Short story · 4 min read · Set in The Aldgate Cistern ·
The Invoice for My Lodging
A lodger of seven years is billed at the standard rate for the nights of his tenancy he cannot account for, and the bill balances to the penny.
I have lodged at No. 2 Cistern Row since 1979, second floor front, Room 4, and my weeks have run as regular as a rota. I keep a day-book — money in, money out, one line of weather — because my father kept one before me, and because a street that sits over an old cistern rewards a man who can say where his evenings went. The house takes its name from what is under it: the hill's overflow drains down to the tank, and Mr. Toft sounds it every Sunday with a pole and chalks the level on the yard wall in a column that runs back further than my tenancy, further than his, very likely further than the brick.
Last October a brown envelope came up with the breakfast post. Inside was a typed sheet of the kind bills come on, no letterhead: RESIDENT'S ACCOUNT, and my room, and the rate. Nights kept, 322. Nights unaccounted for, 43. Standard rate, £1.40 per night. Balance due, £60.20. Down the page ran the 43 dates in a column, tidy as a list of hymn numbers.
I went through it at the table with the day-book open, the way you check a grocer's bill, and I could fault the sheet on nothing. The rate is the rate printed on my rent card. The room is my room. The year is the year of my only tenancy. And the dates are all mine: I turned them over one at a time against my book, and on every one of those nights my line of weather is empty. Not blotted, not torn out, not missed. An empty ruled space, 43 of them, where I had no weather and can put nothing down but the rule.
I took it to Mr. Toft. Not mine, he said, and showed me his own book, and the house's bed-nights tallied in his hand come to the same 322 kept under my name, with no line at all opposite the shortfall, as if the house had never heard of the other 43 either. But the rate was the house's rate to the penny, and the balance was clean — 43 at £1.40, £60.20, no shillings astray — and there is no dispute on any earth I know that I would raise against a bill that knows my room, my year, and my arithmetic better than its own sender is willing to claim. The postmark read CISTERN DEPOT with the date ring rubbed to nothing, so there is not even a day to complain about having lost.
I paid it. A postal order for £60.20, payee line left blank as the foot of the sheet instructed, where it said settled accounts take the receipt. Ten days later a carbon slip came down the same brown way: received with thanks, and then, one line over from where the arithmetic ought to end, nights to credit, 44. Forty-three owed, forty-four credited. A receipt is the one document in the world that does not round and does not make presents, so the overage is not in my favour and not against me and not mine. It is simply one night ahead of my count of my own nights, in the depot's column, and it has stayed there ever since.
Since then I have taken up my own chalk on the yard wall, a line beside Mr. Toft's, level against level, Sunday over Sunday. The tank has run a notch over what the rain allows every single week since October, which Mr. Toft calls seepage off the hill and enters nowhere, and I chalk mine anyway, being trained to note what stands over. And the receipt sits pinned over my table with the overage circled, the only figure in my two rooms that will not sit.
What I have not done, after a year of Sundays, is write to the depot and ask which night the credit is for. It would put the thing in writing, in my plain hand, that the depot counts my nights one ahead of me — and to ask which of the 322 was counted twice is to ask which of my nights there were two of. The pen has been ready on the table for a month. If ever it goes in the envelope, the question will have to be put the plain way, as a rate card would put it: on the nights I cannot account for, who was it who slept, and against whose account was the bed found warm?