Chapter 13: Six Chairs

November, and the waiting room of the clinic on the harbor road has six chairs, and Peter takes the one by the door.

On the television, with the sound off, a woman is gutting a fish in a studio kitchen. By the window sits the old man from the harbor wall, his hands folded on his stick. Beside him a heavy man of forty-five or so, in a fishing cap gone pale with salt, is telling the room about his outboard motor. In the far corner a man sits with his hands between his knees, and Peter knows him before he knows from where: the quota office, the day of the red dot. The sixth chair holds a young man in a football shirt, scrolling his phone with his legs crossed, as easy as a man on his own sofa.

Peter sits with his knees apart. The man in the cap watches him do it, and grins.

"August, was it? When they sealed you?"

"The Monday before my wedding."

"Then you're one of ours." He waves a hand round the room: the old man, the corner, himself. "They book you by the week you were sealed. Same faces every three months, till you die or go to the machine." He puts out his hand. "Tommy. That's Mr. Rewi, thirty years. Him in the corner doesn't talk, so don't bother. I talk."

Mr. Rewi lifts his chin in the same slow nod he gave Peter on the harbor wall in February.

"The Englishman with the walk."

"Everybody saw that."

"Everybody sees everybody's."

"Not him, he's not ours." Tommy nods at the football shirt and doesn't lower his voice at all. "Two weeks ago, the machine. He's in for his check. Look at him."

The young man swings his foot and goes on scrolling. Peter can't remember when he last sat like that.

"Seen the bill yet?"

"It's on the fridge."

"Twenty seconds, it takes. I've timed it. Ray reads the number off your tag, types it in, says see you in three months. And I pay for it like a tooth out."

"How long have you been coming?"

"Four years. I went in to the hospital with one kid and came out with three." He settles back for it; he has told it before and likes it better each time. "First a girl. Lovely. Then the wife's having the second, and the doctor says hang on, and out comes another one. Two in eleven minutes. And there's a nurse from the clinic at the end of the bed with a clipboard before she's finished pushing. Card or cage, Mr. Kereama, at your convenience."

"Three? I thought it was two."

"Twins are one go. The ministry wrote and said the third was a gift of nature, no further action." He taps his chest. "I've got it framed."

"And you took the cage."

"The wife wanted the backup. You don't argue with a woman who's just had twins."

Peter does the sum in his head, as he would on a delivery note, and keeps the answer to himself. It isn't his sum.

A woman with a baby on her hip puts her head round the door and asks for vaccinations.

"Second door, love. The one with the duck on it."

She goes. Tommy watches her go with the satisfaction of a man who has been useful. Mr. Rewi has not moved.

"Thirty years," Peter says to him.

"Thirty-one in March."

"Can I ask why not the card?"

Mr. Rewi takes his time over the question.

"My wife wanted the cage while the children were small. Then they weren't small, and she wanted it anyway. Then she died." He moves one thumb on the head of the stick. "A month after the funeral, the clinic sent me a letter about the card. With a smiling man on it."

"So you kept it."

"Every three months I pay for some young fellow's patches. And every three months they have to look."

"He's going to outlive the lot of us out of spite," Tommy says, fondly.

"That's the idea."

Peter's name comes up on the screen, spelled right this time. The nurse leans out of the treatment room with his reading glasses pushed up on his head.

"Go easy on him, Ray. He's new."

"Everybody's new once, Tommy."

Tommy has it about right. Peter is back in his chair in four minutes, and most of that was the form. He sits down carefully, and Tommy leans across, and for once he keeps his voice down.

"Ray's in one too, you know."

"The nurse?"

"Thursdays, at the hospital. A woman does his. Cold hands, he says."

Peter remembers how the nurse said nothing in August while he stared at the machine, and now he knows why.

At the desk he pays the fee, and the receptionist books him for February, the same Monday morning in the same week, with the same faces.

---

The February slip goes on the fridge where November's was, under the same magnet, and Jessica reads the fee every time she takes out the milk.

It's day twelve. Day twelve was the shelter, and she has counted every month since without meaning to, as every wife here counts. Dale sleeps on the sofa in red week. She could dance naked on the kitchen table tonight and nothing at all would come of it. She is the safest woman on the island.

She wakes in the dark and he is awake beside her, lying on his back, breathing slow and even, as he does every morning at half past five. She lays her palm on his chest. He takes it, gently, and puts it back on her side of the bed.

Then he gets up. She hears the bathroom tap run, and run.

Her phone is on the bedside table. She doesn't decide to pick it up. The cartoon family, his name, the dot.

---

February, and Peter is early, and the rain is drumming on the roof of the bus shelter outside the clinic door. Six chairs.

Mr. Rewi by the window. Tommy, with his wet cap on his knee. The man in the corner, hands between his knees. A plumber in overalls with his hand wrapped in a tea towel and his legs crossed, here about the hand. Peter by the door. And then the door opens, and a man comes in out of the rain walking like a visitor.

Peter knows that walk from the inside: the short steps, the knees that don't want to meet. The man is thirty or so, island-born by his face, with a sports bag over his shoulder, and he eyes the one empty chair as if it might bite him. He lowers himself into it, and every man in the room winces with him, the plumber included.

"Oh, look at this," Tommy says, delighted. "Where've you been, then?"

"On the ships. Three months on, one off." The man lets out his breath. "My boy came early. I was off some coast or other. Didn't even know till I landed. The lady at the passport desk says congratulations, Mr. Hira, lovely, and points at the yellow line."

"Down the line!"

"I said I'm not choosing anything without my wife. So they gave me the bracelet for two weeks." He gets out his phone and hands it to Tommy. A baby in a knitted hat, cross about something. "Two weeks today. So here I am."

The phone goes round the room. Mr. Rewi holds it at arm's length and nods at it. The plumber says he's a big lad. The man in the corner holds it longer than anybody, and hands it on without a word.

"And? What's it going to be?"

"The cage. She wants the backup."

Tommy claps, twice. Mr. Rewi says, "Good," and goes back to the window.

Joel shifts on the chair and stops halfway through the shift, and turns to Peter, because Peter is the nearest thing in the room to a man who has just done this.

"Does it get better?"

"The proper one's better than that thing. It's made for wearing." Peter thinks about it. "Cold tap at night. Don't sleep on your front. And don't watch your wife get dressed in the morning."

Made for wearing: the nurse's line, the one he couldn't forgive in August, and it's out before he notices. He doesn't take it back.

"Long as you don't go fishing in it," says Tommy, who has been waiting for his opening. "September, I'm hauling the net in, the float line catches me round the middle, and snap. The tag's in the bottom of the boat with the sprats."

"No."

"A month. Photographs of the net. A man from the ministry came out in my boat in his good shoes to look at the knot. Statements. My wife's statement. Tampering, they call it, if they don't believe you." He spreads his hands. "They believed me. Then they fined me for damage to a sealed device."

The plumber laughs until he has to hold up his bad hand. Joel laughs too, carefully, from the waist up.

The door opens again and lets in the rain and a woman so pregnant she comes in sideways, with a dripping umbrella, here for the midwife. There are no chairs. Peter is on his feet before Tommy is, and she takes his chair by the door with a sigh, between the plumber and the corner.

The man in the corner glances at her belly once. Then he turns to the television and keeps looking.

Joel's name comes up on the screen. Joel levers himself up, the bag forgotten on the floor.

"Out of one and into the other," Tommy calls after him. "Not even for a breath. Ray'll tell you."

The plumber raises his tea towel. Joel goes in walking like a visitor, and the door shuts behind him.

---

In April Peter stops saying later.

It's a Sunday, and Jessica brings coffee back to bed and slides in against him, still warm from the kitchen, and he puts an arm round her and kisses her hair and says, "Not today, Jess."

It isn't the cage this time. She can tell when the cage stops him; she has learned all the ways it does. This one is his.

"Okay," she says.

They drink the coffee. He reads something on his phone about the lagoon. She lies with her head on his shoulder and counts, without wanting to: eight months married. Before she can stop it, her thumb has opened the app, and he sees it, and says nothing, which is worse than asking.

The May slip is on the fridge. She has started to read the date on it instead of the fee.

---

May. Six chairs, and one of them is empty, and it's Tommy's.

Peter sees it from the door. Mr. Rewi by the window, the corner man in the corner, and Joel, sealed now, sitting down like anybody, with his knees comfortably apart. Only his hand gives him away, going to his pocket once to set things straight. Peter catches himself watching for it, as the market women once watched him.

Nobody mentions the chair.

"Where's Tommy?"

"Didn't you hear?" Joel is surprised. "The machine. In March. My wife had it at the market."

Mr. Rewi's name comes up, and he gets to his feet in stages and goes in. Peter is left beside the empty chair: Tommy's wet cap on his knee in February, Tommy's framed letter.

"Why, did she say? After four years?"

"The fees, I suppose." Joel shrugs. "Everybody goes, in the end."

Mr. Rewi comes out again and lowers himself back into his chair. He has heard.

"His wife did the sums."

"The sums."

"Three children. If one dies, God forbid, he's still got his two. The place never comes back to him. The backup was no good to them from the day the twins came." He folds his hands on the stick. "Took her four years. Tommy would have paid till he died."

Peter saw it in November, in this chair, and kept it to himself. Four years of fees, of a seal snapped in a net, of a month with the ministry's man in his good shoes in the boat. He wonders if Tommy laughed when she told him. He thinks probably Tommy did.

So the room has gained a cage and lost one. Joel shows them a new photo, the boy fatter, the knitted hat gone. Mr. Rewi nods at this one too.

And in the corner the man sits with his hands between his knees, as he sat at the quota office the day of the red dot, and through every one of these mornings. He was here before Peter. He was probably here before Tommy. Tommy talked for four years in this room and never once asked him anything, and nobody else does now.

Peter's name comes up on the screen. At the desk afterwards the receptionist hands him the next slip: August. A year to the week.

He looks back from the door at the man in the corner, and wonders how many of these slips he has taken home.