213

The river ran below the station and it was filthy. It came down out of the works upvalley and by the time it reached us it had been through the whole of the processing, so there was a foam along the edge in the mornings that you could lift off in sheets, and things went past that you did not look at directly.

We were in it every day from thaw until the rains, and under the second bend it goes green and you cannot see your feet. Twice there were snakes crossing upstream. The first time all four of us got out and stood on the bank about ninety seconds and then got back in.

Where it ran shallow we built dams out of stones and mud and grass, and bailed the pool behind them with a can cut in half, and whatever was in there had nowhere to go. Small fish, four inches, the pale kind with the soft spine that the water makes, not worth eating. We kept them in a jar until they went cloudy.

There were dragonflies all along that stretch in the hot months, hundreds of them over the shallow water where we built the dams. A boy in the year above did it on my hand first, to show me, and held it long enough that I stopped pulling. It goes completely still. It stops working. Then we pulled the heads off.

I do not know who started it, it was somebody’s idea and then within a day or two it was simply a thing we did, and what mattered was that it was done in front of each other, so that what was being asked was never really about the dragonfly at all but about whether you would do it with the others watching, and how long you stood there first.

The body keeps going a while after. I did not know that at eight and none of us mentioned it.

We did it about a week and then stopped and did something else. We got bored of it before anybody made us stop.

The station kept pigs, four or five of them at a time in the run behind the kitchens, and feeding them was ours from about the age of seven.

You went round with the buckets after the meals and got the peelings and the grey water off the top of the pot, and then you went down to the tip behind the works, which I would not have described to anybody outside. You take the top off with the rake and after that it is hands. Bread with the blue on it, fat, bones, the outside leaves off everything, and a foot down it is warm. I gagged for about a fortnight and then I stopped and I do not know which day that was. You learn to stop looking at what you are lifting and go by how it moves. The flies came up when the rake went in and went back down in the same place. You could not smell it while you were in it, only later, on yourself, in bed, and there was a period when I did not mind that either.

You put it all in together and it came out grey. The pigs could hear the bucket from the far end of the run and they were at the rail before I was at the gate. The pigs went mad for it. You tipped it over the rail and stood back.

There was nothing to do up there for the three hours you were on it. It was boring in a way I would pay money for now.

They knew you. They were disappointed if you were not carrying, in a way you could see from the gate, and then thirty seconds later they had forgotten and were doing something else.

There was one with a split ear. She would come across the whole run when she heard me on the path, and put her head through the rail, and stand there with her weight against it while I scratched behind the ear. She closed her eyes when I did it. Every day for two and a half years.

We killed two a year, in the autumn, and until you were ten you were only allowed to carry water and hold the leg. At ten you did one.

That is how it went. There was no discussion of it, there was a year when it was your turn, the way there was a year when you started the tape.

Mine came in the autumn I turned ten, five years after I first carried the buckets, and mine was the one with the ear.

I have thought since about whether that was arranged or whether it was simply the year she was ready, and I have decided it was simply the year she was ready, and I have gone on turning it over anyway.

They did not chase her round the run. There is no need. I stood at the gate with the bucket and made the noise with the handle and she came across at a trot the way she came across every morning of her life. She came through the gate and up the path after me with her head at my hip, and the whole of getting her to the block was me walking in front of her holding a bucket.

Nine of them were watching. That is the number, I have counted it since, four from my dormitory and three from the lower and Anneke and the man from the yard.

I was not thinking about the pig. I was thinking about my face, whether it was the right one, whether everything was where it should be, and you cannot check that, which is the difficulty, you can only feel and guess. And I wanted it to be good. I had asked the man from the yard twice how you know when it is done well and both times he asked me whether I had seen his gloves. After that I questioned it in my head, over and over, and I would get tired or lose my place and stop, and then it snapped back and started again. It never finished and it never got any clearer. Sometimes I wish I had never questioned or thought at all, and that is not available either.

I did it because they were watching. And I did not want to. I did not look at her on the way up. I looked at my own hands, which were doing the job, and I remember thinking they were somebody else’s, and then thinking that was a stupid thing to think.

She went down badly the first time and had to be done again.

In between the two, in the four or five seconds, she got her front legs under her and turned her head and looked for the bucket. Not at me. At the bucket, on the ground by the post where I had set it down, and where it always was at that time of the morning.

Her body did not know. All of it was still going, the whole works of her, blood moving and the ear healing where it always was, and none of it had been told, and the last thing that mind did with itself was look for the bucket in the place it goes.

Afterward we all laughed. That is the part I would take out of the record if I could take anything out. There was a great deal of laughing, all nine of us, and somebody did a thing with the tail. It was the loudest we had been in months, and the man from the yard let us have it because he knew what it was for.

I ate her. Everybody ate her. She was on the table on and off for a fortnight, and it went into everything, and by the end of it what was left came back up the path in the grey water off the top of the pot and I carried it.

There were two boys in the lower dormitory who had cycles, actual ones, sent in by somebody’s family before matching, and they had learned to put their hands on the handlebars when they saw us coming because they knew what we were going to say. We took them anyway. They let go every time.

We were numbered. Mine was 41. The rest of it is longer than that and I have never written it down anywhere, though I could say it in my sleep and probably have.

Nobody at the station was cruel in the way people outside imagine. They fed us properly and they treated the fevers and there was a woman called Anneke who ran the tape rooms and who I would still say was kind. What they did not do was pretend it was a childhood. There were no birthdays. There was an intake day for the year and they read the numbers out.

The receiver in the common room needed the aerial turned by hand and so it took two of you, one up on the roof with both hands on the pole and one down at the door watching the picture, and the one at the door would shout and you froze exactly where you were, half bent over with your arms out, sometimes for twenty minutes at a stretch, because moving cost you the picture and there was no way to get it back except by starting again. I was always the one on the roof. At the time I put that down to being good on a ladder. I think now it was that nobody else wanted to be the one who could not see.

The birds came off the tip behind the works, hundreds of them, and they roosted on the long shed and came down into the yard when the kitchen threw out.

Sepp had a trap he had made out of a crate and a stick and he caught one and we took it behind the shed and we had a tin of the marking paint from the workshop, the blue they put on the goats. We did the whole of it. Wings, back, the head. It took two of us to hold it and the paint went up my wrists and would not come off for a week.

Then Sepp put it up. It went straight to the shed and in among the others and for a moment there was nothing, and then the whole roof came off at once, all of them, up and round and onto it in the air.

They did not chase it off. They came back down onto it and stayed on it in a knot in the middle of the yard and worked at it. It was going for a long time after it had stopped moving, and when they were done and had gone back up there was a blue and red thing on the concrete about the size of a fist.

Sepp said they must have thought it was something else, and then the bell went for the meal and we went in, and nobody mentioned it at supper or afterward or ever again. I have gone back to it a great many times since and I have found something different in it nearly every time, though I am fairly sure none of those things are what Sepp meant, because he was nine years old and he meant what he said and nothing underneath it.

217

Matching is done at four and shading starts at nine and everybody at the station knew the year they were matched, because it is on the door of your room.

Mine went up when I was four, and I could not read it, so one of the older boys read it out to me in the corridor: Tobias, eleven years and two months, drowned in a private pool. That is everything a second is given for the first five years, a name and an age and a cause. You carry those three facts around the way another child carries a family. The cause decides how you are trained. A wasting death and you are underfed for two years. A crush and you are given the limp. There was a boy in the year above me who had a limp built into him at seven and who will have it at eighty.

Drowning is the easy one. Drowning leaves nothing. The shaders regarded that as a stroke of luck for me and one of them said so. I understood at nine that I had been lucky in the manner of my principal’s death and I have never been able to get that sentence back out of my head.

The tape starts at nine. People outside think the shading is acting. It is not acting, whatever people outside think. Acting is a thing you put on top of yourself and it comes off at the end of the evening. Shading goes the other way. They take material off you, month by month, until what is left standing has the shape of somebody else.

The families submit everything they have and it is always more than you would think, because people record children constantly and always have. I had four hundred and ten hours of Tobias. Him at two in a paddling pool. At five saying a poem badly at a school thing. At seven opening a bicycle. At nine at a table refusing food. At ten and eleven in the last summer. And eleven minutes of him underwater in a lesson in the March before, shown to me exactly once and then withdrawn from my set.

You learn the laugh first, because the laugh is the hardest and if you cannot get the laugh you are sent back.

Tobias laughed with his mouth almost closed and it came down his nose and it went up at the end. There is a half beat where nothing happens before it starts, which the shaders call the gap.

The sound is nothing. You can have the sound off anybody by the evening. What they wanted was the nothing before it, and they knew it when it was wrong. There is no way to teach a nothing, so they did not teach it. They ran you at it until it was in you.

You do it in a room with a mirror and a speaker. You laugh, the tape laughs, you laugh again and Anneke says, later. You do it again and she says, still later. Four hundred times a day for a year.

Then the hands. Then the walk, on the treadmill, with a weight on one ankle for as long as it takes. Then the handwriting. That took three years and I still cannot do it without a small pull in the forearm, because he wrote with his hand hooked over and I do not.

There was a boy in my intake, 46, who could not get his gap. His principal had a laugh that started immediately with no gap at all. It sounds easier and is not, because a second who has learned to wait cannot unlearn it.

They kept him at it fourteen months. Then one morning he was not at the tape rooms and his door was blank and nobody said anything, and about a week later there was a new number on that door and a new one in the bed.

Sent back is the term. Nobody at the station knew where back was, and Anneke was asked once and said they are looked after, and went on with the tape.

The words are what the outside sees. I have gone at them for years and they are all doing the same job.

You get the words before you get what they are for. Matched at four. Shaded at nine. Sent back you learn off the other boys, and nobody teaches you handed over because by the time it means anything it has happened.

None of those words has a body in it. That is what they are for. You could read the whole of the public material on the practice, the notices and the bulletins and the two paragraphs in the schedule of a marriage, and never once be made to see a nine year old on a table with a bar coming down on his arm. The schedule says physical correspondence. It is a clean pair of words and I have signed one of those schedules myself.

Reserve is the only honest word in it. Nobody thought to soften that one.

Anneke had shaded ninety one seconds before me and she was the best they had and she was not sentimental about any of it. She had a way of stopping the tape with one finger without looking at the machine. She ate the same thing every day of her life, bread and a boiled egg. She kept the shell in her pocket until the end of the session and put it in the bin herself.

She talked to fill the space between repetitions and it was always facts and never herself. That is where I got the thing about the insect. There is one somewhere hot that stays under the ground seventeen years and comes up for a single summer, and it has never been in the air before, so it flies badly and hits things, and it is loud for a few weeks, and that is the whole of it. She told me that while I was doing the laugh. I have never forgotten it and I could not tell you why she picked it.

What she gave me, and I did not know it was a gift for about twenty years, was that she never once told me I was doing well when I was not.

Everybody else at that station said well done. It was the standard thing to say to a child. Anneke said, later, or she said, again, or she said nothing, and on the four or five occasions in six years when she said that was it, that was the one, it was true, and I knew it was true. I could carry it for a month.

I do not know whether that was kindness or whether an inaccurate word would have cost her a repetition.

I have decided it does not matter. I decided that about eight years ago and I have not entirely finished deciding it.

218

Tobias had a scar on the inside of his left forearm, about four centimetres, from a stove at four.

There is no way to grow a scar. You have to make one.

They do it at ten because a scar made at ten has time to whiten and flatten and stop looking like something that happened recently.

Clean room, two technicians and a doctor. The bar is shaped off the photographs and heated in a cradle on the trolley and you can see it going from black to grey while they are still filling in the form. No anaesthetic on the arm, because anaesthetic changes how the tissue takes and the mark comes out wrong at the edges. You get something oral that makes you slow and stupid and does not stop it.

The room smells like a barber’s first, the hair on the arm going, and then it smells like pork.

I have not been able to be in a house where pork is cooking since I was nine. I have built about forty different excuses for that over the years and I have used all of them.

Anneke held my head. A hand flat on each side of my face. She talked the entire time about a dog she had as a girl, the dog’s name, what the dog did to a man who came about a meter reading, and her voice did not change pitch once, even when I screamed, even when I bit through the inside of my own cheek and filled my mouth with blood and she had to turn my head sideways so I did not choke.

They do the crying separately, on a different day, because a second who cries wrong is more likely to be sent back than a second with a bad scar.

Tobias cried without noise, with his chin up, which is unusual, and they had four minutes of it, from a birthday where a cousin broke something.

I could not do it. I cried like a child from a station. Loudly and with the whole body, because that is what you do in a dormitory where nobody comes.

It took eight months in the end. They told me afterward that was about average, though the arm took longer. It weeps for about three weeks and then it is a red rope and then over two years it goes down to what you see now, a pale flat line that people do not notice unless I put my arm on a table palm up. I have not put my arm on a table palm up since I was about fourteen.

For a while afterward I could not go near the kitchens at the back of the long shed. Anneke worked it out inside a fortnight and started sending me the other way round for the goats, eleven minutes longer. She did that every day for two years and never once said why and never once put it in my file.

The file matters. Everything at the station goes in the file and the file goes with you, and a note that a second cannot tolerate a smell is a note that a second is unreliable near a stove, and a family with a stove is most families.

She kept me out of it for two years by walking me round the long way. That is the single largest thing anybody has ever done for me and she did it with her mouth shut. She also once made me redo a laugh sixty times in an afternoon until I was sick with it, and both of those are the same woman on the same job. I have never been able to hold them apart in my head for longer than about a minute.

219

The handover room has two doors. The family comes in one and you go in the other. They had asked for no staff present. Some do.

The mother’s name was Ilse. She went down on the floor in front of me and put both hands on my face and looked at me a long time and did not say anything at all.

Then she said that my hair was longer. The first thing she said to me, and not the name. She said your hair is longer. I said, they let it grow. She laughed with her mouth almost closed and it came down her nose and went up at the end.

I understood then, on the floor of that room, at eleven years and two months, that the laugh had not come from Tobias. It had come from her. He had got it off her the way any child gets it, and I had spent a year learning her own laugh out of her dead son’s mouth, and now the three of us were in the room together.

The father was called Wim and he came forward and shook my hand. I had not been trained for that and I did it badly. He did not seem to mind.

The house was outside the city on a road with a canal on one side and a hedge that had to be cut twice a year with a machine run off an extension lead through the front window, so the room got cold while he did it, and Ilse said something about it every single time and he never once moved the lead to the socket in the hall.

There was a sister, Marit, nine at the time, who had been briefed, and who was the only person in that house who ever behaved normally toward me.

The early years were not bad. Nobody wants that.

Ilse worked out that I hated a thing Tobias had liked and quietly stopped making it and never mentioned it. It is a violation. I knew that at the time. I never mentioned it either.

That is the first thing the two of us ever did together. Wim taught me to sail badly. He was not a good sailor and he was extremely serious about it and we went out on that water every seventh day for six years and came back burnt. I would go up afterward and put the cream on the scar the way you are told to, twice a day until you are twenty.

He was a man who could not be in a room without a job in it. If there was nothing to do he would find the thing in the room that was slightly wrong and do that, and if there was nothing slightly wrong he went out to the shed. In six years I never saw him sit down in the front room in daylight.

What he did with me was tasks. He never asked me a question about myself in the thirteen years I had him, not one, and for a long time I took that as a verdict and it was not. It was that he did not ask anybody questions about themselves. He asked Marit what she was doing and not how she was. That was his range and inside it he was generous to the point of stupidity. He gave me a boat and six years of Sundays and a trade, and if I had wanted a conversation I would have had to want it from somebody else.

The trade is fairing. He had it off his own father and he put me on it at fourteen with a batten and a lamp, and he gave me it in one sentence. A hull is fair when the eye runs off it and does not catch. There is no number in it. You do not measure. You sight down it and you put your hand flat on it and you take material off wherever the hand stops, and you do that for a week on a surface nobody will ever look at properly, and when it is right nobody notices anything at all, because there is nothing left on it for anybody to notice.

I was very good at it by eighteen. I did not work out why until I was about twenty six, in a shed, with my hand flat on somebody else’s boat, and then I did work it out and I went outside.

The first spring there was the business with the ducks. Wim had decided the canal bank at the end of the garden needed what he called management, which meant a low fence. He built the fence over two weekends with a level and a string line. It was a very good fence, and on the morning he finished it a duck stood on it.

He took this badly. He stood at the window with his tea and said, that is exactly what I built it to prevent. Not true. He had built it to prevent erosion, no part of the fence had ever been about ducks, but the duck standing on it had converted the fence into a failed anti-duck measure in front of the whole family, and Ilse laughed into her cup. He heard it.

He bought a thing from a catalogue that was meant to move in the wind and deter waterfowl, and the wind did not move it, so he moved it himself every morning before work to different positions along the fence, believing this made it appear alive. A grown man, out at ten to seven in his work clothes, repositioning a plastic owl with a face on it like a disappointed schoolteacher, every day, for a month.

The ducks liked the owl. There is no other way to put it. Within three weeks there was reliably a duck standing on the owl, and one morning there were two, one on the owl and one on the fence beside it in a supervisory role, and Marit got twelve at the kitchen window before her mother made her stop because Wim was coming up the garden.

He never conceded. He never once said the word duck again in my hearing, for thirty years, and the owl stayed out there going grey until it fell in the canal in a storm, and when Marit fished it out and put it on the step to dry he walked past it four times and said nothing, and the fifth time he picked it up and put it in the shed, gently, the way you handle a colleague who has been let go.

I laughed in that house. Marit is the one who behaved normally. She was nine and she had been briefed and what she did with the briefing was to decide it was interesting rather than terrible, and she has not changed her mind since.

She asked me things nobody else would. Whether we had beds. Whether I missed anyone. Whether I had had a name before, and when I said a number she asked what it was and I told her and she said it was a good number and never mentioned it again.

At about fourteen she stopped calling me Tobias in private. In the kitchen, or in the car, she would say, hey you. She has done that for twenty eight years and she has never explained it and I have never asked her to.

The first year is the year I would take back if I could have one, not because it was good, but because in that year I had not joined it yet. I was in the house and still reading it. There was a version of the arrangement available in which I said something in the first month, and by the second year the arrangement had set and there was no version of it available any more.

221

There were assessments every four months for the first three years. A woman came from the station with a folder and sat in the front room with Ilse and Wim, and then took me into the garden and asked questions and filmed my hands.

At the fourth of these she asked what my name was.

I said Tobias.

She wrote something down. Then she asked, in exactly the same voice, what my number was.

I said it. All of it. Before I could stop myself.

She wrote that down too and closed the folder and thanked me and said I was doing very well.

I did not understand what that had been until I was nineteen. Drift is the word for a second going back. It starts small. The laugh comes late. The handwriting slopes. You are asked something at a table and you answer as the thing you were before.

Reporting is done by the family. Two confirmed assessments and the second is recalled.

The numbers are public and I did not look at them until I was nearly thirty.

There are about eleven thousand of us placed in the country at any time. That is a small number. It is smaller than the people who keep bees. Most families who lose a child do what families have always done and get up the next day. Of the ones who apply, most are refused on means, because the maintenance runs to about a third of an ordinary wage and it runs for the life of the second and it cannot be stopped once begun.

So it is a thing for a particular kind of household. Not the very rich, who go abroad and do something else. The tier below. People with a good house and one thing that has gone wrong in it.

There is opposition. There has been for as long as there has been the practice. There is a society that publishes a bulletin four times a year and holds a service every autumn for the sent back, attended by about two hundred people. There was a bill about eight years ago that got as far as a second reading and then did not.

I have never been to the service. I have looked at the bulletin twice. What they are against, when you read it closely, is not the shading. It is the reserve. They can get the public to be against the reserve because the reserve costs money and produces nothing, and you cannot get the public to be against a woman who wants her son back.

The station people were not monsters and did not think of themselves as being in a monstrous trade. They thought of themselves as being in an unpopular one, like the men who take the animals in the early morning, and they had the same humour about it.

There was a boy four roads down who went at fifteen. His name was Joost and he had been placed a year before me and he was the only other second I knew by sight in that whole district. We had a thing where we did not acknowledge each other. Neither of us agreed to it out loud.

I do not know what he did. It could have been very small. A second who is not going to make it is usually not caught doing anything. He is caught not doing something. There is nothing to point at and nothing to answer.

They came at about eleven in the morning. Two of them and a van. I watched from the corner because I had made a reason to be at the corner.

He walked out. There was no scene. He came down the path with a bag and his coat over his arm. He got in the back of the van. The door was shut by one of them and not by him, and the mother stood in the doorway with both hands flat against the frame and did not come down the path.

Two months later there was a boy in that house who was the same height.

I saw him at the shop in the autumn. He had Joost’s walk, a heavy thing off the left heel, and he had it slightly better than Joost had had it. He looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us acknowledged the other.

That has gone on twenty nine years. He lives eleven minutes from me. We have never spoken.

224

Wim’s father lived in the annexe and after the event in his head his right side did what it wanted and his speech came down to about six sounds, none of them words.

Getting him into the chair is a two person job and most days there was one. You get his arms over your shoulders, then round the back, under, lift with the legs, turn in one movement. He was not heavy. The difficulty was never the weight of him but that he could not help, and that halfway through the turn he sometimes tried to.

The road down to the registry will not take a chair straight, so you go across it in long slants, and at the steep part you turn round and take it backwards with the brakes half on.

He rolled his head along the back of the chair the whole way, following the arc, and made a noise at things so that they would be seen.

Birds went up off the wall by the pumping house as we came past, the way they did every time, and every time he threw his arm out at them and shouted with the part of his voice he had left, and none of them cared.

You got them, I said. You got them that time.

On allowance day the queue goes out of the registry and along the wall. Eighty people, nearly all of them old. He went against the wall under the overhang and I stood in the line.

I was three from the front when I saw the dark shape coming down the front of his trousers and along the seat and off the edge onto the concrete.

I came out of the line. Nobody said anything about it.

He would not look at me. His chin was down and turned off to the right and his hands had locked on the umbrella and he was making a sound that was not the usual sound.

I took the shawl off his shoulders and put it across his lap and down over his knees so it covered everything, and moved the chair forward two feet so it was not sitting over the wet, and got the umbrella out of his hands, which took some doing, and put it under the chair.

The woman on the wall had seen. She looked, then looked away, and started talking loudly to the woman next to her about something else, and the two of them talked about it for a while.

You are alright, I said. Nobody saw. It is only water.

I wiped the seat edge with the corner of the shawl where it would not show, and wiped my hand on my own trouser leg, and put my hand flat on the back of his neck and held it there, and after about a minute he brought his head back up.

Inside there is a counter and a ledger and a tin of violet ink with the lid never properly on. Registry does not take signatures from the incapable. It takes the thumb.

I took his right hand and opened the fingers one at a time and pressed the thumb into the pad and rolled it and lifted it and brought it over and put it down in the box on the line with his name written next to it.

It came out clear. It does not always. Some months the ridges do not take and you do it twice and the second goes over the first and the man draws a ring round the one he wants to count.

Four thousand out of the steel box, counted twice. That autumn there was a review. The score came back at seven. The line is eight. The line had not moved. He had. They assess what he can do on the day. He got his left hand up to his own face when they asked, a thing he could do about twice in ten, and the man wrote it down.

I appealed. There is a form.

It was in the winter that I told him, and I have never worked out whether I had been building up to it or whether it simply arrived. He was on the bed by the window with the receiver going at the volume they keep it at. I told him about the gap. I told him about the tape rooms and the bar and the eight months of crying and about what I had been doing every day since I was eleven, all of it, out loud, in a room, for about four minutes.

He rolled his head at the sound and made his noise. I said yes, and moved his left foot in so it was not hanging off the edge, and turned the receiver down.

That is the only time I have said it out loud to a person, and I chose a man who could not answer, and I knew that before I had finished the sentence.

His thumb stayed violet about a week every month. It was on the sheet as well, in two places, where he had put his hand down.

226

The station burned in the spring, and I heard about it standing on the upper road, from a man with a cart who was telling somebody else.

I had gone up to the ridge with two others from the house because you can see the whole valley from there and there was nothing else to do that day.

The birds went up off everything at once, out of the trees and off the roofs, before anything else.

From up there you could see the whole compound. The tape rooms went first because of what is in them, and then the lower dormitories. It was not all at once, it was in ones and twos over maybe forty minutes, and each building put up its own column that went straight because there was no wind. So what you were looking at was a valley with nine or ten separate towers standing in it, not moving, and under each one there had been a building an hour before.

The dogs in the settlement did not stop for about an hour. What I remember is that it was the most interesting thing I had ever seen. Somebody was shouting for me and I stayed another minute and a half to see the end of it.

The stone building at the centre did not go. Cut and fitted, sitting on rock, from before. Everything else was frame and board on a slab poured in a hurry in a year when nobody had money.

Eleven buildings in that view. I could have named somebody in nine of them.

They lost the tape. Not all of it, but the physical, and a portion of the record with it. There was a period of about two years afterward where a great many things at the station were run off memory and best guess.

I think about that more than about the fire. Somewhere out there is a man of about my age who is being somebody assembled out of what three adults could still recall in a bad week.

Anneke was not in it. She had gone to the eastern station four years before and I wrote to her twice and had one back, on a card, four lines, saying she was well and the work was the same and that I should keep the arm out of strong sun.

I did not write again, because I could not work out what I wanted to ask her, and because I was eighteen and I had begun to understand that the person I most wanted to hear from about my own life was a woman who had been paid to erase it.

She would be in her eighties now. I have not looked.

230

I went out to the lake district and worked at a lodge for two seasons. Three week sessions for families. The parents rode and fished and the children did lessons in the morning and I was one of four who did the lessons. In the afternoons I was down at the boat shed, because the man who ran it had a shoulder and I was the only one there who could do the work. That is how I got in at all. I put the trade on the form and the trade did it.

The study room opened at half six and the tables had to be squared to the line of the windows and not to the line of the door. I got that wrong two weeks until a man called Marek came in and turned one eight degrees and said, there, and went out.

The light comes over the ridge at a quarter to seven and goes all the way across the floor, and by then the tables are squared and the chairs pushed in and the room is finished and correct and set for people who are all asleep. Twenty tables and nobody in any of them. I would stand at the back with the box of pencils longer than the job took.

I had a room above the laundry with a window that opened four inches on a stop. I was saving for a car.

She came in the second week with her son, who was nine, and I had him five mornings a week for three weeks.

He was a good kid. By the second week he was waiting outside the room before I unlocked it.

She started coming to the counter at four with a book she was not reading.

She wanted it in the small cup and not the glass, and only enough milk to take the colour off it. I got it wrong twice and then I had it, every time, without looking.

On the fourth day she asked my name and got it slightly wrong and smiled and went back to the book.

I never corrected her. Not that afternoon and not once in the eight months after. The one she said was a person she had made, and I wanted to be him.

I had been handed a second name by a woman for the second time in my life and I took it the way I took the first one. Gratefully.

She was forty one. I found that out later and not from her.

Money in that place is quiet and worn. She wore the same shirt three afternoons that week, soft at the collar, with a hole starting at the shoulder seam.

I bought her a flower. The bunches were nineteen and I could not do nineteen, so I bought one stem for four, and I had nothing to put it in, so I left it lying flat on the porch rail outside her cabin at seven in the morning.

She never mentioned it. It was still on the rail three days later, gone brown and curled at the edge, and it stayed there until the Friday run. I know that because I checked on the way past for four days.

The first night was on the court behind the maintenance shed. There is a game on the seventh evening, the kitchen and the boat shed and whoever else is off, six or seven of us. She came and stood at the fence about twenty minutes and I played the worst of my life. Afterward she was at the rail outside the dining hall and she asked if I was done and I said yes and she said well then.

I could not talk like that. It was very good and it was not gentle and she knew exactly what she was doing in a way that I did not. She said what she wanted out loud. I did it. I was twenty two.

What she liked was to hear me talk. She would ask about something I knew and put her chin in her hand and let me go fifteen minutes without interrupting. I thought that was the reason it was me and not somebody else. It took most of a year to understand it was something to have on in the room.

Afterward she showered inside a minute with the door open and the light on, and I lay in a very good bed listening to it. Then she came out and said, you should go, they will see you on the path if you leave it later. Which was true. She was thinking about me. That is what I told myself on the service road at half one with my shoes in my hand.

In the second week I found the bag in the closet behind the pillows. A razor. A charger for something that was not hers and not mine. Swim trunks, navy, folded, medium.

I am a medium. I have been a medium since I was fifteen.

I put it back in the same order and straightened the pillows in front of it.

I did not stop. Standing in front of that closet I knew everything I was eventually going to know, and I went back two nights later.

In the cabins there is a bowl of fruit changed every day whether it is touched or not. I know because of two weeks on housekeeping. You take the old one to the cart and tip the whole cart in the bin with the grounds, and build the new ones in the walk-in. Three apples and three pears at the back, two of the round ones in front because those hold a shape, and the small fruit over the front lip so it hangs down the outside. You hang it over the front so it reads as abundance and not as six pieces of fruit in a bowl.

So I would sit in that cabin with a bowl on the table that somebody I knew by name had built at six and would tip out at nine, and I never once ate anything from any of them.

It was not pride, or anyway there was no pride available to me in that room, and I have never found a better word for whatever it was.

She fell asleep once. Raining hard. She was on her front with her face turned away and one arm off the side of the bed and her other hand on my back below the shoulder blade, not doing anything, just there.

Forty minutes. I did not move. I lay there running the odds, because if she woke and I was still in the bed it could become a different kind of thing, and I could not decide, so I did nothing.

Everything after was built on ninety seconds of a sleeping hand. In the last week I spent seven hundred of what I had saved on a chain from a woman who makes them at a bench in the back of her own shop. I went in three times before I bought it. The third time she wrapped it and asked if it was for my girl and I said yes.

She was pleased. It was not performed. She said oh. She put it on there and then, and turned to the mirror by the door, and held it flat to her collarbone with two fingers and lifted her chin. She wore it the next day. I saw it on her at four, coming across the lobby to the end stool.

On the Wednesday of that last week, lying on her side with the sheet pushed down, in a pause, in a nice voice, she asked me whether I had brothers.

I have none. I have an intake. But she had asked me the same question nineteen days earlier, on the porch. I had given her the answer I give, two, and made up their names on the spot. One of them was hard to say. She tried it twice and got it and was pleased with herself. We both laughed. I thought at the time that this was the beginning of something.

I said, two. She said, that must have been fun.

There is a stillness that arrives at exactly that moment and it is not the one people imagine. It comes before the drop and not with it. Everything goes slightly farther away and very clear. You notice the pattern in the curtain. There is a long moment of nothing at all in which you are entirely fine. You think, oh, I have taken that well.

It is the calmest I have ever been. It lasted six or seven seconds.

Then it came up through me the way water comes up through a filter housing when you open it wrong and it takes the wall out of your hands.

I did not say anything. She was lying there with the sheet on her hip in the low light and I was finished inside my own body and I said nothing, and after a minute I said I should go. She said mm. I dressed in the bathroom in the dark the way I always did.

They checked out on the last day of the session. I did not go down.

The next morning I was on turnover for their cabin, because they were short and they put whoever they had on it. That is the only reason I was in that room.

The envelope was on the table by the window with my name on it. A card from the gift shop by the front desk, the one with the elk on it, three of the local notes, and it said thank you for everything in her handwriting. There was a hundred and fifty in it.

That is about what you leave. There were four of us on the teaching staff and two of the others got one as well, and we compared them at lunch.

231

Over the winter I built the whole thing. I picked the town, because we had talked about it ninety seconds on the porch. I picked the kind of windows. I decided we would not have a receiver in the room where we ate. I worked out what her friends would say and decided it would be difficult about two years and then it would not.

Mostly I worked on how I would answer when people asked how we met. That is what I spent the winter on. I wanted a version that was short and did not sound like what it was, and I got it to two sentences. I said it out loud in that room more times than I am going to write.

She sent nine messages in eight months. The longest was forty one words. One was a picture of a dog in a car park with no text.

In the spring one came in during a lesson. A six character code and a date and nothing else. No question in it.

It was seventeen hours each way and she had put me in a seat and not a berth. I bought a shirt.

The floors in her building are the original boards, sanded and left, and everything in there was the colour of nothing. There was almost nothing in it. I understood in the first four seconds of standing in that room that the amount of money involved was not the amount I had been imagining.

There were people coming for dinner. She told me at the door, after she had kissed me, in the middle of another sentence.

Six of them. They were kind to me, and that took longest to get past. Nobody was rude. A man asked me twice about the lodge and listened to the answers.

She introduced me with the wrong name and said I was twenty four. I had turned twenty three in the spring. I said, actually I am twenty three. I laughed when I said it because I thought it was a small funny thing. She said god, is it twenty three, and laughed and put her hand up like she was waving something off.

Then somebody’s wife asked how we met. I had the two sentences. I had had them ready for eight months. And before I had finished taking the breath she said, oh, he fished me out of the pool, and everyone laughed, and it was better than mine. It moved on.

There was about a second and a half in there where nothing happened, and in that second and a half the woman across from me looked at me.

Not unkindly. She looked at me the way you look at a dog in a house you are visiting when you have understood the dog will not be there next time. Then she asked whether I had been to the water gardens, and it went on.

I have gone back to that second and a half more than to anything else. The bag in the closet was information. That look was arithmetic. That woman had sat at that table before, with somebody else in a new shirt, and had watched her get his age wrong too.

I went out to the courtyard and stood under the tree. There is a particular quiet in a place like that, where you can hear a horn twenty streets off and nothing else, and above me the windows were yellow with eight people in them holding glasses. I could see her at the end of the table with her head back, laughing at something. She was so beautiful that I had to put my hand on the wall.

I was proud that night, up until the second and a half. I had been thinking, walking up from the station, about the lift and the strap.

On the last day but one we walked and bought a bag of cherries and ate them on a wall by the water and spat the stones in. It was the best day of my life. I mean that flatly, it has not been beaten. She told me about her father, who sounded like an animal, and her face went for about ten seconds and she stopped it herself, with her hand, and said, anyway.

We walked on down to the shore. I went up her the way you check a thing over, the shoes and then the knees and then the water behind her and then her throat, with nothing on it, and then her face. All of it was true. She was not performing and she was not lying to me and everything on the surface of her was the real article. None of it was owed to me. The chain was four streets away in the bottom of my bag. I wanted, very badly and for about four seconds, to turn round and go up off that shore and keep going and be on a train inside the hour. Then she said something about the birds and I laughed and we went up to the road.

On the last morning she made coffee and handed me a cup with the milk already in it.

I do not take milk. I have never taken milk. I stood in that kitchen with the boards under my feet and drank the whole cup and said it was good.

She came down and worked the lift strap for me herself, not something she had done on the way up, and said, safe trip, and the gate came down between us, four floors of it.

On the way back they seat you with strangers. A woman asked what had taken me out and I said I had been visiting somebody, and she said, family? and I said no. She said, oh, a friend. I said yes, a friend. She said that is nice, and turned to the window because we were coming into a town.

I had the chain in the inside pocket of my bag. I had carried it out and carried it back and had not taken it out once in three days.

The chain was on the shelf in the bathroom next to the tap, coiled, with a hair in it.

It was not thrown away. It was not in the bin. She had taken it off to shower and left it on a shelf and gone.

There was a sun cream and a pair of earrings on the same shelf and there is a form for that, we post things on. I filled out a form that week for the sun cream and the earrings.

I did not fill one out for the chain. I put it in my back pocket with the money.

The last thing you do is the bowl. It had not been touched. Three at the back, two of the round ones in front, the small fruit hanging over the front lip the way you hang it. Pears go first and they go from underneath, so you turn them every morning and you get three days out of them. Apples you can leave. This one had a soft place on it the size of a thumb and I had turned it myself on the Tuesday.

I carried it out and tipped it into the bin with the grounds. The car went at the end of the season. I called on the Tuesday and a man told me somebody had come up from the south with cash on the Sunday, and he was decent about it, he said there would be others.

I stayed through the last session, because leaving would have been a statement and there was nobody to make it to. And in the mornings I was still in there at half six, squaring twenty tables to the line of the windows and pushing the chairs in and putting the pencils out, with the light coming over the ridge at a quarter to seven and going all the way across the floor. Marek came past the door at seven with the cart and looked in the way he does and said, goodnight is meant to be the end of it.

232

Wim died in the spring and I came back and two days later Ilse asked me, in the middle of talking about something else, whether while I was here I might make a start on the back room.

The room faces west and takes the sun from about two. When I opened the door the heat rushed along with smell is what I kept. Hot dust and old paper and something sweeter underneath that turned out to be a bag of bloodroot somebody had put in there and forgotten, and it had gone all the way down and come out the far side as a kind of dark sugary blood of red and white. Eleven wasps on the sill. I counted, All on their backs with their legs folded in, dry, and when I brushed them into my hand to put them out I could not open the window, so I put them in the bag.

The first box was shirts. Twelve or thirteen, folded by somebody who folded shirts properly. Not Ilse. A shirt worn for years by one man keeps the shape of his shoulders lying flat in a box. There is a fullness in it and you notice when you pick it up because for a second it has a volume it should not have, and then you fold it over your arm and it goes.

I did that thirteen times. I put them in a bag for the collection and then took two back out and put them on the mattress, and after an hour I put one of the two back in the bag and left the other. It stayed there all day.

His glasses were in the second box with one arm bent out at about twenty degrees. That had happened years before and he never got it fixed, because he had a way of putting them on that accommodated it, a half turn of the head. I had watched him do that maybe four thousand times.

The second half of the boxes were paper. In folders, in order, going back to before I was handed over. He kept everything. A receipt for a machine. His last docket from the yard. A rationing schedule cut out of the paper from the shortage years, useless for a decade, filed with the bank things, in order, with the rest.

And then, in a tin with a rubber band round it, at the bottom of the second box, the slips, of which there were hundreds. Small ones. They went from about 220 to four months before, and I sat on the floor with the tin in my lap for the guts of an hour. The paper ones from the booth by the terminus and then the printed ones from the machine, a different shape, and somebody must have set that up for him.

There was one for a larger amount that I looked at a long time. He never had that.

Some had come in and had been kept as well. So it was not about the money at any point. A slip that has been paid out is a piece of paper. You throw it out unless it is the day you are keeping.

I put them back and put the rubber band round it. I did not know about any of it. I do not know whether Ilse knows and I have not asked her and I am not going to.

At about two the sun came round properly and the room went the colour a room goes when light comes through a net curtain with dust on it, a kind of thick gold, and it was beautiful for about forty minutes and I noticed myself noticing it.

I took a picture of the shirt on the mattress with the light on it. I looked at it. It was a good picture. I deleted it and sat with my back against the wardrobe and my hands flat on the floor, which was hot.

That was the first one, and it goes like this, and it has gone like this ever since. The mouth fills first, with more than the mouth has any use for, thin and slightly sweet, and you swallow and more comes. Then cold across the back of the neck. Not the room getting colder, because the room was thirty four. Then the sound goes long, and the fly at the window and the machine down the road come apart into their parts and arrive separately. Then the heat. Not the room either. It starts under the breastbone and comes up over the face in about two seconds.

Twenty seconds. Then it goes and you are sitting on a floor.

What had happened in the seconds before was that I had taken a nice picture of a dead man’s shirt and thought, in the front of my mind, in actual words, that is a good picture.

That was the entire event, and I have gone over it since looking for something larger in it and there is nothing larger in it.

The third box had the pictures in it, loose, hundreds, from when they came back in a paper wallet with the strips in a sleeve at the front. There is a specific orange of the inside of those wallets and I had not seen it in fifteen years.

Most are of nothing. Six of a wall. Four of a car park. One with a thumb across it.

And then one from a river, and I am in it, and I am maybe six.

I am mid laugh with my head back and my eyes gone to slits, holding a stick in both hands like a bat, and he is behind me on his knees on the stones with his arms out because he has clearly just done something, and he is laughing as well, properly, with his whole face.

I was at the station at six. I was 41 at six and I had never met that man and would not for another five years, and there is no arrangement of the world in which that picture exists.

I have looked at it maybe two hundred times. It is not a fake, it is not printed differently to the others, it is in the same wallet in the same run with a picture of a wall on one side and a car park on the other.

I would not now know who to ask. The fourth box was the cards. He kept cards. Every card anybody ever gave him. I did not know why and would have said it was out of character.

About forty, and a third in my handwriting, going backwards through my life. A strange thing to do to yourself on a sad Tuesday afternoon. Mine start at eleven. There is nothing before eleven and there was never going to be, and I sat there and went down through them until they stopped, and the bottom of that pile is a wall.

Under the cards, still in its envelope with the flap tucked in rather than sealed, was one that had not been given to anybody. My name on the front in his writing. A birthday card, with money in it, and inside, nine words.

Happy birthday son. Call me sometime. I am fine.

He wrote it in the spring I was twenty three, the spring I was on a train with a chain in my bag. We had not spoken since the previous autumn, over something I could explain now in four sentences. Both of us were waiting for the other to go first. He went and bought a card and put money in it and wrote nine words. Then he did not send it.

I took the money out. It had been folded once to fit and had stayed folded. I put it back behind the card. Then I put the card in the envelope and tucked the flap in the way it had been, under, not sealed, so that it was again a card that could still be given to somebody.

That is when the second one came. It was bigger and it went on longer. I got as far as the landing and stood with my hand flat on the wall and my head down until it passed. Then I went back in and finished the box.

I did not open the one at the back under the window. It is a shoebox with a rubber band on it and I had known since half eleven that morning that it was there, and at about seven I put two other boxes on top of it and told myself I would do it in the morning. I did not do it in the morning. It is still there.

At half eight I went up to the roof and sat with my back against the tank. The concrete had been in the sun all day and was still warm right through and you could put your hand flat on it and it came up into you.

The aerial bracket is still bolted to the parapet with about a foot of pole left in it, cut off at some point and never taken out.

I sat up there about ten minutes and they were the best ten minutes of that year. I have never got anywhere with it.

They come at once. Not one after another. At once, in the same twenty seconds, off the same object. The roof is warm because a man is not in the house. The picture in my pocket is the best thing I own and I cannot get into it and it should not exist. The nine words are the nicest thing anybody has ever written to me, and he did not send them, and I did not call him, and then there was no more time in which to call him, and both are true in the same second. Every word I have takes one and drops the rest.

The kitchen was dark because she had only put the light on over the stove and had gone up.

I opened the cold store and it came out at my legs and there was the bowl. She had cut the melon into the small pieces rather than the big triangles, which takes longer and she has always done it that way, and put a plate over the top, and there was a fork in there with it, under the plate, because she knew.

I stood there with the door open and ate it in the light from the store. She was moving around upstairs. I ate the whole bowl standing up. Then I washed the bowl and the fork and put them on the rack, and turned the light off, and went up.

234

Ilse took me to see the reserve in the autumn. I did not know until we were in the car.

Every principal has two. That is the thing the notices do not put on the front. When a family applies, the station shades two seconds to the same tape, in parallel, in separate buildings, and one is handed over and one is kept.

The kept one goes on being shaded. He gets the same tape and the same treadmill and the same handwriting and the same bar on the arm at ten, and he does it in a room with a mirror, alone, into his twenties and thirties, against the possibility that the placed one drifts.

She had been ill about eight months by then and I think she wanted it done while she could still drive. She told me in the car park with the engine off. I got out and was sick against a wall in the middle of the afternoon and then we went in.

The reserve buildings are not like the station. They are better. The stock has to be maintained.

He was in a room with a window and a table and he stood up when we came in and he had my face.

He was not merely similar to me, because they match on skeleton and they match at four, and by that age there is nothing to tell apart except what a life does, and he had not had one. Heavier at the jaw. Soft hands. He had the scar and it was better than mine, flatter, because they had a better bar in his building. And the shoes. They were good shoes and they had been on a floor and in a yard and on nothing else, and there was no wear anywhere on them, on the toe or the heel or the welt, nothing that had happened to them. Mine had been out in the world and it was all over them, and I moved them back under the chair.

He said hello, and then, almost immediately, that we had come up the north road, and Ilse said, we did, and he said, they have had that road shut since the spring, so you will have come round by the water, and she said yes, and he said, that adds a bit.

He was pleased with himself for that, and you could see it go through him, because he had worked out which way we had come from a road closure and there was nothing else in his week to be pleased about, and he sat down and put his hands on the table flat, both of them, and waited.

There was a jug and three glasses on the table. He poured hers first. Then mine. Then his own.

She said the room was nice and he said it was warm in the afternoons but that he did not mind that. She asked if he got out and he said there is a yard and I go in the yard. She asked what he did in the yard and there was about a second where he did not have anything, and then he said, I walk about in it.

Then she said something about the roads again, about the roundabout they had put in, and how nobody knew which lane, and she said, your father would have had something to say about that lane.

And then he laughed, and he did it perfectly. The gap and then the shape of it, mouth almost closed, down the nose, up at the end, and it was better than mine, and it was better than mine because he had been doing it four hundred times a day for seventeen years and I had been living in a house.

She stopped. She had the glass halfway up and she put it back down on the table without drinking, and she looked at the window for about four seconds.

I said, the water road is quicker anyway. He turned to me when I said it and looked at me for the first time properly, and I saw him do the thing I do, decide what to be, and I watched it take him about a quarter of a second, and then he agreed with me warmly and said something about the bridge.

We are the same. I had known that in the abstract since I was nineteen and I had not known it in a room.

After that she asked him whether he read. He said he read a great deal. He named four things and then a fifth, and the fifth one he said the author’s name wrong, in the way you do when you have only ever seen a word written, and he did not notice, and she did not correct him, and I did not correct him.

He said, do you read.

I said, not much.

He said, no, and nodded, as if I had confirmed something he had suspected about people who live in houses.

She asked about the food. He said the food was good. Then he asked whether she still did the thing with the potatoes, and she said what thing, and he said, with the skins left on.

She said, oh. Yes. Sometimes.

That was the first untrue thing anybody had said in that room in forty minutes, and it was her.

She never did that with the potatoes. Wim liked them peeled and she peeled them for thirty years.

He had it off the tape. It must be in the tape somewhere, four seconds of a kitchen in a year she does not remember, and he had built a whole mother out of it and had been carrying her round a yard for seventeen years.

At the end she stood up and said, well, Tobias. She called him Tobias, and he said, will you come again, and she said, I will try, and he said, that is alright, and shook her hand, and she went out ahead of me because she wanted to be out of that room.

He shook my hand too. He had a good handshake. Somebody had taught him that.

I sat in that room and understood something I have not been able to put down since and am going to try to put down now.

I had assumed my whole life that the arrangement was that they had lost a son and were making do. That is the assumption that lets you sleep. Under it there is a real boy at the bottom and I am second best and everybody is being brave.

But that is not the arrangement, and I understood in that room that it never had been. The arrangement is that Tobias is a specification. He is three hundred and seventy hours of tape. A laugh with a gap in front of it. A scar on a left forearm, a way of holding a pen. The specification can be satisfied by any suitable body. There were two in that room satisfying it, and the one doing it better had never met her.

The boy who drowned was also only ever an instance. He was the first one, and the only thing that made him first is that he came out of her.

On the way back she stopped and bought two coffees and put mine in the holder and said, you were very good in there.

I said, he was better.

She said, he does not know me. That is the only thing anybody in that family said to me in thirty one years that went anywhere near it, and she said it looking at the road, and then she put the receiver on.

246

There are two threads. That is the thing I would have to explain first if I were explaining any of this to somebody. The first has five of us in it and has been going since the yard years. The other has no name, it just shows four at the top, and it was made on a Sunday in the spring.

You have to be careful. If somebody says something in the four and then references it in the five you get four seconds of everyone deciding whether to cover it.

Dev is the one who is not in the second one. He is why the five of us are the five of us. At nineteen he was the best of us. He was the funniest and he was the one who talked to girls first and he was the one who would go up and ask the man at the counter for the thing none of the rest of us would ask for.

Nothing happened to him. No accident, no notice from anybody, nobody died. He was at the depot and then he was not, and then something with his uncle, and then not that, and around twenty four he got heavy and slow and stopped being the one who called.

It went on four years. It did not get better and it did not get worse in a way that would have made it an emergency, and if it had been an emergency we would have been fine. We are good in an emergency. What we are not good at is four years of something that is not going anywhere.

The messages started getting long around then, nine minutes and eleven minutes, three in a row at one in the morning, and they were never crisis ones, just talking, round and round the same six things.

I listened to all of them for about the first year. Then I listened at speed. Then the first forty seconds and the last twenty, so I could answer in a way that sounded like I had heard it.

He never once asked me a question. I counted, over about thirty of them.

A man that far down does not have questions in him. I knew that then too and it did not make me press play.

In the spring at a dinner he talked a while and got onto his ex and it went twenty minutes and somebody’s fiancée was sitting right there and was perfectly nice about it and went out at some point and did not come back for a while.

Outside after, one of them said, we have to figure this out. Nobody disagreed. Nobody said anything cruel. Nobody said cut him out and none of us would have gone for that. He said we have to figure this out and everybody nodded and two days later the four person thread existed and none of us ever said out loud what it was for.

I did not make it. I have leaned on that in my own head more times than I want to write down. When it appeared I looked at it, and then I typed something funny into it.

That was my whole objection. We still see him. Every five or six weeks somebody does a Dev night, three hours, and it is genuinely fine, and he is funny for the first hour, and I have gone home from those laughing.

But it is scheduled. It has a frequency. Four people are managing a dose and the person being dosed is the reason any of us know each other.

In the summer we were out on a step and he said, casual, do you all still do the seventh day.

We do. Nothing formal, but somebody usually ends up somewhere, and it is in the other thread every week.

I said not really. I said it has kind of fallen off, everybody is busy.

He said yeah, and drank his beer, and looked out at the road for a while.

He knows. I have gone back and forth for a year and I have landed on the fact that he knows, and that he asked anyway, and that he let me lie, and that he came to the next thing when we asked him.

Which means for the last year he has been showing up to something he understands is an arrangement.

249

I married in the winter and it was the good kind of tired for about few days.

Her name is Roos. She fits windows for a firm on the ring road and she is better than me at every practical thing and completely uncompetitive about it. I found that suspicious for about the first year. She has a laugh that starts immediately with no gap in front of it. I noticed that the second time I met her and have never mentioned it to anybody.

She talks to plants, not sweetly, she tells them off, and she does it in the voice her mother used on her. She came out of a bad thing with a man in the years before me and she does not discuss it and I have never pushed. She takes that for delicacy. It is not delicacy, because a man who wants no questions asked cannot go around asking them.

Before we were anything I saw her working once. I was walking back from the depot and her van was outside the corner building and she was up on the first floor scaffold, fitting a casement on her own, and I stopped on the far side of the road because I had recognised the van.

She had the frame resting across two trestles and she was going along it with a plane, and every few strokes she stopped and offered it up to the opening and took it down again, and there was no wasted movement in any of it, and she was singing, not for anybody, badly, with the ends of the lines missing where the plane took the air she needed.

Then the frame went in. It went in on the first proper try, and she stood back on the boards and looked at it for a second, and hit the near corner once with the heel of her hand, and turned round and started on the beads.

She never saw me. I stood there about six minutes and she never looked at the road once, because there was nothing on the road she needed, Six minutes she does not know happened. Everything after it has been the version of her that has me in the room.

She has never met me. Eight months, and she has never once been in a room with the person writing this, and there is no way to put that to her that does not land as a confession of an affair, because there is no other way to say it in a kitchen.

She knows what I am. That is on the register and it is on the schedule of the marriage and there was a clerk present when we signed it.

That is not the same as knowing.

What is on the register is that I am placed. What she has decided that means is that I had a hard start, and was given a name, and made the best of it.

That is a story people tell about seconds and it is not untrue. It also has room in it for a man underneath. Damaged and waiting to be reached.

There is no man underneath. There is a set of preferences and a lot of watching.

I used to think of him as something I was wearing, and that the wearing was the injury, and that somewhere under it there was a person from the station being suffocated. That is the version I ran for about fifteen years and it is a comfortable one, because it has a victim in it who is me.

It is not what happened. You do not wear a face for thirty one years. It takes, the way the scar took, at the edges first. There was a boy at the station who could do a laugh, and he did it four hundred times a day until it became the only laugh he had, and now when something is actually funny, when Marit says something in a kitchen and I am not managing anything at all, what comes out of me is a dead woman’s son’s laugh with the gap in front of it, and there is no other laugh in me to come out.

It is not a mask. It is a face.

The one she married is warm. He remembers what her sister said about the kitchen. He gets up early. He is funny at her office things in the way that makes women tell her afterward that she got a good one, and she does get told that, and she repeats it to me on the way home.

He is also, and I did not expect this, better than I would have been. He is more patient than I am. He notices things about her that I would not bother to notice. When her father was in the hospital in the spring he drove out four times a week for two months and sat with a man he does not like, and I would not have done that, and Roos got that from him and not from me.

So there is a case that says the arrangement is fine. That she has a good husband and the good husband is a construction and the construction does the work, and that a construction which drives four times a week for two months is worth more than a real man who would not.

I have run that argument at four in the morning more times than any other and it collapses at the same place every time, which is that he did not drive out there for her father. He drove out there because it was the thing that would be noticed.

I hold them in contempt for it.

My wife. Ilse. The four in the thread who would say without hesitating that I am one of their closest friends. I watch them accept the thing I hand over and something goes cold in me, and it is not aimed at me, where it should be aimed. It is aimed at them. For being taken in. For not checking. For sitting across from me for thirty years and never once asking a question the shading could not answer.

I have tried three times.

A whole season at nineteen, properly. I would not perform. I would answer with the true answer and let silences sit. What happened was nothing at all, and I mean nothing in the flattest sense, not a single consequence. People are not looking for the real one and are not let down when he shows up, they route around him. I went from being in the middle of a room to being a person who was there, and by the end I was eating alone most nights and it was not because anybody had turned on me. There was nothing to turn on. I had removed the only thing I was offering and failed to replace it, because there was nothing behind it.

The second was Dev, at two in the morning. I got maybe eighty percent of it out.

He was wonderful about it. He said everybody is like that. He said he is like that at work. He said it very kindly and then asked if I wanted to get something to eat.

That is when I understood it is not sayable, and not because people are cruel, but because the sentence lands as a common complaint and the size of it will not go into words that exist.

The third was my wife, four months in, and it is the one I would pay to take back.

She was in that state where she wanted to be told something and I started. I said I did not think she knew me. She went very still and then said, in a small voice, are you saying you do not want this.

I said no. I said the opposite. I tried about ninety seconds and watched her face going through the options, and every option was a thing I had done to her. Another woman. Money. A recall notice. Her face was doing that because there is no fourth thing in the catalogue, and I could see that I was about to hand her a wound she would carry without ever getting a name for it.

So I killed it. I put him back on mid sentence. I said work had been bad and what she meant, and that I meant she did not know how much, and I made it good, I made it land, and she was relieved and put her face in my neck.

I lay there afterward with her weight on my arm and hated her.

I notice that I have started to write in shorter units than I used to. Roos says I have got quiet, and she does not mean unhappy, she means quiet, and she is right, and I do not know whether that is the work of the last few years or simply what forty one is.

What is left is maintenance.

There is a file on my machine called u. One character so it sits at the bottom and says nothing if anybody sees it. About four hundred lines. Things that landed, so I can use them again on different people. Things I thought of afterward that I should have said.

I stop at the top of the road before I go down. Four minutes, most days. I have done it since the winter and she has never asked, and I have a whole answer prepared for the day she does.

Somebody will stand up and say what I was like. It will be Dev, probably, or Marit, and they will describe a warm man who remembered things and was funny at the right moments and was, everyone will agree, easy to be around. And the room will nod, because every person in that room met him, and it will be accurate, and there will be nobody in the building who can stand up and correct it.

Not that I will die. That the thing they bury will be a specification, and no complaint will be filed, because the only party with standing to file it is inside the specification.

250

Ilse went in the winter and it was not fast.

By the end she was on something that took the edges off and she said things she would not have said. She asked twice to open a window in a room with no window. She talked to her own mother. Once she looked at me a long time and said, are you the one from the car.

I said yes.

She said, good, and went to sleep.

The night before, at about three, she was awake and quite clear, and she took my wrist, the left one, and turned it over and put her thumb on the scar and held it there.

I do not know what that was. I have gone over it every day since and I get a different answer depending on what kind of week it is. The answer is coming out of me and not out of her.

She died at about ten the next morning.

I sat with the body until they came, which was two hours, and in the second hour I found that I was doing the laugh. Not out loud. In my chest, the gap and then the shape of it, over and over, the way you check a tooth with your tongue.

The weeks after are not in order and I am not going to put them in order.

There was the business with the house clearance people, who were fine, and who wrapped the glasses in paper, each one, even the bad ones from the petrol promotion that nobody had ever liked, and I stood in the kitchen watching a man wrap a glass we had all actively disliked for twenty years with the same care as the good ones and I had to go out to the garden.

Marit took the clock. I took nothing. Then the day before the completion I went back and took the boot scraper.

It is a lump of iron in the shape of nothing. It is in my shed. Roos has never asked about it and I would not know what to say if she did, because there is no story. He scraped his boots on it. Thousands of times. That noise, twice per boot, and you knew he was in.

I keep starting to say what the weeks were like and going somewhere else instead.

The cards came. Some of them were for Tobias, from people at the far edge of her life who I had met four times at weddings. Your mother was so proud of you. I read every one and stood them on the shelf the way you do.

There was one from her cousin in the north. She talked about you constantly, it said. You and Marit were her whole world.

I have not thrown it out and I have not kept it anywhere particular. It is in the drawer in the hall with the takeaway menus. I know it is there. That is the arrangement we have come to, that card and I.

Also in that period I went to the registry about the annexe, and I did the thing with the meter readings, and I rang the man about the guttering. I am putting these in because they were the same weeks. The forms and the guttering do not wait outside.

The reserve is still there. I checked. He is forty two and he is in a room with a window and a table and he has been doing that woman’s laugh four hundred times a day for thirty three years into a mirror, alone, for a handover that is not coming, because there is nobody left to apply and no fee left to pay and no house to hand him into.

They do not release them. There is no procedure for it. The maintenance is prepaid out of the estate for the lifetime of the reserve.

I could go. I have thought about going every week for two years. I have got as far as the car park twice.

The thing that stops me is not that it would be difficult to see him. It is that I would have to decide on the way which of us I was going to be in that room, and I already know the answer, because I would want to be kind to him, and the kindest available thing would be to go in there and be Tobias for him for an afternoon.

He has never had it. That is the whole of what he has never had. He has done the work every day of his life and nobody has ever come.

I thought I would go through her things and there would be something. There was no envelope with my name on it. There was no letter. I went through everything, twice, the second time at night with Marit asleep in the other room, and I was not tidying, I was looking, and I did not say to myself what for.

There was a shoebox of pictures and I went through it at two in the morning at the kitchen table, and they were pictures of her life, her school, her sisters, Wim young and thin with a moustache that must have been a mistake even then, and Tobias, all through, Tobias at every age, and then me, and here is the thing I sat there with until it was light.

You cannot tell where he stops and I start.

She had not sorted us apart. They were in together, one run of boy, two in a paddling pool, five with a poem, eleven at a handover she did not photograph, twelve on a boat, and if you did not know the year of the drowning you would say it was one child. She knew the year of the drowning.

I do not know what that means. I have decided four different things it means and unfolded all of them.

She was a woman with a shoebox, and nobody sorts a shoebox, and I have been pressing a meaning onto four hundred loose photographs because there is nowhere else left to press it.

I had the box on the table until it got light and then I put the lid on it and made the coffee.

Marit’s youngest was at the house at the turn of the year and she is seven, and she found the scar while we were doing a puzzle and put her finger on it and asked what it was.

I said I burned it on a stove when I was four.

She said, did it hurt.

I said, I do not remember, I was very small.

Then she went back to the puzzle and asked me to find the piece with the flag on it, and I found it, and she took it out of my hand without looking up.