Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in The Licensing Office ·
She Will Say What You Mean
At the night counter of the Licensing Office an old net-mender speaks a dialect nobody rostered can answer, and a woman nobody rostered answers it.
The night counter of the Licensing Office runs on one clerk and a buzzer. Corin Basset had been that clerk for six years. He could issue transit rights, renew a cartage permit, and refuse a night-harbour pass in the three politest registers Murrow possesses. Third night of rain, last man in the hall, one form left on the spike: TR-221/MR, renewal of a nets-and-tackle licence for a Mr. Osser Vane, address a leaning house on the Awl, signature like a net itself.
The difficulty was the dialect. Vane spoke the harbour tongue that came off the Kessin boats in the old decades, the one with its own word for slack water and its own way of counting fish by twenties. Two words Corin had. Perhaps three. Vane had no Murrow English to speak of, and the night interpreter service had been wound up the year the Misprint dry-rotted the rosters. The hall closed at eleven. It was now twenty past.
They managed by shouting and pointing and both of them growing steadily more ashamed, Vane's hands flat on the counter like a man waiting out weather. Corin had the form half-filled with guesswork. He had put down, in the box marked PURPOSE OF TONIGHT'S RENEWAL, the phrase *personal reasons*, which did not describe anything at all.
Then he noticed a woman standing between Counter 2 and Counter 3.
That needs stating plainly, because there was no door between the counters. There is a wall there, thought Corin then and thinks still, with a notice about slide rules pinned to it, and the woman was standing in front of the notice as if the notice were a doorway. Grey suit, neat, wet at the shoulders though the hall is a dry hall. A lanyard of expired passes at her collar, fanned. A clipboard with a form in no script Corin knew, the letters tall and unfinished. She did not sit. She did not look at the clock.
"I'm from the night service," she said, in Murrow English so ordinary that it made the empty hall seem fuller.
She did not really translate; that was the first thing Corin noticed, and the wrongness of it put the dread in him before anything else could. Vane would deliver his burst of Kessin, quick and bitter, and while it was still in the air the woman would speak — her mouth a half-beat behind his — and her words came out in plain English that was not the words. When Vane said a sentence about gaskets and tides, she said, "He means the licence is his father's and he is minded to hand it on while he still owns it." When Vane said four words about fog, she said, "He is asking whether your office is a decent one, and he is saying it kindly."
Corin tried to help. We have all tried to help. He leaned toward the speaker grille and said, "Tell him the fee's remitted tonight, it's no trouble, really it's no trouble" — meaning that he wanted to be thought generous and get his coat. The woman turned to him and translated that too, faithfully, into exactly what he meant. He heard himself, in her level voice, saying to Vane: *He is not permitted to remit the fee, and he wants you to like him, and he is frightened of the end of the shift.*
The hall held that for a moment. Vane laughed, the short bark of a man who has had better evenings and worse ones, and said something permissive and warm, and the woman rendered it, and it was, Corin says, the kindest sentence he has heard about himself in a working life.
After that the last part took four minutes. Vane's hands came off the counter. The PURPOSE box was emptied out and refilled with the true answer, dictated to him a clause at a time by a woman who looked at neither of them but at the wall. Vane signed. The stamp came down. Corin's hand was shaking and the stamp took twice.
When he looked up from the wobble of the second impression, she was gone. Not through the hall. Not through the swing doors he personally bolts at ten. The notice about slide rules was still there. So was the wet half-circle on the lino between the counters, breathing faintly, already drying at the edges, the way a hall breathes.
He could not repeat one sentence of hers, not one of the exact words; only what they meant, which has stayed in him like weather. The get-well note he left on Vane's file in the box for OBSERVATIONS says, in full, *understood*, and it is the most truthful box he has filled in six years.
The lanyard bothered him for a long time, so he says. Forty-some passes, all expired, from halls and booths and crossings he has never located in any gazetteer. He is confident about one of them, though he has told nobody at the office this, and does not intend to. The last one on the lanyard, the most recent, the one that swung nearest to him while she stood there — bore a photograph. It was his own face, at an age he has not yet reached, wearing the collar pin he intends to buy himself when he makes supervisor.