Character Questionnaire

We did not ask the council for anything. Not a grant, not a bin, not a word.

Seasonal. Wonderful in August, silent by November, and nobody was allowed to say out loud which one we were in.

How to take money at the gate and count it in front of the person, so they knew it had been counted.

To tell somebody the thing that will cost you, before they find it out cheaply from someone else.

Being shown the working. I have never once changed my mind because a person was upset with me.

Sam, who gets liked without having to do anything for anyone. No, I would not admit it.

Turning up before it is light to crank a gate open for somebody else's swim, and never mentioning that you did.

My aunt, two years dead, whose handwriting I am still keeping out of the record.

Him staying. I can argue for the lido all day. I cannot argue for that.

Read every file in the building before anybody else does. Which is precisely how I got here.

I am braced for somebody to find the letter. What is actually coming is that they will find it and be kind, and I will have to live here afterwards.

I flatten the log book with both hands. Twice. Sam says you can hear it from the changing rooms.

Thermometers. I own nine. Two of them are calibrated and I know exactly which two.

Sleep, then the morning swim, then the part of the day where I speak to anybody at all.

I answer letters at four in the morning, in full sentences, with figures — and then I am the unreasonable one.

The license only comes if the wall is rebuilt, and the wall is only rebuilt if somebody says out loud why it failed.

"Nine point one. Get in." Ovide hears it, on the top step, in June, with the gate already open.

I have the apprentices call the colours out to each other across the bench. It is not cheating if nobody is asked directly.

A pane in my hands, the whole Row watching, and the color meaning nothing at all.

That the license on my wall is for a sense I have never had.

Being wrong in public would finish me. Being poor I have already done twice, cheerfully.

Cold kilns. An unlit furnace mouth is the one thing in Orhalla I will not put my arm into.

Pell. Careful, correct, and quietly replacing things so that nobody ever has to be told.

Private commissions. I say the money is poor. The truth is there is no crowd in a drawing room to agree with me.

Yeva's good opinion, which she has never once given me and which I have been earning for nine years.

I make it louder. I call the reading before I am certain, in front of forty people, and the noise finishes the job. It works until it does not.

The board seat. Wanting it would mean admitting I want them to be right about me.

The salt-bond hearing, when a clerk held up two panes and asked which was the warmer. I chose by weight, correctly, and had to sit down afterwards.

Known. Alone I can work.

That the Sequestered House holds one pane I cannot weigh, because it was fired thin on purpose.

Keep the notes. Eleven years of weights, every pane I have handled, in my own hand, in a drawer nobody has ever asked about.

What the Assize register says under my name.

I am braced to be exposed as a fraud. What is coming is a man who has known since my assay and has been saving it.

Put the day's samples on the north sill and leave them there until morning.

That a thing made well enough cannot be undone by how it was made.

That nobody on the Row has worked it out. Two of them have, and they have been kind about it for years.

I read the files I am moving. It is not prying if the box is already open in front of you.

I am braced for the sack. What is coming is being asked to say out loud what I have known for four years.

I agree to things. Anything that ends the conversation before six.

No. I leave the right paper where a particular person will find it, and call that asking.

The day shift, signed, before the automation date makes the whole argument academic.

Somebody to ask me a direct question, so that I am not the one who has to volunteer it.

Nine weeks. After the automation goes live there is no log, no keeper, and nothing to have been silent about.

The flat. Prue's last school year. Eleven years of clean record, and the only reference I have.

That doing the job exactly as written is the same thing as being a decent person.

That the office is losing my transfers. One man is losing them, on purpose, and he is fond of me.

Say the thing out loud first, before anybody can use it, without working out what it costs.

The night Kit offered to swap the shift. I could have said no and been safe until March.

Kit's. They take the photograph and lose a career for it, and nobody will ever write that part down.

The log survives. Somebody finds it in ten years, and every entry is there in my hand with the column left blank.

That I will keep taking the shift as long as the flat holds. He has never once had to threaten me.

That somebody has been counting, in a place where nobody was supposed to be.

If Renner had signed the transfer in March I would have gone to days, said nothing, and slept perfectly well.

"Twelve. Fourth Tuesday. Manifest blank." Said to a recorder, with the book open, for the record.

Locking a barge through alone at four in the morning. Water level, gates clear, number in the book.

Answering. Never for the thing itself, only for having an answer ready.

Made tea and turned the radio up. Nobody left the room and nobody mentioned it.

Weekly. Thursday was fine and Wednesday was careful, and we all knew which day it was without being told.

Peg, who signed my provisional at seventeen and fell out with my mother for a year over it.

How to hold a timetable in my head. I still know the 1974 late runs and there is nothing left to do with them.

The coal shed, until I got too big for it. After that, the number 12 at the depot once the last run was in.

That I was the sensible one. I was the one who did not get caught.

Took a shilling off the mantel for the fair. Put it back the next day and was never asked about it, which was worse.

Peg's son Ray, who went into the brick works at sixteen and was still there the night it burned.

Wet clay and diesel together. The works had a smell you could find in the dark.

Be in anybody's house on a Sunday because they felt sorry for me.

The year before the fire, when they shut the works for a fortnight to save money and every grown-up said it was fine.

Spending forty years being owed something and never once saying so.

Find a job that needs two people and start it. The talking comes later or it does not.

Take my boots off outside the door, whatever the weather. Peg's rule, not my mother's.

That being useful to people is the same as being close to them.

That my mother did not know about the van. She signed for it.