Short story · 3 min read · Set in Brannock ·
The Sign That Gives Notice
A painted shop sign in Brannock changes trade ahead of every change of owner, advertising the business the paperwork will not record for another month.
The sign hangs over the door of the corner shop on Brannock's market row, a wooden board on forged hooks, hand-painted letters on a green ground. It has hung there since before the war and it has never been repainted so far as anyone can prove. It has been rewritten.
The shop itself has passed through hands the way shops do. Grocer, draper, tobacconist, greengrocer, and so on down the decades, an ordinary history of small trade in a small town, each transfer registered with the district valuer, each listed in the trade directory of its year. The valuation ledger the district keeps is ordinary too, updated quarterly, always a month or so behind the man who signs at the bank. The sign is not behind.
The habit, once you have the two papers side by side, is exact. When the shop was a draper's and the paperwork still said draper, the sign read FISHMONGER. Within five weeks the draper had sold up and a fishmonger, a Mr Coyle, had taken the lease through the bank, through no advertisement anyone in Brannock could afterwards remember seeing. The sign did not change the week Mr Coyle took over. It had changed first.
This has now held through six transfers. The sign anticipates the valuer's ledger by five weeks, every time, to within a day or two either side of five, and the lettering changes cleanly overnight, there being no customer yet born who has caught the painter at it. The letters are always the same handsome block hand on the same green ground, and the paint, when a finger is put to it out of an idle hour, is dry, old, and set into the wood like a thing that had hung for years. Nobody repaints it. It is simply next.
The town has accommodated itself to the habit in the way towns do, without declaring it. The men at the allotments rate the sign as better advice than the parish notices. The bank manager, who would deny it officially, has been known to say that a man wanting to know when the trade was turning should walk past the corner shop first and the ledger second. Children are sent on errands past it and come back reporting the current word the way they report the weather, and nobody has told them not to.
The present word is DAIRY.
That is the trouble, such as the town will allow itself to feel. The present word has stood for eleven weeks, and the usual interval is five. Where the sign has always foretold, it now waits, and the ledger at the district office shows the current greengrocer, a Mrs Hallam, neither selling nor failing, her bank account moving in its ordinary small ways, her lease unbroken to any end anyone has entered against it. The green board hangs level on its hooks. The word DAIRY sits set and dry under its years of varnish-like age, patient as paint, and eleven weeks is now thirteen.
There are two schools of talk in Brannock and they are both quiet. One holds that the dairy trade will come when it comes and the sign is early again for once, eleven weeks being no worse than the war years, when the interval stretch to nine and back again. The other school, which meets further from the row, says the sign never waits, and if it is hanging on DAIRY, then the dairy is already decided somewhere outside the ordinary papers, already trading in whatever ledger the green board copies from, and what the town is waiting for is only the paperwork to catch up to a shopkeeper nobody has met.
The town's own arithmetic, kept at the allotments and at the back bench of the chapel, runs now to a single open line, which the members leave undated: five weeks is the rule, thirteen is the exception, and the question nobody has put to the sign is whose brush, when the paint goes next, will already have done the letters after that.