The Floor Plans Under the Cat

The stairs of Tannery Steps were cut for people with better knees than mine. I take them one at a time, left foot to the tread, right foot brought up beside it, a pause for the joint to file its complaint. The librarian said there are ninety-one. I am counting to check, because counting is something to do with my mind while my body argues.

The tanneries on either side are shuttered, their loading doors painted shut, their hoists still hanging out over the lane like gallows with nothing to do. The air smells of river and old lime. Somewhere below, a tram bell goes, and the dusk comes down the colour of weak tea.

A mint on my tongue. Peppermint, the white ones, from the tin that has lived in my satchel since Annet bought it. I rehearse.

Version one: Thank you so much for having me, but on reflection I’m not able to be of further assistance. Reasonable. Clean.

Version two: I’ve given it a great deal of thought, and I’m afraid the position I’m in, with my pension, you understand, four years, not to be difficult, but.

Version three is just no, and I do not trust myself to say it, so I suck the mint down to a sliver and start on the next flight.

Number forty-four has the dark green door the librarian described. Brass plate, a bellpull, a name worn off the plate by a century of thumbs. I stand with one hand on the rail and wait for my pulse to stop sounding like a stamp pad. Then the door opens before I have touched it, and Elarion Quellow stands there with his glasses pushed up into his hair and a blue-stained finger marking a place in a book.

“You came,” he says. He sounds like a man who had put money on the other outcome.

“I’ve come to say…” I begin.

“Mind the step. It’s higher than it looks.”

It is. I mind it.

The smell takes me by the collar. Bone glue, warm and animal, under leather and paraffin, and over everything a sharp clean wintergreen, like a chemist’s on a cold morning. I know glue. I know paper. I have spent nineteen years among registry stock, and this is the first room I have entered in all that time that smells as though its paper is loved. Presses stand in the front workroom, iron and squat, and gilding wheels, and a wall of volumes in dark spines that I do not look at directly, for no reason I could defend.

From the back room comes a hiss and a soft mechanical sigh, hiss and sigh, hiss and sigh.

“Through here,” Elarion says.

The back room is smaller than a pantry and holds a war. That is the only word. A canvas cot against the wall, and on it a woman so small the blanket barely rises: white hair pinned up with what appears to be a bone folder, a magnifier on a chain lying on her chest like a medal, a clear tube running from her nose to a grey machine that breathes beside her. The machine is also the only thing in the room that is not leaning in. Everything else leans, towards her. A stool, a lamp, a young woman’s straight back by the window. And on the blanket at the woman’s feet, a grey cat, asleep, with one paw stretched out over a sheet of heavy cartridge paper as if claiming it.

The woman points at me with the folder. “That him?”

“This is Mr Tallowmere,” says Elarion.

“Dovrin,” I say, faintly. “Strictly speaking. Mr is fine.”

“Come in, come in, you’re letting the damp at my plans.”

Plans. I look at what the cat is lying on. I do not mean to; it is a clerk’s reflex, the eye going to the document. Ink on cartridge, drawn with a ruling pen, the lines patient and fine. A grand stair. Two lifts. The bend of the corridor on Level Two where the radiator box juts out, which is on no official plan, because it was added in a refit nobody filed. My own desk, a small neat square, with a smaller square beside it that is the tea station.

My mouth has gone dry as stock. “That’s the Deedhouse.”

“Is it right?” says the woman on the cot.

“The, ah. The north stair is nine treads short. There are eleven on the landing.” I hear myself. “Otherwise… it’s very nearly exact.”

“Nearly,” she says, with satisfaction, and looks past me at the straight-backed young woman. “Nearly. From a photograph and a quarter-hour’s chat. Pup, sit down before you fall down. You’ve got the colour of a candle.”

I open my mouth. Versions one, two and three stand ready in it, all of them polite.

The stool is behind my knees. I sit.

“Mr Tallowmere,” says the young woman at the window, and turns round.

She is perhaps twenty-five, with black hair cut to a line at the jaw so exact it might have been ruled. She wears a vellum-coloured coat with a high collar, and over it a yellow rain jacket two sizes too big, the sleeves turned back twice. She does not offer her hand. She looks at me the way a magistrate looks at a late filing.

“This is Luna,” says Elarion. “She’ll have questions.”

“I have forty-one,” says Luna. “I have numbered them. You will forgive me if I proceed in order. The badge locks on Level Two. Do they record entry only, or exit also?”

“Both,” I say. “That is, technically, the exit is only recorded if one swipes out, which most people don’t, so there are rather a lot of people who entered and, according to the log, never left. The warden’s meant to reconcile it. Hasn’t, to my knowledge, since the spring.”

“Who audits the log?”

“Nobody audits it. It’s, ah, retained.”

“For how long?”

“Ninety days, then it overwrites.” I hear how much I am offering. I try to stop and cannot. “Though the Level Three door isn’t on that system. It’s keyed separately. Steel. Old. One reader, and a keyhole under a little brass flap, which I have never seen opened.”

“And the night warden. Rounds.”

“Mr Prosser. Twenty-two years, bad hip, a flask he thinks nobody knows about. He walks Level One at nine, Level Two at a quarter past, Level Three at half past, which is to say he stands at the top of the Level Three ramp and rattles the door handle from a distance, because he can’t get down the ramp without his hip complaining. Then the boiler room, then tea. He is regular as a tide table. Except on gala nights, when he’s pulled up to the main stair to count coats.”

“Count coats,” says Luna.

“It’s a cloakroom. They lose things.”

“How long is he absent from the lower levels on such a night?”

“Three hours. More if the speeches overrun. They do overrun.” I stop. My mouth has been moving ahead of my judgement for some minutes now, and the tin is in my lap, and I do not remember taking it out of the satchel. Tartan, dented at one corner, ANNET’S KITCHEN in cream script that has worn to nearly nothing where her thumb used to rest. My own thumb is there now.

Luna has not written any of it down. She simply looks satisfied, as if I have confirmed a clause. Under the lamp on the sill, her feet make no mark on the floorboards. I look away from that quickly.

“Elarion,” says the woman on the cot, in a voice like a drawer being slid shut. “Tell him what we’ve got.”

Elarion pushes his glasses up, finds them already there, and takes them off instead. “You described the door to me on Tuesday. Steel, heavy, no hinges showing, and you said it felt wrong. You said the air on the ramp side was a few degrees colder than the corridor.”

“It is. I’d put it down to the culvert behind.”

“Grenna thinks it’s a writ.” He says the word with care, as though it might spill. “A written amendment, sealed somewhere inside the door itself. In a brass cylinder, probably, set into the frame, because the paper has to stay whole and legible and nobody who fits a steel door fits it with a loose sheet. It will say something like: This door admits no hand but mine.”

“That’s what the lock does?”

“The lock’s decoration. The writ’s the lock. Any hand but his, and the door simply isn’t there to be opened. You could cut it. It would reseal.” He turns a pen over in his fingers. “Unless the paper’s ruined. Soaked, say. Blotted until it can’t be read.”

“Brass,” I say. “Sealed. Then the paper’s in a tube.”

“Which is why Luna—” He stops, and glances at her, and she lifts one eyebrow a millimetre. He says no more. I notice that, and file it.

“There’s a second,” says Grenna, from the cot. “You said it in your own words, pup. Say it again.”

It takes me a moment to understand she means me. “The warden told me once, years ago, when he’d had a drop. He said the Commissioner warned him never to go into that room alone, because the room, ah. Because it looks back. I thought it was a story for new starters.”

“It’s a writ,” says Grenna. “Whoever takes from this room unbidden, I shall see their face. Plain as a sewn signature. You’ll not beat it. A man writes a thing like that, he’s put a heavy surety behind it, and there’s no tearing a heavy writ out from under him in a night. You can only accept it.”

“Accept it,” I say.

“He’ll see your faces,” says Luna. Her voice is level and entirely without comfort. “At the instant of taking. Not before, and not by any means that stops us. We must therefore plan upon being known, and arrange that being known is survivable.”

My hands are doing something to the tin lid. I make them stop. “Known,” I say. A laugh comes up out of me, small and horrible, a clerk’s laugh. “I’d rather not go on permanent record. Temporary record, perhaps. One would be, ah, indexed. Cross-referenced under Never Seen Again.”

Nobody laughs. Then Grenna makes a sound like a dry hinge, and Elarion’s mouth moves at one corner, and the cat lifts its head and puts it down again. It helps a little. Not enough.

“Next,” says Luna. “The cabinet. You said, Elarion, that the Registry holds a cabinet with a combination lock of the ordinary sort. Can the clerk speak to that?”

“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve never been in. Nobody has.”

“Then it’s beyond us until we can guess it.”

I look at the plans under the cat. I look at the little square that is my desk. And I see, as one sees a misfiled card the instant one’s eye passes it, something I have carried about for nineteen years without ever once opening it.

“It’ll be the date of the Surge,” I say.

They all look at me.

“I’m not, it isn’t a guess, quite.” I hold on to the tin. “He signs things. Constantly. Receipts, circulars, the memorial wreath book every autumn. Years back, a form came down to Level Two for countersigning. A small matter, a drainage easement. He’d dated it himself, with that heavy pen of his. And the date was the Surge. Not the day’s date. The Surge’s. Day, month, year, in his own hand, in the box marked Date, and then a line through it, and the right one beside. He didn’t even notice. I only did because I notice.” I swallow. “It’s the only number he writes without thinking. I should think if he’d to choose a number to keep something safe, it would be the one he can’t forget, and the one he can’t bear to look at either. Which is the same number, isn’t it. In a man.”

Nobody says anything. Grenna’s machine sighs. At the window, Luna has gone still in a manner I do not have a word for, and Elarion looks at me as though I had turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be written in a hand he can read.

“Well,” says Grenna softly. “Sit down, Mr Tallowmere. You’re already sitting. Stay there.”

“Then the first writ is mine to deal with,” says Luna.

She says it to the window, not to us. The streetlamp outside has come on, and the glass gives back the room: the cot, the cat, the little woman with her bone folder. Luna in it is the only figure I can see through, if I let my eyes go soft.

“The brass cylinder sits within the door,” she goes on. “The door has a seam. A sheet of paper may pass a seam, and so may I. We shall go to leaf, reach the cylinder, and wet the text. Water ends a writ. I have a vial.”

“No,” says Elarion.

He doesn’t raise his voice, which is somehow worse. He has taken his glasses off and is holding them by one arm, as if they were evidence.

“You’ve seen what water does to ink,” he says. “Yours is the same ink, only older. First the fingertips, because that’s where your name is. They’ll run before the rest of you notices. Then the grain of the skin lifts, like a wet page, and the layers part. You’ll have blisters that aren’t blisters. And you’ll be doing it flattened to a leaf, in a gap the width of a cuff, with nowhere to pull your hands back to.” He stops. His breath is not quite steady. “It will hurt the whole time. And I’m afraid it doesn’t heal the way a tear heals. I’m afraid paste can’t mend a place that’s been dissolved.”

“I am aware of the properties of water.”

“Then use something else. A flame, through the seam—”

“Brass,” says Grenna from the cot, not unkindly. “You’d cook the hinges, pup, and set off every sprinkler on Level Three before the paper so much as browned. And the paper’s inside a cylinder. Fire wants air.”

“A blade, then. Slit it open from outside.”

“Seam’s too thin for a blade. Paper goes through it. Nothing else does.”

“The clerk’s badge, the, the—” He turns, and I find myself being looked at like a spare key. “Dovrin could open the door.”

“It admits no hand but his,” says Grenna. “Mr Tallowmere’s hand wouldn’t open it if he’d the Commissioner’s own glove on.” She taps the bone folder against the cot rail, once, twice. “I’ve turned it every way, Elarion. I’ve had a good while. Water’s the clean way, because it’s the only thing that ends a writ without a quarrel with the one who wrote it. A smaller surety against a bigger one, and you lose. Blot it, and nobody’s weighed anything.”

“Then I’ll carry it. I’ll—”

“You can’t go to leaf,” says Luna.

“Then I’ll find a way to learn.”

“In nine days?” She turns from the window at last. Her face is quite composed. Only a thread of something pale shows at the inside of her wrist, and she closes her hand over it. “You are very kind, and you are wrong, and it is my decision. The ink is mine. The hands are mine. We shall go to leaf, Elarion, and the matter is closed.”

We. She’s used the plural, the royal one. I have heard it once before, from the Mayor, on the day the Deedhouse roof was condemned. It was not a warm sound then either.

Nobody speaks. The concentrator sighs and clicks. Quarto, on the plans, stretches one paw across the square that marks the steel door and spreads his toes, as if to hold it down.

I watch Elarion. I have spent nineteen years watching men decide whether to come to my counter or go away again, and I know the look of one doing sums. He is adding. Her hands, the vial, the seam, the minutes. I see him arrive at the total and see him find that there is nothing he can offer to subtract. His mouth opens. It closes. He puts the glasses back on, carefully, with both hands, as though the effort of it were all that was keeping him upright.

“Then I’m coming to the door,” he says finally. “I’ll be standing there.”

“As you wish.”

“With the paste.”

“As you wish,” says Luna, a shade more softly, and does not look at him.

And I think: they have none of them got a place to stand, either. That is some comfort. Not much.

I realise my thumb has been working the lid of Annet’s tin, up and down, up and down, a small tin click like a clerk’s stamp. I stop it. I put the tin on my knee and my hands flat on top of it.

“The badge,” I hear myself say. “I can have it for you. Mine, I mean, not a copy, it’s logged, but there’s a ledger of door-holds that nobody has read since, well. And the warden does his rounds at ten, midnight, two. He takes his tea at the Level One desk and he likes to be left alone about it.” I take a breath. “And the number. The Surge. I’d, ah. Strictly speaking, I’ll write it down for you.”

“Mr Tallowmere,” says Grenna.

“Dovrin,” I say. It comes out rather small. “If it’s all the same.”

“Dovrin,” she agrees, and smiles with her whole creased face.

Luna inclines her head to me, a quarter-inch. It is perhaps the most expensive thing anyone has ever given me.

---

The tram wires hum overhead, a low steady note I have never once noticed in nineteen years of walking under them. Tonight I can’t stop hearing it. Somewhere beyond Tannery Steps the last Number Nine rattles down toward the depot, bell clanking at nobody.

My knees are worse going down. I take the stairs sideways, like a crab, with the thermos knocking in the satchel. The mints are gone. I finished the tin somewhere around the word seam and didn’t notice.

The launderette on the corner has its window steamed solid, white as a blank card, and a single machine still turning behind it, a smear of blue going round and round. A nightwash. Someone’s sheets, someone’s whole week, tumbling. I stop to let a pain in my left knee decide whether it’s staying. Through the steam I can’t see anything, and I find that I’m grateful for it.

Next door, the chandler’s. Rope, tar, brass cleats on cards, a tin kettle in the window with a price on it. And taped to the glass among the tide tables, a poster, printed in that green the Works has used on everything since the Surge:

LANTERN NIGHT. THE FLOOD & WORKS AUTHORITY GALA, CIVIC HALL. DOORS AT SEVEN. ALL DEPARTMENTS. ALL FLOORS.

I read it twice. I am a man who reads small print for a living, and it is not small print. It is the only date in the autumn that matters, and it has been hanging in a shop window for a fortnight.

All floors. I know what that means. I have signed the rota for it every year. Every desk upstairs emptied, every clerk sent up in a good jacket to hold a glass of something and smile at the Commissioner. The caterers’ vans in the loading bay. Four hundred people on the marble, and one warden, one tea, one chair at Level One, with the whole building leaning over his head.

Nobody will look down, I think. Nobody ever does.

I put my hand flat against the cold glass, over the date. Behind me the streetlamp buzzes, the dull orange of a boiled sweet, and I step under it, because it seems the sort of place to stand.

Annet used to say I’d never made a decision in my life, only filed one. She said it lovingly. She was right. Twenty-two years of stamping and waiting, and every choice I’ve made has been a choice to be somewhere it could not touch me.

This one will touch me. I can feel it already, the weight of it, like a full drawer.

I take out my phone and, with a hand that hardly shakes, write the date on the back of my own palm in pen, as though I might otherwise forget it.