The Certainty Tax
Chapter 9: The Certainty Tax
Marguerite woke up on Tuesday morning and could not remember whether she liked school.
She had been going to the same school for six years. She knew the colour of the walls in the assembly hall (institutional beige). She knew which stair on the main staircase creaked (the fourth from the bottom). She knew that Mrs. Henderson in Year Four smelt faintly of peppermints and that Mr. Bradley in Year Six always had chalk dust on his left sleeve but never his right. She knew all of this. What she did not know — what she could not, no matter how hard she tried, actually remember — was whether she enjoyed any of it.
She sat at the breakfast table with her father, who was eating toast and reading something on his phone about server migrations, and tried to think about school. The effort was like trying to catch fog. She knew she was meant to feel something. She simply did not know what.
"You all right, love?" her father said, without looking up.
"Fine," said Marguerite, which was not entirely true but had the advantage of requiring no further explanation.
He nodded, satisfied, and returned to his screen. He was a man who fixed computers for a living and was consequently convinced that all problems could be solved by turning something off and on again. Marguerite suspected that her current difficulty was not the sort that would respond to rebooting.
She made herself a piece of toast and then stood in front of the cupboard for a full minute, trying to decide whether she wanted butter or jam. She could not remember. She had liked one or the other, very definitely, just a week ago — but which one? And why could she not recall?
In the end she spread Marmite on it, which at least had the benefit of tasting so aggressively of itself that it did not require an opinion.
By Wednesday, the problem had spread.
She was walking to the shop — it was becoming a habit now, this daily pilgrimage down Puddling Lane — and passed a woman selling flowers outside Monument station. The woman had buckets of roses: red, yellow, pink, white. Marguerite stopped.
"Lovely blooms, dear," the woman said hopefully.
"What colour are those?" Marguerite said, pointing at a bucket.
The woman blinked. "Blue, love. Well, sort of purple-blue. Delphiniums, those are."
Marguerite stared at them. She had always had a favourite colour. She knew she had. It had been blue. Or possibly green. She could not, at this exact moment, picture either colour clearly enough to decide which one she preferred. The delphiniums were very beautiful, but they did not stir anything in her that felt like preference.
"You feeling all right?" the woman said, leaning forward slightly.
"Yes," said Marguerite, which was becoming her automatic answer to most questions. "Thank you."
She walked on. Behind her, the flower-seller frowned and turned to her next customer.
Mr. Cog was sitting behind the counter when Marguerite arrived, as he always was, and was writing something in the ledger with a fountain pen that looked older than the shop itself.
"Good morning, Miss Tinker," he said, without looking up.
"Mr. Cog," said Marguerite, "may I ask you something?"
"You may ask," said Mr. Cog, which was not quite the same as saying he would answer.
"The costs," Marguerite said. "The things I've lost. My preference for toast. My favourite colour. Whether I'm good at maths. When do they come back?"
Mr. Cog set down his pen very carefully. He looked at her for a long moment, and his face — which was usually calm to the point of blankness — softened into something that might have been sympathy, or possibly regret.
"They don't," he said.
Marguerite sat down, rather more heavily than she had intended, on the stool beside the counter.
"Your grandmother," said Mr. Cog, after a pause, "asked me the same question. About sixteen years ago."
"And what did you tell her?"
"The truth," said Mr. Cog. "That certainty, once given, does not grow back. You can live without it — many people do, quite successfully — but you do not recover it. Not on your own."
"On your own," Marguerite repeated slowly. "You mean someone else could recover it for me?"
"In theory," said Mr. Cog. "Someone could perform a repair on your behalf. Restore your certainty. But they would pay the cost themselves. And the cost would be high."
He returned to the ledger and wrote something in his small, precise handwriting. Marguerite watched the nib of the pen scratch across the page.
"That's a trap, isn't it?" she said quietly.
"Yes," said Mr. Cog. "It is rather."
Pip came to visit on Thursday afternoon, which surprised Marguerite, because Pip had not said she was coming and Pip was not in the habit of doing things without announcing them first.
The Friendship Glue had worn off. Marguerite had woken up three days ago and realised, with something that was neither relief nor disappointment but a complicated mixture of both, that she and Pip were themselves again. Not nine years old. Not glued to the best version of a friendship that no longer quite fit. Just eleven, and awkward, and trying to find their way back to each other the long way round.
Pip stood in the doorway of the shop, hands shoved deep in the pockets of her coat, and said, "Your dad said you'd be here."
"I'm usually here," said Marguerite.
"Yeah, I know." Pip came in and looked around. "Still creepy."
"I've got used to it."
Pip picked up the nearest object — a china dog with one ear missing — and turned it over in her hands. "What's this one do, then? Make you love dogs forever? Turn you into a dog?"
"It's just a broken ornament," said Marguerite. "Most things in here are just broken."
Pip set the dog back down and looked at Marguerite properly for the first time. Her face changed.
"You all right?" she said.
"Fine," said Marguerite, which was her third lie of the week and the easiest one.
"You don't look fine."
"I'm just tired."
Pip crossed her arms. "You're doing that thing you do when you're lying. You look at the floor."
Marguerite looked up. "I'm not lying."
"Then why won't you look at me properly?"
It was a fair question, and Marguerite did not have a good answer for it. She tried to meet Pip's eyes and found, to her surprise, that it was difficult. Not because she was lying — or not only because she was lying — but because she was not entirely certain what expression her own face was making. Was she worried? Was she frightened? Was she something else entirely?
She did not know.
"I'm fine," she said again, which made it the fourth lie and also, somehow, the truest thing she had said all week.
They sat together in the back room, surrounded by the shelves of broken things, and drank tea that Mr. Cog had made without being asked. For a long time neither of them spoke. It was not the easy silence they had shared when they were nine and the Friendship Glue was holding them together. It was the harder, realer silence of two people who were trying to work out whether they still knew each other.
"You remember that joke?" Pip said suddenly. "The one about the penguin and the ice cream?"
Marguerite thought. "The one where the penguin goes to the mechanic?"
"Yeah, that one."
"What about it?"
"You used to laugh so hard at that joke you'd get hiccups," Pip said. "Every single time I told it. Even after you knew the punchline."
Marguerite tried to remember. She could picture Pip telling the joke — Pip always did the penguin voice, low and serious — and she could picture herself laughing. But she could not, quite, remember if the laughter had been real or if she had just been laughing because Pip expected her to.
"Yeah," she said. "I remember."
Pip told the joke.
Marguerite laughed.
And then, halfway through the laugh, she stopped. Because she did not know — she genuinely, truly did not know — whether she found the joke funny.
Pip's face went very still.
"What?" said Marguerite.
"You didn't used to do that," Pip said quietly.
"Do what?"
"Stop. Halfway through laughing. Like you'd forgotten what you were doing."
Marguerite opened her mouth to deny it, to say she was fine, to say she was just tired or distracted or thinking about something else. But the denial would require certainty, and certainty was precisely the thing she no longer had.
"I'm fine," she said instead.
Pip stared at her for a long moment. Then she set down her tea very carefully, the way you would set down something fragile, and said, "You're not. Something's wrong with you."
"Nothing's wrong with me."
"You can't even laugh at a joke properly."
"I can laugh."
"Not if you have to think about whether it's funny first."
The silence that followed was the worst kind — the kind where both people know the truth and neither wants to say it out loud.
"I'm fine," Marguerite said, for the fifth time that day.
Pip looked at her. Properly looked at her, in the way that only your best friend can look at you, the way that sees through all the fine and all the I'm just tired and all the nothing's wrong.
"No, you're not," Pip said. And then, very quietly: "And I don't know how to help you."
After Pip left, Marguerite sat alone in the shop and tried to make an inventory of what she had lost.
Her preference for butter or jam.
Her favourite colour.
Her confidence in maths — she had been good at it, she thought, or at least not bad, but now she could not remember whether she enjoyed it or merely tolerated it.
Whether she was brave. That one still frightened her.
Whether her grandmother had loved her. That one made her cry.
And now: whether she could trust her own judgment. Whether she was funny or serious. Whether she liked school. Whether she found jokes funny. Whether the face in the mirror was hers.
She stood up and walked to the small mirror that hung beside the coat rack. It was old and slightly tarnished, and the glass had a crack running through one corner. She looked at her reflection.
Brown hair. Brown eyes. A nose that was slightly too large for her face but would probably grow into it. Freckles across her cheeks, three on the left and four on the right. A face she had seen every day of her life.
For a fraction of a second — no more than that, just a heartbeat's worth of uncertainty — she wondered if it was actually her face at all.
The thought was so absurd that she almost laughed. Except that laughing required certainty, and she was not certain of anything anymore.
She stepped away from the mirror.
"Mr. Cog?" she said.
He appeared in the doorway, as he always did when she needed him, and waited.
"How much did my grandmother lose?" Marguerite asked. "In the end. How much certainty did she give away?"
Mr. Cog was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "All of it."
"All of it?"
"By the end," said Mr. Cog, "she could not remember her own name some mornings. She had given away everything — every certainty, every sureness, every small piece of herself — until there was nothing left but the act of repair itself. And even then, she kept working. Because the people who came to her needed help, and she was the only one who could provide it."
He paused, and then added, very gently: "You are not obligated to follow her example."
"What if I want to?"
"Then you will," said Mr. Cog. "And you will lose yourself in the process, as she did. And someone, someday, will inherit the shop and the ledger and the question of whether it was worth it."
Marguerite thought about that. She thought about Grandmother, writing Worth it in shaky handwriting on the day Marguerite was born. She thought about the costs she had already paid — the small, manageable losses that were adding up to something that was no longer small or manageable. She thought about Pip's face when she had stopped laughing. She thought about the mirror.
"I don't know if I can stop," she said.
"No," said Mr. Cog. "I don't suppose you can."
He returned to the counter and picked up his pen. The shop was quiet except for the scratch of nib on paper.
Marguerite sat down on the stool and tried, very hard, to remember whether she had always been the sort of person who sat on stools or whether she preferred chairs. She could not remember.
It was, she thought, less a loss than an erasure. As though someone were going through her life with a rubber and removing all the pencil marks that made her herself, leaving only the faint grey smudges behind.
Outside, the street lamps came on, and London carried on with its evening, and Marguerite sat in the shop surrounded by broken things and wondered whether she was becoming one of them.