The step
Two knocks, and nobody. On the step is a leaf in the even hand, and what was picked up on the way, and whatever came across the road with it.
Anything on the site with a line under it can be picked up. What is picked up comes here.
The docket
Slip, 74 × 105 mm, the size of the slip pocket.
The pocket What was picked up Everything on this list was read first, on its own page, and kept from there.
Everything on this list was read first, on its own page, and kept from there. Each one goes back to the fold it came out of.
Keepers’ card 04 What holds on the step Whatever its person’s hands are on most.
What it is made of. Whatever its person’s hands are on most. For nearly everyone that is their work, so a man who handed in his fitter’s overalls in YR 4 may be walking the Run forty years later beside six foot of something the colour of new copper. A woman in the Quiet who has been in bed for thirty years and never made anything is followed by a figure in issue blanket. If a followed person changes craft the familiar changes slowly, hands first: a joiner at Km 340 who took up pots was shown pots in ash for six years. A familiar that takes to a second person after a death keeps the body it had (the Skenes).
Where it stays. Where the work is. A familiar will stand all night in a loom room, a pottery or a net loft, and will come into a kitchen only while something is being made there. It will not go into anyone else’s house at all, and during a sitting it waits on the step, in the rain, steaming. So followed people who want its company move a bed in among the work. “He’s moved his bed” means what it sounds like.
What it does. It shows things to its person, and only to its person; to everyone else it is a back and a shoulder. It will stop for another familiar. It holds up the joint you have not cut yet, or the loaf you have been failing at since March, done. If the person takes the thing it stays in the world, and if not it folds back. A flat no tends to bring forty more, so people learn to say not yet, or “leave it on the wall,” or nothing. It has business of its own, which its person finds out about gradually.
It can go. Maud Carrow, the potter at Km 322 who found that an unfinished bowl is never answered, was followed for nine years by a figure in wet clay. Every morning it held up the bowl 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.