The care of things

Fiction, about two adults over 18. The arrangement runs on a Friday. The part she has never been able to explain to anybody happens on a Sunday afternoon, with a cloth and a tin of leather balm.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

There is a tin of leather balm in the cupboard above the kettle, between the honey and a bag of rice that has been there since before the pandemic.

Michael bought it in a saddlers outside Tring on the way back from his brother's, and I sat in the car park and watched him come out with it in a paper bag, and I have never worked out why that was the thing that got me that weekend. A man in a fleece buying a small tin. The woman in the shop will have assumed a saddle.

It lives in the kitchen because the kitchen is where the job happens.

Third Sunday of the month, after lunch, while the light is still decent. Two sheets of newspaper down on the table. The box comes out of the bottom of the wardrobe and I do the four of them in the same order every time, and it takes somewhere between forty minutes and an hour and a half depending on what I find.

He is in the front room with the paper. He does not come in and he does not watch.

I asked him to watch once, in the second year. He thought about it for a while and said no and would not tell me why, and it took me years to work out that he was right.

If he sat there it would be a scene, and I would perform it, and I am very good at performing things. Alone at a table with a cloth I cannot perform for anybody. There is nobody to be good in front of. There is only me and the thing in my hands.

The cloth is one of his shirts. Blue, frayed at the collar, cut into squares about four years ago when it stopped being wearable. I did not plan that as a piece of symbolism and I would rather it were not one, but it is a fact about the cloth and I notice it every single time.

The tawse goes first because it takes the longest.

Two-tailed, quite heavy, and I know its weight in my hand the way I know almost nothing else. Barely damp cloth over the face, then along both edges. Second cloth to dry it. Then it sits and waits while I do the others, because you have to let leather settle before you put anything on it.

Handling a tawse in daylight is a peculiar business and I do not think anybody can be told about it in advance. In a dark room, ten minutes before something happens, it is an event. On a kitchen table at half past two with next door's mower going, it is a shaped piece of leather with stitching down one side and a worn patch two thirds of the way along where the finish has gone dull.

That worn patch is me. That is where it lands. Seven years of it landing in roughly the same place has taken the surface off the leather, and I sit at my own kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon with my thumb resting on the dull part, and there is no word for what that is.

The cane next, and the cane is different.

You do not oil a cane the way you oil a strap. It gets a wipe, and a very light rub of oil once or twice a year, and mostly what it gets is looked at. Michael was clear about that at the start and clear about the reason: rattan dries out, and dry rattan splits, and a split cane opens you up. So I go down it with my fingers, tip to handle and back again, feeling for anything raised.

It is the only part of the job that frightens me, and it has nothing whatever to do with what the cane does.

In March I found a hairline about five inches from the tip. You feel those before you see them. I sat there for a long moment with my thumbnail on it hoping to be wrong, and then I had to get up and go into the front room and tell him.

I have taken twelve strokes from that man without making a sound. Telling him the cane was finished was harder than any of it, and I still do not entirely understand why.

Some of it was being the one who brought bad news about an object I am supposed to be looking after. The rest of it is something I like less, which is that I did not want it to be over. It was the cane I had been caned with since 2019. It knew things.

He took it off me and looked at it and said, "Well found." Then he cut it in half over the bin, in the kitchen, in front of me, and it has occupied me more than I would like to admit.

The new one is paler and stiffer and I do not like it. I will.

The hairbrush leads a double life and is the worst of the four for it.

Oval, wooden, flat-backed. It lives in the drawer of the dressing table with the hairbands and the emery boards, and it does get used on my hair, which is the whole trouble with it. The tawse comes out of a box in a wardrobe and goes back into a box in a wardrobe. The hairbrush is in a drawer I open every morning of my life, four inches from my face, while I am being an ordinary woman getting ready for work.

On Sundays I run a thumb over the back of it for anything proud, and sand it if there is, and put the smallest amount of oil into the wood. Twelve minutes. Then it goes back in beside the emery boards, and on Tuesday at ten to seven I look straight at it with a mouthful of toothpaste.

My sister rang in the middle of it in February. I had the strap across my knee and the tin open, and I talked to her for twenty minutes about our mother's hip and whether the extension was going to get planning permission, and I did not stop working while I talked. My hands had the job and my mouth had the phone call and the two of them had nothing to do with each other.

She said, "You sound busy."

I said I was doing a bit of cleaning.

Which was true. That is the strange part. It was completely true.

They are his. That was decided at the start, in about four sentences, and I did not argue.

But he has never once cleaned one. He has never opened the tin. He does not know that the strap has a nick in the edge near the handle where it caught on something years ago, or that the tawse smells faintly of the balm for two days afterwards, or that the hairbrush wants sanding roughly twice a year while the cane wants little more than looking at.

He owns them and I know them. Neither of us would say that out loud and I would be embarrassed to try. It is the arrangement inside the arrangement, and it is mine.

Here is what the job actually does, and it took me three years to see it.

Nothing happens on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing has ever happened on a Sunday afternoon. We do Fridays, for dull practical reasons we worked out in the first month and have never had cause to change.

So I am sitting at a kitchen table in the light with an object in my hands that is going to be used on me at some point in the next few weeks. I do not know which one. I do not know when. He is twenty feet away reading about the cricket.

All four get the same care and only one or two of them will be picked up on a Friday, and by then it will be dark and I will not be thinking about grain or edges or a dull patch in the leather.

But I will know there is oil on it because I am the one who put the oil on it.

I cannot make that sound like anything. It is not a dramatic thought and there is no moment in it. It just sits in me for the rest of the afternoon like a stone in a shoe, and by about six I have stopped being much use for conversation, and he knows the signs by now and says nothing about it, which is as close to tenderness as this whole arrangement gets.

He came in for the kettle at four on that Sunday in March, the day of the split cane, and he did not look at the table. He never looks at the table. He filled the kettle and got two mugs down and said, "Is the tawse all right?"

Yes, I said. The tawse is fine.

"Good," he said, and took his tea back in.

Four words about a piece of leather, from a man who has not looked up from the sport. I sat there with my hands smelling of the tin and my ears going hot, and I could not have told you which part of that sentence did it.

At the end I fold the newspaper up with the dust inside it. Everything goes back into the box in the order it came out. The box goes to the bottom of the wardrobe under the spare duvet cover, and I wash my hands twice, because the balm does not come off easily and I am not spending the evening smelling of it.

Then the kettle goes on and the dishwasher gets emptied and it is a Sunday like every other Sunday. Four things upstairs in better condition than they were at two o'clock. And the tin back in the cupboard between the honey and the rice, where anybody could find it and nobody ever has.