Chapter 10: The Quota Office

The nurse behind the yellow door looks up from her counter as Peter comes in, and smiles at him as if he has been gone a weekend.

"Mr. Lowe. What did I tell you?"

"For good, you said."

"For good." She pulls up his work visa on her screen. "Anything new since February? Allergies, operations?"

There is nothing new. She tears open a sealed plastic bag and takes out a fresh device, the same curved tube, the same ring, the same little brass padlock, and he goes into the cubicle and drops his trousers without being asked. He knows the drill now. He thinks of tax forms before she has to tell him to. Cold steel, a click, and the old weight settles back where it was, as if it had only been waiting.

She writes his passport number on a new envelope in her round hand and seals the key inside.

"This one won't come back here," she says. "When you're a citizen, the clinic sends for it."

"And then?"

"Then that's between you and the clinic." She hands him the yellow slip. "Welcome home, Mr. Lowe."

The flat is as Jessica showed it to him on the phone, two rooms and a kitchen and a balcony the width of a chair, and he lives in it alone for now. Jessica stays at her mother's until the wedding. That's how it's done, she says, and Ruth doesn't need to say it at all. So he unpacks two cases into a wardrobe barely big enough for one, and learns which tap gives cold, and eats the landlady's fruit off the tree, and reads his flash cards on the balcony with his knees apart, because it rubs less that way.

The exam is on the Tuesday of his second week, at the ministry. The pastel building on the main street has a room on the first floor with eleven school desks and a ceiling fan, and eleven candidates. A Dutch engineer from the harbor works. A nurse from the hospital who came from Manila. A young cook. A man of sixty who wants to marry an island widow and says he has studied for a year. The men all lower themselves onto the plastic chairs in the same careful way. Peter supposes he does it too.

Forty questions on a tablet. The volume of the lagoon. The nine fish. Cooking oil, not. Paint, never. And there, at number thirty-one, an old friend:

A new citizen wishes to father children. What should he do first?

He taps the right answer without reading the others. At the end the tablet plays a little tune and shows him a cartoon fish giving a thumbs up, which is a thing he didn't know a fish could do. Thirty-eight out of forty. He got the spotted one wrong, the one that lives in the reeds, and he will never forgive it.

The oath is on Friday, in a small room on the ground floor with a flag in the corner. Jessica sits in the front row in a yellow dress. A woman from the ministry reads the words out a line at a time and the new citizens say them back: to keep the law of the Garden, to keep the lagoon clean, to put nothing down a drain that the drain should not have. Then she shakes each of their hands and pins a small silver starfish to each lapel.

"Congratulations," she says. "You're one of us." And to the room, brightly: "The population office is across the hall, if any of the gentlemen wish to apply today. It's on your way out."

---

Jessica holds his hand across the hall and is so proud of him she can't stop smiling at strangers.

Everyone calls it the quota office, though the sign on the door says Population Services in English and in her own language, in the same rounded letters as the website. Inside there is a ticket machine and a row of chairs. A young couple with a newborn asleep in a car seat, waiting to register the birth. A man on his own, about forty, with his hands between his knees. Peter takes a ticket. Number 58.

When the screen shows 58, the clerk turns out to be a girl younger than Jessica, with glasses on a beaded chain and a lanyard full of badges. She takes Peter's new citizen number and types it in with two fingers.

"Lovely. Paternity entitlement?"

"Yes, please."

"And you've got the app? Log in with your citizen number. There." She leans over the desk and taps his screen for him. "That's you registered."

Jessica looks over his arm. A clean white page with the cartoon family at the top, his name under it, and one line.

Paternity entitlement. Next to it a red dot.

"Red," Peter says.

"Red is pending. Green is granted."

"And how long does pending take?"

"It's subject to availability, sir." She says it the way you'd say it looks like rain. "When a place comes free."

"A place."

"We're at the cap. The island is full. Then it goes to the next on the list."

Jessica hears her own voice before she has decided to speak.

"But he's a citizen now. A citizen has his two."

"Island-born gentlemen have their two," the clerk says kindly. "New citizens apply. It's in the guide, madam. Chapter Nine."

Peter has gone very still beside her.

"Where am I on the list?"

"We don't give out positions. It only upsets people."

"Roughly. A year? Two?"

"Places come free when people die, sir." She smiles at him with real sympathy. "I can't tell you when people will die."

Behind them the baby wakes up and starts to cry, and its mother hushes it.

"Now, you've taken the oath today, so your visitor device has to go back to the Border Office." The clerk is already printing something. "You'll want to book yourself in at a clinic. Most new gentlemen go in on the Monday."

"Book in for what?"

"Your choice, sir. Like any gentleman who has had his two." She slides a leaflet across the desk. "There's everything in here."

Jessica knows the leaflet. Every girl on the island has had one: the school nurse hands it round in the same lesson as the red days. A smiling man on the cover, and in the rounded letters, You Are Free to Choose! Inside, three boxes in three pastel colors. Sanitisation. A long-term device. Emigration.

She looks at the third box and can't look away from it. Her father chose that one. It has a little drawing of an airplane.

Out on the steps the heat is waiting. Peter walks down them slowly, the visitor's walk, and stops at the bottom in the shade of the building and looks at nothing. She stands beside him. Across the main street Mr. Tane is putting out the board in front of his pharmacy.

It's in the guide, the girl said. Chapter Nine. Jessica never read the guide. She never needed to. She was born with her two, the way she was born with her name, and so was everyone she knows, and when she told Peter, a year ago, in the dark of her bedroom with her thumbs shaking, she told him what everyone knows. Only if you ever became one of us. Then it would. And in the guesthouse bed, when he said he'd have his two like anybody, she said like anybody, softly, and believed it. She put her hand on the steel and believed it.

She kept the plant from him for weeks. And all this year she has been telling him something that wasn't true, without even knowing it.

"I didn't know," she says. "Peter. I swear I didn't know."

"I know you didn't."

"Nobody knows. Nobody here ever has to."

"I read it." He laughs, without much in it. "I read it in March, Jess. I underlined it. Subject to availability. I thought it meant a stamp."

She waits. She doesn't know what she's waiting for. Then she does, and it's the third box.

He turns the leaflet over in his hands, and opens it, and looks at the three boxes for a long time.

"The card's out," he says. "Obviously. Then it'd never be ours."

"Yes."

"So that's the cage." He folds the leaflet in half, and in half again, the way Mr. Tane folds his bags. "It's a wait, that's all. I can do a wait. Half my job is waiting for results."

She can't speak. She takes his hand instead, and holds it hard.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says. He doesn't say like your father. He doesn't have to. He gives her his phone, and she looks at the red dot until the screen goes dark.

---

The clinic is on the harbor road, a low building painted pale green, and on Monday morning Peter sits in its waiting room with a ticket in his hand and the visitor's ache between his legs, for the last time.

There are six chairs. On the wall a television with the sound off shows the coast guard advert, boys in navy blue grinning on a speedboat. A woman with a toddler. A man in work boots who doesn't look up from his phone, and whose hand goes to his pocket for a moment when he shifts in his chair. Peter doesn't wonder about him. He knows.

His name comes up on the screen in the rounded letters, misspelled. Mr. Lowie.

The nurse is a man, fifty or so, bald, in the same pale blue as the airport nurse, with reading glasses pushed up on his head. He has a voice like a radio announcer and the hands of a mechanic.

"Mr. Lowe. Yes. Your envelope came on Friday." He holds it up: brown, taped with Border Office tape, Peter's passport number on the front in the airport nurse's round hand. "And you've chosen?"

"The long-term device." He hesitates. "Can I ask you something first? At home a man would have a vasectomy. A small cut, an afternoon off. It can even be undone, if things change. Couldn't I just..."

"That doesn't count," the nurse says, with the patience of a man who is asked it every week. "Not since the amendment."

"What amendment?"

"Before my time. Well." He smiles. "Just about. The long-term device, then."

The treatment room has a padded table, a steel trolley, and in the corner, behind a curtain that's pulled open, a grey steel cabinet waist high, with a screen at the top. Peter knows the model. He watched it work in February. It stands in the corner with the patience of a fridge.

The nurse sees him looking and says nothing, and Peter is grateful for that, too.

On the trolley lies the new one. It's lighter than he expected when the nurse puts it in his hand, smooth and rounded, a dull grey steel, with slots cut along the tube to let the air in. No padlock. Where the padlock would be there is a small hole through two tabs, and beside it on the tray lies a loop of thin steel wire with a numbered tag, and a pair of pliers.

He knows that seal. He has put a hundred of them on crates of parts going out to customers. The wire goes through, the tag is crimped, and if the number doesn't match at the other end, someone has opened the crate.

"Lie back for me. This is the quick bit. You won't be out of one before you're in the other." He slits the envelope with a thumbnail and the brass key drops into his palm. "Law says no gap. Not even for a breath."

It's nearly true. A click, a twist, the old ring easing off, and for the length of one breath Peter is bare in the cool air of the room, and he feels himself stiffen straight away. He looks at the ceiling. Tax forms. Brackets from Stoke. The spotted fish in the reeds. Then the new ring is round him, warm from the nurse's hand, and the tube slides on, and the nurse threads the wire, and squeezes the pliers once, hard.

A small metal crunch, and it's done.

"There." The nurse reads the number on the tag aloud and types it in. "That's you, Mr. Lowe. Only a clinic can take that off now. You'll find it better than the visitor one. It's made for wearing."

He's right, which is the worst of it. Peter sits up and it moves with him, and it doesn't pinch. It's lighter. It's built by people who expected it to be worn for thirty years.

The nurse drops the visitor device into a plastic bag, seals it, and writes Border Office on it in marker. Then he hands Peter a leaflet. Your Long-Term Device: Questions and Answers! The cartoon man on the cover is smiling, his hands on his hips.

"Cleaning, it's all in there. You do that at home. Inspection every three months, you come in, we check the seal. Anything wrong in between, come in any time." He taps a box at the bottom of the page, printed in bold. "And the fees."

Peter reads it. Each inspection is billed. So is today's fitting. Underneath, in cheerful italics: Your fees help us provide hormone patches free of charge to sanitised men!

"The card's free, of course," the nurse says, rolling the pliers up in a cloth. "Just so you know. Not that anybody's pushing."

At the desk Peter pays for his own cage with his English bank card, which the machine accepts after two tries. The receptionist gives him an appointment slip for the middle of November.

"See you in three months, Mr. Lowe," the nurse calls after him.

Peter goes out into the heat of the harbor road, where Jessica is waiting in her mother's car with the engine running and the air on. He walks to it carefully, out of habit, and then a little less carefully, because it doesn't need it. Three months. He tries to count how many lots of three months there might be, and finds he has no idea what number to start from.