There is a superstition about the thirteenth of the month, when it falls on a Friday, that the day is unlucky. I have never found this to be the case. The thirteenth is merely the day after the twelfth and the day before the fourteenth, and luck, in my experience, is a story we tell about events that were going to happen anyway.
What happened on the thirteenth of March was this.
A man of seventy-nine took the 8:14 bus from Millhaven. He carried a canvas bag and a magnifying loupe and a flask of tea. He climbed ninety-four steps. He lay on a stone floor and looked at a piece of brass the size of his thumb. He said: “She’s not broken. She’s tired.”
And somewhere in that sentence — in the pronoun, in the tenderness with which he applied it to a machine — the whole character of the city showed itself. We do not discard things in Bobington. We send for the man who understands them.
A ship tied up in the harbour this morning. Twenty-four days out of Thessara by the long way round. The captain said that twenty-four days is a conversation that goes on too long, and he would prefer eleven, which is the correct distance between two places that are not, in fact, at war.
The Havenport carried two hundred and twenty pounds of spice. There was a time, not long ago, when this would have been unremarkable — cargo, arriving at port, as cargo does. Now it is news. That it is news tells us something about how quickly we adjust to shortage, and how slowly we readjust to sufficiency.
The Eastern Spice Index fell to 304. One suspects that Mr Varga of Fernwich Trading House will find something cautionary to say about this, and one suspects he will be right, and one suspects it will not matter. The index falls. The ships arrive. The lamb shoulder returns to the menu. The conversation ends.
Seals. On the mudflats below Bramblegate Steps. Seven of them, or nine — the number depends on the tide and the counter. Harbour seals, not seen in the lower Ashwater since 1891, which was the year the river stopped being a river and became a drain.
A retired harbour pilot, sitting on a bench at half past six in the morning, saw grey shapes on the mud and thought someone had dumped something. Then one of them moved.
I find this unbearably hopeful. Not because seals are in themselves remarkable, but because they came back. They did not read the water quality reports. They did not consult the municipal survey. They tested the river with their whiskers and their bellies and they decided it was fit. And they stayed.
If the seals say the river is clean, I am inclined to believe them over any committee.
Tomorrow in Dunvale, a woman of eighty-one will lay white flowers at a sealed mine entrance. She has done this sixty-three times. She was eighteen when the roof fell.
Her son will drive. They will not say much. The heather will be pinned to the coat. The chrysanthemums will lean against the low stone wall. And this year, for the first time, there will be something new on the hillside — the foundations of a memorial that took fifty-eight years to approve.
I have nothing witty to say about this. I am not sure that wit is what Mrs Holloway requires. What she requires is that we notice. That on the fourteenth of March, every year, the earth remembers what it took, and a woman remembers what she lost, and the flowers are white, and the drive home passes through Greymoor village because Arthur liked the view.
The clock will be repaired. The ship has docked. The seals are sleeping on the mud. And in Edgeminster, the chrysanthemums are ready.
Friday the thirteenth. No luck required.