Psychological horror · 6 min read · Set in The Hallam Reading Room ·
Read the Margin
A proofreader finds pencil annotation in the margins of reports she has already filed, and the notes answer what she was thinking rather than what was written. They are waiting for the sentence she did not correct.
- perspective: first
I proofread for the city. That is the whole of what I am, professionally: an extra pair of eyes on the third draft, the one before the files go down into the Municipal Archive and are spoken of in the past tense. Incident summaries, licensing minutes, amendments to the roll of premises. I work Tuesdays to Fridays, mostly at my desk on Stanhope Road, but the desk was being painted through the autumn, so they gave me a table at the Hallam Reading Room. Table 6. Under the window, facing the shelves, with an empty chair opposite that nobody, in three months, ever sat in.
The first note I found in November. I had come back to a filed folder — citing it, not reading it — and there in the margin of page six, beside the paragraph about the drainage rates, a pencil line and, under it, in a slanting hand: You've missed it here.
I rubbed at it with my thumb and got nothing. I am the person in that room with the rubbers; it is my trade. The pencil would not come up. The grade of it sat in the paper the way pencil sits when the paper was made around it.
I want to be careful here, because what I believed has to be laid out in order or it sounds like damage. I did not think: someone has been in the files. The Archive is sealed below street level since the year they poured the caps over the doors, and the files I proofread are copied up on the trolley, and counted, and the count is kept. I thought, for nearly a week, that I had written it. Proofreaders' hands do things in margins; I have found my own concentric circles on documents from a decade ago. But it was not my hand. And it was not quite anyone's. It was the hand you make when someone asks you to show them how to write.
Then the notes turned from the text to me.
The second one was in a housing report I had read through on the Thursday and filed on the Friday. In the margin, beside the one sentence I had privately doubted — only doubted, mind, I had seen a way round it and taken the way round — the note said: You already know the answer. Beside a clause I had skimmed: So would you, if you said it. In the margin of the page where I had yawned: Length is not the problem.
They do not answer the sentence. They answer what I was.
I did the thing you would do. I went back through everything. Sixty-one documents carried notes that had not been there at filing; the desk compare showed it, and the stamps were untouched, and no one had signed in or out. I talked, obliquely, to the room staff, and one of them — the older man who winds the corridor clock — listened all the way through my careful little speech and then asked, not unkindly, whether I had noticed that the notes never repeat themselves. I said no. He said that he had heard, from the people who asked before me, that they never do. Each note is freshly written. Someone is keeping pace.
Here is what cannot be said, and I have been trying to say it in this paragraph for an hour.
Since the notes began, I have not been able to see who looks over my shoulder. I do not mean that I feel watched — I do, constantly, the way you feel a draught, and I have stopped turning round, because I know what turning round gets: the empty chair opposite, the pencil that has appeared across its seat, laid neatly, as if a reader had stepped away one sentence ahead of me. I do not mean that either. I mean the ordinary sense, the one you live out your whole life on and never thank: the knowing, from the light going wrong in a window, that a figure is behind you. That is gone. Woman, glass, wrong light, gone. I sat across from my own reflection at the window of the reading room and the reflection sat alone. Whatever is at my shoulder now does not interrupt the room's opinion of what is in it. I proofread alone the way the pool at the deep end is quiet.
I know what this is about, of course. I am not a stupid woman.
In September, at the bottom of a rota report, a date was wrong. The stillborn roll — no: I will write it exactly. A death was misfiled to the wrong month, a woman of eighty-two, and the proof that it was wrong was there in front of me, in the register page clipped behind the report. To correct it, I would have had to write the query sheet, and cite the page, and set in motion the small cold machinery that sends a form down into the Archive and — the Cantor's people at the unrecorded end — moves a Writ. It was the end of a Friday. I wrote in the margin of the draft, in pencil: date at variance with register — query?, and then I looked at my own punctuation and did not believe it was mine to enforce, and rubbed it out, and initialled the page clear, and sent it down file.
I have not been able to find out since whether she was recorded. That word since covers everything that has happened to me.
Last Tuesday the notes stopped being marginal. On the last leaf of the newest folder, below my signature, where the page is white, there was a single word, centred, unhurried: Read.
And down at the foot of the same page, small, in pencil, the way a note is written by someone who does not want to interrupt: filed.
I held it steady with both hands on the table at 6, and the window behind the shelves was going darker, and the chair opposite was empty, and the pencil on its seat had been used — the point blunted since the morning, the length of it shorter by a page's worth.
I am not writing this for the record, you understand. There is no form for the record. I am writing it in my own notebook because I have begun to need to be a person who writes things down.
Because I would like to know, before they put me on some future trolley and speak of me in the past tense, whether the notes in that folder, read in order, are correcting me — or filing me. I would like to know which it is I am being kept for. Because either answer means that someone, in whatever reads over that folder at table 6, has read every word I have not said out loud — and has agreed, so far, with all of it.