Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Tern Street ·
A Note Will Be Made
A complainant takes a leaking roof to the Ward Office on Tern Street, is thanked for her time by the clerk everyone blames, and leaves having lost the anger without learning where it went.
The Ward Office on Tern Street takes complaints in triplicate, carbon between, and the carbon smells the way it did when the forms were new, which in office terms means the forms are still in use. Harriet Nolloth took her number from the dispenser — 44, the wheel having been reset at the top — and sat in the row of chairs under the noon window with her folder open on her knees and her grievances listed in three columns, squared and ruled, the way a person prepares for a hearing.
Column one was the downpipes at the flats, and the column was short, because the downpipes are the water board's and she knew it. Column two was bus 16, which she had watched turn short of the terminus four Fridays running, and which is the county's. Column three was the roof, which was the grievance, the roof being the thing her husband had made into a topic, then a hobby, then the part of the day arranged last: quotes, dates, tarpaulin, the builder who would not come back. She had rehearsed the roof at the mirror. It is not about the money, she planned to say, twice.
Her number came up on the tally board at 12:31, and she walked the folder down the length of the room toward the last desk, which sits at the far end the way a pulpit sits at the end of a nave. The desk is enormous, grey folders stacked in ramparts at either end of it, the floors bowed; under the desk itself the boards have sunk into a shallow dish, visibly, the way a mattress goes under a sleeper. The nameplate says O. OSK — COMPLAINTS. The clerk behind it is thin, in a coat shiny at the elbows, and courteous before she reaches him.
He took the complaint the way a postbag takes a letter. He did not correct the builder's name. He did not say the drains were the water board's, though they were, or the bus the county's, though that too. He wrote her dates into the correct columns of a rubber-banded pad, and when she had finished with the roof he asked, mildly, pad still open, whether the roof was the thing — or whether she would like the whole folder taken as one. Whole folder, she said, meaning the roof, meaning the bus, meaning — and this she understood only in the third week of the aftermath — the whole married politics of a ceiling that had become, in her house, a form of address.
He thanked her for her time. He wrote an apology by hand, three lines, sincere in the manner of small handwriting, and he stamped it with the office's square, and said that a note would be made.
Contentment among the district's complainants is at record levels; the returns say so, and the returns get checked. No other officer's name is complained of any more — the tally board's other desks, planning and licensing, sit idle into the afternoon, and their officers move paper between in-trays like men keeping the pitch while the match is played elsewhere. The man at the last desk has been named in forty-one thousand complaints in thirty years: potholes, late buses, a drought, a divorce. He has never denied one. A cousin of Nolloth's went in once about her husband's hearing and came out, by her own account, having apologised to the counter for the state of the church hall roof.
On the Tern Street steps with 44 still in her hand, Nolloth noticed she was not angry. Then she noticed she could not remember being angry — the way one cannot recall, once out of it, the exact temperature of a bath. Her folder was lighter. She checked it twice on the steps: downpipes, bus, builder, all still present, dates and receipts intact, and none of it any longer about anyone. The grievances had been in the folder. They were not in her.
She went back in to thank him. The tally board could not price the return visit, so no number was issued; the clerk at the last desk received the thanks standing. That close, she saw what the rampart folders were: tabs upon grey tabs, each marked, in the same pencil, *received as about others — held as about him.* She said it was not his fault. About the roof, about the year, about any of it; she meant to be kind.
He said: *Sorry. I will make a note of it.*
And the pad came out for the note, which is what he keeps — a note — while the desk settles another centimetre into the boards. The floor beneath the last desk is the one floor in the building nobody has been sent to look under. The plan chest's own card reads, in the oldest ink in the office: *cellarage, unrecorded.* Nolloth has written at the foot of her carbon the one line the visit leaves standing, and it is not about the roof.
If he takes what the district cannot agree it is owed, and takes it justly, and takes it down with him one year at a time — what, when the boards finally give, gets filed at the bottom of the Ward Office, and who is holding the queue number for that?