The Ladder in the Window

Kestrel and Sons Hardware stood on Bell Street for thirty-one years, and for thirty-one years there was a wooden stepladder in the window. Seven rungs, pale with age, standing among the saws, the tins of paint and the coils of rope. At night, when the rest of the cobbled street went dark, the window stayed lit, and the ladder stood in it like a small wooden lighthouse. A handwritten card at its foot said NOT FOR SALE. The card yellowed and was replaced four times. The ladder was never replaced at all.

The street built its directions around it. Go past the ladder and turn left. The dentist is two doors after the ladder. Taxi drivers knew the ladder before they knew the shop. Parents told children to wait by the ladder, and children did, because it was the only thing on Bell Street that had never once moved. One couple insisted on being photographed in front of it on their wedding day, in the rain, which the photographer later described as a firm request.

Over the years the ladder collected stories it had done nothing to deserve. Some people said it had belonged to the first Mr Kestrel. Others said it had once been used to rescue a cat from the chapel roof, or that a collector had offered a small fortune for it. The owner denied none of it. He dusted it on Mondays, turned it slightly on the first of every month so that the light faded it evenly, and sold a great many other ladders to people who had come in to ask about that one.

When the shop finally closed, the owner turning seventy-four and deciding that was enough, the neighbourhood asked more questions about the ladder than about the shop. Somebody asked him, at last, why it was there. He said he had honestly never decided. He had carried it in one morning in 1994 to fix a shelf, propped it in the window, and then a customer had asked to buy it, and he had said no, and after that it seemed rude to move it.

The bookshop that took the unit left the window empty for a week. It was a strange week on Bell Street. People started giving directions and stopped halfway, unsure what came after the missing landmark. A delivery driver went round the block twice. Then the window filled again: the same ladder, the same seven rungs, now with a pile of books on every step, and a new card in new handwriting saying the same three words.

Nobody asked where the new owners had found it. The old owner had left it behind with a note taped to the top rung, and the note has never been read out to anyone. Directions on Bell Street did not have to change. Go past the ladder and turn left, and if the window is lit, the bookshop is open late.