Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Tern Street ·
The Shop That Sells the Same Paper
A corner shop owner on Tern Street sells the same evening paper every day, and a customer she has never seen before buys the paper from the day before, and then asks for the one for tomorrow.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: Brenda Oyelaran, corner shop owner
I have run the newsagent's on the corner of Tern Street for nineteen years, and I know my customers. The milkman who takes his paper with two sugars in his tea. The retired headmaster who wants the crossword and the sports pages folded, never rolled. The two sisters from number twelve who buy one copy between them and fight over the horoscopes. I know who is struggling, and who has been ill, and whose son has gone off to the army. That is what a corner shop is for.
So I noticed the man straight away, the first Monday in March.
He came in at seven, before the rush, in a dark overcoat that was too heavy for the weather. He did not look at the magazines. He walked straight to the paper rack and took the evening paper, the Tern Street Courier, and brought it to the counter. I put it through the till and said good morning, and he said, "Thank you. I'll take yesterday's as well, please."
I told him yesterday's was gone. I had sold out.
"Oh, I think you'll find you haven't," he said pleasantly. He reached past me and took a copy from the back shelf, under the card rack, where I do not keep spare papers. It was dated the previous Sunday. The front page had a photograph of the council offices, and a headline about drainage. I had never seen that edition. I know because I have been stacking the Courier since 2005 and I know every page of it.
I rang up the sale. He paid in coins I did not recognise, very old, with a head on the front that was not any monarch I knew. He put the papers under his arm and wished me a good day and went out into the street, and I watched him walk up toward the church, quite slowly, reading the front page of the older paper as he went.
He came back the next morning and asked for the paper for Wednesday.
I told him the paper for Wednesday had not been printed. He smiled at me as though I had made a little joke, and he said, very kindly, "It's the one with the story about the bell," and went out again.
On the Wednesday there was a story about the bell. It was on page five, a short piece about the restoration fund for St Brannock's, with a photograph of the tower and a quote from the vicar about the bell ringing out of time. I had not read it, because I had not stocked that edition. I had only been given it that morning by the van driver, and I had not seen the van driver before either.
I have not told the police. I have not told the newsagents' association. I told my husband, who said I was overtired and should take a day off. I did, and I came back and found the back shelf stacked with papers I had never ordered, every one of them dated for a day that had not yet come, every one of them folded to the same page: a picture of a man standing at my counter, in a dark overcoat, with his hand held out for change.
I still open the shop at seven. The man still comes in. He has not yet asked for a paper I do not have. But each morning he takes the one I have put out for that day, and he reads the front page, and then he looks up at me over the top of it, and I am the one who looks away.