Chapter 19 The Name in the Byline

The audit came and went in November and found eleven thousand dollars unaccounted for, which in a hundred and eighty thousand dollars of federal harbour money in 1996 was a number that could be defended and was defended, and the council would go on defending it for four more years. The solicitor's letter did not go away either. It sat on the desk in Bernice Doyle's cardigan pocket for six weeks and then it went to a firm in the city with a better name, which wrote back in four paragraphs and offered to make a formal enquiry into the conduct of a member of the teaching staff of the school in connection with the removal of twenty-nine pages from volumes in the custody of the council. The board of governors, which consists of nine people of whom six have children at the school, wrote back in one paragraph. *The board has considered the matter and is satisfied that no member of staff has been engaged in the removal of any document from the municipal archive. The board notes the public statements made by a pupil of this school at a council meeting on 14 October and wishes to place on record that it does not consider such statements appropriate. The board further notes that no pupil of this school has been suspended in connection with these matters.* Tove read that last sentence four times in the print room and then went and found Piet and made him read it, and he read it and stood for a while with his hand on the door frame and then said, "It is an apology for being frightened." "It is a legal document that happens to be an apology for being frightened." "It is the first thing anybody in this town has written down that admits the police exist." Piet took the paper off him. "I am having that printed. In the same issue. Next to mine." The fourth Thursday issue of The Current went out with eight pages in it, and on page three, under a rule, there was a piece of four hundred and ninety words with a byline that had two names on it. Tove wrote hers. She wrote it about twenty-nine leaves of paper and the shape of a gap in a bound volume, and she did not put a single person's name into it except those of a librarian and an archivist who had asked her to. Piet Beaulieu wrote his in the library on a Sunday afternoon, with Silas Teal reading over his shoulder, and it took him two hours and he cut it from one thousand four hundred words to four hundred and ninety. It began: *My father signed a page in a harbour office in Selkie Cove in August 1996 at the request of an old man whose hands had stopped working, and he wrote the old man's name in nine seconds and then would not take a cup of tea, and he has never told me any of this, and I am sixteen, and he is sixty-one, and one of those two numbers is going to have to change before either of us dies.* It went on for four hundred and ninety words about a grandmother with a blade and a tin of biscuits and a letter written by a girl of nineteen who held a door, and at the end it said this: *I am not asking anybody in this town to forgive my father. I do not think that is the business of a school newspaper and I would think less of the newspaper if it were. I am putting my name under this because a woman wrote in it in September that she has never known a fact in this town that was said in front of four witnesses in the room where it happened, and I would like it recorded that this one was, and that I was in the room, and that I read it out in my own voice and not out of a document.* *My name is Piet Beaulieu. I live at the top of the harbour office. I am the boy on the strand in a photograph taken in June 1996, and that part is not true, and I have decided I would rather have it printed wrong than not printed at all.* That last sentence was the one people argued about for a year, and it is the reason the thing happened, and it was not in the first draft. Yannick Beaulieu's letter came on the eleventh of November, and it came by hand. It was brought to the school gate at twenty past eight in the morning by a fisherman called Sorken who has a boat the size of a table and who had been paid nothing and who told three people on the quay about it before he got to the top of the lane, which Tove only learned about in December and never minded. The envelope was thin and had the name of the school on it and nothing else. The letter was two pages, and it was written in a hand that Tove, who had spent four months looking at hands, recognised inside about four seconds as the hand of a man who does all his writing on a wheelhouse table in a boat that is moving. *Miss Vinter.* *I have been told that there is a piece of paper about 1990 in a basement and that it has a name on it and that my son has read it out on a fish quay and that you have printed it. I have been told this by a man who came to the harbour in a hired car on the ninth and sat in the office and did not tell me what he was going to tell me until he had.* *You asked me once, through a woman in a headscarf on a radio, whether I had been in this town in 1990. I said no. I am not going to say anything else to you about that. What I am going to say is the following, and you may print all of it.* *There was a woman here in 1990 who was seventeen and who typed and who held a door and who had a girl of nineteen in 2010 who got on a bus in April with a letter. I have known since 2010 that she did it and I have never gone to her, because she asked me in 1989 in a kitchen in Norhaven, with her hands round a cup, not to come to that town again, and I have spent twenty-seven years obeying a woman with a cup in her hands, and I would do it again tomorrow and I am not proud of that and I am telling you anyway.* *My son does not need me to be right. He needs me to be there.* *The auditor will find the eleven thousand dollars and the council will bury it and I have not got the strength to fight a council in a town I was asked never to enter. But there are two boxes of my own money in a bank in Norhaven and I have instructed that one of them be opened and the contents sent to the county, and that is not an audit and it is not a confession and it will not pay anybody. Do what you like with it.* *Yannick Beaulieu.* *PS. He has asked me to say that he is sorry about the tea. He has not told me who it was I was not polite to.* Tove read it standing at the print room window with the machine running, and then she went out into the corridor and stood against the wall for a minute, and then she came back in and pinned it to the rota inside the library door, under the six names, because it was evidence, and because Iona Pratt had written on that card that everything which comes in gets logged before it gets read, and Piet got a biro and put the date on it. Then she went back up the two flights to the top of the library stairs, on her own, and sat on the floor of a room with six tables and thirty years of dust on it, and thought about a boy who had read a sentence out loud on a quay in front of a whole town and then put his own name under it. "Doak said there is one document nobody can deny," she said, to nobody, to the lamp on the middle table with a full bulb in it and a switch that shone with handling. The lamp was still in the desk. And in the desk, under the blotter that Iona Pratt had told them in September not to touch because it was hers, there was a flat envelope, and it had been there the whole time. --- ---