Chapter Seven
Her Own Blind Spots
She had a clock and a building and a head full of dark places, and she had to turn the three of them into a thing she could do with her body in a single night, and she had nothing else in the world to do it with.
She did the work on the bench, in the grey before dawn, because the bench was where she did her thinking now and because the work needed no paper, which was as well, since paper was the one tool she could no longer lay her hand on. She sat upright with her bag on her knees and her dead badge warm in her fist, and she built the night the way she had once built a plan at her desk — not all at once, but a piece laid down and looked at and left, and another piece laid down beside it, and the shape of the whole coming up slowly out of the pieces the way a face comes up out of a list of facts. She had no board to pin it to and no fine black pen to draw it with. She had the inside of her own head, which had held the building for eleven years and held it still, and she found, bending to the work, that it was all there — the walls and the doors and the stairs of it, the red circles and the dotted lines, every tile she had ever signed off into the dark.
It steadied her to work. She noticed that and did not examine it. The weeks on the bench had taught her how a person comes apart when there is nothing in the day that needs deciding, and here, at last, was a thing that needed deciding, the largest thing, and the old machine in her took it up and began to turn, and the turning was a comfort, the way the cup had been a comfort, the way the tea had been. They had taken the badge and the roster and the account and the lease. They had not taken the work, because the work did not live on a sheet they could pull. It lived in her hands, in the trick a frightened child had taught herself and grown up to be paid for. It was the one thing the morning had left her, and bending to it now was like finding the handrail again in the dark. She was a woman who closed open things. The night was an open thing. She would close it.
She began with the clock, because a plan without a clock was a daydream, and Margaret did not deal in daydreams. The clock was the burner, and the burner she could not see, and a clock you cannot see is the worst kind. The clearing was weeks of work — weeks of it, the man in the café had said — and somewhere in the dark of it her folder was working its slow way up towards the trolleys and the man with the list. She could not know where in the queue her own name sat, so she reasoned as though it sat near the top, because to reason any other way was to give herself comfort, and comfort, she had learned, was a thing that got people caught. You have until he reaches it. You do not know when that is. Work as though it is tomorrow. It was the cleanest stake she had ever costed, and the cruellest, and it was hers.
The folder was three things, and she made herself name them, because naming the thing you went in for kept you from going in for everything, and a person who went in for everything came out with nothing, or did not come out. The prints, the service photograph, the ledger-leaf — and they would be together, laced as one folder, the sheets fastened at the top with a brass stud, one treasury tag through the foot. She did not have to find three things in the dark. She had to find one folder, and the folder held the three. The last paper that said she had been real. She let herself have that, just the once, the way you let yourself have a thing that is true and then put it down before it can soften you.
The way in was the gaps, and the gaps were hers. She had drawn every dark corner of that building — the ten feet of unlit perimeter between two lamps, the yard angle where two camera arcs did not quite meet, the half-landings of the deep stairs she had signed off because the budget would not light a place no stranger reached — and the building had never thought to take a single one of them back. She did not need to walk the route a hundred times on the bench. She knew it to the foot. She had drawn it.
There was one thing in it she could not trust, and the work made her name it. She had read the route the way Duval had taught her to read a file — once for what it offered, twice for where it did not agree with itself — and where it did not agree was the patrol. The fence, the camera arcs, the dark corners were where she had drawn them; cameras cost money to move and the building had moved none. But the patrol cost nothing to send round a different way, and a clerk above her could have redrawn its round in any of the weeks she had not been there to see, and there was no sheet of paper in the world she could pull to find out. She could plan around a gap she had drawn. She could not plan around one she could not see. The night had a hole in it exactly the width of a patrol she could not check, and she would have to step into it on faith, and find out, in her body, whether the floor was there.
She spent the day on the outside of the building, which was the only part of it she could reach, and she spent it the way a thief spends a day or a clerk spends a day, which she found were not such different things. She did not go near the fence — a thin grey woman who stood at a perimeter fence was exactly the thing the booth man's eye was trained to catch and hold — so she worked the streets around it, from a café window, a bus shelter, a bench in the small park where the office people ate their lunch, and read the building from the angles a person was allowed to read it from.
She learned the smell of the burner. The wind turned one afternoon and there it was, the oily, bitter, paper-and-heat smell she had caught in the market yard in the weeks before she understood it, coming on the cold wind from a low brick stack at the rear of the building, a stack she had never given a thought to in eleven years because it was plant, the building's own works, not a thing Coverage drew a circle round. She stayed and learned it — when it came, how strong it ran, what hour the stack smoked hardest — because the stack was the only face the clock had. It ran hot in the afternoon and banked down towards evening. They burned in the day, when the men were on, and let it cool at night. The man with the list would be gone home, the dead paper would be sitting in its trolleys waiting for the morning and the fire, and her folder, if it had not yet gone in, would not go in tonight. The night was hers. The fire kept day hours.
It was on the day's reconnaissance that she met the first of the easings, though she did not call it that, then or ever.
She was working the side of the building, the cleaners' entrance, from the far pavement, and a thing about it did not sit right, and she sat with the not-sitting-right the way she had once sat with a wrong tag. The cleaners came in at their hour at a door that had a reader on it — she had specified such a box for that door herself, years ago, because the cleaners came after the grade had gone and a door that let a tide of low-checked staff into an emptying building wanted a reader that logged each card. She watched the women come, and not one of them held a card to the box. The first came to the door and pushed it, and it gave, and she held it for the woman behind her, and the tide went in through a held door, past a grey reader that no one fed.
The door was propped. Somebody had propped the cleaners' door — a folded bit of card under the foot of it, she thought, or the latch turned back, the way a person props a door they are tired of carrying a card to. It was the kind of thing she had logged a hundred times and signed a stiff note about: side door found propped, reader bypassed, see that it is not. A bored cleaner, a heavy bag, a door it was a nuisance to badge through forty times a night — and so the door stood open to anyone, the reader feeding on nothing, the log of who came in that way a blank. It was the ordinary carelessness of an ordinary building, the kind she had spent eleven years writing stiff notes against and that the building had gone on committing because buildings did, because the people in them were tired and a propped door saved a man's back.
She filed it. A propped side door, reader bypassed — a thing she could perhaps use, a way into the building that wanted no card, if the propping held, if no one found it and freed the latch before her night. She did not let it be more than that. She did not ask herself why the cleaners' door, of all doors, should be propped on the very days she was watching it, because the answer to that was that she was watching it on every day there was, and a thing that happens every day will happen on the day you watch.
She came back to the route, in the evening, on the bench, and the propped door changed it, and the changing of it was the first time in eleven weeks she had built a thing instead of losing one. The propped door wanted no working — only that she be inside the perimeter at the cleaners' hour, in the small slow tide, a thin grey woman with a bag, which was, she thought with a coldness that was almost humour, the one thing she could still be. The erasure had touched only the paper. And a propped door did not read the paper. A propped door read nothing. It was the one door in the building that did not care that Margaret Vane had never been born.
The way down she knew. The building was watched at its skin and trusting at its heart — it spent its cameras on the doors and the perimeter, on the places a stranger might come in, and once you were past the skin and walking the corridors as though you belonged, the watching thinned, because the rule of the place was that the building knew its own. She had built it that way; she had signed off the thinness of the inside watching a hundred times, because no one got past the skin who was not staff. And she had a body. Get the body past the skin, and the body was a person again, for as long as it walked as though it belonged.
She sat with that a long time, in the cold, and it was the closest thing to comfort she had felt in eleven weeks, and she distrusted it, and held it anyway, because a person needs one warm thing to carry into a cold night.
She would carry nothing else. She settled it early and did not revisit it.
No weapon. She had never carried one, in eleven years, because Coverage did not carry weapons, Coverage carried plans; and she would not start now, on the worst night of her life, in the most watched building she knew. A weapon bought you nothing. It bought you a struggle, and a struggle was noise, and noise brought the watchers, and the watchers were the whole of the danger. A woman fighting her way down a corridor was a woman caught, and faster. The only way through a watched building was to be a thing not worth watching — unremarkable, unhurried — and a weapon made you the opposite of that, a thing every eye in the place would lock to. She had spent eleven years teaching the building to lock its eye to exactly such a thing. She would not be it.
So she would go in as she had gone in every working morning for eleven years: with nothing in her hands and nothing in her bag that a person might not carry, walking as though she belonged, because that was the only weapon the building could not take off her and the only one that worked. She had her dead badge, warm, useless, which she would carry not because it opened anything but because she could not put it down, and because a woman with a bag and a card in her pocket looked more like a person than a woman with a bag and nothing.
The day before the night — she did not know it was the day before; she knew only that the burner-smell had run strong that afternoon and that strong meant the trolleys were moving up towards the man with the list, and that a thing moving was a thing she could not give another day to — she walked the route on the ground, the parts she could reach without crossing the fence, and she met the second easing, and the third.
The cleaners' door was still propped, three days propped now, a thing she had once expected a sharp note to fix in an afternoon — but the desk that wrote such notes was the desk she had sat at, empty now, and the things that desk had caught went uncaught. And the patrol came round the corner of the building one man short. There had been two of them on the round in her head, because the rule she had signed said two, so that one was never alone in the dark stretches; and there was one, walking it at the slower drifting pace of a man alone, the gaps between his passes wider, the dark stretches standing empty longer than two men would have left them. A man off sick, a roster run short and not filled — the ordinary short-handedness of an ordinary night shift, the thing she had logged a hundred times, and that no one had seen to now, because the desk that saw to it was empty.
It helped her. A round one man short was a round with wider gaps, and wider gaps were more night for her, and she took the gift of it the way she had taken the propped door — but she felt it this time, the cold underside. Two pieces of luck in three days, both of them exactly the luck she needed, was a place where something did not quite agree, and she had built a career on the places where things did not quite agree. The thought reached for Duval — he knew the building, he knew the gaps — and she put it down hard, because to think the easings were Duval was to think Duval knew she was coming, and that was a thought that ended in the cold and went nowhere good. She knew only that a door was propped and a patrol was short and that both of them helped her, and the alternative to luck was a thought with no floor under it.
She gave the night its hour on the last evening, the way she had once given a watch its hour, costing the dark out to the quarter.
Not too early. Early, the grade was still leaving, the front gate busy, eyes about, the booth man fresh and watchful at the start of his turn. Not too late, either — too late and the cleaners' tide had gone in and the propped door might be freed behind them, and the building settled into its deep-night quiet where a single moving thing showed against the stillness like a mark on a clean page. The cleaners' hour was the hour: late enough that the grade had gone and the booth man had gone soft in the long middle of his turn, early enough that the side door still stood propped and a grey woman with a bag in the small slow tide was a thing the night expected to see. She fixed the hour. She held it in her head the way she had held the slip under the blotter, a thing for a particular time and no other, and she felt, fixing it, the old clean feeling of a plan come together, the left-hand pile gone and the right-hand pile squared, and she let herself have it, because it was the truest thing she had felt in eleven weeks and because she had earned it and because, for the first time since the cold morning, she had chosen something.
That was the thing she turned over, on the bench, in the last of the light. Not that she would win — she did not think in terms of winning; winning was a word like hope, too large for the desk, and she dealt in neither. But that she had chosen. For eleven weeks the world had done things to her, one after another, the badge and the roster and the account and the lease and the chart, a thing done to her every hour of every day, and she had stood in it and taken it because there was nothing to choose. She had been good at the building for eleven years, and she had thought, without ever putting it into words, that being good at it was the same as being safe in it — that a woman who knew where every blind spot lay could not herself be lost in one. The morning had shown her the two were not the same. She did not turn the lamp full on what that meant. She only felt it, low and cold, and went on. And now there was a thing to choose, and she had chosen it. The choosing was the one act in eleven weeks that began with her and not with the record, and it was a thing they had not been able to take.
She was not doing it for revenge. She had told herself that in the café and she told herself again now and it was true — she was too tired and too precise for revenge, and there was no one a ghost could revenge herself upon, and revenge was a hot word and the night wanted cold hands. She was doing it for the folder. For the prints and the photograph and the ledger-leaf, for the last paper that said she had been real, for the seed of the thing she did not let herself name. She was going back not to settle a thing but to prove a thing — to prove that there had been a Margaret Vane, that the upright grey woman on the poor bench was not a thing the record had merely failed to delete but a person the record had been wrong to deny — and she was half-afraid, in a way she did not examine, of what the proof would show, because she had read ten thousand files and knew that a file does not always say what you hope it says, and she was going down into the dark to read the one file she had never read, the one with her own name on the cover, and she did not, in her heart, know what was in it. She told herself it did not matter what was in it, that she went for the proof of who she was and would take that proof whatever shape it had. The telling held, mostly.
She would go the next night. She set it, the way she set a watch — not because the next night was special, there were no special nights left to her, but because the burner-smell had run strong and the trolleys were moving and she could not give another day to the clock she could not see. She had the route. She had the hour. She had the one warm thing and the one cold thing, the body that would pass for a person and the patrol she could not check, and she had her empty hands and her dead badge and her bag, and she had, for the first time in eleven weeks, somewhere to be and a thing to do when she got there.
She went back to the bench for the last grey hours, because the bench was where she waited now, and she sat upright with the bag on her knees and the badge warm in her fist and she did not sleep, and did not expect to, and the river went by in the dark the way it always went by, present, moving, unaddressed. She did not go over the route again. She knew it to the foot, and a plan known to the foot was not made surer by walking it a fourth time in the dark.
She fixed the hour for the next night, and turned up her collar against the river cold, and waited for the grey, and let herself believe what she needed to believe to do the thing at all — that no one expected a dead woman to use her own door, that the gaps she had drawn were still gaps. For proof of who she had been, then, and not for revenge. The rest of it — the one moving thing, the round she could not check — would keep until the fence.