Shane Ian Murphy: What the Brass Remembered — A Cambridge Story

Fiction set in an imagined Cambridge watch-repair shop. The characters, shop and events are invented.

The customer wanted three things: a new crystal, a working second hand, and a clean back. He placed the watch on a square of green felt and tapped the scratched inscription with one trimmed fingernail.

“Especially that.”

Mara put on her eyeglass. The watch was ordinary brass, plated once and rubbed bare along its edges. On the back, someone had engraved seven uneven words: FOR THE DAYS YOU THINK YOU CANNOT.

“I can repair the movement,” she said. “I can replace the crystal.”

“And polish it.”

“Enough to clean it. Not enough to erase this.”

He studied the shelves behind her. “Is that a technical limitation?”

“No.”

The customer took off his spectacles, folded them, and unfolded them again. Mara had run the shop for thirty years. She recognized that gesture. A person arranging an argument into a shape that could be spoken politely.

“It belongs to me.”

“Yes.”

“I don't need a lesson about memories.”

“I wasn't offering one.”

For a moment they listened to the clocks disagree. Then he said he would think about it and left the watch behind, as though it were something he had brought for her to consider.

Mara wrote his name on the envelope: Leon Vale. Beneath it she wrote, Crystal. Movement. Await instructions.

Her apprentice, Imogen, came out from the back room carrying two mugs.

“You could have done it,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You've replaced whole cases before.”

“Yes.”

“Then why?”

Mara turned the watch over. In the final word, the engraver had started the second N too close to the first. It gave the sentence a small stumble, like someone speaking with conviction before finding enough breath.

“Because I don't want that particular job.”

Imogen considered this. At nineteen, she was still surprised by the existence of work a person could refuse without condemning it.

Leon returned on Thursday carrying a paper bag of screws. He emptied them on the counter.

“These fell out of my kitchen chair. Can you tell which holes they belong in?”

Mara looked at him.

“It seemed as reasonable as asking a watch repairer to manage my feelings.”

She laughed before she could stop herself. He looked relieved, although perhaps only because his joke had survived delivery.

“My sister had it engraved,” he said. “When I opened a bakery. She thought I was brave. I thought I was borrowing too much money.”

“What happened?”

“The bakery did very well. That's part of the problem.”

He pushed the screws into a little pile.

“I sold it last month. Twenty-seven years. Everyone keeps congratulating me on freedom. Then I look at the watch, and it feels like an instruction. Keep going. Be brave. Do another impossible thing. I want to sleep until eight and learn how to make one decent chair.”

Mara examined the loose screws. Two had damaged threads; one was a different size entirely.

“I could replace the back,” she said. “You could keep this one somewhere else.”

“Like a retired badge.”

“Like a part you no longer need fitted.”

He sat on the customer stool. “Why didn't you suggest that first?”

“Because I thought I understood what you were asking.”

“And now?”

“Now I understand a little more.”

They agreed on a plain replacement back. Leon asked her to put the old one in its own envelope. He took his screws home and returned the following week for the watch, which kept excellent time and looked pleasantly unremarkable.

On the invoice, beneath the price, Mara wrote: Kitchen chairs generally require a carpenter.

Three months later, a small wooden stool appeared outside the shop before opening. It had four sturdy legs and a seat with a shallow, uneven hollow. A note tied to one rung said it was for Imogen's bench, if she wanted it. No need to be tactful if it wobbled.

It did wobble. Imogen shortened one leg with a file, overshot, and fitted a scrap of leather beneath it. Then it was perfect.

Leon came by that afternoon. He wore the watch and had a smear of blue paint on his sleeve.

“I found somewhere for the old back,” he told Mara.

He showed her a photograph. The brass circle was fastened inside the lid of a wooden toolbox. Around it lay a ruler, several chisels, and a pencil sharpened with a knife.

“I read it differently now,” he said. “Some days the difficult thing is stopping.”

Mara handed him the photograph. Behind them, Imogen settled onto her new stool and opened a broken clock. Leon stayed a while, watching her discover which tiny part had been preventing all the others from moving.

About the author: Shane Ian Murphy is a former co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Limitless Mobile. This story is a work of fiction.