87 - Oben Farr

The standing notice went up on the board at the seventh bell on the first of the month, and there were six people in front of it.

There used to be four. There have been four in front of that board every month of Kalen's life and he could have named all of them at eleven.

Marra Sull, who reads it the way you check a wound. A woman with a baby on her hip, and it is not the same woman, because the first one's child is four now and comes along and holds the rail. A slag yard man who started coming in the autumn and stands at the back with his cap in his hands. A girl of about eleven who comes on her own and stands right at the front, and whose name he has not asked for and is going to.

Mata Ovel, who would not come to that board at all for two years and sent her son.

And Ames from Fetter Street, who cannot read a word of it either, and who had begun turning up in the summer and standing exactly where the old man from the cooperage used to stand.

Nobody had asked Ames to do that. Kalen had watched it happen over three months and had never mentioned it to anybody, and was not going to.

WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE

Levy assessed ................ 17.8

Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 47 days

Forty-seven.

He had done the subtraction on the walk up, the way he does every month, and had been right, and had looked anyway.

"Move up if you are not reading it," said a man behind him.

"I am reading it," Kalen said, and moved up, which he would not have done in the spring.

* * *

There was a man waiting in the yard when he got down and he had been waiting since the sixth bell.

The hands had left him alone because he was in a Sedge clerk's coat and nobody in that house wanted the conversation. He was fifty or so. He had a wooden case on his knees. He stood up when Kalen came through the gate and then did not appear to know what to do next.

"Mr Ashgrove."

"Yes."

"You will not know me."

He held the case against his chest with both hands, the way you hold a paper in a wind, and said the rest without a pause anywhere, because he had plainly been saying it to himself in that yard since the sixth bell. Oben Farr. A clerk at the Counting House, eleventh year. In the spring he had been under a loading frame on the Cinder Row dock, and a man had held it off him.

Kalen stood still in his own gateway with a grease can in one hand.

He had thought about that man on and off since the spring. In a cold room with a blanket round his shoulders. On a step with the man's cut coat across his knees. At a bench in the summer, over a Sedge receipt with a serial on it, which turned out in the end to be the most useful piece of paper anybody in Ward Nine has ever held.

He had never once been able to put a face to him. Here was the reason, standing in the gate with a case.

"You were face down," Kalen said.

"I was face down. You saw the back of my coat and I saw four inches of board and a nail."

"I have gone over it forty times and could not work out why I had no face for you."

They have walked past each other twice since, in Sedge Row, and neither of them knew.

"There is a file on you," Farr said. "There is a note in it about a First Collection on a dock in the spring, and the date is the date. I have read that file eleven times in eleven months and it took me until the summer to look at the date."

* * *

He would not come in. He would not sit down and he would not take a drink and he would not put the case anywhere except on his own knees.

In the end Kalen gave up and sat down on the kerb outside his own yard. Farr sat down beside him with the case. That is how the whole of it was done.

"Do not thank me," Farr said.

"I was not going to."

"Good. I want the order of things clear, because I have gone over the order of things a great deal."

He gave it in order, with his hands flat on the lid, in the way of a man who has rehearsed a thing walking to work and is now saying it in the wrong place and cannot stop.

He was not here because of the dock. If Kalen wanted the truth of it, he had not thought about Kalen for months. He had a back that would not straighten and a claim he did not dare make and a wife who did the whole of it, and he went back to a desk, and the man on the dock was a thing that had happened on a Tuesday.

Then in the winter he was moved into disposition entries.

"It is the smallest room in the building. Four of us."

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He said it the way you say a street name. Every docket carrying a variance line comes through that room and is entered and goes on, and the entering takes about nine seconds, and Farr has the fastest hands of the four.

"How long has that room been there."

"Longer than the building. They have moved it twice."

He looked at the road. Two hundred a month for eleven months, every one of them correct. He had never once done a wrong thing at that desk and he wanted it said before he opened the case.

"Say the rest plainly."

"The dockets are destroyed at the quarter. That is the procedure and there is a bin and a man who takes the bin."

Farr's hands had not come off the lid.

"I did not put mine in the bin. I put them in my coat, one at a time, at the end of the day, and took them home, and put them in a case in my own room under a bed. I did that for eleven months."

"Why?"

"That is the question my wife asks and I have not got a good answer for her either."

He turned his head then, and he was not apologising, which was the thing about him. He was correcting a misunderstanding he had come across the ward to correct.

He is not a brave man. He has never once stood up in a room in his life. He got as far as the grate about a dozen times with a docket in his hand and thought, these are the only ones, and put it back in the case. That is the whole of his reasoning. It is not a moral position. He keeps things. He has every dock receipt he has ever signed and his mother's rent book from a house that has been down twenty years, and he could not tell anybody what any of it is for.

Kalen looked at the case for a while.

He had spent the better part of a year assuming that if a man ever came out of that building with a piece of paper, it would be a man who had decided something.

There was no decision anywhere in this. There was a clerk with a habit. The habit had outlasted the fire by eleven months.

"You were worth saving," he said, "and I could not have known why."

"No. And it does not work backwards, Mr Ashgrove. I would rather you did not try to make it." Farr put his hands flat on the lid again. "You would have got a stranger off that dock either way. It happens that the stranger was a man who does not throw anything out."

* * *

Kalen went into the shed and came back with a small brass thing on a cord and put it on the lid of the case.

Farr looked at it for four seconds.

"That was in my coat lining."

"It was in your coat lining. They cut the coat off you in the road and it came to me in a heap on Ovel's step, and I have had it since." Kalen sat back down on the kerb. "It was a Common and it was broken in two places and I read it back into true on a kitchen table. It is a Sound now. That is not a favour. It is yours, I have had the use of it since the spring, and it is better than it was when I got it."

Farr picked it up and held it out on the cord at arm's length and watched it not move.

Then he put it in his waistcoat pocket without any ceremony at all.

"There has been a hole in that lining since eleven ninety-eight," he said. "I have been meaning to have it done."

He opened the case.

* * *

Two hundred and six dockets in eleven bundles. The tape was the tape a counting house buys by the mile. Each bundle was labelled on a fold of card in a small even hand, with the month and the count.

Kalen read for forty minutes on a kerb in the cold with a man sitting beside him not saying one word.

They were exactly what Farr had said they were. Each one carried a ward, a quarter, an amount, and a disposition entry. The entries were filled in. Every single one of them, in the same hand, in the same box, in the same nine seconds at the end of a run of nine seconds that has been going on longer than the building.

He had seen a disposition line with anything in it once in his life. Nine days ago, on the fourth sheet of a printed return attached to a Ward Four invoice, at the end of a fourteen hour day, with the lamp turned down.

Here were two hundred and six of them, and they were Ashfall's.

W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.8 [carried, 987]

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

DOCKET 7,441,109 / WARD ...... W9

DOCKET 7,441,109 / VARIANCE .. 3.8

DOCKET 7,441,109 / TO ........ RECEIVING 8

The ward's own line was blank and would stay blank, because the ward's own line prints on a brass tag that gets struck at the quarter and thrown in a scrap bin, and nobody in Ashfall has ever had a reason to turn one over.

The docket's line was not blank. It had never been blank. It had been filled in nine seconds after it arrived, at a desk in the smallest room in the building, two hundred a month, by four men with good hands.

"Eight," Kalen said.

"Ours is always eight. I do not know what it means and nobody in that room knows what it means, and we copy it off the head of the sheet." Farr had his hands on his knees. "There are eight of them altogether. That is the whole of what I can tell you, and I only know it because after the fourth month I counted them."

Ward Four is not Ward Nine. Ward Four carries one point one from 1102 and Ashfall carries three and a half from 987, and the two wards have never had one thing in common, and there is not a clerk in Kentra who would put them on the same sheet.

They go to the same place.

* * *

"You know what happens to you," Kalen said.

"Within the week, I should think."

"Say it out loud anyway."

"It is not a hanging matter. It is a dismissal for the removal of ward paper, and they will be sorry about it, and there will be no argument, because they will be right."

Farr shut the case and pushed it along the kerb with the flat of his hand until it came up against Kalen's boot.

He has four months of wages behind him. His wife has been asking him since June what is under the bed. She knew before he did, the way they do, and when he finally told her on the Sunday night she went quiet for about a minute and then said: then take it to the boy who does the pump.

"I will find you a position," Kalen said.

"Do not say that if you cannot."

"There are three houses in this ward that owe me a favour and two of them owe it badly. And there is a Reclaimer in Ward Four who cannot keep a register straight and knows it." He stood up with the case under his arm. "You will not like the money."

"I have not liked the money for eleven years," Farr said.

He went off up Cinder Row with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up against the wind. He did not look back. Kalen watched him the whole length of the road and then stood in the gateway a while after that.

* * *

He did not open the case again that night.

He put it on the bench under a rag and went up to the Warrant counter instead, because the counter shuts at the eighth and it was seven.

He had been there once before, in the summer, with a completed Charter and a clean record and eleven days of paper in both arms, and had been handed the whole of it back on page one, line four, on the ground that a petition cannot be admitted while a complaint stands against the man it names.

The complaint had been withdrawn in the autumn. He had not gone back since, and he had told himself it was the work.

The clerk read the first sheet, turned it over, and asked for a number that had nothing to do with any of it.

"Line."

"Three thousand three hundred and fifty."

"Sponsors."

"I have not got them yet."

"Two, and one of them at the grade petitioned or above." The clerk ruled under the box. "The sheet dies on the fifth day without both names on it and I will not send for you."

Kalen signed it and put the date under his own hand in Accord script and left it on the counter.

Then he walked back down Cinder Row past the lamp at number eleven, which was on.

Four days, and one of the names had to be Warranted.