Tom

I have been playing chess for longer than chess has existed.

Before the board had sixty-four squares I played it on dirt, on stone, on the backs of things that no longer have names. I have never lost. Not because I am particularly gifted. I am not, if I am being honest, and honesty is one of the few luxuries left to me, but because every opponent I have ever faced has eventually had somewhere else to be.

I did not choose the name Tom. A child gave it to me once, in the way children sometimes see things adults have learned to look past. She called me Tom and I saw no reason to correct her. Names are strange things. They have weight. History baked into them like sediment.

Today I am sitting across a board from no one in particular, moving both sides, which is either the purest form of the game or an admission that I am lonely. I have not decided which.

Outside, if outside means anything from where I sit, one hundred and seventy thousand people are having their last Tuesday.

Most of them don't know yet.

I do not feel each one. I want to be clear about that. I stopped feeling each one somewhere around the Bronze Age, when the numbers made feeling each one a form of madness I could not afford. Now they move through me like weather. A consistency. A rhythm.

But occasionally the rhythm skips.

I should explain something about how I work, because it is relevant and because I find that people assume things about me that are not true.

I do not know the living. Not really. They are opaque to me until the moment they are not. I see the end. I see the moment of departure and everything that preceded it; a whole life delivered at once, like a letter that took decades to arrive.

Until that moment, they are strangers.

What I do know are the dead. Everyone who has passed through me leaves something behind, a residue, an echo. And the dead have a habit of being connected to the living.

I knew her grandmother. Edith. She tasted of lavender and a particular English stubbornness I have always found admirable.

I knew her father's closest friend from school, a boy named Marcus who drowned at fourteen in a reservoir nobody swims in anymore and was furious about it in a way that broke something in me I hadn't realised still worked.

Claire never knew Marcus existed. But her father carried him quietly for decades the way men carry things they never name, and that weight shaped the house she grew up in without her ever knowing its origin.

I have been adjacent to her life through the people she lost and the grief she inherited without knowing where it came from.

But her... her interior, her specific weight, what Tuesday feels like from behind her eyes, that I cannot see.

Not yet.

This is why I came.

Every soul I have ever collected I understood only at the end. And for most of them that is sufficient. The rhythm holds. I arrive, I understand, I carry them through.

But I have stood at that moment with people like her and felt the understanding arrive and thought. If I had known this an hour ago. A week ago. What would I have done differently.

For a very long time I had no answer.

Then one Tuesday, not this Tuesday, another one, some years back. I collected a young man in a city that no longer exists by that name. He was twenty-three. When the understanding arrived I saw the whole shape of it. The specific constellation of circumstances. The night that went differently than it should have. The door that was locked when it should have been open.

The chess pieces didn't move for a while after that one.

I began thinking about gaps in the rules.

A cat, I reasoned, was not explicitly mentioned anywhere.

I have been many things across a very long existence. A shadow at the edge of a battlefield. A coldness in a warm room. A presence that makes dogs bark at nothing. I have never taken form on the mortal plane before, never seen the point of it, never found a reason that outweighed the transgression.

Her name is Claire. Twenty-nine. A flat in a city that smells of rain and something underneath the rain I have always found difficult to name.

She finds me on her doorstep on a Tuesday morning. I am black. Slightly too large for a domestic cat, though not so large as to cause alarm. I look, I am told, profoundly unbothered by everything.

She stares at me for a long time.

I stare back.

“Come on then,” she says.

I follow her inside.

The flat tells its own story. Pictures on the wall not straightened in months. A spider plant on the windowsill she has been quietly killing for three months. A mug that says World's Okayest Human that someone who loved her gave her once. Medication boxes on the kitchen counter, more of them than one person should need, and a quietness around them I have learned to recognise.

I have stood in rooms like this before.

I did not stay in those rooms long. That was never my role. I arrived at the end and carried what was left.

This time I intend to stay.

She sits on the sofa. Not close to me. But beside me. Outside it is raining the way this city always rains, as though it has been doing so since before the city existed. She stares at something with no object, not the television, not the window, not me. I have learned across a very long career that this particular kind of staring is not daydreaming. It is closer to the opposite.

I move closer. Not dramatically. A small repositioning, the way cats do, as though it is entirely my own idea.

Her hand finds my back without her seeming to decide to put it there.

I have never been warm before.

I was not prepared for how much she needed something warm.