Export is done on the third floor of the post-office palace, between parcels and the quiet-boxes, and it has the shortest queue in the building.
She has been standing since half past eight and her calves have gone from aching to that other thing, the numbness that is not rest. She has the folder, the good one with the elastic, the kind they sell at the arcade with the glass roof. Her mother’s license, the renewal receipts going back four years, the death certificate with its two stamps, the offer of employment in the other place, the tenancy, the ticket. She has been to two windows already and has been sent up, politely, twice.
“You want to take her with you,” the clerk says. He is perhaps thirty and has the voice they train into them, the one that does not go up at the end.
“I want to take her with me.”
“Then I have to be precise, and precision here sounds unkind. The license does not travel. The recording travels. They are not the same, and the difference is what you are asking to keep.”
He says it the way a man says a thing he says eleven or twelve times a year. The queue on the third floor is the shortest in the building, and the reason is not that the counter is quick.
He turns the screen. It is a schedule, and it is not long, and at the foot of it there is a line for the applicant’s signature under a sentence declaring that the retained portion has been explained. He does not ask her to sign it. Two windows along, someone is signing one. A continuation is licensed for use on registered premises within the jurisdiction. The recordings — the voice, the habits, the small hours, the way she said your name — are the property of the estate and may be exported on payment of the export duty, which is calculated on the retained portion. He shows her the figure. It is the price of the flight, twice, and then some.
“And if I pay it?”
“Then you have a file that plays. On the other side there is no license and no host, so it plays flat. No answering. No presence. It is a recording of your mother rather than a continuation of her.” “People do buy it. They tend to play it once.”
“And if I don’t pay it?”
“The license lapses on departure. The estate retains the recordings for the statutory period, and the standard version is preserved in any case, and may be consulted.”
“What’s the standard version?”
“What she was assessed to be.” He does not look away when he says this. “The rest is the retained portion. That is the part with the price on it.”
She asks the question everyone asks at this counter, and he answers it correctly and at no charge: no, you cannot leave and keep paying from the other side; the premises must be registered, and premises abroad cannot be registered, and there has been no exception in the eleven years he has been here. He tells her about the appeal, which exists, and takes eight months, and has a fee, and which he has never seen succeed. He tells her this before she has spent anything.
She goes to the window on the landing. Her hands have kept the shape of the folder and take a moment to stop being that shape. Below, the counting-house lane; beyond it, the water, and the boats, and the crossings going on all afternoon in their unhurried way. Her mother crossed in April. It was paid for and stamped and done.
At the arcade on the way home there is a tin in the window with a picture on it of a city that is not this one. Cream buildings on a slope, a blue harbor. She has walked past it for years. It costs almost nothing and she buys it, and the man wraps it in paper.
She goes home and puts the tin on the shelf where the license used to sit, and does not go back to the third floor.
On the last Thursday she does the renewal one final time, in cash, at the hall, standing in the queue with the mothers and the widows, and pays for a month she will not be in the country for. The clerk asks if she would like the receipt. She says yes.
She takes the receipt to the airport in the front pocket of the folder, where a passport would go.
At the final call her calves give, four years of queues arriving at once, and she stands through it against the rail. On the belt the folder’s front pocket is dark in one place, the size of a thumb.
The flight is at dawn. From the air the city is the shape the city has always been: two hills, a channel, a hook of lights along the water, and out on the far hill a crane with its jib swung loose, pointing where the wind takes it. Somewhere down there a hall of cabinets is humming forty notes to a row, and one of them runs until the month she paid for runs out, and then does not.
The seatbelt sign goes off. The window fills with cloud. In the tin in her hand luggage, wrapped in a sock, is her mother’s spectacle case, which is not a recording, and travels free.
The hinge is stiff. It was stiff for her mother too.