Chapter 14: In Order of Receipt

The August slip says a year to the week, and Peter, who has kept every slip in a kitchen drawer, sits down in his chair by the door with the fourth one folded in his shirt pocket.

Mr. Rewi has the window. Joel has the chair beside him and sits in it like a man on a bus, his knees comfortably apart, his phone out, showing Mr. Rewi a video of a baby trying to eat a spoon. The corner holds the man with his hands between his knees. A woman with a bandaged foot reads a magazine, and a girl of about twelve sits beside her with her own foot up on her schoolbag, out of sympathy. On the television a man in a suit points at clouds.

"Still red?" Joel asks, when the baby has dropped the spoon.

It's a small island. Joel's wife will have had it at the market, the way she had Tommy.

"A year last Friday."

"A year." Joel winces on his behalf, kindly, as he might at a man who'd lost his wallet. "It'll come."

"Some of them wait a long time," Mr. Rewi says to the window.

"Nine years."

The voice comes from the corner. Peter turns, and so does Joel, and the woman with the bandaged foot looks up over her magazine. The man in the corner hasn't moved. His hands are where they always are. He is looking at the floor between his shoes, and for a second Peter thinks he has imagined it.

"Nine years last Friday," the man says. "The same day as you, I think. You were at the office. Number fifty-eight."

His English is careful and flat, with an accent Peter has heard in every warehouse in Manchester.

"You remember my ticket?"

"I remember everybody's. I go every year on the day." He lifts his head at last. He's about forty, with a tired, decent face, the kind that gets asked for directions. "I take a ticket. I sit. I ask the girl where I am on the list. She says she doesn't give positions, it only upsets people. Three years now it's the same girl. Before her, a man with a moustache. He said the same."

"She told me she can't say when people will die."

"She says that to everybody. It's true, so they let her say it." He nods, as if Peter has passed something. "Marek."

"Peter."

"I know. The Englishman with the walk."

Mr. Rewi's shoulders move once, which might be a laugh.

Marek came eleven years ago, he says, to build the new harbor wall, on a contract for two years. He met his wife at the end of the first one. He took the exam and the oath and the silver starfish, and at the quota office he got a red dot, and on the Monday he got the cage. He says all of this the way a man reads out his own address.

"Nine years," Peter says. "And nothing?"

"You know who they are? The places?" Marek looks at him. "Not old men. An old man has had his two, so when he dies there is nothing in his pocket. A place comes when a man dies who never had his children. A young man. A boy on a motorbike. A fisherman who goes out alone in bad weather." He opens his hands an inch and closes them again. "My wife reads the newspaper for it. The page with the funerals. Every morning, before coffee. Then she's ashamed of herself, and then the next morning she reads it again."

Nobody says anything. On the television the man in the suit has moved on to the wind.

Peter thinks of Jessica's thumb going to the app before the kettle has boiled. Every morning. He has never once asked himself what she is waiting for, exactly. Not a stamp. A boy on a motorbike.

"In order of receipt, though," he hears himself say. "That's what the guide says. After nine years you must be near the top."

"In order of receipt." Marek smiles, not at Peter, at something a long way behind him. "My wife is forty-one."

Peter waits for the rest. There isn't any.

Marek's name comes up on the screen, and he gets up and goes in, and the room lets out its breath.

"I've been coming a year," Joel says, low. "He's never said a word."

"I've been coming longer than that." Mr. Rewi turns his stick a quarter turn on the floor. "He said one once. Somebody stood on his foot."

When Marek comes out again he sits back down in the corner to wait for nobody, and puts his hands between his knees, and doesn't speak again. Peter goes in for his twenty seconds. At the desk the receptionist gives him the November slip, and he folds it and puts it in his pocket with the August one.

---

Jessica holds her friend's little boy on her hip in the yard, because he wants to be held and his mother can't bend anymore.

He's a heavy, damp, cheerful weight, sixteen months old, with a fist in her hair. Her friend sits on the step under the fruit tree with both hands on her belly, seven months gone with the second, fanning herself with a paper plate. Her cousin has come too, with the twins, who are eight now and have been sent to the end of the yard to stop fighting and are fighting there instead.

"He's taking the cage," her friend says. "For the backup. I told him, I'm not having what happened to Lina's sister."

Everyone knows what happened to Lina's sister. A boy of four, a fever, a week. And her husband with the card since the day the second came, so the place came back to nobody. The cousin snorts, because her own husband took the card before the twins ever left the hospital, and she has never let him forget it.

"Backup," the cousin says. "Mine didn't even ask me."

Jessica jiggles the boy and says nothing. She smells the top of his head, milk and sweat and something like warm bread, and her whole body knows what it wants. She has stopped being polite to it. She thinks about it at the board with the chalk in her hand. She thinks about it at night with her palm on the steel.

"And you?" her friend says. "It's a year, isn't it?"

They all know. There's no point pretending they don't.

"A year on Saturday."

"There's the children's home on the north road. Island children. Already counted. They don't take a place from anybody." She shifts on the step. "My aunt's neighbor got a little girl from there."

"How long did she wait?"

Her friend hesitates.

"Five years. There's a list."

Of course there's a list. Jessica laughs, and the boy laughs with her because she's laughing, and grabs her nose stud, and she has to unpick his fingers one at a time.

Later she carries cups into the kitchen, and her cousin follows her in with the cake plate and shuts the door with her hip. Her cousin is older, rounder, and has never once in her life lowered her voice, and she lowers it now.

"There's the other way."

"What other way?"

"Don't be stupid, Jess. Plenty of men with one to go." Her cousin runs the tap over the plate. "It's done. Not often. You'd be surprised who."

Jessica stares at her.

"It would be his name on the record. Not Peter's. The whole quota office would know."

"The quota office doesn't go to the market."

"And then I'd be what? A married woman with a child by another man." She can't say the word out loud. Whore. The market never says it either, about a woman with children by two men; it only thinks it. "Like that."

"You'd be a mother," her cousin says. She puts the plate in the rack. "I'm only saying what nobody else will. I'm not saying do it."

Through the window, the twins have stopped fighting to watch a lizard. Jessica dries the same cup three times. When she goes back out her friend's boy holds his arms up to her again, and she takes him, and the weight of him nearly undoes her.

---

On the last Saturday of August, a year to the day, Peter takes Jessica to their table on the beach, and orders the fish they had the first night, and tries very hard to make it a good evening.

It is, mostly. The lanterns, the moths, the sea doing what it always does. She's wearing the yellow dress from the oath. Dale's boy has drawn them an anniversary card, two fish in a heart, and one of the fish is wearing a veil and the other one, for reasons the boy wouldn't explain, a hat.

She tells him about the yard, and the children's home. Five years. He tells her about Marek. Not all of it. He leaves out the funerals.

"Nine years," she says.

"His wife's forty-one."

He watches her do that sum, as he did it in the waiting room, and get the same answer.

Her phone is face down by her plate. She hasn't touched it all evening, and he knows what it costs her, because twice he has seen her hand go out toward it and come back.

"My cousin said something," she says, and turns her glass on the tablecloth. "In the kitchen. I don't want to tell you."

"Tell me."

She tells him. She tells it as a joke, the way you'd tell someone about a mad aunt, and waits for him to laugh. He doesn't laugh. He sits and looks at the lantern, and finds that the thing he ought to feel isn't there. What's there instead is Marek's wife at a kitchen table, nine years of mornings, reading the funerals before her coffee.

"If you wanted to," he says. "I wouldn't..."

He doesn't know how that sentence ends. Leave you. Hate you. Stop you. She doesn't wait to find out.

"Don't."

"Jess, I'd rather you had a child than nine years of..."

"Don't you dare." She is white under the tan. "I'm not my cousin. I'm not somebody's spare. I married you."

"I know."

"Then don't offer me to some man with one to go like a cup of sugar."

He reaches across the table for her hand, and after a moment she gives it to him, and holds on hard enough to hurt. The fish comes. They eat it. Somewhere down the beach the boys are laughing round their tortoise nest.

They walk home the long way, by the sea, and up the three streets. She falls asleep before him for once, curled on her side, one hand under the pillow where her phone is.

Peter lies awake until the town goes quiet. Then he gets up, carefully, and goes into the kitchen without turning on the light, and opens the drawer where he keeps the slips. Under them, folded in half and in half again, as he folded it on the ministry steps a year ago, is the leaflet.

He unfolds it on the counter. The smiling man on the cover. You Are Free to Choose! Inside, the three boxes in their three pastel colors, and the little airplane in the third.

He looks at them for a long time, by the light from the street, and this time he doesn't fold it up again.