Chapter 17 The Shortest Note

The town did not get angry all at once the second time either. It got organised, which was worse, because in a town of eleven hundred people organisation is just anger that has found a secretary. By the Monday there were two hundred and twelve signatures on a sheet of A4 asking the council to confirm publicly that no page had been removed from any volume in the basement of the town hall in 2010. It was worded beautifully. Tove read it in the library on her lunch break and felt the back of her neck go, because she recognised the sentence structure of it, which is the sentence structure of a paragraph in her own paper, put there by somebody who has been reading her work for a month and has learned from it. Mrs. Ostler from the Co-op came in on the Tuesday and put a carrier bag on the counter and said there was a dog in it. "There is no dog in it." "There is no dog in it now because I have got it in the van." She took her card out and put it down on the counter, the way people do when they have done this before. "You are going to be asked by a solicitor and I am the secretary of a committee and I have come to tell you that the committee has never once met in a room with the press in it, so everything you have printed has been printed by children without anybody in an adult's chair saying no to any of it, and that is not a defence of you. That is a fact about you." "It is a fact about the council as well." "It is." She picked her card back up. "My mother signed the 2010 sheet. I did not know that until last Thursday and I have still not rung her." There was a letter from a firm in the city with a postcode and no name on the letterhead, four paragraphs long, which said that the board of governors of the school had been made aware of allegations concerning a member of its staff and would be taking advice regarding the publication of material capable of causing distress to an identifiable individual. Bernice Doyle read it twice at the print room window and then folded it into eight and put it in her cardigan pocket and said, "Right. Now we know what we are doing." "Is that bad?" "That is the fourth letter I have had in eleven years of teaching and the other three were about a mole in the changing rooms." She did not look round. "Tove. Up to now this has been a story. From today it is a piece of paper that a lawyer has put a name to, and everything after this point is going to be slow and expensive and dull, and the only thing that will get you through it is to have everything that matters in the room when it is said." "So the rota." "So the rota, and the room, and four hundred words." Bernice Doyle put her hand on the door frame. "And one more thing, and I am saying this as your teacher and not as the woman who puts your work in a corridor. You have written 'a source with knowledge' about four documents now and at some point somebody is going to ask your source, and if the source is sitting in that reading room with a vacuum flask, then you have got the best case in this county and you should be terrified of how easy that is." They printed twenty-nine leaves of paper in a fortnight. Piet photographed each one twice, flat, with a ruler in the frame, and Tove checked the photographs against the leaves herself, one at a time, both hands, while Piet read out the numbers, because a rule that two people made in September is a rule and not a habit. Then they took the leaves to the library printer in Norhaven, who could not believe what he was being asked to do and did it in eleven minutes for nine euros, and the twenty-nine leaves came back on card stock the colour of old photographs. They went into The Current on the Thursday, six pages, with no names in it at all. That was Tove's decision and it cost her a conversation with her grandmother that lasted forty minutes and went badly. "You could put my name in." "I could put your name in and I am not going to, because the second I print B.V. next to twenty-nine pages of a book of births then every person in this town who ever sat at that typewriter in 1990 becomes a story about guilt rather than a witness, and that is what I would be doing to you, and you would let me, and I am not going to let either of us." Berta Vinter sat at her table with the blind up for once and did not say anything for a while. "You have learned it from somebody," she said. "I have learned it from you. You just have not noticed yet." The meeting on the council was on the Thursday after that, in the hall above the library, which is not a coincidence anybody in the town noticed out loud. Ole Ostrand had asked for that vote four times in eleven years and had been refused four times by a clerk using the phrase for the present financial year, and this time the clerk was on holiday and somebody had put a page in a newspaper that made the phrase impossible. Two hundred and thirty people came. The hall holds ninety. Tove sat on the stairs with Hester and counted the faces and recognised about forty, and the forty were not all the same, and one of them was Mrs. Ostler from the Co-op, who had brought a folder. Ostrand read his own statement out loud from a sheet of typing paper with two spelling mistakes in it, which Tove thought about for a long time afterwards, because it is one thing to have been right for forty years and quite another thing to have been able to say it. Elmer Doak was let in at the fourth item and he was given the floor by a chairman who was visibly frightened of him, which Tove also thought about for a long time. He spoke for four minutes. He did not say a name. He said that he had been the harbourmaster's clerk in 1994 and 1995 and 1996, and that he had carried a box to a bank in Norhaven four times, and that he had put the fourth box down in the passage of a building in Bridge Street and that it had gone before he reached the end of the street, and that the reason he was telling a public meeting this was that he was eighty-one and had been told by a doctor in a city in November that he had a season of good eyesight left and possibly no more. The vote was five to four to open eleven boxes of fund papers and to commission an outside audit. The four who voted against it were all over sixty and two of them were related to the landing stage. Afterwards, in the car park, in the dark, with her hands shaking in a way she was going to have to explain to her mother on the telephone one day, Tove said, "Four to five. If two people had stayed at home." "Two people could have been anywhere," Piet said. "That is not how a town works. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the only thing you have ever written about that nobody in this building understood before you wrote it." The sixth note came in over the shelf at eleven minutes past one that night, and it was the shortest of them all. Nine groups of five digits. Forty-five digits on a page that a stranger could read in a single breath. Piet had it decoded in three minutes and twenty seconds, sitting on the steps of the library with the torch between his teeth, and he said it out loud once and then made Tove write it down before he said it again, because he had learned that a sentence said once in the dark in October is a sentence that can be denied later. "The page you cut is not the page that matters," he read. The sea came up over the shelf in the split rock and lay there, the way it did at the top of a spring tide, and went back down again, and Tove stood on the shingle at ten past two in the morning with nine digits of a stranger's sentence in her coat and understood that they had spent a month learning the shape of a thing that was not the thing. --- ---