The shop opposite

Text 1: All Things Mended, by Colin Ashby-Rae

An original novel extract.

The shop opposite had been empty for as long as Billy could remember. Its window was whitewashed from the inside, and somebody had written CLOSED in the whitewash with a finger years ago, and the letters had run, so that the word seemed to be slowly weeping down the glass.

Then, one Monday in October, a van pulled up outside it.

Billy watched from the counter of his father’s newsagent. The man who got out of the van was very tall and very thin and wore a long black coat that came almost to his ankles. He did not look up and down the street the way people did when they arrived somewhere new. He simply unlocked the shop, as though he had done it every day of his life, and went inside, and shut the door.

For a week nothing happened that anyone could see. Boxes were carried in, long flat ones and small square ones, all wrapped in brown paper and string. At night a faint gold glow burned behind the whitewash, and sometimes the shadow of the man passed across it, enormous and bent, like the shadow of a heron.

The street talked about nothing else. Mrs Pike from the bakery said he was a foreigner. Mr Ross from the butcher’s said he was a criminal, lying low. Billy’s father said he was probably just a man who liked his own company, and that this was not yet a crime, more’s the pity, and told Billy to get on with the papers.

On the Saturday morning, the whitewash was gone.

Billy saw it first, because he was opening the shutters. The window opposite was clean and sparkling and full of clocks. Dozens of them. Tall clocks and tiny clocks, clocks with brass faces and painted faces, clocks shaped like houses and owls and ships. Their pendulums swung in the morning light, all at slightly different speeds, so that the window seemed to shimmer with movement. And in the middle of them, sitting very upright at a little bench with a glass screwed into his eye, was the tall man, bent over something tiny and golden in his long fingers.

He looked up. Across the street, through two panes of glass, he caught Billy staring. Billy waited for a frown. Instead the man reached into the window, turned round a small card propped against the glass, and went back to his work. The card said OPEN, and underneath, in careful copperplate: Repairs. All Things Mended.

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