The Notice Board
The Notice Board
The notice board under the A57 had split down the middle, not through any of the notices, which felt deliberate.
It had missed the dog-walking group, the lost bank card, the laminated warning about scooters, and the council number printed in twelve-point type. The crack ran through the cork itself. A clean line, top to bottom, as if the board had been asked a question and chosen sides.
Nina saw it on her way to work. She worked mornings at the chemist and had ten minutes she usually spent outside the back door, not smoking. She had given up smoking seven years ago and kept the ten minutes.
A boy was already there. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. School trousers, no tie, one trainer lace dragging wet along the pavement. He had a strip of blue cloth in one hand and a roll of parcel tape in the other.
"It's not vandalism," he said.
"I didn't ask."
"People ask."
Nina stood beside him. Rainwater came down the steps one at a time. Above them, cars crossed the bridge with the heavy confidence of things built to leave.
The boy pressed the cloth into the gap. It was too soft to hold there. It sagged.
"Needs backing," Nina said.
He looked at her properly then, the way young people do when an adult says something useful by accident.
She took the roll of tape from him. The tape was cheap and split twice before she could get a clean length. He held the cloth flat with both thumbs. She stretched the tape across, not hiding the crack, just pinning the cloth beside it. The blue stayed visible. The crack stayed visible. Their fingerprints clouded the tape.
"My mum put up the swimming thing," he said.
Nina looked at the board. There was a notice for adult beginners, Tuesdays, seven-thirty, first session free.
"She going?"
"No."
He did not say why. Nina did not ask. She pressed the tape down with the edge of her key until the bubbles moved toward the corners.
The repair looked ridiculous. A blue strip beside a crack on a council notice board under a road where everyone walked quickly because the place smelled of rain and old chips.
"It'll come off," he said.
"Most things do."
He nodded, accepting this as practical information.
At the chemist, Nina served three pensioners, one man with hay fever, and a woman who wanted to know if the pharmacist could look at a rash without her saying the word rash. At ten-forty she used her break to phone the council number from the notice board.
"Damaged street furniture," the woman on the phone said.
"It's not furniture."
"Signage, then."
"It's where people leave things."
There was a pause. Nina could hear typing.
"I've logged it as damaged signage."
"All right."
On the way home, the tape was still there. The cloth was darker from rain. The crack was exactly as broken as before.
Someone had added a new notice beside it, handwritten on the back of a cereal box.
FREE TOMATO PLANTS. TAKE TWO. LEAVE THE TRAY.
Nina stood under the road and read it twice. Then she pressed the tape once with her thumb, not because it needed pressing, but because it had held.