Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Ostmark ·
The Census of the Lost List
The lost-property register of Ostmark Town has begun taking entries in the names of people who are not on any roll yet, with the fees set aside as the form requires.
- filed: "with the annual return"
- reference: "OT/LR/76"
1. The lost-property office sits at the foot of the stair under the rates hall, and its register has been kept in the same ruled book since 1932, two occupants to an opening, finder and owner, item and fee. Entries are made at the counter, on the slip, in the clerk's own hand, from the finder's own mouth. This note is made up with the annual return as the audit requires, and it concerns the year's entries in the closing quarter, which cannot be struck out, and will not go away.
2. In October the register began to take entries whose owners are not on any roll the town keeps. The town keeps its rolls well. The rate books, the school lists, the gas accounts, the burial board's two ledgers, and the harbour's own tally of seamen ashore: a name that means to be paid money in this town has to stand on one of them, and every name in this register since 1932 stood on one within a fortnight of being entered, which is the usual finding and the reason the office needs no second knock to pay out.
3. This year's closing quarter holds nine entries that stand on none. Item one, a latchkey, cut on a pattern the locksmith's board does not carry, blank of any tag. Item four, a season ticket of the ferry office, stiff with use, expiring under its holder's own name in March 2016. Item seven, a wedding ring, gold, worn thin at the back like forty years of wear, inscribed within with two names and a date that is not yet. The remaining six are small and are listed in the return: a fountain pen, a lenses case, two scarves, a pension book, and a false tooth, and the register gives a full name for the loser of each, written plainly, in the clerk's hand, from the finder's dictation, and every name is the name of nobody.
4. The checks were run as the instruction requires and are booked in the annex. No name of the nine appears in the rate books of any year. No name appears in the school rolls back to 1894. The burial board's two ledgers, which every clerk of this town fears in the way one fears a house brick in a loaf, hold none of them either. The registrar at the county office was written to, and wrote back that none of the nine was born on his books, and that none of the nine appears in his father's books, the father having held the post before him, which covers the ground from the year the parish began.
5. The fees stand set aside, as the form requires, since a fee is owed to the finder whatever the owner's standing, and the standing of these owners is nobody's business yet. The set-aside is kept in the usual drawer, in the usual envelopes, one to an entry, and the amounts come to £3.47 the whole nine, and the drawer is at the exact weight of drawer and coins that the last audit booked, to the ounce, and the audit clerk measured it twice before doubting it, and a third time before filing it.
6. The item the undersigned cannot carry to a finding is the order of the drawer. The envelopes stand in the order the entries stand in the book, young to old, by an age of the owners which the register supplies in a column ruled for it, though no clerk ruled the column this year and no clerk computed it. The ages at the top of the column are small. The ages at the bottom are the sort one writes of fathers. The hand is the clerk's own. The clerk does not remember ruling it, and says so plainly, and the sound of a clerk saying so plainly is itself entered in this note as evidence of the ordinary kind.
7. The question left standing for the return, and standing unstruck, is the one the payment counter will eventually want answered: when the first of the nine names comes in person for its property, as names here always do, and the man across the counter is no nearer the writing than a finished sentence, whether the fee is tendered to the hand that draws it, or to the hand it was set aside for, since these two, on the evidence of the column, will not be the same person by forty years.