The Fourth Thing on the Table

The repair café ran from ten until one in the church hall, and Barry’s table was the one by the radiator. By half past ten there were four things on it.

The vacuum cleaner came first. The man carrying it explained, at length, that this was not a normal fault: it had lost power slowly, over months, and he had already changed the bag. Barry has heard that speech maybe two hundred times. If a vacuum loses power slowly, something is stuck in the pipe. He took the pipe off, held it up to the window and pushed a broom handle through it. A sock dropped onto the table. Nine minutes.

The kettle had been boiling halfway and stopping, which is a five-minute job: a loose wire where the cable enters the base. The woman who brought it seemed almost disappointed, because she had already bought a new one and now had to decide which of them to keep.

The third was a toaster, and Barry likes toasters. If a toaster heats up but won’t stay down, the fault is almost never the heating part; it’s the small magnet that holds the lever. He cleaned it with a folded piece of paper and the lever clicked and stayed. The teenager who had brought it looked at him as though he had done something illegal.

The fourth was a microwave, and there was nothing wrong with it.

He tested it twice. The turntable turned, the light came on, the cup of water was hot. The woman who had brought it stood very straight beside the table, and she had already told him twice that her husband always dealt with this sort of thing.

Barry had about four seconds to decide what to say.

“It’s working,” he said. “But that plug is the old kind, and the cable’s worn where it bends. I’d put a new one on before winter. That’s twenty minutes, if I do it properly.”

“Twenty minutes,” she said.

“There’s tea by the door,” Barry said. “Bring me one, if you’re going.”