The Appointment
The services at two in the morning breathed only when somebody walked at the doors, and nobody had walked at them for an hour. The place stood lit and open out of principle, the way churches used to. Mick had the bench by the shuttered units, the one with a clear line to the doors, and on the bench beside him stood two coffees going slowly cold. The cups had names on them in blue biro. One said DAMO. The other said MIK, because the boy at the machine had not asked twice, and Mick had not corrected him. He had been called worse things by better spellers.
The seating area behind him was a field of upturned chairs. A floor buffer droned somewhere out of sight, circling, the way a fly circles a room it has forgotten it can leave. Above the dead food units a television played to no one with the sound off, and Mick did not look at it.
He looked instead at the WHSmith. The grille was down and yesterday’s paper sat behind it in its wire rack, folded so that only the top of the front page showed. MINISTERS DENY, it said, and then the fold took the rest. The word BRINK survived lower down, orphaned. Mick had read it eleven times without meaning to. It was a poor habit, reading. He had picked it up late and it had never sat well on him, like a coat bought for somebody else.
Outside, beyond his own reflection, the forecourt lights burned over the pumps, all of them empty, lit and ready, a table laid for company that had not been announced. Past them the A1 ran north and south in the dark, and under the A1, under the roundabout and the retail shed and the drive-thru, the river went on doing what rivers do. There had been a bridge here once that mattered. Now there were several that didn’t.
It was the twenty-eighth of March.
Damo came through the doors at six minutes past two, which was on time, because he was always six minutes late and had been for longer than minutes had existed. He was dressed a full day sharper than the hour: a dark suit with no argument in it, an open collar, a coat that had cost somebody a favour, shoes that had never once met weather. Nothing about him belonged to two in the morning, and he crossed the dead concourse like a rep who owned the site.
“Roadworks at Wetherby,” he said. “Forty miles of cones and not one human being working. That’s us, before you ask. One of ours came up with the average speed camera and got a commendation.”
“You say that every year.”
“It’s funny every year.” Damo sat, picked up the cup with his name on it, and read the other one. “Mik.”
“It does the job.”
“All this time and they’ve never once spelled you right. You’d think someone up there would have a word.”
“At least yours was yours to keep,” Mick said.
“I never got a say in mine at all. You were there.”
“You were glad of it at the time.”
“I was being polite.” He pointed with the cup. “You saw a horror picture in Leeds. Nineteen seventy-six. A little boy with a fringe and a birthmark, and you came out of that cinema laughing. Once. The only time in all the centuries I’ve known you. And I have been Damien ever since, because your lot fill their forms in in ink.”
“It suits you.”
“It’s a film, Mick.”
“It’s shorter than what you had.”
Damo drank, and nodded at the cup as though signing for it. The order was right. It was always right. Neither of them mentioned it, the same way neither of them had ever once said the word anniversary, and the not-mentioning was the oldest part of the ritual, older than the coffee, older than the building, a courtesy kept the way you keep a grave.
On the television above the food units, the silent picture changed to a studio, and a red banner began to crawl along the bottom of the screen. Neither of them turned around.
“Quiet one this year,” Damo said.
“It’s two in the morning.”
“I meant the year, Mick.”
Mick said nothing. Out on the forecourt the lights flickered once, all together, the way they do when something heavy passes on the road. Then the quiet settled back over the concourse, and the buffer droned on behind them, going over and over a floor that was already clean.
