The Cost Of Everything
Chapter 16: The Cost of Everything
Mr. Cog had asked Marguerite if the Regret Eraser could be reversed, and she had said she didn't know.
This was not entirely true.
She knew. She had known since the morning after Gripe walked out into the rain with his heart light and his memory empty, when she'd gone down to the back room and found the eraser still sitting on the desk, pink and ordinary and terrible. She had picked it up — not because she wanted to, but because not picking it up felt like cowardice — and held it in her palm whilst the weak grey light filtered through the window.
The moment her fingers closed around it, she had known.
The knowledge had arrived the way knowledge sometimes did in the shop: not as words or instructions but as a deep, bone-certain understanding, the same way you knew which way was up even in the dark. The eraser could be reversed. The regret could be restored. But the cost — the cost would be Marguerite's, and it would be large.
She had set the eraser down very carefully and told Mr. Cog she didn't know, which was easier than saying what she suspected: that she was going to do it anyway.
It took her three days to find Aldous Gripe.
He was not difficult to locate, in the end. A man who wandered through the city with no particular destination tended to follow certain patterns — bus shelters when it rained, cafés when he grew hungry, benches in squares when the weather was fine. Mr. Cog had made discreet enquiries. A friend of a friend who worked at St. Pancras had seen him. A café owner near King's Cross had served him tea twice. A woman who ran a charity shop in Bloomsbury said a tall, thin man in a coat with many pockets had spent an hour looking at the books and left without buying anything.
Marguerite found him on a Thursday afternoon, sitting on a bench in Russell Square, watching the pigeons with mild, empty interest.
"Mr. Gripe," she said, and sat down beside him before her nerve could fail her.
He looked up, squinting slightly against the pale March sun. "Hullo," he said politely. "Have we met?"
"Yes," said Marguerite. "We have."
"Ah." He nodded, accepting this. "I'm sorry, I don't remember. I don't seem to remember very much these days. Are we friends?"
Something tightened in Marguerite's chest. "Not exactly," she said. "But I think we might have been. In a different sort of way."
Gripe smiled, that kind, terrible, empty smile. "That's nice," he said. "I expect I could use a friend. I seem to have rather a lot of time and not much to fill it with."
Marguerite reached into her coat pocket and withdrew the Regret Eraser. She had wrapped it in tissue paper, the way you might wrap something fragile, though she knew perfectly well that the fragile thing was not the eraser.
"I need to ask you something," she said. "And I need you to answer honestly, even if you're not sure."
"All right," said Gripe. He looked at the tissue-wrapped bundle in her hand with curiosity but no recognition.
"Do you feel like something is missing?" Marguerite asked. "Not something you lost. Something that was taken. Something important."
Gripe considered this for a long moment. A pigeon hopped near his feet, pecking at something invisible, and he watched it with the sort of attention people gave to things when they had nothing more pressing to occupy their minds.
"Yes," he said finally. "I suppose I do. Though I couldn't tell you what it is." He frowned slightly. "It's rather like walking into a room and forgetting why you came. Except the room is my life, and I've forgotten why I'm in it."
"I can give it back," Marguerite said. "The thing that's missing. But—" She swallowed hard. "But I need you to understand that it's going to hurt. Very badly. And I can't promise that having it back will be better than not having it."
Gripe turned to look at her properly for the first time. His face was calm, untroubled, and Marguerite thought with a sick lurch that this was the face of a man who had nothing left to lose because he had already lost everything and didn't remember losing it.
"Will I know why I'm here?" he asked quietly. "If you give it back?"
"Yes," Marguerite said. "You'll know."
"Then I should like it back, please," said Gripe. "Even if it hurts. I've been hurting anyway, you see. Just — differently. Like a tooth that's been removed. The pain is gone, but so is the tooth, and your tongue keeps going to the space where it used to be, and the space is worse than the ache ever was."
Marguerite unwrapped the eraser.
"All right," she said. "But I need you to do something for me first."
"What's that?"
"When you remember," Marguerite said, and her voice shook only slightly, "when you remember everything — I need you to promise me you won't use the shop again. Not for this. Not for anything. I need you to promise me you'll carry it."
Gripe looked at her with those calm, empty eyes. "I don't know what I'm promising," he said. "But if it matters to you, then yes. I promise."
It would have to be enough.
The reversal was simpler than Marguerite had expected, which was how she knew it was going to be terrible.
She held the eraser in her right hand and placed her left hand on Gripe's shoulder. He sat very still, watching her with polite confusion. The pigeons scattered as a child ran past, shrieking with laughter, and somewhere nearby a busker was playing something that might have been Vivaldi, badly.
Marguerite closed her eyes and thought, very clearly and very deliberately: Give it back. Give him back what was taken.
The eraser grew warm in her hand. Then hot. Then burning, though when she looked down, there was no flame, no smoke, just a small pink eraser that was rapidly growing hotter and hotter until she could barely hold it. She gritted her teeth and held on.
And then, quite suddenly, the eraser crumbled to dust.
It happened all at once — the pink rubber disintegrating in her palm like sand, like ash, like something that had been holding a shape for far too long and could not hold it any longer. The dust slipped between her fingers and fell to the ground, where it was caught by a gust of wind and scattered across the square.
Marguerite looked at her empty palm. Then she looked at Gripe.
His face had changed.
It was the mirror of what had happened in the shop three nights ago, only reversed. The softness around his mouth tightened. The smooth brow furrowed. His shoulders, which had been relaxed and easy, curled inward as though bracing against a blow. He took a breath — a sharp, ragged breath that caught halfway through — and his eyes, which had been calm and empty, filled with something that looked like pain and recognition and terrible, overwhelming clarity.
"Oh," he whispered. "Oh, no."
And then he began to weep.
Marguerite had seen people cry before. She had cried herself, more than once in the past few weeks, usually late at night when Mr. Cog was asleep and the shop was dark and quiet. But she had never seen anyone cry the way Aldous Gripe cried.
It was not loud. It was not dramatic. It was the sort of crying that came from somewhere very deep, the sort that had been locked away for so long that when it finally escaped, it brought everything with it — fourteen years of grief, of guilt, of love that had nowhere to go and no one to receive it. He pressed his hands to his face and wept, and Marguerite sat beside him on the bench and did not touch him and did not speak.
The cost hit her whilst he was still crying.
It arrived without warning, the way a migraine sometimes did — a sudden, vertiginous sense of absence, as though someone had reached into her chest and removed something essential. She gripped the edge of the bench and tried to steady herself, but the world tilted anyway.
Her father.
She could not remember whether her father loved her.
She knew he existed. She knew his name — Richard Tinker — and she knew he was her father. She knew he lived in Manchester and worked in IT and had come to London with her when the solicitor's letter arrived. She knew all these things the way you knew facts from a textbook, true but distant.
But the warmth — the bone-deep certainty that he loved her, that he would answer when she called, that he thought about her when she wasn't there — all of it was gone.
She tried to reach for it, the way you might reach for a word that had slipped your mind, but there was only a hollow space where the certainty should have been. She thought about the phone calls he made every evening. She thought about the way he had driven her to Puddling Lane without complaint, even though he didn't understand the shop and found Mr. Cog's precise manners faintly alarming. She thought about the sandwiches he made for her — too much butter, never enough filling — and the way he always checked twice that she had her keys before leaving the house.
She looked at the evidence and tried to believe it meant what she hoped it meant.
But belief, it turned out, was not the same as certainty.
Belief was harder.
"I remember," Gripe was saying, his voice thick and broken. "I remember her. Eleanor. Her name was Eleanor. We met at a conference. She hated conferences. She said they were full of people who talked too much and listened too little, but she came anyway because—" He stopped, swallowing hard. "Because I asked her to. And I remember the accident. And I remember not being there. I remember—" His voice cracked. "I remember everything."
Marguerite's hands were shaking. She folded them in her lap and tried very hard to focus on Gripe and not on the enormous, terrible absence that had opened up inside her chest.
"I'm sorry," she managed.
Gripe lowered his hands from his face. His eyes were red-rimmed and wet, and when he looked at Marguerite, there was something in his expression that had not been there before — recognition, gratitude, and a grief so profound it seemed to have weight.
"Don't be," he said hoarsely. "Don't be sorry. You've given her back to me. Not — not her, I know that. I'm not a fool. But the memory of her. The truth of her. For three days I've been walking around this city feeling like I'd lost something and not knowing what it was, and it was worse than grief, do you understand? It was worse than anything I've ever felt, because grief at least has a shape. This was just — emptiness. A room with no furniture. A book with no words."
He wiped his face with the back of his hand, a gesture so ordinary and human that Marguerite felt something twist in her chest.
"She was real," he said quietly. "Eleanor was real. And I loved her. And she died, and I wasn't there, and I will regret that for the rest of my life. But the regret—" He stopped, searching for the words. "The regret is the proof that it mattered. That she mattered. Do you see?"
Marguerite nodded, though she wasn't sure she could speak.
"Your grandmother," Gripe said, and his voice was steady now, steadier than it had been in years, "was right. She told me the cost was too high. I didn't believe her. I thought no cost was too high if it meant I could have Eleanor back, or at least stop feeling this—" He gestured helplessly at his chest. "But she understood something I didn't. She understood that the pain is part of the love. You can't remove one without removing the other."
He looked at Marguerite, really looked at her, and for the first time since she had met him, she saw a man who was present, whole, devastatingly sad but alive in a way he had not been when his grief was gone.
"Don't use the Eraser," he said. "Not for me. Not for anyone. And don't—" He paused. "Don't let anyone use the Time-Wound Eraser either. Whatever it costs. Whatever it promises. Some wounds are meant to be carried, not erased."
"I know," Marguerite whispered.
"Do you?" Gripe smiled slightly, a sad, knowing smile. "I hope you do. I hope you never have to learn it the way I did."
He stood slowly, joints creaking, and looked around the square as though seeing it for the first time. The pigeons had returned. The busker was still playing Vivaldi, still badly. The world had not changed, but Aldous Gripe had, and Marguerite could see it in the way he stood — not like a man pursuing something, but like a man carrying something. And carrying, she thought, was not the same as being crushed.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "For giving her back to me. Even though it hurts."
"I'm sorry it had to hurt," Marguerite said.
"I'm not," said Gripe. "Not anymore."
He walked away across the square, moving slowly, his coat with its many pockets flapping slightly in the breeze. Marguerite watched him until he disappeared into the crowd near the Tube station, and then she sat alone on the bench and tried very hard not to think about her father and whether he loved her and how she was supposed to live without being certain.
She lasted approximately four minutes before she started to cry.
She cried the way eleven-year-olds cry, which is to say messily and loudly and without any regard for the people walking past or the pigeons scattering or the busker who had mercifully stopped playing Vivaldi and was now attempting something that might have been Leonard Cohen. She cried until her throat hurt and her eyes stung and her chest ached, and when she finally stopped, it was only because she had run out of breath, not because she felt better.
She did not feel better.
She felt hollow and frightened and utterly, devastatingly uncertain of everything except this: she had given Aldous Gripe his grief back, and it had cost her the certainty of her father's love, and she did not know if that was a fair trade.
She did not know if anything was fair anymore.
After a while — she had no idea how long — she became aware of someone sitting down beside her on the bench. She looked up, expecting Mr. Cog, but it was not Mr. Cog.
It was Pip.
"Your Mr. Cog rang my mum," Pip said matter-of-factly. "Said you'd gone to Russell Square and might need a friend. So." She shrugged. "Here I am."
Marguerite tried to speak and found she couldn't.
Pip reached into her rucksack and withdrew a packet of tissues, slightly crumpled, and handed them to Marguerite. "You look terrible," she said. "No offence."
"None taken," Marguerite managed, and blew her nose, which was a deeply undignified process but marginally improved her ability to breathe.
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Pip said, very quietly: "What did it cost you? This time?"
Marguerite folded the tissue in her lap, very carefully, into smaller and smaller squares. "My dad," she said. "I can't remember whether he loves me."
Pip went very still. "What do you mean, you can't remember?"
"I mean I know he's my father. I know his name. I know facts about him. But I can't—" Marguerite's voice broke. "I can't feel it anymore. The certainty. The knowing. I have to look at the evidence and choose to believe it, and belief isn't the same as knowing, Pip. It isn't."
Pip was silent for a long moment. Then she said, in a voice that was surprisingly fierce: "He loves you."
"You don't know that."
"I do, actually," Pip said. "Because when Mr. Cog rang my mum, your dad was there. He came round to ask if we'd heard from you. He's been ringing Mr. Cog every three hours to make sure you're all right. He wanted to come to London himself, but Mr. Cog convinced him to wait, said you needed space. Your dad didn't want to wait. He wanted to get on a train right then." She looked at Marguerite with her extremely expressive eyebrows raised. "Does that sound like someone who doesn't love you?"
Marguerite tried to hold onto the words, to let them settle somewhere solid, but they kept slipping away like water through cupped hands. "I want to believe you," she whispered. "But I don't know if I can."
"Then don't believe me," Pip said. "Believe the evidence. Believe the phone calls and the sandwiches and the way he drove you to London even though he didn't understand any of it. Believe the facts." She paused. "That's what facts are for, you know. When you can't trust your feelings. You trust the things that are true whether you feel them or not."
It was, Marguerite thought, possibly the most sensible thing anyone had said to her in weeks.
"It's hard," she said.
"I expect it is," Pip agreed. "But hard isn't the same as impossible. You've been fixing impossible things for a month. I reckon you can manage hard."
Marguerite looked at her best friend — her real, imperfect, un-glued best friend — and felt something shift slightly in her chest. Not certainty. Not yet. But perhaps the beginning of it. The possibility.
"Thank you," she said.
"You're welcome," said Pip. "Though to be perfectly clear, I think you're mad. Giving that man his grief back. Losing your certainty about your dad. All of it." She paused. "But I also think you did the right thing. Which is probably why you're mad. The right thing usually is."
They sat together on the bench whilst the afternoon light slanted across Russell Square and the pigeons returned, cautious and hopeful, to investigate whether either of them had food. They did not. The pigeons left, disappointed, and Marguerite blew her nose again and tried to imagine a future in which she could believe her father loved her without needing to feel certain of it.
It was a strange sort of future. Uncertain and frightening and somehow, despite everything, not entirely terrible.
"Come on," Pip said eventually, standing and offering Marguerite her hand. "Mr. Cog said he'd make tea when you got back. And I don't know about you, but I could murder a biscuit."
Marguerite took her hand and let herself be pulled to her feet.
They walked back to Puddling Lane together, through streets that were beginning to fill with people leaving work, past shops closing for the day and cafés opening for the evening shift. The city moved around them, enormous and indifferent, and Marguerite thought about Aldous Gripe carrying his grief like a living thing, and Grandmother giving away her certainty so that Marguerite could live, and the Regret Eraser crumbling to dust in her palm.
She thought about costs and repairs and the difference between fixing something and making it right.
When they reached the shop, Mr. Cog was waiting at the counter. He took one look at Marguerite's face and said, very quietly: "Ah."
"I did it," Marguerite said.
"I know," said Mr. Cog.
"It worked."
"I expect it did."
"And the cost—" Her voice broke, and she could not finish.
Mr. Cog came around the counter and did something he had never done before: he put one small, precise hand on her shoulder and left it there, warm and steady and real.
"I know," he said again.
And then he made tea, because that was what one did when the world had tilted and everything hurt and there were no words adequate to the occasion. He made tea, and he set out biscuits (digestives, slightly stale), and he sat with Marguerite and Pip at the counter whilst the light faded on Puddling Lane and the shop settled into its evening quiet.
After a while, Marguerite said: "Mr. Cog?"
"Yes?"
"Can you tell me something true? About my father?"
Mr. Cog set down his cup and regarded her with his steady, careful gaze. "Your father," he said, "rings every evening at seven o'clock. He has not missed a single call in four weeks. He asks how you are. He asks if you are eating properly. He asks if you need anything. And when I tell him you are managing, he always says the same thing: 'Tell her I'm proud of her.' Every evening. Without fail."
Marguerite's hands tightened around her cup.
"He loves you," Mr. Cog said simply. "I cannot give you back the certainty of it. But I can give you the evidence. And the evidence, Marguerite, is overwhelming."
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Pip, who had been unusually quiet, said: "Your grandmother gave up everything to save you. Your dad rings every night to make sure you're all right. And you just gave a stranger back his grief because keeping it from him was worse than letting him suffer. If that's not love—" She shrugged. "Then I don't know what is."
The three of them sat in the gathering dark, drinking tea that was slightly too strong and eating biscuits that were slightly too stale, and outside the rain began to fall softly on Puddling Lane. Marguerite listened to it and thought about faith and evidence and the difference between knowing something and choosing to believe it.
She still could not feel certain that her father loved her.
But she could look at the facts — the phone calls, the visits, Mr. Cog's steady testimony, Pip's fierce conviction — and choose to believe they meant what she hoped they meant.
It was not the same as certainty.
But perhaps, Marguerite thought, it was enough.