The Weight Of Certainty
Chapter 13: The Weight of Certainty
Marguerite kept a list.
Not a proper list, written down on paper where someone might find it and ask questions she did not know how to answer. This was a mental list, compiled in the grey hours before dawn when sleep had finished with her but morning had not yet begun. It went like this:
Things I Am No Longer Certain Of:
- Whether I prefer butter or jam on toast
- Whether my favourite colour is blue or green
- Whether I am good at maths or merely average
- Whether I am brave
- Whether my grandmother loved me
- Whether I can trust my own judgment
The list grew longer every day. By Thursday it included whether she found penguin jokes funny. By Friday it included whether she liked school. By Saturday — which was today, three weeks after she had opened the ledger and read the words Worth it — the list had grown so long that she had stopped adding to it and started, instead, to make a different list.
Things I Am Still Certain Of:
This list was shorter.
Much shorter.
So short, in fact, that Marguerite could not currently think of a single item to put on it.
She sat at the counter of the Department of Impossible Repairs and stared at the surface of the wood. There was a knot in the grain shaped like an eye, or possibly a keyhole. She had looked at it every day for three weeks and could not, now that she thought about it, remember which interpretation she had decided on.
Mr. Cog was writing in the ledger. The scratch of his fountain pen was the only sound in the shop. It was the sort of sound that ought to be comforting — repetitive, methodical, proof that the world continued to operate according to reliable principles — but Marguerite found that she was no longer certain whether she found it comforting or irritating.
She suspected she was becoming the sort of person who was no longer certain of anything.
She suspected, further, that this was precisely what had happened to her grandmother.
The shop bell rang.
Marguerite looked up. Pip stood in the doorway.
She was wearing a coat that might have been red or might have been orange — Marguerite genuinely could not decide — and her hair was coming loose from its plaits in that way that suggested she had been running. Her face had the careful blankness of someone who had practised what they were going to say and was now trying to remember it.
"Hallo," Pip said.
"Hallo," said Marguerite.
They looked at each other for a moment. The Friendship Glue had worn off two weeks ago. Since then they had been themselves again — not nine-year-old best friends frozen at their peak, but eleven-year-old former friends trying to work out whether they still liked each other. The answer, so far, seemed to be: probably, but it's complicated.
"I brought biscuits," Pip said, holding up a paper bag. "Custard creams. From the corner shop."
"That was kind," said Marguerite, which sounded wrong even as she said it, too formal, like something you would say to your grandmother's friend at a funeral. She tried again. "Thanks."
That was better. Marginally.
Pip came in and set the bag on the counter. She looked at Mr. Cog, who was pretending very hard not to be listening, and then back at Marguerite.
"Can we talk?" she said. "Properly, I mean."
Marguerite hesitated. Talking properly meant saying true things, and true things required certainty, which was precisely what she no longer had. But Pip was looking at her with the particular intensity of someone who has travelled all the way across London on a Saturday morning and is not leaving until they get answers, so Marguerite nodded.
"Back room?" she said.
"Back room," Pip agreed.
Mr. Cog cleared his throat. "I shall make tea," he said, and disappeared before either of them could tell him not to bother.
The back room was still full of gadgets. The Promise-Mending Needle. The Apology Amplifier. The Courage Thermometer with its crack running through the glass. The Memory Tape. The Trust Compass. The Regret Eraser in its drawer. And, locked in a separate drawer that Marguerite had not opened since the day she found it, the Time-Wound Eraser.
All of them waiting. All of them ready to work perfectly and solve the wrong problem.
Pip and Marguerite sat on the floor, backs against opposite shelves, the bag of custard creams between them. For a long time neither of them spoke. It was not the easy silence of friends. It was the harder, more honest silence of two people who had been glued back together wrong and were now trying to work out whether they could stick without help.
Pip opened the bag and took out a biscuit. She bit into it. Swallowed. Said, without looking at Marguerite: "You're getting worse."
"I'm fine," said Marguerite automatically.
"You're not." Pip turned the biscuit over in her hands. "Last week you couldn't remember if you liked school. Yesterday your dad said you stood in front of your wardrobe for ten minutes because you couldn't decide what to wear. Not because you couldn't decide what looked nice. Because you couldn't remember whether you were the sort of person who wore jumpers or the sort of person who wore hoodies."
Marguerite said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was all true.
"And just now," Pip continued, "when I came in, you didn't know whether to hug me or shake my hand or just nod. I could see you trying to work it out. Like you'd forgotten how to be friends with someone."
"I haven't forgotten," Marguerite said. Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. "I just don't know if I know anymore."
Pip set the biscuit down. "Is it the shop? The repairs?"
"Every time I use one of the gadgets," Marguerite said slowly, "I lose a piece of certainty. Something I was sure about. My grandmother did the same thing. For fifty years. Until she couldn't remember her own name."
"And you're doing it too."
"Yes."
"Why?"
It was a fair question. Marguerite had asked herself the same thing approximately four hundred times in the past three weeks.
"Because people need help," she said. "Because Grandmother built this place to fix impossible things, and if I don't use it, then what's the point? Why did she give everything away if I'm just going to lock the gadgets in a cupboard and let them gather dust?"
"Maybe there isn't a point," Pip said. "Maybe she made a mistake."
Marguerite looked at her, startled. In three weeks of thinking about the shop and the gadgets and the costs, it had not once occurred to her that her grandmother might have been wrong.
"She saved my life," she said.
"Yeah," said Pip. "And she lost herself doing it. And now you're losing yourself too. And for what? So Mrs. Firth's son can come to dinner and not remember why? So that shopkeeper can forgive everyone until she can't tell right from wrong anymore? So Tom Dredge can be brave on Monday and a coward on Tuesday?"
She picked up the biscuit again, looked at it, set it down again. "The gadgets work. I get that. But they don't actually fix anything. They just move the problem around."
Marguerite opened her mouth to argue. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I don't know what else to do," she said.
"You could stop."
"I don't think I can."
"Why not?"
Marguerite thought about the ledger. About the fifty years of entries in her grandmother's handwriting, growing shakier and more uncertain with each repair. About the final entry: Worth it. About the knowledge that her grandmother had given away everything so that Marguerite could live, and the terrible weight of that gift.
"Because if I stop," she said, "then Grandmother gave herself away for nothing. She saved me so I could run the shop. So I could help people. If I stop, then I'm wasting what she gave me."
Pip was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, very gently: "Or maybe she saved you so you could live. Not so you could do what she did. Just so you could be here. Be alive. Be yourself."
Marguerite felt something tighten in her throat.
"I don't know who I am anymore," she said. It came out as barely more than a whisper.
Pip looked at her. Really looked at her, in the way that only your oldest friend can look at you, seeing all the parts you've tried to hide.
"You're Marguerite," she said. "You're clever and you're serious and you think too much about everything and you get this little crease between your eyebrows when you're worried, like you're doing right now. You're good at listening and you're terrible at dancing and you once cried during a nature documentary about polar bears. You're my friend. You're you."
"But what if I'm not?" Marguerite said. "What if all those things — all the things that made me me — what if I've lost them? What if I've given them all away and there's nothing left?"
"Then I'll tell you who you are," Pip said simply. "Until you remember."
The tightness in Marguerite's throat was doing something complicated. Something that felt suspiciously like it might turn into crying, which she had been trying very hard not to do for the past three weeks.
"I'm scared," she said. It was the first completely true thing she had said to anyone in days, and saying it felt like setting down something very heavy that she had been carrying for a very long time.
"Yeah," said Pip. "I'd be scared too."
They sat in silence. Outside, London carried on with its Saturday. Somewhere a car horn honked. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere people were living ordinary lives that did not involve losing themselves piece by piece to pay for impossible repairs.
"The Friendship Glue," Marguerite said after a while. "Did you hate it? When it wore off?"
Pip thought about this. "No," she said. "I was relieved, actually. It was nice while it lasted — being nine again, thinking everything was simple. But we're not nine. We're eleven. And I'm not the same person I was at nine. Neither are you. The glue tried to hold us to who we were, but that's not friendship. Friendship is letting people change and choosing to stay anyway."
She picked up the biscuit again, broke it in half, offered one piece to Marguerite.
"We had a fight," she said. "Six months ago. We both said things we didn't mean. Then we stopped talking because we didn't know how to start again. That's normal. That's what people do. They mess up and they fix it, the slow way, by being honest and awkward and real." She paused. "The glue skipped all that. Made us best friends again without actually repairing anything. But this —" She gestured between them. "This is real. It's weird and it's hard and it's not perfect. But it's real."
Marguerite took the half-biscuit. She ate it. It was sweet and slightly stale and exactly what a custard cream should taste like.
"I've been thinking," Pip said, "about what you said. About not being able to stop. About owing your grandmother something."
"Yes?"
"You don't owe her becoming her," Pip said. "She gave you a future. Not her future. Yours. Maybe the best way to honour that is to actually use it. Not to repeat what she did. To do something different."
Marguerite stared at the custard cream in her hand.
"I don't know if I can," she said. "I don't know if I'm strong enough to stop."
"Then don't stop all at once," Pip said. "Just stop for today. Tomorrow you can decide again. And the day after that. You don't have to make one big decision. You can make lots of small ones."
It was such a Pip thing to say — practical and slightly bossy and exactly right. Marguerite felt the tightness in her throat again, but this time it did not feel like crying. It felt like something loosening. Like a door opening. Like the possibility of breathing.
Mr. Cog appeared in the doorway with two mugs of tea. He set them down without comment and disappeared again. The mugs were mismatched. One said LONDON: A GUIDE. The other had a picture of a cat wearing a crown.
"He's good at that," Pip said. "The tea thing. Very precise."
"He was my grandmother's friend," Marguerite said. "He kept the shop going after she left. Kept the ledger. Waited for someone to inherit it."
"He's your friend now too," Pip said. "You know that, right?"
Marguerite picked up the cat mug. The tea was too hot but she drank it anyway.
"I think," she said slowly, "I might be the thing that needs fixing."
Pip nodded. "Yeah. Probably."
"But I don't know how."
"Nobody does," Pip said. "That's the thing about being broken. You can't see the edges from the inside. You need someone else to help you. Not with a gadget. With the normal stuff. Time. Honesty. Someone who'll sit on the floor with you and tell you you're being an idiot but they're staying anyway."
She picked up her own mug — the LONDON: A GUIDE one — and blew on the tea to cool it.
"I'm not good at feelings," she said. "You know that. I'm better at maths and arguing and making lists. But I'm good at being stubborn. And I'm good at not leaving. So if you need someone to be stubborn and not leave, I can do that."
Marguerite looked at her. Pip was still Pip — blunt and practical and slightly awkward, with her plaits coming undone and a smudge of custard cream at the corner of her mouth. Not frozen at nine. Not glued to their strongest point. Just herself, here, now, offering something that no gadget could create.
"I'd like that," Marguerite said.
"Good," said Pip. "That's settled, then."
They drank their tea. It was too sweet. Mr. Cog had put sugar in both of them. Marguerite could not remember whether she took sugar. Pip pulled a face.
"Does he always do this?" Pip said. "The sugar thing?"
"I don't know," Marguerite said. "I can't remember whether I usually take sugar or not."
"That's all right," Pip said. "I'll remember for you. You don't take sugar. You think it makes tea taste like drinking a puddle."
"Do I?"
"You do. You said so last year when we had tea at my nan's."
Marguerite tried the tea again. It did, she thought, taste rather like drinking a puddle. That seemed like the sort of thing she would object to.
"Thank you," she said.
"That's what friends are for," Pip said. "Remembering your opinions when you've temporarily misplaced them."
She said it lightly, like a joke, but Marguerite understood what she was actually saying: I will hold these things for you. Until you can hold them yourself.
Outside, the day was grey and damp, the particular grey-damp of London in winter that makes everything look slightly smudged. But here in the back room, surrounded by impossible gadgets that worked perfectly and fixed nothing, Marguerite felt something she had not felt in weeks.
Not certainty. Not yet. But the possibility of certainty. The hope that one day she might be herself again, not because a gadget had repaired her but because someone had stayed with her while she remembered how to repair herself.
It was, she thought, rather a lot to get from a bag of custard creams and a conversation on a dusty floor.
But it was something.
And something, right now, was more than she'd had in a very long time.
They sat for another hour, drinking tea and eating biscuits and talking about nothing in particular. School. The weather. Whether pigeons were secretly very intelligent or secretly very stupid. The sort of conversation that does not matter at all except that it matters enormously, because it is the sort of conversation that friends have when they are not trying to fix each other, just trying to be together.
When Pip finally left — her mother was collecting her at Monument station at three — she paused in the doorway of the shop.
"You don't have to keep fixing things," she said.
"I know," said Marguerite.
"I'm serious. You don't have to use the gadgets. You don't have to help everyone who walks through that door. You can just close the shop. Or keep it open and only fix normal things. Watches. Teapots. China dogs with missing ears. There's no rule that says you have to repair impossible things."
Marguerite thought about this. "Grandmother did."
"Your grandmother," Pip said firmly, "is not you. She made her choices. You get to make yours."
She adjusted her rucksack on her shoulder. "I'll come back next Saturday. If you want."
"I want," said Marguerite.
"Good," said Pip. "And if you use another gadget before then, I'm going to be really annoyed with you. Just so you know."
"Noted," said Marguerite.
Pip left. The shop bell rang. The sound hung in the air for a moment and then faded.
Marguerite stood at the counter. Mr. Cog was writing in the ledger again. The scratch of his pen was steady and methodical and strangely comforting.
"Mr. Cog?" she said.
"Yes, Miss Tinker?"
"The list of things I've lost. The certainties. Will I ever get them back?"
Mr. Cog set down his pen. He looked at her with his dark, kind eyes.
"Some of them," he said. "The ones that matter, you will find again. The ones that don't matter, you will discover you never needed in the first place. And some of them will be replaced by new certainties — different from the old ones, but no less real."
"How do you know?"
"Because that," said Mr. Cog, "is what growing up is. You lose the certainties of childhood and replace them with the certainties of experience. The difference is that your grandmother's gadgets accelerated the process. What should have taken years took weeks. That is why it feels so violent."
He picked up his pen again. "But the principle remains the same. You are not losing yourself, Miss Tinker. You are discovering which parts of yourself are essential and which parts are negotiable. It is uncomfortable. It is meant to be."
Marguerite thought about this.
"That's not very comforting," she said.
"No," said Mr. Cog. "I don't suppose it is."
He returned to his ledger. Marguerite looked at the shop — the shelves of broken things, the amber light from the window, the bell hanging above the door. It was, she thought, less a shop than a question. And the question was: what are you willing to pay to fix things that might not be fixable?
She did not have an answer yet.
But she thought, perhaps, that not having an answer was all right. Pip had said she could decide tomorrow, and then the day after that, and the day after that. Small decisions instead of one big one.
Today's decision was this: she would not use a gadget. She would not perform a repair. She would sit in the shop and catalogue the broken things and drink tea with too much sugar and wait to see if certainty came back on its own.
It was not a grand decision. It was not a dramatic moment of moral courage. It was just a small, quiet choice to stop.
Just for today.
Tomorrow she would decide again.
Outside, London carried on with its Saturday. Inside, in the Department of Impossible Repairs, Marguerite Tinker sat at the counter and was, for the first time in weeks, certain of one thing:
She did not have to fix everything.
She did not even have to fix herself.
She just had to stop breaking long enough to see what was still whole.
It was, she thought, enough.
For now, anyway.