Witness account · 4 min read · Set in The Licensing Office ·
The Queue That Kept Its Number
A claims intake clerk describes a morning at the licensing office when nobody was served, every ticket read 37, and the queue politely let the next one in.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Ines Blatt, claims intake"
I work the intake rail at the licensing office, which means I take the numbers, the forms, the proofs, and I stamp what I can and refuse what I cannot. The rail opens at eight. There is a stand of paper tickets by the door, a roll that dispenses from the top, and people take one and sit and wait their turn, and the display above my hatch goes up by one as I press the serves pedal with my foot. Thirty years of that morning, more or less, and it has never once surprised me.
The morning in question was grey and damp and there was rain running in the doorway groove the way it always does, and I unlocked the hatches at five to eight and pressed the pedal to reset the display and went to get the ledger from the lock cabinet. When I came back there were nine people in the hall and all of them seated and all of them holding tickets, and the display read 37, which is where it had stopped the evening before, half serving a man about a mooring license, and I had pressed reset twice at close and seen it die at zero. I have seen it die at zero a thousand times.
I pressed the pedal. Nothing moved. The display stepped to 37 again. Looked at from the side it does a little hop and settles. I pressed four times. It stayed 37, and the hop got smaller, like it was tired of being asked.
So I tried the other way, the clerk's way. I called, out of habit, Next please, in the flat tone we are given at training, and the first person stood, a woman with a plastic bag of documents about a boat she did not own, and she came to the hatch, and I took her form, and her ticket in her hand said 37. I know that it did because I pulled it out flat with the back of my hand when she laid it down and it was the same roll, my roll, the cheap yellow stock, and my number stamp had printed its 37 the way it prints a hundred a week. I checked the next three. All 37. All torn off the same roll at different lengths, the stubs at different angles, the roll itself still full behind the clip, which does not follow and I will not try to follow it.
Nobody was served that morning. I want that understood before anything else. I could not press a serve, the pedal gave nothing, and the display would not leave 37, and after the third try I stopped pressing because the hall had a quality I did not want to stir. It was not silence. There were coughs, a radio somewhere, boots on rubber. What it was, was patient. Every person who had come in did the same thing: they sat, and when I said nothing more, each of them at some point looked at the ticket on their knee and then at the person beside them and stood aside so the next one was nearer the rail. Not leaving. Yielding. Like runners at a doctor's where you let the worse man go first, except nobody was worse, and there was no doctor.
At twenty past nine the pedal worked again mid-press and the display hopped to 38 and the hall went back to being a hall. The nine had gone, all of them, in that same minute or the one before it, and I cannot say which because I did not watch them go and nobody saw them leave, not the porter at the door, not the tea woman, not anyone. Their tickets were on seats and the floor and one on the radiator rail, nine tickets, and I gathered them, and every one read 37.
My serve sheet for that hour has no lines. The stall book the porter keeps says the same. But the sheet is mine and the book is his, and if you ask him he says ask her, and if you ask me I will show you a blank line and nine tickets in an envelope in my top drawer, and the tickets are the paper memory, and the tickets are only paper. You cannot hear who tore them. That is why I say uncorroborated, because it is, and because I would like one witness, one, who stood in that hall and let the next one in.