the book

There is a book at the kedai that I have wanted to read my whole life.

It is the credit book. Pakcik keeps it by the till, and in it, in his small careful writing, is who owes what. Who took a tin of milk and will pay Friday. Who has run a tab on rice since the start of the month. It is the most interesting book on the whole street, because it knows everybody's business, all of it, in one place, and nobody is allowed to read it except Pakcik.

I am not allowed to read it because of money, and I want to be clear, we are fine. I just wanted to read the one book everybody keeps shut.

You do not just ask Pakcik. Pakcik always knows what you want before you walk in. Ask him straight out and he does the small wave that means he already knows what you want, and he is going to let you find out the long way that you are not getting it.

So I decided to earn it. I would make myself so useful to the kedai that Pakcik would have no choice.

"I have prepared a business improvement plan," I told Pakcik, holding up the maths book with the cover torn off. It had a title. It had three sections. It had a diagram of the shop, with the shelves drawn in all the wrong places, but it looked very official.

Pakcik read the whole thing, leaning on the freezer. He did not say anything for a while.

"Mm," he said.

That was the entire reply. I decided "Mm" meant yes, because I needed it to.

I brought in the gang as my team. This was my first mistake, but not the way you think.

Aiman walked in to help reorganise, and Pakcik, who can spot a person who likes money from across a whole street, looked at him for two seconds.

"You," said Pakcik. "Count the tins. I pay per shelf."

"Done," said Aiman, and that was that. In one minute Pakcik had taken my accountant, put him on his own team, and started paying him. I had brought Pakcik a free worker and lost my own.

Kavi helped by reorganising very fast. That is Kavi's whole way of helping. He moved things at speed, with enormous energy, to places that made sense to Kavi and to nobody who has ever actually shopped.

Pei Pei built a rack to hang the keropok in a neat row, which was genuinely good, and is the only part of my whole plan that survived the day.

So I did the shelves. By category. Logically. All the tins together. All the soap together. All the sauces in a Sauces Section, with a label, because a proper shop has sections.

"There," I told Pakcik, very proud. "Now everything is where it should be."

Pakcik looked at the shelves. Then he did the small wave. I did not yet know what that small wave meant.

I found out at the morning rush.

The morning rush at the kedai is fast. People come in on the way to work, on the way to school, the ones catching the early bus to the Causeway who cannot lose a single second to the jam. They say the thing they want, they want it now, and they are gone. It works because Pakcik does not look for anything. His hand goes to the spot without his eyes. Forty years, the same spots. A man says his usual and Pakcik's hand is already holding it.

Except I had moved everything.

The first man wanted kicap. Pakcik's hand went to where the kicap has been for forty years. The kicap was not there. The kicap was three shelves away, in the Sauces Section, being logical.

"Kicap," said the man again.

"One moment," said Pakcik.

It was not one moment. Pakcik looked for the kicap with his eyes, slow, in his own shop. The next person wanted milk. The milk had moved too. So had the sugar. So had the matches. Every single thing the rush reached for was now in a tidy new spot, and a tidy new spot is no use at all to a hand that knows the old one in the dark.

The queue built up to the door. Pakcik did not say one cross word. That was the terrible part. I kept wishing he would just shout at me, so it would not be so quiet.

I tried to help and could not, because I was the only one who knew the new system, and I had already forgotten half of it.

We put it all back after, when the rush was long gone and the shop had gone quiet. Pakcik started moving things home, and I helped, because I had moved them, and that is the rule. The tins went back. The kicap went home. His hand started finding the spots again, without his eyes, the way it should.

While we were putting it back, in the half-dark of the closed shop, I finally asked him about the book.

Pakcik looked at me for a long moment. Then he did a thing I did not expect. He picked the book up off its shelf and opened it.

He did not turn it round for me to read. He turned the pages himself, slow, and I caught only bits over his arm. Friday. A tin of milk. A name, a number. Then he stopped on a page near the back, where the writing had gone old and faint. His finger came to rest on one name. Next to it was a date from a long time ago, with nothing written after it. No payment. No Friday. Just the name, sitting there, year after year.

He looked at it for a second. Then he closed the book.

"This book is for the street," he said. "Not for reading."

I did not ask to read it after that. I did not even want to.

I bought an ice lolly from the freezer, the way you do, and I paid for it, cash, no tab, and Pakcik wrote nothing down.

On the way out I looked at the book properly for the first time, sitting on its shelf by the till where it has always sat. It looked completely ordinary. Just a fat old exercise book gone soft at the corners, which is the best disguise a thing like that could ever have.