Chapter 4 You’ve moved it #2
“A refusal isn’t a zero.” He shifted his weight; the stoop came and went, a decade of ice in it.
“The exercise is the whole of band two — baseline compatibility — forty points of the hundred, and the schedule doesn’t score a declined band at zero.
It scores it unmeasurable. Which converts, page four, small print, to a discretionary mark.
The panel’s hand, not the instrument’s.” He watched her take it.
“You decline that slot tomorrow, you’re not scoring yourself nothing.
You’re scoring yourself whatever Ingrid Vestergaard thinks of you, out of forty, with no instrument reading to argue with.
You’d take a zero over that. A zero’s arithmetic. Discretionary is a person.”
The stove ticked. Robyn stood very still, and turned it over, and he was right — she could hear the phrase in her own typing fingers, band declined, referred to panel discretion, she’d typed it about somebody in February and hadn’t thought twice, because typing was not reading.
A zero she could have planned around. A zero was a number you could spend against the other bands, the domestic log, the shared-meals entries, all the soft evidence of a working unit.
Discretionary meant the forty points stopped being hers to spend and became the panel’s to bestow.
“You knew this afternoon,” Kwabena said, “when you told Okonjo. Most of it. The forty, the unit-share, all of that.”
“Most of it,” Robyn said.
“But not that bit.”
“Not that bit,” she said, and did not thank him, and he did not wait to be thanked.
“What you’re refusing it for,” he said, “you’ll have had a box to put it in, and it won’t have been much of a box.
You’re right about what it measures. I’ve read the protocol.
It’s a room, and a timer, and a blotter, and it measures what your body does when it’s handled by people performing for a form.
” The flat voice made it somehow worse and somehow bearable at once. “I’ve no opinion on the rest.”
“Everyone’s got an opinion on the rest,” Robyn said.
“Not me.” He picked up the field case again.
“I read the same form you did. That’s the sum total of what I’m good for in this conversation — I check instruments, I don’t tell people what to want.
You’re the only person in this unit who’s read the scoring schedule cover to cover, and I’ll not insult you by telling you what to do with what’s in it.
” He paused. “I’d have come in and told you the discretionary bit even if the bed had been where they left it. For what that’s worth.”
“It’s worth something,” Robyn said.
“Hm,” he said, which she was beginning to understand was a valley-wide dialect for more than it said, and then, with the tired politeness of a man at the end of a very long day: “Now. Is it still all right if I come in, or have I talked myself back out onto the mat?”
“You can come in,” Robyn said, and meant it as the whole sentence.
He came in. Two steps and then the third, and the room changed around him the way rooms did — took his cold and his ice-and-stone and his tired dry warmth into itself and made space.
He set the kit bag down where she pointed, by the wall beside the near room’s door, out of the walkway, and he did it without checking back, as Halvor had set down the chairs, and Robyn stood in the middle of her wrong warm room and registered, with the part of her that typed things and never got to vote, that three men in one day had now moved their weight through this room in the direction she’d pointed, and that she had not once had to raise her voice.
“I’m in the far room with Osgood, apparently,” Kwabena said, reading the door assignments off the cork square by the kitchen, the one bit of the unit’s paperwork she’d left alone. “He’s got the top bunk and all the wall. I’ve been warned.”
“By whom?”
“By the duty clerk. By the chap on the desk. By a text from a number I don’t know that just said he talks in his sleep, it’s mostly about the road.” The not-quite-smile again, gone before it could be held to account. “Danny’s been managing expectations.”
“That’s one word for it,” Robyn said, and he made a low sound that was nearly a laugh, and the room took that too.
He filled the kettle — everybody’s first act in this kitchen, she was learning; it was going to be that kind of week — and while it came up he stood at the counter with his careful hands wrapped round a mug, and looked at the room one more time, slower, the way you’d read a line back after typing it.
His eyes stopped on the bed. On the three blankets, the two green cushions, Danny’s shirt down the side where the cold came through the boards.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “and it’s worth the same as the rest of my opinions — nothing —” the flat voice went flatter, dry as the cold off the glacier, " — it’s a good nest. Wrong’s just what a diagram calls a decision it didn’t make."
Then he took his tea to the far room, said goodnight in the doorway of it like a man closing a ledger, and was gone.
Robyn stood in the main room a while after, with the lamp low and the stove ticking down and the black water of the night against the glass, and she did the new sums — forty points, discretionary, Vestergaard’s hand instead of an instrument’s — and then she put it down, because it was done, it had been done at four in the afternoon in front of a tablet, and a number you learned at ten at night did not change a sentence you’d meant at four.
She turned the lamp off. The room went to stove-light and snow-gloom, the bed lying at its angle in the corner like something considered, wrong and warm and hers, and she went to it, and put her hand flat on the blankets the way you’d touch a signature you’d just written, and stood there a moment longer than there was any reason to.
A zero was arithmetic. Discretionary was a person.
She’d have told four people today what she was doing, if anybody had asked her that way. One person finally had, in a doorway, at ten at night, flat as a bus announcement, smelling of ice — and he had not once come in until she said the whole sentence.
The week was one day old. Robyn got into the bed she’d built wrong, on purpose, in the stove’s throw, out of the draught, and the room smelled of all four of them now, faintly, like a form being filled in by hand.
She was asleep before the kettle finished cooling.