Multiple-choice reading

Hana had imagined her first Saturday at the shop as a kind of holiday. Her uncle Pavel had been fixing bicycles in the same narrow building on Mill Street for twenty years, and as a child she had loved sitting on the counter, breathing in the smell of oil and rubber while he whistled over a wheel. Working there, she assumed, would mean more of the same, with pocket money at the end of it.

By half past nine she had changed her mind. The first customer, a tall man in a cycling jacket, wanted to know why his gears were “making that clicking noise”, and he looked straight past Hana to her uncle as he asked. The second brought in a child’s bike with two flat tyres and a seat that had been raised so high nobody could have ridden it. The third simply wanted directions to the station. Pavel dealt with all of them calmly, and gave Hana the job of sweeping the floor.

“Sweeping?” she said, when the shop was empty again.

“Everybody starts with the floor,” he replied, without looking up. “You’d be amazed what you learn down there.”

She swept, feeling slightly insulted. But he was right in a way she had not expected. Among the dust she found a tiny spring, three different-sized screws and a small metal ring she could not identify. Each time, she held the object up, and each time her uncle named it, explained what it did and told her which drawer it belonged in. By lunchtime she knew where the brake pads were kept, and that the drawer labelled “Misc.” was where things went when nobody could be bothered to decide.

After lunch, Pavel handed her the child’s bike. “Tyres,” he said. “You’ve watched me do it a hundred times.”

Watching, it turned out, was not the same as doing. The first tyre came off easily enough, but getting the new tube inside without twisting it took her four attempts, and when she finally pumped it up, it made a sad hissing sound. She had trapped the tube under the edge of the tyre. Her face went hot. She waited for her uncle to sigh, or worse, to take over. Instead he pulled up a stool, sat down and said, “Good. Now you know what that sounds like. You won’t do it again.”

She did the second tyre without help. It took twenty minutes, which was probably fifteen more than Pavel would have needed, but when she lowered the seat to a sensible height and wheeled the bike to the front of the shop, she felt something she had not felt all morning: useful.

At four o’clock the child’s mother came to collect it. She paid quickly and seemed to be in a hurry, but her son walked round the bike twice and then pressed the bell, very seriously, as if that too had been part of the repair. “It’s like new,” he announced. Hana knew perfectly well that it was not like new. There was a long scratch on the frame and the paint was coming off the mudguard. Still, she did not correct him.

When the door closed, Pavel counted the money in the till and pushed a few notes across the counter towards her. “Same time next week?” he asked.

Hana thought about the clicking gears, the tall man who had ignored her and the hissing tube. Then she thought about the boy and his bell. “Only if I don’t have to sweep,” she said.

Her uncle laughed. “We’ll see,” he said, which she was beginning to understand meant yes.