every night of the trading year the way other people say a grace, and for twenty-two years it had kept her square with the market authority without one remark entered against her name.
The rule lived on the last card of her pass-book, where nobody read to: takings to be photographed nightly against a dated card, print to be lodged at audit with the rents clerk. Stall 41 was buttons, thread and mending wool, which is a trade in silver — more small coins than notes, and coins that sit well under a lamp. So the habit held: she counted twice (her own rule, under the authority's) and photographed once, laid the same tea towel over the kitchen table, built the coins in their columns, silver left and copper right and the notes flat on top, wrote the date on the white card in pencil, took one photograph from directly above, and filed the print in the ring binder, one page to a date, squared to the margin.
Twice a year the rents clerk turned those pages at audit. Twenty-two years of prints as regular as hymn boards, and his remarks had thinned over the decades to a fine two-word weather: all square.
The evening it took a different shape was a Tuesday in November, with fog off the water thick enough to shut the market early, so that there was more evening than takings. She counted twice, laid the cloth, built the columns, dated the card in pencil, took the one photograph from directly above, and while the print was still coming up grey in the lamp's circle it came up wrong.
Wrong, and quietly wrong. The columns were her columns, in her order. The tray was her tray. But the day card inside the picture was dated Thursday, three days on, in pencil, in her own hand, and along the white border the same date had been written a second time, also hers, in the small inward-leaning hand she used for borders when she wrote them at all.
She took the photograph again. The second print was right: Tuesday's total, Tuesday's tray, Tuesday's date. She filed it where it belonged, at Tuesday's page, and shut the binder, and did not open it again that night, because she was a fair way through her sixty-second year and had learned what her sleep was like when she went looking.
She did not go looking, and so it was Wednesday evening, trading done clean and counted clean, before she turned the pages to Thursday and found a print already sitting there, squared to the margin like all the others, dated Thursday in her own hand, columns built the way she builds them. The early print, the wrong one, the one that had arrived out of Tuesday's lamp. She could not remember filing it. The likeliest account, she told the lamp, was that she had filed it herself while her mind was on the fog, the way a person sets down a key and swears to the drawer. The statement did not need her to believe it. It only needed to be available.
By Thursday she had it almost arranged: a thin day, fog again, a morning of one-penny and two-pence, an afternoon of thread. At half past nine she did the whole of it. Counted twice. Laid the cloth. Built the columns. Dated the card. Took the one photograph, from directly above, flash off.
The lamp stayed on. The print came up in her hand and she set it face down on the table beside the early one, and she did not turn it over, and she did not turn the other one up, and she did not compare totals, and she did not file either print, and the binder stayed open at Thursday's page under the lamp with both of them waiting on it.
It was the first count in twenty-two years that she had refused to make, and she knew the refusal for what it was: the habit was the rule, and the rule was the habit, and one had gone ahead of her by three days and left the other standing on the platform.
The question she carried to bed past midnight, with the lamp switched off and the cloth still laid and the sayings all said but one, was this: whether Thursday was served when she counted it at half past nine, or whether she had spent the whole day catching a Tuesday photograph up to Thursday, and whether the rents clerk, at Monday's audit, would be able to tell from the pages which of those two things she had done.