Chapter 15: Freely

Peter tells her on a Sunday morning in October, at the kitchen table, with the leaflet open between their coffee cups where she can see which box his finger is on.

It isn't the third one. He watches her see that first, and watches what it does to her: her shoulders come down, and she lets out a breath she might have been holding since the ministry steps. Then she sees which one it is, and her face changes again.

"The card."

"The card."

She doesn't say anything for a long time. Outside, the landlady's radio is playing something with a lot of trumpets. A gecko is halfway up the wall by the window, waiting for a fly.

He has thought about how to say it for six weeks, and none of it comes out in the order he planned.

"I keep thinking about Marek's wife. Nine years of reading the funerals. And you'd do it, Jess. You're already doing it. You'd do it for nine years, and then you'd be forty-one and it'd come, or it wouldn't." He turns his cup round. "And I'd be saying not today for nine years. I don't want to be a man who says not today."

"It's not you. It's the cage."

"It was the cage at first. It isn't now." He makes himself look at her. "Frank says nothing between him and the wife. He's sixty-three. He means it. The patches keep you a husband, the leaflet says. I could be your husband. Properly. Next month, not in nine years."

"And a child?"

"The north road. We go on the list on Monday. The card doesn't stop that. A child from there would be ours on paper, and ours every other way." He tries to smile. "It's another list. At least nobody has to die for this one."

She puts her hand flat on the leaflet, over the first box, as if to keep it from blowing away.

"And if it comes? The permit. The week after."

"Then it comes for nothing." He has had six weeks for that one too, and it still goes in like a splinter. "I know."

"When?"

"November. The inspection." He hears how it sounds, and says it anyway. "It saves the fee."

She laughs, which he didn't expect, and then cries, which he did, and he comes round the table and kneels on the tiles beside her chair and holds her, and she holds his head against her and says into his hair that it's his choice, it's his, she won't be the one, she won't. The law's own words. He doesn't think she hears herself.

"Then I choose it," he says. "Freely. Not that anybody's pushing."

---

Jessica asks the principal for the Monday morning in the middle of November, and the principal gives it to her without asking why, which is how she knows the principal knows.

The waiting room has six chairs and she has never sat in one. Wives don't come to the inspections. She takes the last chair beside Peter, by the door, and the men all notice, and nobody says so. Mr. Rewi by the window, with his stick. Joel, scrolling. In the corner Marek, the man from the quota office, with his hands between his knees. A young mother bounces a toddler on her lap, waiting for the door with the duck on it. On the television, the boys in navy blue grin on their speedboat.

Mr. Rewi's eyes go to Jessica, and then to Peter.

"Not an inspection, then."

"The card."

The room goes still. Joel lowers his phone.

"Your wife did the sums?"

"I did."

Mr. Rewi considers this for some time, his thumb on his stick. Then he nods, slowly, the nod from the harbor wall, and turns back to the window.

"Everybody goes in the end," Joel says, and seems to wish he hadn't.

In the corner, Marek has lifted his head. He's looking at her, not at Peter. Forty-one, she thinks, and nine years. Then his eyes go back to the floor.

Peter's name comes up on the screen. Mr. Lowe, spelled right. He squeezes her hand, and stands, and walks to the treatment room with nothing in his step to give him away, and Ray holds the door for him and shuts it.

She sits. She doesn't know what to do with her hands. The toddler drops a toy car, and she picks it up and gives it back, and the mother smiles at her, the way you'd smile at any woman in a clinic. On the screen the speedboat goes round and round.

Her phone is in her hand. She doesn't remember taking it out. Her thumb is already on the app, the way it is on the alarm in the morning, the way it is on the light switch in the dark. A year and three months of this. The cartoon family. His name.

The dot.

She looks at it, and it doesn't mean anything, because it's the wrong color.

It's green.

Under it, in small rounded letters, a line she has never seen: Granted. 2 children.

She closes the app and opens it again. Green. She turns the screen to the window, as if the light could be lying. Green. Marek has seen her face, and is staring at the phone in her hand, and she watches him understand before she does.

Then she's on her feet. The receptionist says "Madam," and then something louder in her own language, and Jessica has the treatment room door open before either of them has finished.

---

Ray has had the wire off for a minute, and Peter is standing in front of the machine with nothing on below his shirt and the cage in a steel tray behind him.

It was quick. A pair of cutters, a small snap, the tag dropping into the tray with a sound like a coin. Then the ring easing off, and air. He waited for his body to do what it did at the airport and in this room a year ago, and it didn't. It knew where it was going.

"Law says no gap," Ray said, typing. "But you're three steps from the machine, and I'm watching you take them, so I'll allow it." He turned the tablet round for Peter's signature. Sanitisation, elective. "Patches are on the trolley. A box of twelve. You'll go home with them."

In the corner of the treatment room the curtain stands open, as it always does, and the grey cabinet waits at hip height with its padded mouth and its screen. He has seen one at work once, at the airport, through a curtain, with a man in a tie behind it. The screen says Please position yourself, in the rounded letters, with a little drawing of the pictogram man in case he's unsure how.

He puts his hands on the cool top of the cabinet. He thinks of Jessica outside, on the sixth chair. He thinks: freely.

The door bangs open behind him.

"Peter. Peter, stop. Don't."

He turns, with his shirt tails and nothing else, and there's his wife in the doorway, with the receptionist behind her saying madam, madam, and her phone held up in front of her in both hands like something she's found on a beach.

"It's green," she says. "It's green. Look."

Ray gets to her first. He takes the phone out of her hands, pulls his reading glasses down off his head, and reads it. Then he sits down at his own screen and types with two thick fingers, slowly, the way a man types when he wants to be sure.

Peter stands by the machine. He can't move. He doesn't trust any part of himself to move.

"Well," Ray says at last. "Mr. Lowe."

"Is it right?"

"It's right. Came through at eight minutes past nine." He pushes his glasses back up. "You don't want to be standing there."

Peter steps away from the machine. One step, and another, and he's in the middle of the room, and Ray reaches past him and pulls the curtain across the cabinet, with a long rattle of rings, until it's gone.

"Do I need," he starts, with a glance at the tray.

"Not a thing." Ray turns the tablet back round and cancels something with his thumb. "Green's green. Nothing on you and nothing off you. You're like any young fellow on the island now." He puts the box of patches back on the shelf, and holds out Jessica's phone to her, and only then seems to notice that she's in a men's treatment room with a half-dressed man. He doesn't seem to mind. "Get dressed, Mr. Lowe. Before somebody changes their mind."

Peter gets dressed. His hands won't do the button on his trousers, and Jessica does it for him, and he lets her. She's laughing and crying at the same time and so, he finds, is he.

The cage lies in the steel tray, dull grey, with its slots and its two tabs and nothing through them. Ray considers it, and then Peter, and Peter remembers that under the pale blue tunic, on Thursdays, at the hospital, a woman with cold hands reads Ray's number off his tag.

"Go on," Ray says. "Both of you. I've got Mr. Rewi."

In the waiting room every face turns. Mr. Rewi. Joel, half out of his chair. The young mother, who has no idea what she's looking at and looks anyway. Peter can't speak, so Jessica holds up the phone.

Joel whoops. The toddler, delighted, whoops too.

Mr. Rewi holds the phone at arm's length, as he holds all the photographs, and nods at the green dot, and says, "Good."

Marek doesn't get up. Jessica goes to the corner and holds out the phone to him, and he takes it in both hands and keeps it for a long time, longer than anybody, the way he held Joel's baby in February. Then he gives it back.

"Eight minutes past nine," he says. "I was sitting here."

That's all. He puts his hands back between his knees.

At the desk the receptionist has the bill ready. Removal of long-term device, at the patient's request. The fee is in bold.

"The card would've been free," Jessica says, and laughs until she has to lean on the counter, and pays it.

Outside, the harbor road is bright and ordinary. The coast guard boats sit at their moorings. A man on a scooter goes by with a ladder under one arm. Somewhere, this morning, somebody has died with nothing in his pocket, and Peter will never know who, and he finds he can't think about that yet. Jessica's mother's car is parked by the bus shelter, where she left it, and he walks to it in the sun, holding his wife's hand.

Before she starts the engine she opens the app again, and he lets her, and they look at it together: the green, and the two. Then she puts the phone face down on the dashboard, and doesn't touch it all the way home.