Chapter 8 Four days early
She woke at twenty to twelve with the room too warm and Danny asleep against her back and putting out heat like something banked for the night, one arm across her middle and his face in her hair, breathing like somebody who had run somewhere he was glad to be and intended to stay.
She lay there a while doing the arithmetic of getting up without waking him, which was the kind of arithmetic she was good at — his arm first, lifted by the wrist and set down on the sheet like a thing on a shelf, then the slow roll, then the floor cold under her feet.
Danny muttered something with the word plow in it and took her warm place over for his own without waking, and she stood in the main room of nest unit four in her shirt and let the too-warm feeling drain off her into the dark.
The window was open its two inches and the black air came down off the mountain and settled on the sill.
There was snow-glare enough to see by — the sky clear, the moon somewhere above the ridge, the whole room drawn in blue-white edges — but she turned the lamp down to its lowest anyway, because the lamp was where the bed faced now, and the room did not feel finished at night until the lamp had its say.
Danny slept on. Down the corridor Halvor was asleep in the near room, come down off the ridge after the dark had properly settled, and if the wind changed in the night he would know it before the instruments did.
Kwabena was still out at the shed logging cores, or was back and asleep with his glasses on their cord on the table beside him; she had not heard the door and would not have, he moved like somebody who had spent a decade not disturbing instruments.
Which left her, awake, in the middle of a room she had built wrong on purpose, with no reason to be awake that she could have written down.
So she did what she had been doing all week, which was read the room, and adjust it.
She saw it from the door first — she always saw it from the door first, she had stopped pretending that was accidental — and what she saw from the door was the bed sitting wrong and warm in the lamp-light, and the two green cushions at the head end where the timber was cold, and one of them, the nearer one, was half buried where Danny had rolled.
And before she had decided anything at all she had crossed the room and lifted it free and put it on the chair, square on the seat, corners aligned, where a person coming in at ten in the morning with a tablet would see a room being lived in sensibly and a bed that was a bed and a chair that was a chair.
She stood there with her hand still on the chair back.
Then she picked the cushion up off the chair and put it back in the bed where it had been, and sat down hard in the other chair — the hard one, the one with nothing on it — and was furious with herself in the dark.
Because she knew what that had been. She had typed it for three years.
There was a heading for it on the assessment form — she could see the dropdown as clearly as if the tablet were in her own hands, because the tablet had been in her own hands: nesting behaviour, and under it the little rows, prompted, self-directed, appropriative, declined.
She had ticked those boxes about strangers.
She had sat in the clinic office with the radiator ticking and entered, about women she had never met, that they had built well or built oddly or built not at all, and she had never thought about what it was to do the building with the dropdown open behind your eyes.
The cushion was not the problem. The cushion was nothing.
The problem was that she had moved it for a reader — for Okonjo’s tablet, face-down on the counter; for the log that was not in the room; for an audience she carried around in her own head and had apparently brought to bed — and she had not noticed she was doing it until her hand was already off the thing.
Two days of building this room for herself, on purpose, out loud, and on the second night she had caught herself tidying it for the form.
That was what three years of the other side of the desk got you. The desk came along inside you.
Fine. She sat in the hard chair with the cold coming off the window at the back of her neck and she did it the records way, because the records way was what she had: provenance and reason, one object at a time, until she knew whether the room was hers or the audience’s.
The bed, off the north wall, facing the lamp. Reason: the draught came down the wall and the lamp was warm, and a bed was for sleeping in, not for being a diagram of a bed. Hers.
The sofa, off the west wall and turned in on the stove. Reason: a soft seat with its back to the room and its feet in the draught is a seat nobody sits down on, and this household sat down, three men deep, on the second evening, without one of them noticing they had. Hers.
Three blankets. The two grey unit-issue ones because they were heavy and at altitude you wanted weight more than you wanted warmth, and the red-checked one from the bottom of the cupboard because it smelled of cedar and of having been somebody’s once, a long time ago, before the academy laundered the somebody out of it. Hers.
The two green cushions, the wrong green, the green nobody would have chosen, off the chairs and into the head end of the bed where the timber was cold against her shoulders at night. Hers.
Danny’s blue shirt, pushed down the side of the mattress where the draught came through. It blocked the draught and it smelled of him and those were the same reason; he had accused Kwabena of taking it, to his face, and owed the man an apology and a coffee. His by accident, hers on purpose.
Danny’s beanie, found under the chair on Tuesday morning and kept on the lamp-side corner of the shelf, for the sole reason that it had been under the chair and now it wasn’t.
Halvor’s sweater, folded at the foot of the bed.
He had left it over the chair on Monday with the groceries, had never asked after it, had in all likelihood not thought about it once, and that was how the sweater had come to be hers.
Cold air and pine resin off the wool. The back-of-the-throat of him, present in the bed while he slept down the corridor.
Hers, now, by the same rule as the shirt.
And that was the inventory, and every object in it passed, and there was nothing of Kwabena’s in the room at all — which she registered, standing there, the way she’d register a missing field.
He left nothing anywhere. Four months left on a contract and the man travelled light through every room he was in; his glasses went back on their cord, his pencil went back in his pocket, and whatever he thought about the bed stayed behind his face where he kept it.
She was not going to go and take something of his to correct the record.
That would be arranging him for the audience too.
The sill stayed bare. That was the one line of the diagram she had kept, and she had kept it because the diagram was right about the sill — the window wanted nothing on it but the cold — and if she was going to drag a bed off a wall she was going to be accurate about which parts of the diagram were wrong.
She was not contrary. She had never once been contrary in her life.
She was accurate, and the difference was the whole week.
So the room was hers, object by object, and the contamination was not in the room.
It was in her, and it had a job title and a login, and she sat with that a minute and let it be true, and then she filed it the way she filed everything she could not fix at twenty to twelve on a Tuesday night, which was carefully and not too deep.
She got up and went to the kitchen end to put the kettle on, because the cold had got to her hands, and that was when she let herself look at the tablet.
It was face-down on the counter by the fruit bowl where Okonjo had left it at seven, charging, the little light breathing green at the edge.
Okonjo had eaten with them and gone on to admin and forgotten it or trusted them with it, and either of those was its own small entry in a log nobody was keeping.
Robyn had known exactly where it was for five hours.
She had not let herself look at it twice.
She stood close enough to touch it and dried her hands on a tea towel that did not need drying.
She could have read her own week in under a minute.
She had trained the temporary staff on that interface; she knew the assessor screens better than some assessors did, knew which entries were dropdowns and which were free-text and which had a character limit that made liars of everyone.
Access to every file in the valley and she had never opened one she was not working on, not out of virtue but because the files were work, and you did not take work home, and the file was never the person anyway.
She was not going to start with her own.
Whatever was in it had been written from the doorway of a room it had not entered, and she would find out what it said when the form decided to tell her, which it would, in its own time and its own words, both of them wrong.
She did not read it. She made the tea instead, and stood holding the mug with her back to the counter, and that was when she picked up Halvor’s sweater off the chair where she’d set it while her hands were busy — to fold it properly, to put it back at the foot of the bed exactly as it had been, some small honest task to end the night on — and the wool gave him up at the back of her throat, loud, cold air and pine resin.
And underneath all of it, faint and unfamiliar and entirely her own, herself. Changed.