The woman at the front of the queue has been there since ten past six and has a flask, and by half past seven there are nine of them who know the order they arrived in and will defend it.
Renewals are Thursdays. The licensing hall opens at eight and the mothers are there by seven, tickets from last time, folders under their arms. They know each other from the school gate. Twelve windows; the biros chained to the counters; above every window a screen offering the same sentence: Kindly confirm the details below are true. The hall smells of wet coats and toner.
A child’s renewal is the long form; the fee schedule hangs where the queue bends. A woman near the front says to nobody that they never take a thing off, they only add. Two along, somebody says that is the same as taking something off, and the queue moves. Their children are the ones the school still reads out. The free term ends in June.
At window seven the screen finds a payment taken twice in April and returns it before the mother asks, and prints a line to say so, and asks nothing further of her. She stands looking at the slip. Nobody in the queue has seen this happen.
On the last Thursday of term they come in forty together, and the queue folds twice around the hall. One by one, each mother kindly confirms — a name, a date, a photograph — every detail true, and none of them hers. The screens think. Not one of them shakes its head.
That afternoon the register holds forty renewals, each one true somewhere, not one where it was. The hall closes on time. That month, no invoices go out.
In the following term the long form gains a second signature box, and a line above it in the standard type: confirmed in the presence of the person confirming. It takes four seconds longer. The mothers sign it forty times a year each, and the woman who thought of the Thursday says, at the gate, that four seconds is what it cost them, and that it was worth it, and nobody at the gate is sure whether she means it.
Over the weekend the register puts itself right; by Monday the printouts the mothers kept agree with the files, not with Thursday. They stand at the school gate comparing pages that have stopped being the pages. There is one name more than there are mothers. Nobody asks it out loud.
The one with the umbrella is written to first. Her son’s renewal is paused pending confirmation of identity. She brings his photographs, his dates, the folder with everything in it. The window is courteous. The screen shakes its head. The letter is warm. Thank you for helping us keep the record true.
At school his name is still read out. Somebody answers it.
He stops going in the third week. Nobody tells him to. The register answers for him whether he is there or not, and he has worked out what it costs his mother, in mornings, every time he is asked to be somebody. His friend keeps his chair for eleven days and then a smaller boy sits in it, and the smaller boy is not told anything, and the room adjusts the way a room does. By spring he has grown an inch that no form measures.
Her son’s renewal is still paused when the new term starts. She takes a ticket. Standing has swollen her feet into the shoes she wore for the first appointment and she does not sit, having learned that the ones who sit are asked again for the forms they have already produced. On the last Thursday the queue is longer than the hall, and the mothers have brought their sisters.