Chapter 18: Small Repairs

Three months later, on a Saturday afternoon in late January, Marguerite Tinker sat at the counter of The Department of Impossible Repairs and fixed a watch that had stopped working because someone had dropped it in a sink.

The repair took four minutes. A new battery. A careful drying of the mechanism. The watch started ticking again with a small, satisfied sound, and Marguerite handed it back to its owner — a woman in her sixties who smiled and paid in exact change and left without asking for anything impossible.

It was, Marguerite thought, quite nice.

The shop looked different now. Cleaner, for one thing. The dust had been removed from the shelves, the windows had been washed, and the floor no longer creaked in quite so many places. The light that came through the front window was still amber-coloured, but it was brighter somehow, less like the light in a museum and more like the light in a place where people actually did things.

The shelves that had once held broken promises and lost courage and friendships gone wrong were now mostly empty. Marguerite had moved those objects — the impossible repairs, the gadgets, the things Grandmother had made in the years when she still knew who she was — to the back room. They sat there in careful rows, each one tagged and catalogued, locked behind a door that opened only to Marguerite's touch. She had not destroyed them. She had not thrown them away. They were part of the inheritance, after all, and you did not throw away an inheritance just because parts of it were difficult to love.

But she had not used them either. Not in three months.

The front room shelves now held ordinary things waiting for ordinary repairs. A teapot with a cracked spout. A violin that needed new strings. A clock whose hands had stopped at twenty past four. A lamp that flickered. A photograph frame with a broken hinge. The sort of repairs that could be fixed with patience and time and a small set of tools, and which cost nothing more than twenty minutes and a spot of concentration.

The sign above the door still read THE DEPARTMENT OF IMPOSSIBLE REPAIRS. Marguerite had thought about changing it, but Mr. Cog had said — in his precise, economical way — that the name was accurate. "People bring us impossible things all the time," he'd said. "A marriage that's falling apart. A child who won't speak to them. Grief that won't ease. We simply tell them the truth: we cannot fix that. But we can re-glue the mug they broke during the argument. And sometimes that is enough to start with."

The bell above the door made its questioning sound.

Marguerite looked up.

Pip Stitch stood in the doorway, wearing her school uniform and carrying a canvas bag that looked like it had been through a small war. Her extremely expressive eyebrows were doing something complicated that suggested she had strong opinions about whatever was in the bag.

"You're early," said Marguerite.

"Maths got cancelled," said Pip. "Mr. Fenton's got the flu. Again." She dropped the bag on the counter with a thump. "I brought biscuits. The good ones. Not the ones your dad buys that taste like cardboard."

"My dad's biscuits are fine."

"Your dad's biscuits are a crime against tea." Pip opened the bag and produced a packet of chocolate digestives, which she set on the counter with the air of someone laying down a winning hand of cards. "Where's Mr. Cog?"

"Stockroom. Cataloguing."

"Is that what he calls standing very still and thinking about the nature of existence?"

"Probably."

Pip grinned. She had the sort of grin that took up her whole face and made her look younger than eleven, though she would have been furious if anyone had said so. She climbed onto the stool behind the counter, the one Marguerite used when her feet got tired, and began opening the biscuits with the focused determination of someone who took refreshments seriously.

Their friendship, Marguerite thought, was better now. Not perfect. Not glued to some impossible peak of nine-year-old closeness. But real, which turned out to be more important. They argued about music — Pip liked bands Marguerite had never heard of, and Marguerite liked silence, which Pip said was not actually music. They did homework together on Saturdays, though Pip was better at English and Marguerite was better at science, and both of them were rubbish at French. They had stopped trying to be what they had been and started being what they were, which was two eleven-year-olds who liked each other for reasons that didn't require a gadget to explain.

The Friendship Glue sat in the back room, in a jar on a shelf, unused.

"So," said Pip, through a mouthful of biscuit. "What've we got today?"

Marguerite consulted the ledger — a new one, smaller than Grandmother's, with pages that were still mostly blank. "Three repairs. The watch, which I've done. A music box that doesn't play anymore. And Mrs. Chen's reading glasses, which need the arm reattached."

"Is the music box the one that old bloke brought in on Thursday?"

"Yes."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Spring's come loose. Should be fixable."

Pip nodded, satisfied. She liked the mechanical repairs best, the ones where you could see exactly what had gone wrong and exactly how to fix it. She was good with her hands, patient in a way Marguerite was still learning to be, and she had started coming to the shop on Saturdays not because the Friendship Glue had stuck them together but because she wanted to.

That, Marguerite had discovered, made all the difference.

The bell rang again.

This time it was Tom Dredge.

He looked different than he had three months ago. Taller, though that might have been Marguerite's imagination. He stood straighter, certainly, and when he came into the shop he met Marguerite's eyes instead of looking at the floor. He was carrying a bicycle chain in one hand, rusty and tangled, and he set it on the counter with a grimace.

"It's a mess," he said. "Can you fix it?"

"Probably." Marguerite picked up the chain, turned it over, assessed the damage. "It'll need a clean and some oil. Maybe twenty minutes."

"Brilliant. Thanks." Tom shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the way people did when they had something to say but weren't sure how to begin. Then: "I talked to my dad. About the thing I needed to say. The thing I didn't have the courage for."

Marguerite set the chain down carefully. "How did it go?"

"Badly," said Tom. "He got angry. We had a row. It was awful." He paused. "But I said it. And he heard it. And yesterday he apologized. So." He shrugged, the sort of shrug that tried to make something enormous seem small. "It's getting better. Slowly."

"That's good," said Marguerite.

"Yeah." Tom looked around the shop, at the neat shelves and the clean windows and the ordinary broken things waiting to be fixed. "The shop looks different."

"We're doing small repairs now," said Pip, who had been listening with interest whilst eating her third biscuit. "Marguerite's given up on impossible things."

"Not given up," said Marguerite. "Just... postponed."

Tom nodded as though this made perfect sense, which it probably didn't, but he was twelve and had learned that some things didn't require understanding, just acceptance. "Right. Well. I'll come back for the chain later, yeah?"

"Four o'clock," said Marguerite.

"Cheers."

He left, the bell making its sound behind him, and Pip looked at Marguerite with an expression that was trying very hard not to be smug.

"He found his courage the long way," she said.

"He did," agreed Marguerite.

"No thermometer required."

"No."

"Almost," said Pip, "as though people can do difficult things without magical gadgets."

Marguerite threw a balled-up receipt at her. Pip caught it, still grinning, and threw it back.

The afternoon passed the way Saturday afternoons did — slowly, comfortably, with tea and biscuits and the small, focused work of fixing things that could be fixed. Marguerite cleaned and oiled Tom's bicycle chain. She reattached the arm on Mrs. Chen's reading glasses using a tiny screwdriver and a great deal of patience. Mr. Cog emerged from the stockroom, took one look at the empty biscuit packet, and made more tea with the resigned air of someone who had made a great deal of tea in his life and would make a great deal more.

At half past three, the bell rang again.

An elderly man came in, holding a wooden music box in both hands as though it were made of glass. He set it on the counter very gently.

"It doesn't play anymore," he said. "It used to play a waltz. My wife's favourite. But it's been silent for two years now, and I—" He stopped. Cleared his throat. "I'd like it to play again. If that's possible."

Marguerite opened the music box carefully. The mechanism inside was delicate, brass and pins and a cylinder etched with tiny bumps that should have plucked the comb as it turned. She could see the problem immediately: one of the springs had come loose from its housing. Not broken. Just displaced.

"I can fix it," she said.

"How much will it cost?" the man asked.

Marguerite thought about this. Three months ago, she would have said: a piece of certainty you'll never get back. She would have fixed it with a gadget that worked perfectly and charged a price no one should have to pay.

"Five pounds," she said. "And twenty minutes."

The man let out a breath that sounded like relief. "That's very reasonable."

"It's a small repair," said Marguerite.

She took the music box to the workbench at the back of the counter — not the back room with its locked door and its impossible gadgets, just the ordinary workbench with its ordinary tools. Pip and Mr. Cog watched as she worked, using a pair of fine-tipped pliers to ease the spring back into place. It took longer than twenty minutes. Closer to thirty. But when she wound the key and opened the lid, the music box played.

A waltz. Slightly tinny, slightly hesitant, but unmistakably a waltz.

The elderly man's face did something complicated. He did not cry, but his eyes went very bright, and when Marguerite handed him the music box he held it the way you might hold something you thought you'd lost forever.

"Thank you," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word.

"You're welcome."

He paid in cash, exact change plus an extra pound that he insisted was for doing such careful work, and left with the music box tucked under his arm, still playing its slightly tinny waltz.

When he was gone, Mr. Cog opened the new ledger — the small one, the one for ordinary repairs — and wrote in his precise, economical hand:

Music box. Spring displacement. Repaired.

Cost: thirty minutes, one pair of pliers, and a spot of patience.

He closed the ledger and looked at Marguerite.

"That," he said, "is a proper repair."

"It's not impossible, though," said Pip. "It's just ordinary."

"Ordinary repairs," said Mr. Cog, "are the most impossible of all. Because they require you to accept that some things can be fixed without magic. And magic—" He gestured towards the back room with its locked door and its waiting gadgets. "—is often easier to believe in than patience."

Marguerite thought about this whilst she cleaned the pliers and put them back in their place on the workbench. She thought about Grandmother, who had spent fifty years fixing impossible things and paid with pieces of herself until there was nothing left. She thought about the Promise-Mending Needle and the Apology Amplifier and the Courage Thermometer and the Friendship Glue and the Memory Tape and the Trust Compass and the Regret Eraser and the Time-Wound Eraser, all of them sitting in the back room, all of them working perfectly, all of them solving the wrong problem.

She thought about the music box, fixed with pliers and patience, playing its waltz in the hands of a man who had waited two years to hear it again.

"Mr. Cog," she said.

"Yes?"

"Do you think Grandmother would be angry? That I'm not using the gadgets?"

Mr. Cog was quiet for a moment. Then: "I think your grandmother would be proud. She built the gadgets because she wanted to help people. But by the end, she understood that helping people and fixing their problems are not always the same thing. The gadgets fixed problems. You—" He gestured at the ledger, at the repaired music box, at the ordinary shop full of ordinary repairs. "—you help people."

"That's a bit grand," said Marguerite.

"Nevertheless," said Mr. Cog, "it's true."

Pip, who had been quiet for an unusually long time, said: "What happens to the gadgets? If you never use them?"

"They stay in the back room," said Marguerite. "Locked away."

"Forever?"

"I don't know. Maybe." Marguerite thought about the Time-Wound Eraser, warm and waiting in its drawer. "Maybe one day I'll need them. Or maybe I'll never use them. But they're part of what Grandmother left me, and I can't throw away part of an inheritance just because it's difficult."

"Even the scary parts?" asked Pip.

"Especially the scary parts."

Pip nodded, satisfied. She had a gift for accepting things that made no sense, which Marguerite envied.

At five o'clock, Marguerite turned the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. Mr. Cog locked the till, counted the day's takings — not much, but enough — and retreated to his small flat above the stockroom, where he lived a life that seemed to consist entirely of reading extremely old books and drinking tea at precise intervals.

Pip packed up her school bag, gave Marguerite a hug that was quick and slightly awkward but entirely real, and left to catch the Tube home to Walthamstow, where her mum was making curry and had threatened to start without her if she was late.

Marguerite stood alone in the shop.

She walked slowly along the shelves, looking at the objects waiting for repair. A china shepherdess missing her arm. A photograph album with a broken spine. A kettle with a faulty element. Small things. Ordinary things. Things that could be fixed without costing pieces of herself.

On the counter sat three envelopes that had arrived that morning.

The first was from Mrs. Bellamy Firth. Inside was a Christmas card — late, but Mrs. Firth had never been good with dates — and a short note written in shaky handwriting. My son came for Christmas. He stayed four days. We talked. Really talked. He's coming back for Easter. Thank you for everything.

There was no mention of the Promise-Mending Needle. Mrs. Firth's son had come not because a magical repair had forced him but because his mother had written him a letter, a real one, in her own hand, telling him she missed him. He had come because she asked.

The second envelope was a postcard. No return address. Just three words in careful, sloping handwriting:

I remember. Thank you.

It was unsigned, but Marguerite knew who had sent it.

Aldous Gripe had his grief back. Marguerite had reversed the Regret Eraser three months ago, at a cost she still felt — she could not remember, with any certainty, whether her father loved her, though she trusted that he did, which turned out to be close enough. Gripe had wept when the regret returned, from grief and relief and the overwhelming weight of remembering. But he had also thanked her. Because grief, he said, was proof. And proof was worth carrying.

The postcard sat on the counter, three words that meant everything.

The third envelope was from her father. Inside was a cheque for three hundred pounds — his contribution to the shop's running costs, he said, though they both knew it was his way of saying he was proud of her without having to use the actual words, which would have required an emotional vocabulary he did not possess.

Marguerite put the envelopes in the drawer beneath the till, next to the ledger and the jar of pens and the small brass key that opened the back room door.

She put on her coat — navy blue, slightly too big, bought from a charity shop in November because her old one no longer fit. She checked that the back room was locked. She turned off the lights, except for the small lamp in the window that Mr. Cog insisted must stay on always, because a dark shop, he said, was a sad shop, and there was enough sadness in the world without adding to it.

She stepped out onto Puddling Lane.

The evening was cold and clear, the sky above London turning from grey to indigo, the first stars beginning to appear in the spaces between clouds. The Monument rose in the distance, keeping watch the way it always had, and the city hummed with the quiet sound of people going home.

Marguerite locked the shop door behind her.

The key was warm in her hand, the way it always was, as though someone had been holding it just a moment before.

She walked down Puddling Lane towards the Tube station, past the shuttered accountancy office and the narrow alley used mostly by delivery vans and pigeons, past the bricked-up window and the door that led nowhere. The street was the same as it had been three months ago, and six months ago, and probably six decades ago. Narrow. Quiet. Slightly off most maps. The sort of place you found only when you were looking for it.

Or when it was looking for you.

Marguerite passed a woman walking a very small dog.

She passed a man carrying a violin case.

She passed a shop selling keys, which seemed ironic, and a shop selling nothing at all, which was either very honest or very sad.

She thought about Grandmother, who had given away everything to save a granddaughter she would never remember. She thought about Mr. Cog, who had stayed in the shop for twelve years waiting for someone to inherit it. She thought about Pip and Tom and Mrs. Firth and Gripe, all of them finding their own ways to repair the things that mattered without magic, without shortcuts, without gadgets that worked perfectly and cost too much.

She thought about the music box, playing its slightly tinny waltz.

She thought about the ledger entry: Cost: thirty minutes and a spot of patience.

She thought about the impossible gadgets locked in the back room, waiting. She did not know if she would ever use them. She did not know if keeping them was wise or foolish. But they were hers, part of the inheritance, and she had learned that you could carry difficult things without being crushed by them.

You just had to know what you were carrying.

And why.

Marguerite reached the Tube station and stopped.

She turned and looked back down Puddling Lane, at the narrow alley disappearing into shadow, at the amber light glowing in the window of The Department of Impossible Repairs.

She had lost a great many certainties in the past three months. Small ones and large ones. Whether she liked tea. Whether she was brave. Whether her father loved her. Whether her grandmother had made the right choice. She would never get those certainties back, not completely, and some days that frightened her more than she wanted to admit.

But she was certain of some things.

She was certain that ordinary repairs were harder than impossible ones, because they required patience instead of magic.

She was certain that Pip's friendship was better un-glued.

She was certain that grief was proof of love, and that proof was worth carrying.

She was certain that Grandmother's final words — worth it — were true.

She was certain that Mr. Cog made terrible tea, but that drinking it mattered anyway.

She was certain that she would open the shop again on Monday morning, and that someone would bring in something broken, and that she would try to fix it the ordinary way first.

And if the ordinary way didn't work?

Well.

The impossible gadgets would still be there, locked in the back room, patient and waiting. She might use them one day. Or she might not. But knowing she could — knowing she had the choice — made the weight of the inheritance lighter.

Marguerite walked down the steps into the Tube station.

The city folded around her, vast and ordinary and full of broken things that might be fixed and impossible things that might not, and she stepped onto the platform with her hands in her pockets and her heart neither heavy nor light but somewhere in between, which was, she thought, exactly where hearts were meant to be.

The train arrived.

She got on.

The doors closed.

And Marguerite Tinker, eleven years old, keeper of impossible repairs and ordinary ones, traveled home through the dark tunnels beneath London, certain — not of everything, but of enough.