Trays

Marion got in at twenty to nine, as she had for twenty-three years, hung her coat on the second hook, because the first hook had a wobble that nobody had ever fixed and nobody ever would, and put the kettle on before she took the cover off her screen, because a day should be approached, not pounced on.

The peace lily was still called nothing at all. It had produced, against the fluorescent light and every reasonable expectation, one new leaf, which Marion had decided not to mention to it, in case that ended the arrangement.

The in tray held the usual, and under the usual, the programme.

The programme had been calm in January. Calm the way new systems were calm, everything in the future tense, everything achievable because none of it had yet been attempted. Then the spring had come, and Phase Two with it, and the paper had changed weather.

Marion did reconciliations. Reconciliation meant noticing when figures disagreed with their own totals, and she had spent twenty-three years getting the ear for it, and the ear did not switch off just because the thing in front of her was words. Words had totals too. The memo from the programme office, for instance, dated Tuesday, regretted that the timetable had been revised to reflect the depth of stakeholder engagement. The sentence was calm. The spacing around it was not. Somebody had written that sentence several times, she judged, each version angrier than the last, and had settled in the end for regret, which in that building was the loudest anger the stationery allowed.

The revised timetable was attached. In February the timetable had known everything, to the day. Now it knew the back half of April, provisionally, and the word provisionally was doing the kind of work that gets a word signed off sick.

There had been questions. The memo did not say from whom, because memos never did, but questions had been received, and were being addressed, and would be responded to in full and in due order, and Marion, reading between those particular lines, formed a picture of the questions and gave a small professional nod. They would be proper questions. That was the trouble with them. An improper question could be refused. A proper question had to be answered, and answered on paper, and the paper had to agree with the other paper, and somewhere in the building the other paper was already being looked for.

Somewhere out there was a person who asked questions the way she checked provenance, patiently, in order, with the reference to hand. She hoped never to meet them across a desk. She would not have backed herself.

Mr Okafor, two desks over, was having his own spring with municipal utilities, which had been resequenced, which meant renumbered, which meant that March now disagreed with February on principle.

“It’ll settle,” he said, to his screen, without belief, the way you say it to weather.

The annex to the revised timetable listed the sites. Marion ran her eye down it, because running her eye down things was the job. A records store in Acton. A depot nobody had visited since the flood. A library, mid list, one row of a table, correctly formatted. A basement in Hounslow. The eye moved on, because there was nothing to hold it, which was, if you thought about it, the entire design of a table, and Marion did not think about it, because thinking about it was nobody’s job.

At half past two the programme office sent a further memo, superseding the morning’s memo, apologising for any confusion, and the apology had been through drafts as well. There would be a meeting. The meeting would confirm the revised approach. Attendance was encouraged, in a font that made it compulsory.

There was one more thing, which she noticed because noticing was the job, and logged because logging was the job, and took no further, because further was not in her tray. The afternoon memo gave the assessment window as the back half of April. Its own annex, four pages on, gave the third week. The document disagreed with itself, quietly, over the same officer’s initials. In twenty-three years she had watched the building be wrong in every direction, early, late, sideways, she could not remember the building ever disagreeing with itself. She corrected her copy in pencil, both ways, so that whichever April arrived would find her ready, and went on.

The trays went out even. The figures agreed with their own totals, all the way down, which Marion entered, and initialled, and did not celebrate, because agreement was the job and you did not applaud the job. But she had been in the building long enough to know what agreement was worth in a spring like this one, with the paper running a temperature and the timetable off its food, and on her way out she gave the peace lily its turn toward what light there was, and took her coat from the second hook, and her bag, which weighed what it weighed. One of these Saturdays she would go through it properly. There was no hurry. There had been no hurry for some time.

The first hook still wobbled. Nobody would ever fix it. There was a comfort in a fault that kept its word.