Illustrative photograph of a coat on a rail. Photo: Chris Reyem / Unsplash. This photograph does not depict the fictional museum.
A short fiction
At six, there was one coat left in the museum cloakroom.
It was brown, with a loose button and a receipt in the pocket. Nina did not read the receipt. She only established that it was not a telephone number, which seemed a reasonable professional distinction.
The coat had arrived at eleven on a man who asked whether the museum had somewhere to sit. Nina had told him about the benches upstairs.
“Proper benches?” he had asked.
“Reasonably proper.”
Now the galleries were empty. A guard had checked the toilets, the lift and the room with the enormous blue painting, where visitors sometimes stood so still that checking required tact.
Nina put the coat on the counter. Without its owner, it looked rather tired. She fastened the remaining buttons, then unfastened them again. There was no reason to prepare it for weather it wasn't going to encounter.
At ten past six, somebody knocked on the glass.
The man held up his cloakroom ticket as though it were a passport from a country the museum might no longer recognise.
“Sorry,” he said when she opened the door. “I went out through the café.”
“It happens.”
“I got on the bus.”
“That happens less.”
He took the coat but didn't put it on. For a moment they both looked at the loose button.
“Did you find a bench?” Nina asked.
“Yes. There was a small painting opposite it. A bowl. Three pears.”
“Did you like it?”
He considered this carefully.
“I sat there for a while.”
Outside, he put on the coat and held it closed with one hand. Nina watched him check the bus stop, then turn the other way.
She found a small sewing kit in the drawer beneath the tickets. She left it there. The museum was closed, and the button was already halfway down the street.
