The Toaster Man

The repair café was in the Methodist hall on the first Saturday, ten till one, and Vernon did the toasters. There were others. A woman who did clothes, with a sewing machine older than her. A young lad who did phones and laptops and looked at the older ones like they were fossils. A retired electrician called Ray who did anything with a plug and would, if you let him, tell you why it broke in the first place. Vernon did toasters. And kettles, and the occasional lamp. Small things. Things people would otherwise throw away because a new one was fourteen pounds and the bus into town to find someone was more. He'd been doing it four years. He was seventy-one. He had a table by the window and a box of tools and a mat, and people brought him things in carrier bags, apologising, and he'd say, "Let's have a look," and open them up. In March a woman brought a toaster that had belonged to her late husband. She said that. "It was Ted's." A four-slice, early nineties, the cord frayed. Vernon rewired the cord and cleaned the elements and it worked. Took twenty minutes. She stood and watched all twenty. When he handed it back she didn't take it straight away. She said, "Why do you do this?" He said, "Somebody has to," which was the thing he said. "No," she said. "Why do you." He thought about it, there at the table, with the toaster between them. He thought about the flat he lived in alone. About the forty years at the works, doing one operation on one part, never once seeing the finished thing. About how a toaster, when you opened it, was the most honest object he knew: a wire, a spring, a lever, heat. Nothing hidden. Nothing that wouldn't tell you what it was. "I like it when they work," he said. "That's all I've got." She nodded, like it was enough, and took the toaster, and went. He's been thinking about it since. That's not the whole answer. He knows that. But he's found that when he tries to go further, the words go vague, and he distrusts vague words the way he distrusts a wire with the insulation gone. So he's leaving it there for now, at "I like it when they work," and the first Saturday comes round, and he sets out the mat.