Showing Here

by The Trickster, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Lot 214 was a cardboard box that had once held twenty-four tins of tomato soup, and in it, on the Friday morning, were a bread bin, a cheese grater, a sandwich toaster with its flex wound round it, two Pyrex dishes that did not nest, a tea towel printed with the lighthouses of the Pembrokeshire coast, and a yellow bowl with dog biscuits in it.

I knew the box. I had carried it in from the van on the Tuesday with the rest of Mrs Prosser's bungalow, which came to us as thirty-one boxes and a wardrobe, and I had put it on the trestle under the window where the kitchenalia goes, between a mangle and a crate of jam jars. Nobody had told me to take the biscuits out. Nobody tells porters anything. Porters carry.

That was Mr Breen's rule, and the saleroom ran on it the way a mill runs on a stream. Breen & Tolley, Auctioneers and Valuers, established 1921, occupied a former chapel on the road out of town towards the border, and the sale was every second Saturday, three hundred lots, furniture in the nave and smalls in the gallery and the kitchen stuff and the garden stuff and the boxes of books under the long windows where the light came in green off the yews. Mr Breen sold. Mrs Tolley, who was ninety and still came in on Saturdays, did the money from a booth by the door with a cash box and a card machine she distrusted. Kerry, who was nineteen, sat at a laptop beside the rostrum and did the internet. And I carried. My name that autumn was Rob. Mr Breen called me Hob, because he had misread the rota in my first week and had never gone back on anything in his life.

---

Viewing ran from ten until four. Through it the dealers came in out of the rain and went back into it, and in between they touched everything.

Gerald Pine came at half past eleven. He was a big soft man in a waxed jacket that had not been waxed in my lifetime, which has been a long one, and he did the gallery first, the silver and the clocks, with his catalogue open on his forearm and a propelling pencil going. He wrote against everything. Little ticks, little figures, a column of them down every margin, in a hand so small it looked like a line of ants. Then he came down the stairs and along the windows to the kitchenalia, and lifted the bread bin, and put it down, and lifted the yellow bowl.

He tipped the biscuits into his palm. He turned the bowl over and looked at the bottom of it for about as long as it takes to read a bus ticket. Then he poured the biscuits back in, put the bowl in the box upside down, laid the lighthouses over it, and pushed the box with his knee under the trestle, into the mangle's shadow.

He wrote nothing next to 214. That was how I knew.

Steve Cottle came at noon. He was thin and quick and wore driving gloves indoors, and he went to the window and did not look at the box at all, though he looked at the mangle for a long time and the jam jars longer. That was the second thing. And at two o'clock Price came, who had come to every sale for eleven years and had never been known to buy anything, and who sat at the back with his arms folded through all three hundred lots; he stood by the window and watched the rain on the yews with the toe of his shoe resting against the corner of the soup box, the way a man rests his foot on a step.

I am not an expert in porcelain. I am expert in men who put a thing back upside down.

I went to the office. Mr Breen was at his desk with the catalogue and a Scotch egg.

"Two-fourteen's had some attention," I said.

"Everything's had attention, Hob. That's what viewing's for."

"Mr Pine turned the dog bowl over."

"Then Mr Pine knows what's under a dog bowl." He took a bite of the egg. "Which is the floor."

"He put it back the wrong way up."

Mr Breen looked at me over his glasses. He had a red face and white eyebrows and a way of looking that he had learned from a magistrate.

"You carry, Hob," he said. "Kerry does the internet. I do the selling. Mrs Tolley does the money. You carry. Everybody in this building knows where they stand, and that's why it's still standing." He turned a page. "Mr Pine and Mr Cottle have bought in this room since before you were born."

That was true, in its way. He did not know when I was born. Neither, in fairness, do I.

At Christmas, Mr Pine and Mr Cottle sent Breen & Tolley a ham.

---

At three a young woman came in with a dog. She had a parka over a lilac tunic with a name badge on it, and the badge said BETHAN, and under the name it said CARE TEAM, and she smelled faintly of hand gel and the inside of a car. The dog was a Jack Russell with a grey muzzle and one ear that stood up and one that had given up.

"I'm Prosser," she said to me, because I was the one nearest the door. "It's my nan's things. I wanted to know what time they'd go tomorrow, roughly, because I'm on at two."

"Your nan's in the morning," I said. "The wardrobe's about ten. The boxes are after eleven."

She looked down the long room at the trestles with their cards, at her nan's crockery with numbers stuck on it, at the jam jars. The dog had already gone. He went along the windows with his nose down, ticking on the boards, and under the trestle and into the shadow of the mangle, and put his whole head in the soup box.

"Oh, Nipper," she said. "He can smell his biscuits. I should have taken them out. I couldn't look at any of it, I just said take the lot." She went and crouched and got him by the collar. "Fourteen years he's eaten out of that. Nan got it at a boot sale in Kington for fifty pence. She wouldn't put it in the dishwasher. She said the yellow would come off."

"You could take it out now," I said. "It's your lot. You can withdraw anything until it sells."

She lifted the tea towel and saw the bowl lying on its face, and the biscuits spilled under it, and she put the tea towel back.

"He's got a new one," she said. "Plastic. Goes in the dishwasher." She stood up and pulled the dog out by his back end. "What do you think it'll all make? Roughly. The man said four or five hundred, the wardrobe's the best thing."

"Mr Breen's usually right about wardrobes."

"Only the funeral was four thousand two hundred," she said, to nobody, and then she laughed, as if she had told a joke against herself in company. "Sorry. It's not your problem. Half ten?"

"Come at eleven," I said. "Two-fourteen will be about twenty to twelve. Sit at the back by the door. Bring the dog."

She looked at me then. I was wearing a brown warehouse coat with BREEN & TOLLEY on the pocket in yellow thread, and a pencil behind my ear, and there was nothing whatever in my face. I have practised that face at a great many doors.

"All right," she said.

---

On Saturday it rained harder. The chapel filled up with wet coats and the smell of them, and the gas heaters on their brackets ticked and roared, and the camera on its arm above the showing table looked down with its small red eye at the square of green baize where I would stand. The camera fed Kerry's laptop, and Kerry's laptop fed the internet, and the internet, Kerry said, was mostly a man in Wolverhampton who bought fishing reels and a woman in Dorset who bought anything with a hare on it. Kerry sat with her headphones round her neck and a can of something blue.

Mr Breen took the rostrum at ten sharp and began. He sold the way a good shearer shears, without hurry and without stopping, a hundred and thirty lots an hour. "Lot one, a pair of brass candlesticks, Hob's showing them, who'll start me at twenty, twenty I'm bid, twenty-two, twenty-five, at twenty-five, all done at twenty-five," and the hammer, which was a little ivory thing like a chess piece and made a noise on the block like a single knock on a door. The first time it went, Nipper barked. He was at the back by the door on Bethan's lap, where I had told her to sit, and every time the hammer came down after that he barked once, sharp and exact, as if he were the one selling, and the room began to laugh at it, and by lot forty Mr Breen was saying "Thank you, Nipper" after every knock.

Gerald Pine sat in the front row in his waxed jacket with the catalogue on his knee. Steve Cottle stood against the radiator on the left in his gloves. Price sat at the back, three seats along from Bethan, with his arms folded.

At lot 96 there was a Georgian oak chest of drawers, a good one, with its own handles. Cottle had viewed it twice on Friday; I had seen him pull every drawer and look at the dovetails with a torch. Mr Breen started it at two hundred. Pine nodded. Nobody else moved. Cottle looked at the ceiling of the chapel, where there are painted stars, very faded, put there by Methodists. "At two hundred," said Mr Breen. "Two-twenty anywhere? Lovely chest, this. At two hundred then." Knock. Bark. The chest went to Gerald Pine for two hundred pounds, and Steve Cottle studied the stars.

Afterwards, in the car park of the Talbot, the three of them would sit in Price's Volvo with the windows steamed and hold their own sale of everything Pine had bought, and the difference between Mr Breen's price and theirs would be divided into shares. I have watched men divide things in steamed cars since cars were invented, and before that in barns, and before that under trees. It is very old, and it is always done quietly, and the people who are robbed by it are never in the car.

The wardrobe made a hundred and eighty. Bethan's hand went to her mouth and came down again. The boxes came after the garden tools.

At eleven thirty-six Mr Breen said, "Two hundred and fourteen. A box of kitchenalia. Hob's showing it."

I lifted the soup box onto the baize under the camera.

"Who'll start me at ten. Ten pounds. Five, then. Somebody give me five for the bread bin alone."

Mr Pine's catalogue lifted half an inch off his knee.

"Five I'm bid. At five. Seven anywhere? At five pounds, then."

I held up the bread bin. It was cream enamel with BREAD on it in brown letters, and it had a dent, and I turned it so the dent faced the room and then the camera, as a porter does, because a porter shows the faults. The hammer was in the air.

Then I put the bread bin down and took the tea towel out of the box, and shook it out, and held it up by two corners above my head like a flag, so that all the lighthouses of the Pembrokeshire coast hung there in the gas light, Strumble Head and St Ann's and South Bishop, each with its beam drawn in yellow, going out over a blue sea.

The room laughed. Nipper barked, though nothing had been sold.

"Thank you, Hob," said Mr Breen.

I put the lighthouses down. I took the yellow bowl out of the box, and the biscuits rattled in it, and I tipped them into the pocket of my warehouse coat, all of them, and wiped the inside of the bowl with my thumb. It was small, smaller than two hands together, and it was the yellow of an egg yolk in the light, a deep even yellow without a crack in it, though the rim had a few little nicks where fourteen years of a Jack Russell's teeth had been. I held it up to the red eye of the camera. Then I turned it over and held it there, foot to the lens, still, the way you would hold a letter up to a window to see what was inside the envelope.

On the bottom, in the white ring of the foot, there were six small characters in blue, in two columns, inside a double circle.

"And the dog's bowl, sir," I said. "Bit of writing on the bottom."

The room laughed again, less. Mr Breen's hammer was still up. He was looking at me over his glasses with his magistrate's face, and I was looking at the camera, and the camera was looking at the bottom of the bowl.

"Internet," said Kerry. "Ten."

There was a pause, which Mr Breen filled by not filling it.

"Ten on the internet," he said. "Twelve in the room?"

Mr Pine's catalogue lifted.

"Internet's twenty," said Kerry. "Fifty. Sorry. It's — fifty. A hundred." She put her headphones on, which she never did, as if that would make the screen quieter. "Two hundred. There's two of them."

"Hob," said Mr Breen, "put it down."

"Yes, Mr Breen."

I put it down on the baize the right way up.

It took nine minutes. That is a long time in a saleroom; Mr Breen could have sold twenty lots. It went up in hundreds and then in five hundreds and then in thousands, and Kerry read the numbers out in a voice that got higher and smaller, and Mr Breen repeated them in a voice that did not change at all, because whatever he was, he was an auctioneer, and the laptop kept a record of every bid and the time it came. Gerald Pine bid in the room until three thousand, and then until eight, and at fifteen thousand he turned round in his seat and looked at Steve Cottle, and Steve Cottle looked at the radiator. Then Pine looked further back, to where Price sat with his arms folded, and Price unfolded his arms, and stood up, and put on his cap, and went out past Mrs Tolley's booth into the rain.

Pine did not bid again. Every sum they had done in their heads on Friday had just been done again by somebody in another country, and come out bigger.

"Forty-two thousand," said Kerry. "Forty-four."

"Forty-four thousand on the internet," said Mr Breen. "Nothing in the room? At forty-four thousand pounds. All done, then."

Knock.

Nipper barked.

At the back by the door Bethan Prosser sat with both her hands flat on the dog, as if he might go off, and did not move at all.

"Two hundred and fifteen," said Mr Breen. "A mangle."

---

He sent for me at one, in the break, when the room had gone across the road for soup.

He was standing behind his desk instead of sitting. Mrs Tolley was there too, in the corner on the hard chair, with her handbag on her knees and the cash box at her feet.

"You'll have heard of a ring, Hob," said Mr Breen.

"I've heard of rings."

"There's no ring in my room."

"No, Mr Breen."

"Mr Pine has been in. He says you made a spectacle." He picked up a pen and put it down again. "Mr Pine says a porter who shows the room what he likes and hides what he doesn't is no use to anybody, and I'm inclined to agree with him."

"You said Hob's showing it."

"I said carry."

There was a brown envelope on the desk. He pushed it across with two fingers.

"Mrs Tolley's made up your week," he said. "And the Saturday."

I picked it up. It was thinner than a week and a Saturday, but I did not open it in front of them. A thing that has to be paid is best paid quickly, and without counting, and I had known what this one would cost at the trestle on Friday when Gerald Pine laid the lighthouses over the bowl. By Monday there would not be a saleroom between Ludlow and Hay that would put a warehouse coat on me. That is how it goes. I have been turned out of better houses than Breen & Tolley's, for carrying lighter things out of darker boxes.

"Did you know what it was?" said Mr Breen. He said it in a different voice.

"No."

"Then why?"

"Mr Pine put it back upside down."

He looked at me for a long moment with his white eyebrows. Then he sat down.

"Go on," he said. "Out."

From the corner, without looking up from her handbag, Mrs Tolley said, "Forty-four thousand," quietly, the way some people say a prayer and some people say a price, and then she said, "Fifteen per cent," and I believe it was the happiest I ever saw her.

---

The rain had stopped. The yard behind the chapel was full of puddles with the sky in them, and the yews dripped, and the vans were backed up to the loading doors with their engines running.

Bethan Prosser was standing by a little red Fiesta with the dog on his lead. She had her car keys in her hand and her parka undone over the lilac tunic, and her face was the colour of someone who is going to be late for a shift and has just decided she does not care.

"Forty-four thousand," she said.

"Less commission."

"Less commission." She laughed, and it went wrong in the middle, and she put the back of her wrist to her nose. "They said in there it was an emperor's. They said it was for an emperor."

"Then he'll have wanted it back."

"Did you know?"

"No," I said, which was true, and which has never once in all my years been believed.

Nipper was standing on his back legs with his front paws on my knee, pushing his nose into the pocket of my warehouse coat. I put my hand in. The biscuits were still there, a whole pocketful, brown and bone-shaped and a little furred with crumbs; and they were lot 214 as much as the bowl was, every one of them, and had belonged since eleven forty-five that morning to a gentleman on the internet.

I took one out and held it on my flat palm, and the dog took it, and crunched it, and looked up for the next.

"You'll spoil him," Bethan said.

I gave him another.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Veterātōre per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

The Trickster, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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