Chapter 14 Withdrawn
The shuttle bay was the warmest public room on campus and the least comfortable, because the warmth was diesel and wet wool and the big doors never quite closed against the weather coming up the valley.
Robyn came down into it at one o’clock with the panel office still on her — old paper and cold tea and a radiator ticking toward a warmth it would never reach — and the bay’s smell was almost a relief, almost honest, engines and snowmelt and the rubber of the mats the drivers hosed down at the end of shift.
The top road above the units had closed again in the morning and opened again by eleven, and the board said so, and the roster said so, and the clipboard by the duty door said which of the trial units wanted seats down to town on Friday.
She was not looking for the clipboard. She was crossing the bay toward the canteen because she had not eaten since seven and the ache under her ribs had opinions about that, and she went past the clipboard the way she had gone past it six times this week, and the sixth time her eye did what records work had trained it to do, which was read a document without deciding to.
Unit four. The trial roster, reprinted — she could see it was reprinted, the paper was a different white from the rest of the pad, newer, nobody had touched it with an inky thumb yet.
One line fewer than there had been all week: the unit, the assessor, and the candidates.
She stood in the middle of the floor with a driver going round her with a crate and read it, and it did not change no matter how many times she went at it.
Sunde, H. Osgood, D. Bracken, R. The assessor’s line read Vestergaard, I.
(chair, subst.), which she had known since half past eight.
And under the three names, in the small type the office used for amendments, one line, dated today, timed at nine o’clock in the morning: Asare-Hill, K. — withdrawn, candidate’s own request.
She stood there long enough that the driver with the crate said " ’scuse," a second time, kindly, and she stepped aside without looking at him.
Nine o’clock. She had been sitting in Vestergaard’s office at nine o’clock with her own sentence going into a margin in longhand, and he had been at a window somewhere filing.
He had been in the bed she built until three.
He had slept on the floor by the window rather than be counted in it, and she had thought that was the worst of what the form was doing to him, and at nine, while she was telling the chair of the Placement panel that the room was hers, he had been taking his name off it.
She forgot the canteen. The ache under her ribs forgot it too, or she stopped being able to hear it over the rest of what her body was doing, which was a thing she knew from the clinic files had a drop-down of its own, candidate distressed, and which she declined, out loud, in the middle of the empty bay, to let them have.
Then she put her collar up and went out the side door and up the service road toward the glacier shed, into the wind, bright as broken glass.
The shed was cold the way a church is cold — held, deliberate, a cold somebody maintained on purpose.
The cores lay in their tubes along the rack in lengths of white and grey and bubble-veined blue, ten thousand winters of weather lying on their sides like files in a drawer, and the thermometer by the door said it was colder in here than outside, and the whole room smelled of metal and old ice and, faintly, of him: paper, wool, and under it the warm dark note she had learned on Wednesday and could not now unlearn.
He was at the bench with his back to the door, reading glasses on their cord, a core section in the cradle and a notebook open, and he did not turn round, and she knew he had known she was coming since the door, since before the door, since the road.
“You filed at nine,” she said.
“Eight fifty-eight.” He capped the pen and set it parallel with the edge of the notebook, and turned round on the stool, and looked at her the way he looked at instruments, carefully, taking the reading before he trusted it.
“The window clerk time-stamped it nine. I’ve stopped correcting people who round up.
It used to be half my personality.” His voice was its usual flat Manchester, unhurried, and his face was doing the thing it had done in the doorway on Monday, something moving across it that he had no word for, only this time she had one: he had been crying at some point that day, hours back, somewhere with a door shut on it, and the shed smelled of it under the cold, salt and heat kept down.
She did not say so. You did not say so. That was the whole etiquette of a world where the air told the truth — you let people keep what their faces kept.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“No,” he said. No apology in it. He took the glasses off and folded them and they hung on the cord against his chest. “Sit down if you’re staying, there’s the other stool, it’s colder than it looks. Mind the cable.”
“I’m not arguing with you sitting down like an outpatient.”
“All right.” He stood up. He was taller standing than she ever remembered, rangy, the stoop of a decade bent toward instruments in cold rooms, and he put his hands in his pockets and gave her his full attention as though she were a reading too, and something in her that had been winding tight all the way up the service road wound tighter, because this was the man who noticed what nobody else noticed and said it out loud, and he was going to be reasonable at her, she could smell it coming.
“Say it, then,” she said.
“Three of you score placeable,” he said.
“Four don’t. A candidate with under six months on contract caps the unit’s placement score at the band below the one unit four needs — I gave you the number on Wednesday, you remember the number.
The report files at nine tomorrow either way.
Me in it or not in it, the arithmetic is the same for three of you and worse for all four.
” He said it evenly, without hurry, a man reading figures off a sheet he had long since memorised.
“I read the same form you did, Robyn. I read it months before you did. There’s no version of the week that ends with me counted, and I wasn’t going to spend the last two days of it costing three people a placement to keep me company in a bed I was sleeping on the floor next to. ”
“That’s the sum,” she said. “I’m not arguing with the sum.”
“No,” he agreed. “You’d lose. You’ve read the form.”
“Then hear the thing I’m actually saying, because you’re standing there answering an argument I haven’t made.
” Her voice came out level and she was fiercely glad of it; the heat was up under everything now, turning the volume on her own wanting, and she noted it and put it where she could see it, because nothing in this shed was going to be decided by her body.
“The sum isn’t yours. You did it alone. At nine o’clock this morning, at a window, while I was in a room with the blinds down being asked what the room was for — you took yourself out of it without telling me, and you knew what you were doing, because you slept on the floor at three in the morning so as not to be counted, and this is the same thing at a bigger scale.
You keep deciding which parts of you we’re allowed to have. ”
The shed’s heater ticked. Outside the wind came off the glacier and found the seams in the walls, and the cores lay in their ten thousand winters, and Kwabena looked at her for a long moment, and what moved across his face this time he did have a word for, he had just never had it aimed at him.
“If I’d told you,” he said, “you’d have argued.”
“Yes.”
“You’d have spent yesterday evening and this morning on it.
You’d have brought Halvor and Danny into it, and Danny would have done whatever Danny does when he’s cornered, which is agree with everybody in turn, and it would have been four people’s week spent re-litigating a number that does not move, and it would have been in the log, all of it, in whatever phrase the menu had for it, on top of the twelve.
” He paused. “And there’s a decent chance you’d have talked me out of it.
You’d have stood in the middle of the room and read it, and decided, and you are very hard to refuse — you must know that about yourself by now, it’s the engine of the entire week.
And then it wouldn’t have been my decision any more.
It would have been yours. When the report files tomorrow and it’s unfavourable — and it will be unfavourable, whatever Marguerite’s successor finds to say about the furniture — I needed the only decision in it that was mine to actually be mine.
That’s not sacrifice. I don’t feel noble.
I feel like a man who’s finally filled in a form correctly. ”
“You arrogant—” She stopped. Started again, lower.
“Listen to what you just said. You’d have decided.
Yes. That’s what the room is for. I decide where the bed goes and who sleeps where and what comes in and what stays out — you stood in the doorway on Monday and watched me build it and you were the first person all day who understood I’d done it on purpose.
You don’t get to be the one thing in that room that moves itself.
” She heard it land, watched it land, and did not soften it.
“You took yourself off my arrangement, Kwabena. In a ballpoint, at a window, on a Thursday morning, like moving a shelf two feet to the left. And you didn’t ask the room. ”
He was quiet for a while. The wind came and went. Somewhere behind the bench a relay clicked and a pump she had never seen started up and thought better of it.