The Last Announcement

I lower the arcade shutters at six, beginning with the bakery and ending beside the dry fountain. The fountain has held three dead leaves and a button since Easter. Nobody has thought to remove them.

Most of the traders leave before me. They call goodnight through the metal grilles, their voices flattened by the emptying corridors. Mrs. Fenn from the wool shop always waits until I have passed her window. She says it is bad manners to leave the arcade alone with itself.

There is a story behind that saying.

Years ago, when the floor was brown tile and the fountain still worked, children were often separated from their parents on Saturdays. The arcade had a public address system then. A clerk in the office would announce the child's name, and some breathless adult would come pushing through the crowd.

The old traders said the system sometimes made one announcement after closing.

It never named the child. It named the parent.

Those who followed the voice found a child waiting beside the fountain. The child would be near enough to their own that, from a distance, relief did the rest. Up close there were small discrepancies. A cowlick turned the wrong way. A freckle missing. A familiar coat fastened with unfamiliar buttons.

Most people walked away.

My mother did not.

She had lost her son in the arcade while choosing school shoes. He was six, impatient, and angry because she would not buy the pair with silver wings. She looked away to count coins. When she looked back, he was gone.

The shops closed around her. Staff searched cupboards, toilets, stockrooms. At last they sent her home.

She was crossing the dark arcade when the dead speakers crackled.

“Would the mother of Daniel Vale please come to the fountain.”

A boy was sitting on the rim with his bare feet in the dust. He wore one of the rejected shoes. The silver wing shone beneath the emergency light.

My mother knew at once.

Daniel had chipped his front tooth on a garden wall. This boy's tooth was whole. Daniel called her Mam. This boy looked up and said, very softly, “Mum?”

She knelt and examined him. Behind Daniel's left ear was a pale crescent where a dog had bitten him. The boy had the same mark behind his right.

She did not mistake him. That is the part people soften when they tell the story.

My mother took off her coat, wrapped it around the boy, and carried him home.

She kept looking for Daniel. There were notices in shop windows long after the ink turned blue. Every birthday she bought two small cakes, one with silver sugar wings. But she never asked the boy where he had come from. She gave him Daniel's room and Daniel's surname. When he woke crying, she sat beside him until morning.

The scar is still behind my right ear.

After my mother died, I took the job closing the arcade. Mrs. Fenn knows why. Perhaps they all do. Kind people are skilled at leaving certain doors unopened.

Tonight the shutters are down and the fountain contains its three leaves and its button. I have switched off the lights. The speakers were removed during the refurbishment, leaving pale circles in the ceiling.

A woman's voice has just spoken from one of them.

It used the name my mother called me only when we were alone.

There is someone waiting by the fountain now, wearing her green coat. The face is almost hers. The hands are folded patiently in her lap, though my mother never could keep hers still.

I have left the final shutter half lowered.