the auditor’s first morning
The file came in the overnight bag with a note from Reagan’s office, make it agree, and I had it open on the kitchen table before the kettle was through, because I wanted it done before the school run. Halloran. The valuer’s sheet said four. The rates roll said three. Someone was wrong and it was my job to say which, and I have done a thousand of these, and they bore me the way only other people’s certainties can.
So I read it once. Four houses, blue door on the end, a note about a pot. Fine. I went to write four and stopped to drink my coffee, and the coffee was cold, which meant time had gone somewhere I hadn’t spent it, and I read it again before I signed.
Three.
The same sheet. I knew, because there was a ring where my cup had stood, the wet brown circle I’d only just made, sitting on the page like a seal. No one had swapped it. No one comes into my kitchen. It was the page I’d read, reading back a smaller number, calm about it, the way a person tells you a thing you already half knew.
I sat there a while. The radiator ticked. Upstairs my daughter was awake and not yet up.
I wrote three, because three closes the file and four keeps it open, and a man wants to close the file. I initialled it. I bagged it for the courier. And all morning I haven’t been able to think of the name of the woman with the blue door, though I read it twice, and I am not a man who loses names.
Pull a thread:
- she is one — the file, the woman in it
- the film student — the record that won’t hold
- Halloran — the street he was sent to