This Census-Taker(34)

I shook my head when I understood that was what he required.

“I do have this authority. To make this count. So will you.”

He smiled and stilled my new unease. I was eager to make this count, as he said.

“Bring what you want,” he said, pointing me into the house. “What you can.”

One more looking through the windows. Two shirts. What books I could find. Samma’s little knife, which I stared at, which I’d forgotten. I went through every room. Some oatcakes. Two pencils.

In my father’s workroom I looked at the table all mucky with metal dust. The room felt saturated with his presence, felt like he was speaking in it.

I didn’t take any of his keys.

Tucked behind his worktable was the message in looped blue ink that was or was not my mother’s. I blinked to see it there. That I took.

In the upstairs room I used the knife to score around the edges of the image I’d drawn on the wallpaper. I teased with the point and tried to lift my animals off the wall to carry them with me. But the glue was too strong and the paper came off in strips and they tore away.

I took the house key from the hook in the kitchen. It should have been dark when I came out but it was as if there was gray light under the hill’s stones.

The man fetched his mule. It met my eyes in challenge. “What do you have?” he said. I started to justify everything I carried but he just opened a pannier for me to put it in.

“My goat!” I said. I ran to it and it hawed and hustled me.

“You should bring it,” the man said, giving it a wave of welcome.

“You took the other one,” I said.

He frowned. He shook his head.

“I wouldn’t steal,” he said.

“Who took it, then?” I said.

“There’s no shortage of thieves.”

“I thought you took it. I thought I heard you shoot.”

“You might have done. But,” he said then, “not your goat.”

I closed the door of my house. I locked it. “You came here because I was here, didn’t you?” I said. I looked at the key I held.

“Wait,” I said.

I ran to where I’d buried the bottle. It was too heavy to bring. I couldn’t let those remains molder without me. I couldn’t bring myself to smash that thick glass even had I the strength. I pulled it out of the earth and shook it and the bones rattled.

You could put a bird’s egg in there and let it grow in the glass. Drobe hadn’t said if anyone had ever put a baby in a bottle and let it continue. You could. Push food in, teach it through the glass, clean it out. If you were strong enough. You could grow a man in there, a woman, in the glass.

I didn’t smash the bottle but I did at last upend it and scatter the bones.

I put my house key into the bottle and stopped it up again and nestled it carefully in a hollow of dried weeds and stone, where the bones it had contained could watch it.





He said, “Let’s put this place out of our sight.”

Halfway between what had been my house and the bridgetown the man clicked within his throat and veered off the path.

I was so surprised I stopped at the edge of the rough and watched him. He turned to face me and walked backward to keep up with his mule. He beckoned as he went so I stepped after him among the stones, pulling my goat. It came, complaining.

“Careful,” the man said. “We’re going wherever there are people to count.” The mule sniffed but I thought it sounded happy.

The coming darkness and the picking of the plant life against my ragged trousers and the sway of our step-by-step descent narcotized me so I felt myself retreat behind my eyes, watching from a long way back, listening to my own body until after some hours at the start of deep night as we approached a spreading canopy, the foothills and the hill’s forested surrounds, the census-taker woke me for a startled moment by lifting me to put me in the saddle, nestled between bags. I fell asleep again, proper asleep, at once.

Much later I lurched half out of a bad dream with a cry, shaking, my hands clutching for something. Perhaps the animals had sounded. I don’t think so.

We were in the wooded lowland, I realized. We were off the hill.

I looked still sleepily at the flat land that somehow did not shock me alert, or all the way awake.





This Is My Catechism, it says in my second book, a book started, confiscated, pilfered, regained, and that I’ve inherited, that my boss taught me slowly to read, the few scraps left of which I go over many times, and ultimately in which now I write.

And there’d come to be a lot to write, a diaspora of which to make sense. An aftermath of war and commerce. Numbers to run, in as many kinds of places as there are places, cities you could call invisible or uneasy or beleaguered, cities about which I won’t even start to write here, in this part of my second book that can only be a prologue. There would be functions to apply according to instructions, which I can do without insubordination.

My line manager rarely speaks about my predecessor.

It wasn’t my catechism that fronts this, to which I’ve at last responded, with my five words on two lines, and with all of this; it was hers, the message she needed to give me, to give whoever came after her. It is mine now, though. Written with her unorthodox precision and inserted at the start of what would become my second book too, I’ve keyed it many times with the muffled typewriter, with its hacking bird sound: I write it again now, in full, by hand.