The Good Jug

I went out for tea and came back with a damp sleeve, a paper bag of apricots and a moderately revised opinion of myself. A productive afternoon. I had intended to spend it reading.

The café stood beside a square where the plane trees had lost interest in providing adequate shade. Someone had arranged six tables beneath them anyway. At the nearest, a man slept over an unopened newspaper. At the furthest, a girl was drawing the same window repeatedly, with increasing hostility towards its proportions.

I chose the table between them. It rocked.

“Third leg,” said the woman bringing my tea.

“Tables don't usually number them.”

“I do. That one's been trouble since February.”

Her name was Mara. She told me because I asked, and asked mine because she was still holding the teapot. I said Doctor. She said she hoped I wasn't going to tell her to stop lifting things, and put it down.

Beside the café door stood an unglazed earthenware jug in a shallow dish. Its sides were dark with moisture. I noticed the wet patch underneath, the empty chair beside it, and the strip of cloth hanging from its handle.

“Your jug may have a crack,” I said.

“No.”

I bent closer. “A very fine one, possibly.”

“It's supposed to do that.”

There is a particular embarrassment in having offered expertise to someone who was simply trying to give you a drink. I recognised it a little late.

“Then I should like to withdraw the diagnosis.”

“You haven't examined the patient.”

She poured water into a glass and handed it to me. Cool. Not cold enough to ache in the teeth, but appreciably cooler than I expected on that pavement.

“The clay lets a little water reach the outside,” she said. “My aunt brought it. You leave it where the air moves.”

“Evaporation.”

“Probably. She called it the good jug.”

The girl with the drawings looked up. “How does leaking make it cold?”

I started to answer. Mara raised one finger.

“She asked me.”

Quite right.

Mara dipped the cloth in the dish, wrung it out and offered it to the girl. “Put that over the back of your hand. Now wave it about a bit.”

The girl did. She looked at her hand, then at the jug.

“Water going into the air takes heat with it,” Mara said. “That's as much as I know.”

“That's the important part,” I said.

“Does it run out of heat?” the girl asked me.

“No. Heat keeps arriving from the warmer surroundings, too. It settles into a balance. And on a very humid day it won't do nearly so well.”

She considered this. “So sometimes the weather wins.”

“Quite often. It has an unfair amount of practice.”

Mara went inside. I drank my tea, which was attempting the same trick from the other direction, and asked the girl about the windows.

“They keep coming out wrong.”

She pushed the notebook towards me. Five drawings of the café frontage. In four, the upper window was centred over the door. In the fifth it sat awkwardly to the left.

I looked up. The real window sat awkwardly to the left.

“Which one troubles you?”

“The last one. It's the only one that looks like it.”

I was assembling something rather polished about the difference between symmetry and observation when a delivery trolley struck the edge of the square.

One wheel caught. A crate tipped. Apricots rolled under the tables with the soft, appalling persistence of things you cannot afford to bruise.

I caught the crate. The girl caught two apricots against her shoes. The sleeping man caught nothing, but woke with the unmistakable expression of somebody prepared to deny responsibility.

The delivery boy stood holding the trolley handles. He couldn't have been more than seventeen. His eyes moved from the fruit to the café door.

“Leave the trolley there,” I said. “I'll hold this.”

“I can get them.”

“I know. This is simply an inconvenient number of directions.”

We gathered what we could. I knelt beneath my table and discovered the cause of its instability: three feet on paving stones, one over a missing corner. February's troublesome leg was entirely innocent.

A woman stepped around my boots. I apologised. She handed me an apricot she had rescued from the gutter and went on without waiting for a conversation.

When Mara came out, the boy began explaining too quickly. She set down her tray and waited until he had finished.

“Put the bruised ones separately,” she said. “I was making jam tomorrow. I can make it tonight.”

“Will they charge you?” he asked.

“We'll count them first.”

She didn't tell him that nothing mattered. She found a clean bowl, checked the split fruit and made room on the counter. He began breathing more normally while they worked.

I offered to move the jug out of their way.

“Into the shade by the door,” she said. “On its stand.”

It was heavier than I expected. Water slid over the rim and down my cuff. The girl watched this with the close attention of an artist discovering a better subject.

“Don't draw that.”

“I've already started.”

“Then give me longer legs.”

“No.”

The delivery boy laughed. It was the first sound he'd made that hadn't been an apology.

Before I left, Mara let me shift my table a hand's breadth onto sound paving. It stood perfectly. I resisted the urge to announce this as a major contribution to structural engineering.

The girl showed me her new drawing. My legs were accurate, unfortunately. So was the bend in my back as I carried the jug, and the small determined frown I hadn't known I was making.

She had put the upstairs window in the wrong place again.

“Leave it,” I said, then caught myself. “Unless you want to change it.”

“I do.”

She rubbed it out.

Mara charged me for the tea and sold me a little bag of the bruised apricots. I ate one on the way back. It was warm on the sunward side, sweet enough to stop me walking for a moment.

My sleeve had dried by the time I reached the blue door. I still hadn't read a page.