Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Record of My Water
I keep my washing water in the zinc bath for a working week, and the bath has begun to keep a record of what I washed off.
- perspective: first
My name is Cyril Mullis and I keep the night duplicate desk at the Registry, which means I know what a record is for, and I am not a fanciful man. A record wants paper, ink, a date, and a cold eye. What I have is a zinc bath, and I am setting this down because there is no form for it yet, and a thing without a form is a thing that will be misfiled by whoever finds it.
I wash after shift, Monday to Friday nights, in the zinc bath in the kitchen alcove of my flat. I change the water once a week, Saturday at ten o'clock in the morning. Between Mondays the water stands: it stands through the five washes and it gives up nothing to the drain until Saturday, and what it does instead is keep a height. Zinc is honest that way. Each night's water settles at its own level — Monday's highest, the week descending in steps after it, the way a column of figures descends a page — and as it settles it lays a faint ring on the zinc at that height, and the ring stays. By Saturday the inside of my bath is ruled like a wages sheet, five lines to the week, Monday at the top.
I measure the lines before I bail. That is the whole of my ritual, and I have never missed it since I began: the dressmaker's tape out of the drawer, the shilling notebook, the five figures entered in half-inches, Monday's at the top, a line ruled under the week, the Saturday date written beside them. The tape snaps back into its tin, the bath is bailed to the yard grating with the enamel jug, and the week is finished and filed. My colleagues would call it housekeeping. I call it keeping, and I notice the difference.
I approved of the rings before I understood them. Then I understood them, and I have thought better of my approval ever since. The rings do not only mark the nights. They hold the nights. Monday's ring, at its height, keeps a smell of the spirit-fluid I clean the duplicator roller with, though the roller and the tin and the rag were all left ten minutes' walk away at the Registry. Wednesday's ring holds the blue flecks off my wrists after the copying shelf, lying in it in short rows, like figures set up and waiting to be summed. Thursday ring smells of the yard lime off the sacks in the archive yard, and I write this plainly because hedging is a form of misfiling. Two Fridays ago, the lowest ring of all kept a smell of stamp ink I had not used that week at all, because my round had taken me to the receipt side, where there is no ink.
Let me be exact. Two Fridays ago, the lowest ring smelled of the stamp ink I had not used that week at all, because my round that week had taken me to the receipt side, where there is no ink. I put it down to the week before, carried over. The bath did not correct me. That is what troubles me about baths. They never correct you; they only keep, and a keeper that never contradicts you is keeping something you have not agreed to.
Last Saturday I went in at ten, tape and notebook, and I counted six lines.
I wash five nights. There are five evenings in my working week and five rings have answered for them for two years, and last Saturday there were six: five in their places, Monday through Friday, heights agreeing with the notebook to the quarter-inch — and the sixth under Friday's, fainter than the others, a hair's line, smelling of nothing whatsoever. Of my kitchen, of zinc, of cold water. Of nothing washed. I stood a long time with the tape flat against the side and I did not measure it and I did not rule it off, and in the end I bailed the bath out with the fifth figure entered and the sixth left standing in the notebook without a date, which is the nearest thing to cowardice I have put on paper.
I have washed four nights this week at the usual hours. There is no one in the flat but me after three o'clock, when the house pipes go quiet. Saturday is tomorrow. There will be a tape in my hand at ten o'clock whatever the bath does, because a keeper keeps, and the question I have found no form for and no drawer wide enough for is the one I will carry into tomorrow with the tape: what did I wash off on the sixth night — and where exactly was I standing while the bath was keeping it?