The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Missing Nought

This is the same evening as "The Mark for Nothing", the eighth book of "The Day Before". Inkling's grandad was not on the Green.

The scoreboard at the lake field was older than anyone who played on it.

It stood at the far end beyond the boundary rope, a black-painted board on two posts with a little roof like a bus stop, and three rows of hooks. On the hooks you hung tin plates with white numbers painted on them, ten of each, kept in a wooden box under the pavilion steps. Total, wickets, last man. Inkling's grandad had kept it for nineteen summers. He liked the weight of the plates, and the small clank they made going on, and the way the whole field looked round at the clank to see what had changed.

He did not like that the nought had gone.

Not all the noughts. They had had three. One had been lent to the school fete years ago and never come back. One had rusted through. And the last one had gone into the lake last July, when a wind came off the water halfway through a hook-change and took it out of his hand like a frisbee. He had watched it skim twice and sink.

Since then, whenever the score needed a nought in it, he had simply left that hook empty. It had not mattered much. Twenty or thirty in the tens column happened, and he would hang the two and leave the units bare, and people mostly understood.

Then the lake houses had reached the final.

It was on Saturday. The village would be there, and the next village, and the man from the paper who came once a year and took one photograph. And last Saturday, in the semi-final, the lake houses had made two hundred and five, which they had never done in his memory, and he had hung the two on the hundreds hook and the five on the units hook and left the tens hook empty, and half the field had read it as twenty-five. A man in a deckchair had shouted "Twenty-five? What have you been doing all afternoon?" and there had been a small, unhappy argument about whether the lake houses had collapsed, which they had not.

He had ordered a new nought plate. It would come in three weeks.

So, for Saturday, here was the sensible thing. He would stand under the board himself. Every time somebody squinted at it, he would call out the score, loud and clear, the way the drivers at the depot used to call out "number nine" to people who could not read the front of the bus. Two hundred and five. Two hundred. And five. All afternoon if need be. It would wear out his voice, but it would be right.

He was practising, under his breath, in the kitchen, when Inkling came in from the Green.

She came in slowly, the way she always did, looking at the room before she walked into it, and there was something grey and dried on her fingers that looked very much like clay. She looked at him.

"Who are you talking to?"

He told her. The board, the lake, the plate, the man in the deckchair, two hundred and five read as twenty-five.

Inkling sat down at the table.

"What goes on the empty hook?" she said.

"Nothing," he said. "That's the whole point. Nothing goes on it, because there's nothing in the tens—" and he stopped.

Because nothing was exactly what everyone had seen. They had looked at the board and seen two, then nothing, then five, and nothing does not look like anything. It looks like a gap. And a gap, from a deckchair forty yards away, closes up.

He sat down too.

Inkling was quiet for a while. Then she said, "It needs a mark. A real one. Not a gap. Something you hang on the hook that says none here."

"That's what the nought plate was for."

"Then we make a plate," said Inkling.

There was a spare in the box: a blank tin plate, painted black, that had never had a number on it at all. He had kept it for when one of the others went. They brought it home from the pavilion that evening, with the white paint and the old brush, and Inkling took the brush and stood over the plate on the kitchen table for a long time.

He waited for her to paint a nought.

She did not paint a nought. She painted two short slanting strokes, side by side, leaning the same way, like two people walking into wind.

"That's not a nought," he said.

"It says nothing's there," said Inkling. "That's all it has to say."

He opened his mouth to explain that people would not know what it meant, and found he did not believe it. People knew what the empty hook meant. They had simply not been able to see it. This, they would see.

On Saturday he hung the two, and then Inkling's plate with its two slanting strokes, and then the five. He walked back round the boundary to the pavilion steps and turned and looked. Two hundred and five. It could not be read any other way.

Mrs Hale, settling into her folding chair by the sight-screen with a flask, looked up at the board and then round at him. "What's that in the middle?"

"Nothing," he said.

She looked again. "Two hundred and five, then," she said, and poured her tea, and that was the last anyone said about it. He had expected to be asked. He had half wanted to be asked, so that he could explain the two strokes, which he had been rehearsing in his head since breakfast. But the plate did not need him to explain it. That was rather the point of it.

Nobody asked him the score all afternoon. The man from the paper took his one photograph, and the scoreboard was in the corner of it, and in the corner of the scoreboard was Inkling's plate.

That evening he found her on the jetty.

"Where did you get that from?" he said. "The two strokes."

"Some clay," said Inkling, and did not explain.

He did not ask whose. Some of what Inkling brought back from the Green came with its story and some came without, and he had learned not to dig for the ones without. But he sat beside her for a while, thinking how many years he had spent being the man who explained what the board meant, and how one plate had done his job better, and quietly.

When the new nought came in the post, three weeks later, he hung it up on the hook in the pavilion and kept Inkling's plate in the box, on top. On the back of it, in pencil, he wrote NOUGHT, so that nobody would ever lend it to the school fete.

The question for your own table

Where in your house does an empty place go unseen because nothing marks it as empty?

Something to do

Find a list, a timetable or a form where a blank space has been misread, and give the blank a mark that says "none" on purpose.