What happens in the video
In a workshop, a man in a tan coat points towards an open car door while a mechanic holding a cloth speaks with him. A woman in white comes forward, crouches beside the car and holds up an open presentation box. The man takes the box and looks down at it while the mechanic watches. The contents are difficult to make out.
Continuation:
“Did you find anything under the seat?”
It was the third time Simon had asked. The young mechanic looked at the cloth in his hands as if he hoped, for both their sakes, to find something tucked into it.
Simon had brought his father’s car in for its last service before selling it. That morning his sister had mentioned a little box their father used to carry in the passenger door. She remembered it because she had once tried to put a water bottle in the pocket and he’d said, rather sharply, “Something lives there.”
Now the pocket was empty. Simon had gone from asking whether the mechanic had seen the box to asking who else had been inside the car. He heard the suspicion in his own voice a second too late.
His sister Kate bent down beside the open door. The lining of the pocket had come loose at one corner. From a standing position the gap was almost invisible. She reached behind it and brought out a box covered in brown dust.
“There you are,” she said. Exactly as their father used to say it when one of them came home.
Inside was a cheap wristwatch, the kind with a stretchy metal strap that pinched the hairs on your arm. Simon had expected something finer. Then he noticed the face was upside down in the box. His father had always taken watches off and put them down facing away from himself.
Kate turned it over. Three crooked initials had been scratched into the back with a compass point. Simon remembered doing the scratching. He was eleven. He’d saved pocket money to buy the watch after breaking his father’s good one against a cricket ball. Dad had worn the replacement every Sunday until the strap went.
Simon closed his fingers around it. Across from him stood a young man he’d been prepared to mistrust over a watch he hadn’t even remembered giving.
“I made it sound as if you’d taken something,” he said. “You were answering the question I kept asking. I owe you a better morning than that.”
The mechanic accepted the apology. Then he pointed to the loose lining. “Want that fixed before it eats anything else?”
They sold the car as planned. Kate kept the box and Simon had a new strap fitted. On Sunday his daughter spotted the old watch while he was washing up. She asked whether it was worth much.
“About fourteen Saturdays mowing next door’s lawn,” he told her.
She considered that a serious price. He dried his hands, took the watch off, and showed her the initials. For the first time in thirty years he was rather proud of how neatly he’d managed the S.
