Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Time I Hold in Trust
Marion Fiske books every appointment weeks early, because the hours she lives on were taken on credit and the repayments must never come due all at once.
- perspective: close-third
The appointment card was for the fourteenth, and Marion Fiske had it in her handbag before the month it named had opened its books. That is how she keeps herself: in front. The dentist is booked six weeks out, for a tooth that has done nothing. The optician is booked in November for February. The man who reads the meter asks for any day after the fifteenth and she says, make it the second Tuesday, early is cheap. At the hairdresser's she takes the eight-thirty slot nobody wants and thinks of it as ending well. She books early the way other people hold handrails.
Nobody taught her the arithmetic. It arrived with the arithmetic, the winter she came out of a long February ahead of her own schedule and found herself three good weeks deep in days she had not yet earned. Steady mornings. Paid-for feeling. And the deduction she could not shake, because it balanced: time does not multiply. If she was spending it now, and had not yet earned it, then it was on loan from later, and later keeps books too. Later collects. Later, if you are careless, collects in a lump.
So she keeps the ledger. Two diaries: the town's, in ink, for other people; and her own, in pencil, with three columns — OWED, LENT, PAID. The PAID column is the long one and it is where the living goes. An hour given to the clinic queue with her mother goes in not under visits but under payments. A morning spent steadying a neighbour's paperwork is a repayment. The dentist, taken early, unasked, while the tooth is quiet, is the purest payment she makes, and she makes it twice a year like a subscription. Nothing in the PAID column has ever come back to her with a receipt on it. That is why she keeps the columns in pencil, where a thing can be moved nearer, if not forgiven.
Repay small, and nobody notices. She has it written inside the cover of the pencil diary, from the winter she started. She says it at the surgery desk, politely, when the girl offers her the slot after next. She thinks it in the queue at the building society. It is the whole of her doctrine and she adds its second half at night: never let it fall due in one lump. She takes her Friday afternoons singly, never a week together. A fortnight's holiday would be a withdrawal; she has not made one in years, and when people ask where she goes in the summer she says, away, in instalments, and they laugh, and she lets them, because the laughing is free.
And since the columns began, nothing in the pencil diary has ever had to be struck through for dread. Dental moves a date; buses change a timetable; the weeks themselves arrive on the nail, financed in advance, no collections, no arrears. Coincidence could do that, she allows — she is not a woman who argues with unkind hypotheticals — but the diary does not argue either. A ledger's virtue is that it does not discuss. The town's clocks err together, three minutes slow, the same three minutes for years now, and she corrects for it without thinking, the way everyone here does, and she corrects a little early, because corrected time is a courtesy she can afford and an interest she can pay.
At the back of the pencil diary there is a page ruled into columns with no headings, and no entries. She rules it fresh every January. It is the page for the day the account is called in — the lump, the reckoning she has spent her solvency avoiding — and its emptiness is the closest thing she has to a certificate. Each Sunday she copies the week's totals, redraws the empty page, checks the stamped cards in the drawer the way a woman checks a till at close of day. Repay small, and nobody notices. So far, nobody has.
The payments clear. She has watched them clear for years, hours going into the future the way coins go into a slot, and the weeks arriving on the nail, pre-paid, punctual. What the columns cannot show her — and what she thinks about in the three minutes the town's clocks hold like a breath — is the counterfoil. Every hour she pays in is received somewhere. She has never once been able to establish who, on the far side of the page she rules every January, has been signing for her time.