This is a short story. It is fiction.
There was a shorter way. Everyone in the office knew there was a shorter way, because everyone in the office took it: out of the station, left at the pharmacy, four blocks straight, and up. Eleven minutes. On a bad day twelve.
Tomas took twenty-six. He went east along the canal to the iron bridge, crossed it, and came back west through the allotments and out at the top of the hill behind the building, and he arrived at the same time as everyone else because he left earlier.
The canal in that stretch is not scenic. There is a scrapyard on the far bank and a stretch where the path narrows to a single file between the water and a fence, and in February it is dark at both ends of the day. But there is a bend past the second lock where the water opens out, and a heron that was either one very old heron or a succession of herons occupying a good position, and for a few hundred metres nothing at all happens and nobody can reach you.
For two years nobody asked. The office had, without discussing it, filed the long way under the general heading of things Tomas did, alongside the thermos and the refusal to use the group chat.
Then a new hire, who had not yet learned which questions the office had agreed not to ask, put her bag down next to his and said: “Why do you go the long way?”
“Because I arrive differently,” Tomas said.
She waited. It was the right thing to do, and it is rarer than it sounds.
“If I take the short way I arrive still thinking about the train,” he said. “About the man with the bag, and whether I will get a seat tomorrow, and the announcement they make at Junction that I have heard four thousand times. I sit down at this desk with the train still running.”
He took the lid off the thermos and did not pour anything out of it.
“If I take the long way, the first ten minutes are still the train. I have stopped noticing that they are. Then somewhere around the bridge it goes, and for fifteen minutes I am thinking about something else. Sometimes work. Usually not.” He shrugged. “It is the only fifteen minutes of the day that nobody has a claim on. The evening has the house in it. The morning before I leave has getting out of the house in it. That stretch has nothing in it, and that is the whole of what it is for.”
“You could get up fifteen minutes later,” she said.
“I could. I would not give it up to save the same fifteen minutes in bed.” He looked at her, to see whether it was going to be worth saying, and decided it was. “It is not the same fifteen minutes.”
She took the long way the following Tuesday, mostly out of politeness to an idea. It rained. She did not see the heron and she got mud on one shoe from the allotment path, and she arrived thinking that she had proved something about the value of the pharmacy route.
She took it again the Tuesday after that.
By the autumn she had stopped counting which day it was, and when a colleague asked her, on the stairs, why she came in from the top of the hill, she found she had an answer ready, and that it was not the same answer as Tomas’s, and that this seemed about right.
Time is not fungible. A quarter of an hour that belongs to nobody is worth more than the same quarter of an hour spent asleep or in a queue.
For another story about a practice kept up past the point of obvious usefulness, read The lamp room. If the idea of protecting unclaimed time is the part that stayed with you, how to plan a weekend away that actually rests you takes the same idea somewhere practical.
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