Chapter 16 The Yard Sale

Dev had a sale on the Saturday in June because he does one every year and clears the sheds, and it is a fixture of the calendar in Anderry in the way that a fair is, and about ninety people came, and I stood at the back of shed two for two hours holding a coffee and talking to a man from the boat club about antifouling, and I did not go near the bench. The bench was the one at the north end with Bram's vice on it, and the vice was not for sale and could not be sold, and the rest of it was on a sheet of tarpaulin in four rows. I want to describe the sale itself because I have never described a yard sale in my life and I found it genuinely beautiful, and because at the time I thought I was hiding. Dev is fifty-eight and cannot be told anything. He stood in the middle of shed two with a ledger and a pencil and conducted the whole afternoon like a man settling a series of small disputes, and nobody argued with him about a price, and nobody ever does, because he has been doing it since 1994 and it is his shed and his ground. There was a man who wanted a hand plane, a Stanley No. 4, and it was a good one, and it was a quarter worn at the toe, which is the correct amount of wear for a plane that has been used and sharpened and used again, and Dev priced it at eight pounds, and the man said, "That's a plane, that is," and Dev said, "It's a plane," and the man bought it for eight pounds and then stood in the middle of shed two holding it and looking at it for a full minute with an expression I recognised completely and could not have named. That was most of the morning. Nine hundred hand tools, some of which are worth nothing, all of which are worth something to somebody, and the whole thing is a man handing a stranger a piece of a life for eight pounds and both of them pretending it is a transaction. I have never told anyone this, so I am writing it down: I stood at the back of that shed for two hours and I watched about forty people do the thing I have wanted to do for four years, which is to say a true thing to a stranger and be met halfway, and every single one of them managed it, and it took them four minutes, and not one of them managed it in a car park in the rain, and I do not blame them, and I want it recorded that I do not blame them. I was in the doorway at half past one when Jonah came in, and he had a carrier bag, and I had not seen him since the Tuesday. He looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us said anything, and he came over and stood beside me, and we watched Dev sell a set of gauges for two pounds, and it was the most comfortable three minutes of my adult life. Then he said, "Did you come to look at the vice?" "No." "You've come to look at the vice," said Jonah. "That's fine. Everyone comes to look at the vice. Everyone who knows anything looks at the vice and then looks at me and then doesn't say anything, and that's fine, it's a vice, it's got my father's name on the side of the base." "It's got nothing on it," I said. "It's got nothing on it at all. You told me that. You said a key had been made for it and lost, not a name." "It hasn't got a name on it," Jonah agreed. "It hasn't. I've had it twenty-five years and it doesn't have a name on it, and I have never once been able to make myself put one, and I've thought about it every year in March, and every year I decide I'll do it in the summer, and this is the fourth summer." "Jonah—" "So I did it," he said, and put the carrier bag down on the bench, and took out a bottle of cold chisel, and a can of blue paint, and a brush, and looked at me, and I said, "You have got to be joking," and he said, "I have got a surveyor's eye for a job and I've had a whole winter to think about it." That is not a thing you can unpick. I watched him do it. He cleaned the casting with a rag and acetone, which took ten minutes, and then he set the letters out on a piece of card because he cannot do straight lines freehand, and he did it in one and a half inch transfers, and the letters are B, then P, and there is a space, and then the first one of the three, and he left a space for the third one. He painted B and P in two thin coats and it came out well, and it took forty minutes, and about twenty people watched him do it, and nobody said anything, and when he finished he held the bottle up so that the shed could see it, and somebody at the back said, "Bram." And Dev put his pencil down. He came over and looked at it for a long time, and he did not touch it, and then he said, "Your dad painted a boat with that vice." "I know." "He painted the blue one. The *Alder*." Dev was not looking at any of us. "That's the colour, that's my colour, and I've never had it on a bench before, and he mixed it in an old paint tin and he told me the recipe and I wrote it down and it's in the shed, in the book, on the page with the engine bearings." He looked up. "I'll put it on the tool board tomorrow. Not the vice. The tool board. That's a different thing and I'll not have it moved." "All right," said Jonah. "That's it, then. Back in a minute." And he went back to his sale. I have to write about the third letter, because I have not mentioned it and it is the reason I have not been able to sleep since the Saturday. He left a space. There is a B, there is a P, and there is a space where a third letter would go, and he left it about two inches wide, which is more than a letter takes, and he had not touched the brush after the two letters and the paint had gone on the rag. I said, "That's a long space." He said, "It's a two-inch space." "Jonah, that's a two-inch space. A letter is about one inch." "It's a two-inch space," said Jonah Pike, and put the brush in the tin, and screwed the lid on, and picked up the carrier bag and put it under the bench, and then stood there with his hands in his pockets, which is the posture of the entire species. Then he said, "Do you want to know what the third one is, or do you want to come and see the boat." I have thought about that for a week. I have thought about it every night. I have got a file in a flat in Anderry that is eleven sheets and a book and it has to go in an office in Derby by the end of the month, and the boat is on the hard with a ringwormed deck and a rot in the hull that is eleven points long and it is mine, entirely mine, because a man who was not allowed to own it any more bought it off him for a pound in a plastic wallet, and I do not know whether to be furious or whether that is the most generous thing anybody has ever done for me, and I have not been able to find the place in myself where those two things meet, and I have looked. "I want to see the boat," I said.