Nothing left to tune
The yard was grey enough to feel neutral — no rain, no promise — when I rolled the shutter and let the workshop’s cold breath meet the morning. Emma had waved me off with the unfair luxury of “Take your time”, so I did: lights on one by one, kettle filled, Land Rover bonnet parked by the bench though there was nothing left to tune.
Murphy circled twice and parked himself beside the off-side front wheel as if the day were perfectly ordinary. I opened the middle drawer — nuts and bolts, odd gaskets — and laid its cargo across the bench, not to pack, just to be reminded of its contents. Oily rags: present. Adjustable spanner with the handle worn smooth: present. Ritual satisfied, I listened to the kettle climb toward the click.
The door clanged at half ten. Ronnie came in grinning but winded, a boxed pair of plastic tumblers in one hand, a hip flask in the other.
“Figured we’d christen the end properly,” he said, tipping two generous brass glugs into the cups before I had time to reach for my tea. The smell — somewhere between decent Scotch and dockyard diesel — caught in the throat, then warmed it.
We stood shoulder to shoulder in the open doorway, steam twisting away into the still air, Land Rover looming behind us like a patient that wouldn’t make this ward round.
“You reckon the emotion will kick in later,” Ronnie asked, “or is this the sting?”
“Probably the silence,” I said. “Engines stop easier than echoes.”
We took the day gently apart, shuttling the few yards between my workshop and his, lifting for each other as we went. Old boxes opened, contents argued over, redistributed.
Ronnie brandished a corkscrew-shaped drill bit, edges blunted to irony. “Cursed decking job, oh-nine,” he announced, pocketing it like a medal.
Under a lower shelf I found another old tobacco tin speckled with ancient primer. Inside: a bent ignition key from some forgotten breaker, two rust-bloomed washers, a carpenters’ pencil gnawed to the ferrule. Whatever memory it served stayed sealed; the tin slipped into my coat without commentary.
Ronnie, lifting the last plank of shelving, uncovered Murphy’s tennis ball, half-felted, faintly diesel-scented. No words — he set it in the top tray of my toolbox and closed the lid like a favour returned.
By three the walls of both units looked stripped for auction: just pegboard ghosts where spanners had hung. I prised the little wood offcut from the yard’s edge — the marker I’d placed when the orange mesh first crept inward — and pocketed that too. Insurance against forgetting where the line began.
We man-handled Ronnie’s final crate into the Transit. He slapped the side panel. “I’ll be round to see you and Emma soon,” he said. “Can’t get rid of me that easy.” The grin held, but the laugh caught.
Padlocks snapped shut; keys turned. The metal rang hollow and final. Murphy paused halfway across the concrete, nose tracing something I couldn’t sense, then trotted on. A gull wheeled, complaining at nothing in particular.
I didn’t look back at the unit. The mugs were washed, upside-down on the draining board; the kettle cooling. In my coat the workshop keys knocked together — small cold anchors — already drifting toward some office drawer where they would rattle, idle, and forget the shapes of our locks.