Short story · 4 min read · Set in Whinmoor ·
The Queue One Step Outside
A sub-post office that prides itself on serving the shortest visible queue finds its counts always one ahead of the visible, and the extra one standing on the painted band outside.
The Whinmoor sub-post office keeps a white band painted across the flags one step outside its door, repainted every few years by the properties office when the budget notice comes round, and on the band, in letters gone soft at the edges, the old word QUEUE. Inside the glass of the counter partition a card has bleached in the sun for longer than anyone can date it: customers will be served in strict order. Order being a thing Whinmoor is proud of, and counts.
Miss Doreen Aldiss, sub-postmistress, opens at nine and counts the queue through the glass before she turns the key, heads on the flags, the way she has counted them for sixteen years. The count she gets is always one more than the heads she can see. She counts again. Same. Sixteen years of the same surplus one, arriving in the ledger like rent.
The surplus stands on the band. That is the only place left to stand, the band being first in the paint and the paint being first in the order of things, and by the time anyone in the office thinks to lift the blind and look at the band properly, there is somebody on it. A coat, a collar, an ordinary height, reading matter or tobacco or nothing in the hands. By the time the door is opened and the call of next is given across the forecourt, the band is holding its paint and the flags are holding nobody, and the extra ticket has been taken by then, or was always going to be. The ticket machine at Whinmoor issues in strict sequence and has never been accused of poetry; the last number of any day is one more than the last face Miss Aldiss ever put a name to.
The arithmetic closes. That is the unnerving part, and Miss Aldiss has been at pains over the years that it should stay the unnerving part rather than become the frightening one. Stamps against takings, takings against the day book, the day book against the roll of tickets: the whole of it walks into the district audit every quarter and comes out level, to the penny, as Whinmoor requires. The discrepancy they could not audit away was the count itself, so she raised it once, at inspection, in writing, and got back the district's answer in the district's hand: queue discipline satisfactory; one, one standing discrepancy, carried forward. Carried forward. The phrase had a bureaucratic neatness she has since come to respect the way you respect a tide. Each morning's surplus is the previous morning's surplus, walked one day further along, which is why the queue at Whinmoor is, by any honest count, a queue a day longer than the shortest one visible, and always has been, and now cannot be otherwise by anyone's hand at all.
Explanations are available, and Miss Aldiss keeps them in service the way the flags keep the paint. Glass doubles a head; forecourts double feet; the same man counted at the corner and counted again at the band. A reflection that stands patiently on a white band all morning, in front of a door, in a light that changes, is not against the byelaws. Twice she has crossed to the band herself at opening time, and found it bare, and counted through the glass on the walk back, and the count was the closed count, and by lunchtime the band was the occupied one. The flags show no wear at the band beyond what paint wears of itself.
At half past five she locks the drawer, and the takings of the day agree with the tickets of the day agree with the queue of the day plus the one the district carries forward, and Whinmoor is square. What the squareness of the day leaves unsolved, and what Miss Aldiss stands for a moment with her key in the door, is the plain question the band goes on holding open under its worn word QUEUE: whether the extra one the count keeps is waiting to be served by the office in strict order like anyone else — or whether, all this time, it has been the extra one that keeps the count.