The money landed on Thursday. All of it, the whole five figures, from the man whose mail had swallowed my invoice for months (a spam filter, not a villain). The machine, the software that runs my small business, saw it before I did. It reads the bank the way the Mrs. reads the balance. In its log, under the chase it had given up on weeks ago, it wrote one line: paid in full, forty-one days late. No comment. It doesn't do comments.
I did, though. Out loud, one word I won't print here. Then something in my shoulders let go that I hadn't noticed was holding on.
I didn't announce it at home. The Mrs. does the month's sums off the balance, the money that has actually landed, and I wanted the balance to tell her instead of me. It's the only messenger she's never once doubted. That evening she stopped halfway down her page and then went on a little lighter. Or that's how I read it. Later she put on a record from when we were young, and we danced badly in the kitchen for one whole song. Nobody needs to know that.
Anyway. Friday was singing night at the pub with the piano. Once a month, mostly the same men. My old colleague was there and knew all the words. Somebody's daughter had passed her exams. Somebody's son, a year out of school, is still looking; the table moved past it quicker than it would have once. Somebody else retires in June. The beer was the same beer.
I sang the low parts, which is where they put you after they've heard you try the high ones. I sat some of it out and watched the room. It was as good as an evening gets.
My phone stayed in my jacket by the door. Whatever the machine was doing, it was doing it without me, which was the whole idea, and for one evening I let the idea be true. My hand still went looking in my trouser pocket, twice. A small itch, and then it passed.
Later, I read this whole thing back, thirteen weeks of pages, the way I sometimes do. In week five I'd written that I'd already figured out what was wrong with me three separate times, in my own handwriting, and lost it again each time by Monday. The machine reads everything I write. It didn't predict a thing. It just took me at my word.
For one whole week now, everything has felt handled. I fell asleep trying to remember the last time that was true, and what happened next.
Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end.
— Mary Hopkin