Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
The Receipts of My Brother's Kit
In the locker room the attendant's audit book comes to list kit that has not been brought in yet, stamped or burned with the owners' initials, waiting on pegs the men have yet to be given.
- dated: "the kit audit"
- narrator: "Albert Quenby, locker attendant"
Friday. Receipt forms came down from the office today for the kit audit, a blank to a peg, ninety-two pegs, and I printed the list of names against numbers the way I have since I had the room. The rule of the locker room is the one I was given with the keys: nothing goes in the book till it is worn. By that rule the book was level going into the audit. I checked it twice against the pegs tonight, lamps lit both rows, and every entry answered to something a man had hung on a hook himself, because I watched near every one of them do it.
Monday, the audit proper. Went round with the checker from the office, hook by hook, comparing each receipt to what was in the locker and signing off peg by peg. Level to peg 87. Then four pegs at the bottom row that are not level. They are the new men's pegs, given out Thursday to the shifters engaged to start next week, and the men have come nowhere near the place yet.
What the audit found, since I have to write it once clean: the lockers at pegs 88 to 91 hold kit, and the receipts against those four pegs are filled in. The kit is boots and a tin box at 88, gloves and a mackintosh at 89, a billy at 90, boots again at 91. The stamps are the part I will not dress up. The boots at 88 carry D.A. burned into the soles, the way the joiner's shop does initials, dark at the edges as if done some time past. The mackintosh is stamped F.R. at the collar. And the billy at 90 has T.Q. stamped piecemeal on the base and the handle strap. T.Q. is my brother Tom. He burned those marks on with the soldering iron the summer he was seventeen, before he signed off the works, and no two of his marks sit the same.
Tuesday, after. The receipts for 88 to 91 are filled in my hand, which spent Monday at my side, and in my ink, the bottle of which stood full on my desk tonight. The dates on the receipts are for Monday the audit itself, which they should not carry, because I had not worked the day when they were filled and could not have filled them. The checker signed the page for me and said signings are signings, and went off to his tea.
The audit is signed and gone up to the office. So either my book is being written ahead of the works, or the works is arriving behind its book, and both of those can be dressed as order. What I have not got past, and am setting down here because I cannot say it in the room: whose hand burned my brother's initials where his go, and whose hand has been doing my writing for me, and by what leave the pegs were ready.