Ossel

The wall, Km 0 to Km 893

1. Km 0

   the Head

   The only natural rock in the country. Everything else was carried here.

   Stone is cut here, in the quarry sheds. Everything else on the wall was carried from this rock.

   Next door: a few, in the quarry sheds

   1. 0

      The Counter

      The Mole Company's pay hall, and in it sixty metres of oak. Wages went across that counter for thirty years and then uniforms went across it for seven, and the men who took the uniforms in were the men who had handed out the money. The Keepers were given the public side in YR 71 and told to expect forty thousand coats. Four and a half thousand came.

      A001-PH-102 · The Counter, Recount, YR 71

      Km 0 — A001-PH-102 · A001-PH-007 · the returns ledger · the Keepers

2. Km 1 – 99

   the Low Numbers

   Labourers' terraces, four to a room, and the ferry families, who were the last trade to hand in and have never let anyone forget it. They eat eel out of the Former, which disgusts the entire rest of the country. Elver is their word, and they lent it to everybody.

   Rope is walked here, boats are built on the slips, and bread comes off the step at Km 88.

   Next door: thick, and noisy with it

   1. 12

      Door 2

      Arel Noll's door, a ferry conductor of eighty-two, and the last rostered sitting in Ossel: four hours on an afternoon in YR 70, served by Ines Morrow, who stayed the night and went back for her things in the morning. He died in YR 74. She is forty-seven and still at that door, and still has the coat, which the Keepers would very much like.

      A001-PH-104 · A001-GA-010, the Place-Holder, made to hang where her coat would be

      Km 12 — Ines Morrow · her letter · A001-PH-104 · the Place-Holder

   2. 40

      Staithe's slip

      Jory Staithe, a ferry conductor's son, built a fourteen-foot boat here in YR 44 and came down in the morning to find a second one beside it on the slip, the same boat, the same three places where he had run out of patience with the planking. He took the answer, on the grounds that theirs would know the way, and went out at the September tide on the bearing they were all facing. His own boat is still on trestles in his mother's yard under a tarpaulin she replaces. Nothing has been heard.

      Who else has tried to leave, and what they are waiting for, in Next door

      Km 40 — next door, and the copies · over the front →

   3. 61

      The ropewalk

      A neighbour opposite counted “nine or thirty” at the window one afternoon and sent for somebody official. The Ministry inspector walked the length of the shed, came out, and wrote three words on his sheet. The rope that week was the same rope as every week.

      Km 61 — next door, and how many · the smear at knee height

   4. 88

      Pell's bakehouse, lit since YR 3

      Ada Pell over-salted her loaf because her husband liked it that way. She was baking the week the bakers handed in, so that is the loaf, and it has been the loaf every morning since. She died in YR 29. It keeps better than anything her granddaughter makes and her granddaughter's son prefers it, and says so at the table.

      A001-PH-112 · Loaf on the Step, YR 3. Plate withheld.

      The morning Dena Pell walked in here is told at length in Next door

      Km 88 — A001-PH-112 · the figure in the kitchen doorway · at length →

3. Km 100 – 199

   the Hundreds

   Wind, and troughs of potatoes nobody needs to grow. The name means nowhere and was meant to.

   Bread is baked here, six households at a time, and potatoes come out of the troughs.

   Next door: ordinary

   1. 116

      Door 8

      Dena Pell bakes here, six households on a Thursday, an hour spent discussing bread they could have picked up off their own steps in forty seconds. She keeps a notebook of who praised which loaf. Her son is in it under his full name as preferring the other. In the spring of YR 53 the elver opposite began putting her face across the crust, and she filed a form about it, and then walked twenty-eight kilometres to her grandmother's bakehouse to have it out with them in person.

      The complaint is in the archive, In their own hands

      What she found at the other end of that walk: Next door

      Km 116 — the complaint · A001-DO-001 · at length →

   2. 120

      The late lamp

      Somebody's front room with the door-lamp left burning and crates of issue beer in the hall. There is dancing on the nights there is dancing. Dena Pell took it up at fifty and has been unreliable about Thursdays ever since, and the six households have opinions, and she has heard them.

      Km 120 — the issue · Dena Pell, at length →

4. Km 200 – 299

   the Two-Hundreds

   Where Attendance started, and where the joiners are. On a Friday at Km 286 a man will carry a stool into the road and set it beside the one that came back, and let people walk round the pair of them.

   Chairs and stools are made here, and on a Friday they are set out beside their answers.

   Next door: thick at the chair rooms

   1. 203

      Door 14

      The first recorded sitting, YR 10, three hours. Nobody wrote down what was said and both of them were asked, later, more than once. One said they had talked about the ferry. The other said they had not talked.

      A001-PH-001 · First Sitting, Km 203, YR 10

      Km 203 — A001-PH-001 · A001-FI-001 · the slip wallet

   2. 209

      The Skenes

      Dan Skene, net-maker, went over the back in YR 57, followed thirty years by a figure in tarred line that stood the way he stood, thumbs hooked in where a belt would be, and cleared its throat before it moved, as he did. Within the month it had taken to his daughter Nell — thirty-eight, married, a net-maker herself, and she had not wanted it. It came across the yard in the evenings and did her father's cough under the bedroom window. The Bench said it could not summon an elver, so she told it herself, out loud in the yard, feeling a fool: not the house side, the gate. It has stood at the gate since and has not once come past it. The cough was the last thing to go out of it, and that took four years. The dockets come to her whether she wants them or not, and she could not get a limit on those.

      Ruth, the sister Jessa wrote to when she left Bruno Halloway in YR 35, is at this kilometre too. Her letter is in Next door

      Km 209 — what holds for familiars · the Bench, at Km 410 · the letter to Ruth →

   3. 214

      A band with nineteen file marks

      Most of them are wedding rings, from the July after the storm. The woman at this door wears hers after a divorce, because she nursed a stranger through nineteen days of it, and she wants that part known and the rest not discussed.

      A001-OB-033 · Long Sitting Band

      Km 214 — the Long Sitting Band · A001-RE-002

   4. 233

      A notebook, YR 58

      Forty-four, married, not followed, and three slips in a row to the same door at Km 251, which he has decided not to think about too hard. He watched her wrists for four hours and sat on his hands. By the last page he is working out what it would cost in backs to buy a Thursday at that door off a broker in the Eights, and which relative's chest would make the trip true as far as it went. The notebook was lent to the Keepers and taken back.

      Read at length in Next door

      Km 233 — the door at Km 251 · the brokers, at Km 801 · at length →

   5. 251

      The door he keeps getting

      She does the finding slowly. Most people pat you down for the fault in your coat; she starts at the hem and goes up the back seam with two fingers and does not talk while she does it. Then she makes tea. She has a burn on the left wrist from the range, shiny, about the size of a bean.

      Km 251 — A001-PH-111 · the notebook, at length →

   6. 286

      The chair rooms

      Joiners' workshops facing lit houses across a lane two chairs wide. On Fridays a piece and its answer are shown side by side and people take sides about which is which, loudly, and are sometimes wrong. Several people here have each taken hold of what they took for a separate chair and found they were all holding one, from different sides. Mara Senn has spent thirty years learning to describe what she sees and is better at it than the Ministry's observer. She dislikes being called a worshipper and has said so to the observer.

      Km 286 — the answer chair · the card under the short leg · Mara Senn’s note · the offence, photographed · the bench, line eight · SHELF 01 · one night at Door 11 →

   7. 291

      Lio Fer

      Twelve backs to Sab Rell for a chair his partner thought ugly. Rell called one in for his annual dinner and another for the trial opening of a drawer, then endorsed four of them to a friend whose speaking nights run past midnight. Lio had done eight hours of Rota that week and missed a night, and his signed promise went up on the shelter wall where people queue. Nothing happened to his bread. The witness he needed for his own work found she was busy; his partner's sister took back an invitation; somebody said within his daughter's hearing that the Fers did not keep their word. He turned up the next time and sat through all of it.

      Km 291 — the Ministry, and the Rota · bearer paper, at Km 801

5. Km 300 – 399

   the Threes

   Fitters, plumbers and joiners, all retired and none of them retired. Most of the country's pamphlets are printed here, on duplicators, badly. If your door sticks, somebody in the Threes will fix it without being asked and then explain your own door to you.

   Pamphlets are printed here, on duplicators, and doors are mended whether or not anyone asked.

   Next door: ordinary, and much complained about

   1. 322

      Maud Carrow, potter

      She found early that an unfinished bowl is never answered, and spent her life not finishing things. For nine years a figure in wet clay stood in her doorway and held up the bowl every morning with its foot turned. Every morning she said not yet. One morning in YR 41 it was not there. She went on not finishing things until YR 77.

      The nine years, and the morning it was not there, in Next door

      Km 322 — the bowl, held with its foot turned · the nine years, at length →

   2. 344

      Dunnock's door

      Abel Dunnock made a kitchen chair in YR 12 and found a second on the step with the first docket anybody kept — the handwritten note that comes with the copy, listing what you made and everything that happened while you made it. He made forty more chairs that winter trying for one they could not match, and burned every answer. He left the forty-first alone. He sat in one of that pair for twenty-eight years and his wife sat in the other, and neither of them ever said which was which.

      A001-DO-031† · still at Km 344, in a family Bible. Read in In their own hands

      Km 344 — the first docket · next door, and the copies

   3. 371

      Mrs Renn's shelf

      Bruno Halloway took it down during a sitting because it was loose. She had liked it there. She said so from the public seats at his trial, at some length, and was asked twice to sit down.

      Km 371 — Bruno Halloway · the Bench, second day

   4. 377

      Door 9, the tap

      Emmet Souter's bed had been in that kitchen since his hips went. The tap dripped eleven days and he would not leave a chit for it, because a chit brings one in and it mends the tap and then it shows you taps, thirty or forty of them, at the foot of the bed, and he could not get up and go into the other room. Halloway rolled his sleeves rather than take the coat off, which is what he was tried for, and Handists have rolled theirs since.

      Handists hold that attendance without help is theatre, and the protest is the rolled sleeve, which shows the lining to the street, which the Ministry calls indecent. Some of them go door to door doing repairs in full coat. A good many householders would rather they asked first.

      A001-PH-105 · A001-PO-011 · A001-GA-006

      Km 377 — A001-PH-105 · A001-PO-011 · the overshirt · the Handists

6. Km 400 – 430

   the Match

   Clerks, in the good doors, and the whole country's paperwork. A clerk owes one sitting a week and serves the rest of the four at a desk, under common hours, which is the Ministry's word for work that still wants a person and is therefore not a trade. Retired teachers, teaching, have views about that. The stretch is named for the general belief that the ninth floor is a marriage bureau. They are the only people who say the Arrangement out loud, and they say it the way you would say the drains.

   Paper is made here: patterns, slips, rotas, returns, and the cards behind the ninth window.

   Next door: hardly any. The Match puts this down to breeding.

   1. 409

      The Pattern Office

      Orla Venn cut here, and lived at Door 3 with Tess Carrow, a button-presser, registered as a household of two since YR 11. She spent a year drawing people sitting down before she drew a coat, and the margin of the first sheet says cut it for the chair.

      On a November evening in YR 13 one came out of the old button works opposite, stood up to her height, and opened. She got as far as the edge of the slip. She went indoors, spread the coat front on the table, and asked whether there was any of the iodine ink left. The Colour Ordinance she proposed the following year puts the one colour on the inside, and her reasons for it are not written down.

      A001-DO-010 · Pattern 1, draft sheet, YR 9

      The whole of that evening, as Tess Carrow told it, in Next door

      Km 409 — A001-DO-010 · Orla Venn · the sitting coat · the whole evening →

   2. 410

      The Bench

      The one court. There are no prisons, there being nobody to staff one, and food and a roof cannot be taken away. What it can do is add hours, take a door in a bad case, and unlamp you: struck off the Rota for a term, nobody sent to you, your lamp dark while the street's are lit. Six months is usual. Dot Sallow got three years, which is the longest anyone has had.

      Km 410 — the Bench, second day · Dot Sallow, at Km 801

   3. 412

      Rota House

      Twelve storeys, one window a floor, and the ninth window is the one people point at. Perpetua Lode ran that floor from YR 24 to YR 55 and kept everyone on cards with a line for temperament in a shorthand only she could read. Asked at her retirement whether the Rota was random, she said it was as random as she could bear to make it. From YR 68 the section began burning the cards, and the inquiry the following year was held partly to find out what had been in them.

      A001-AR-002 · A001-PH-106 · A001-PH-014

      Km 412 — A001-AR-002 · A001-PH-106 · the letter from the ninth floor · what the house took from it →

   4. 413

      Behind the stairs

      The lift in the annexe has not worked since YR 44 and the stairs are the only way up to the filing floors. There is a landing halfway with a kettle on it.

      Km 413 — the walls, recorded · A001-AR-002

   5. 415

      D. Wick's door

      Deputy of the ninth-floor section, thirty-one years' service, and the only person from that building who came to the inquiry without being sent for. He was asked about one Tuesday in March and said the arithmetic was on the sheet, and that a good many people find everyone frightening, and that the section was not resourced to tell the difference. His door here was put under review afterwards, which he asked to have noted, and which he regarded as a punishment.

      Km 415 — the letter from the ninth floor · the Ministry · the inquiry →

7. Km 431 – 589

   the Wets

   A hundred and fifty-nine kilometres of low crest. In a westerly the sea comes over the road and you wait it out on the Back with your feet up on a chair. Few doors, which is why people who cannot get a door anywhere else end up here, walking an hour to work in the morning. The wet-kilometre cape was cut for this stretch and nowhere else.

   The wet-kilometre cape was cut for here, and one clerk cuts ferry stairs out of paper.

   Next door: thin. There is not much work to follow.

   1. 438

      Perrin Sull

      A junior clerk at the Match, billeted out here because the Match has nothing free, so he walks twenty-six kilometres on a Monday and stays over. He makes paper models of ferry stairs, badly, and has never improved at it in eleven years. He has been followed since he was twenty by something tall and grey and creased like cartridge paper, which comes in while he is cutting and goes out when he stops, and which has developed, over the years, an interest in the tide that he does not share and cannot account for.

      What holds for familiars, in Next door

      Km 438 — A001-AR-005 · the hull, at Km 879 · what holds for familiars →

8. Km 590 – 640

   the Loom Stretch

   Three hundred licensed looms and the last people in Ossel allowed to call their work their own on paper. Weavers are deaf by fifty and lip-read across a shed without noticing they are doing it. They call the elvers gulls, because they follow a working loom the way gulls follow a trawler.

   Cloth is made here, on three hundred licensed looms, and every loom’s error is written down.

   Next door: thicker than anywhere. Dozens are followed.

   1. 596

      Col and Marit Beck

      Both weavers, both Sodality, and she is the better weaver by a distance; it was her loom the gulls lined up for. In YR 52 one of them took to Col. By the next spring it stood as tall as he did, in his own grey twill, with his doubled pick across the chest like a crease out of a drawer, in an old issue jacket of his that stops two inches short of the wrist. He calls it Pick. It re-sorts his bobbins every night into an order that is not colour, weight or count, and it walks into the sea to the waist at every slack water and comes back and steams until the shed smells of wet sheep, and he hates the sea side and hates the smell. On the Run it stops for Hanna Rill's familiar from Km 598 and the two of them stand a yard apart at the shelter for an hour, showing nothing and making no sound.

      In the autumn of YR 54 he reached for it differently and it stepped back one pace, and held that pace for five months, and his dockets from that winter say The maker reached. Not taken. Entered. eleven times. In March it laid a hand flat between his shoulder blades, unasked, for the length of a bobbin. He moved a bed into the loom room that summer. Marit wants it, specifically, and has never touched it, and knows to the inch how far away it is.

      At length in Next door

      Km 596 — A001-PH-121† · A001-PH-110 · the Sodality · what Marit wanted, at length →

   2. 598

      Hanna Rill

      Fifty years at the loom and followed for twenty-two by a tall thing in unbleached linen, which walks up the Run and stands a yard from Col Beck's familiar at the shelter for an hour at a time. In Slack Week YR 61 she swam out to the second mussel rope before breakfast, ate eleven off it standing on the ladder, sent her familiar out to the step for four hours while Mr Garth of Km 601 was in the house, and had her leaf of dockets for the day like anybody else. She lent it to the Keepers and said there was nothing in it she was ashamed of.

      The leaf is read in full in Next door

      Km 598 — Slack Week · the Sodality · the bench, line one · the leaf, read in full →

   3. 611

      Door 6, above

      Jo Vask, whose thumbs have gone. She let her familiar hold the warp at tension while she threw the shuttle, declared it to the Sodality, and was refused certification, which she could have avoided entirely by saying nothing. There are weeks when she is at the loom from first light to lamp-lighting with both hands strapped and does not notice she is hungry, and the cloth out of those weeks is the softest anything in the Quiet is made of. It carries no stamp. She is paid for it in visits to her mother.

      Km 611 — the Sodality · A001-PH-110 · what holds for familiars →

   4. 612

      The Sodality hall, and the witness room

      Every registered loom has its characteristic error written down like a signature. The fault proves nothing on its own, since next door can copy one to the thread, so the proof is a person who sat in the room and watched, and signed, and the mark can be forged. When a fraud is caught it is never the cloth that gives it away. An apprentice talks, or the witness turns out to have been at a wedding forty kilometres off.

      A001-PH-110 · The Fault, YR 24

      Km 612 — A001-PH-110 · the Sodality · the witnesses →

9. Km 641 – 760

   the Quiet

   Terraces kept well, cuffs worn long, and firm views on Attendance held by people who serve the minimum. This is where you move when you get ill, because the sick rooms are here and so are the people who will sit with you, and everybody knows what it means when a family takes a door in the Quiet.

   Net is knotted here, cups are fitted to a mouth at Km 703, and ash is made at Km 744.

   Next door: ordinary, and very quiet about it

   1. 664

      Door 3, H. Oram

      Fifty-six, widowed, was on the dredgers, smelled of pipe and of a dog that died in the spring. Followed by something his own height made of tarred line, the old sort, which lives in the net loft over the yard where he keeps a bed. Twice a day, at the turn of the tide, it goes out and stands in the yard facing the sea wall in whatever weather there is, and he stops knotting and waits for it with his hands in his lap. During the nineteen days of the Long Sitting the outside stair to the loft was unusable, so he knotted net in the kitchen from breakfast till the lamp went out, net for nobody, forty foot of it in the hall, because it will stay in a room while there is work going and not otherwise. He went over the back in YR 61. His daughter gave the Keepers several hundred dockets tied with net twine and asked not to be told what was in them.

      A letter written at this door during the Long Sitting is read in Next door

      Km 664 — A001-PH-122† · A001-RE-002 · the letter to her sister →

   2. 703

      Ena Rusk's kitchen

      Her brother Sef was dying and could no longer manage a cup, so one came in to make one that fitted his mouth, and was still there seven hours later, making cups. There were fifty-six in the room by morning. A visiting clerk asked her to confirm whether it had been attending. She said it had been making a cup fit his mouth. He would not count the hours, and she would not let him in on his next round. Sef died the following morning with a human neighbour in the room.

      Eide's card for one of the cups is in In their own hands

      Km 703 — Eide’s card · the Keepers

   3. 744

      The burning house

      For households who cannot put somebody into the Former, which is most often families from the Low Numbers who have watched what comes out of it. The ash goes seaward. It is not thought better or worse, and it is thought about.

      Km 744 — what is under the Former · the Low Numbers

10. Km 761 – 879

    the Eights

    Shelters unpainted since the Ministry stopped sending paint. This is where people went who had moved away from anyone who knew them, which is exactly why the brokers set up here: where nobody can vouch for you, somebody will sell you a stranger's evening. Caught fish comes down through the Eights at night in wet sacks and is not discussed in daylight.

    Bearer paper is written here, and fish comes down the stretch at night in wet sacks.

    Next door: ordinary. Brokers do not like them near the slates.

    1. 801

       Dot Sallow

       She held paper signed by about eleven hundred people, ninety thousand hours in all, which is more evenings than some of them had left to live. When she began calling it in across the Low Numbers, three kilometres refused together, then thirty. Bearer paper was worthless in the Eights inside a month and families who had given up a door for it had nothing. It barely touched the Loom Stretch, where nobody takes paper from a signer they have not met, and it did not touch Lio Fer, who owed a man he drinks with.

       Km 801 — the Bench, at Km 410 · Lio Fer, at Km 291

    2. 879

       The last lamp standard

       Past here the Ministry stopped putting them up, and past here there is nothing to light. People walk out to it on clear nights to look at the dark and come back, because a single elver's colours carry for kilometres over open water and there is nothing lit out here to argue with them.

       In the shed under the standard there is a hull, half planked, belonging to a clerk from Km 438 who has written to the Door Office asking how a person gives up a door. Each evening the thing that follows him holds up the same hull, finished. He says not yet.

       Over the front, and the nights the whole country goes down to the water, in Next door

       Km 879 — A001-PH-124† · the clerk, at Km 438 · over the front →