The street the next morning
Entry 46 stood on this pavement at closing time, when the first sentence out of the door is too loud for it. This is the same pavement seven hours later. Nobody has touched it since the shutter came down, and it is very easy to read.
The cigarette ends lie in a rough crescent a step or two out from the door, thickest just where the light from the window gave out. Since smoking moved outdoors, that is where the smokers stand, and the curve is the edge of the crowd at its largest. Past it the litter thins into a trail, ones and twos, toward the taxi rank. The chip papers all lie on the far side of the chip shop, which tells you which way people walked and that nobody came back. On the windowsill of the bank next door there is a pint glass, upright and nearly full, put down with care by somebody who meant to return for it.
The first readers are never anyone who was there. A gull gets to the chip papers. Then comes the council’s early sweeper, and perhaps the pub’s own cleaner, because a common licence condition makes the premises clear its frontage. Whoever holds the broom can count, from the ends alone, roughly how many stood outside and for how long.
Two other records of the night exist, and both were written by people standing still. The door staff keep an incident book, which many licences also require: refusals, ejections, the time the police were called. Across the road, if the nights have been bad for long enough, somebody keeps a noise diary, because that is what the council asks for before it will act: date, time, what was heard, how it affected you. The two books cover the same hours from opposite sides of the street, and neither is opened unless there is a hearing. Between them they are the whole written evidence that the night happened, and both are lists of things going wrong. A good night, in writing, is a blank page in two books.
The licence has a clause for the sound in between as well. Many forbid tipping empty bottles into the outside bins overnight, because a crate of glass going into a steel bin carries further than any voice. So the empties wait in crates by the back door, and the last noise of the night is moved to the morning, when the only people near enough to hear it are the ones with brooms.
Set beside the two books, the pavement is the odd record out. Nobody wrote it, and it is complete. It holds the good night along with the bad: everyone who went out for a cigarette, not just the one who was refused at the door. It is also the only record whose reading destroys it. Sweeping is reading done with a brush. The sweeper takes in the crescent and the trail and the careful glass in the act of removing them, and by eight the street has been made to say that nothing happened. After that the night survives only in the two books, which kept the parts that went wrong.
The one complete account of the night is read once, at six, by someone paid to make it disappear.
Thread: over the fence