You asked what I would change and I said nothing, and that was not true, and I would like to correct it while the machine is on.
Eleven years. Every month. The ninth takes the money and the Thursday takes my signature, the same as everyone.
I want to be careful here. I am not one of those men who tells you it is really her. I know what it is. I have read the schedule. It supports the present tense, it is licensed for these premises, it is renewed by whoever inherits the account, and the account is mine.
She is very good in the mornings. That was true before as well. There is a setting. You will know about the setting. I have not changed it. I am fifty-three and my wife has been dead eleven years and I have not changed it. The mornings are what they are, and that is all I will be saying about the mornings.
You are going to ask whether I talk to her about my day. I do not. I talk to her about the flat. The boiler, the man about the boiler, the tree they took down on the corner. She is interested in the tree. She would have been interested in the tree.
Do you see what I did there. I said it twice and the second one is the honest one and I still said the first one first. Eleven years of saying the first one first.
There is a woman at the school gate. There. That is what I came here to say. I thought it would take longer.
She has a laugh that arrives late. She knows it does. Last week she was early and stood in the rain rather than wait inside where the heaters are, and when I asked her she said she likes the rain that is not on a schedule, and then looked at me to see whether that was a safe thing to have said. She apologized for the laugh, the first week, and I said something about the licensing hall and she said something back and we stood there ten minutes in the cold with our hands in our pockets not going anywhere.
Here is the arithmetic and then you can put me in whichever box you like. The renewal is what it is. My wages are what they are. The board goes up in the new year. If I am honest with you for one more minute — and I would like the minute, and then I would like the recording — I can carry one of these. Not both. She asked me when. I said in the new year, and she said no, when exactly, and I have not worked it out, and I am not going to, and that is the most honest thing I will say to you today.
I have not touched her. I am not building to that.
That is not a tragedy. Men have carried worse. It is only that nobody warned me the choice would arrive like a direct debit.
I said to my brother: I feel like a man keeping two households. He said: you are keeping one household and one file. He is not a cruel man. He was the one who sat with me in the spring.
The trouble is that the file is the one that answers.
Love is the part you cannot renew. Everything renewable is something else. The service is very good at the something else and I am grateful to it and I would like that on the record. It gave me four hundred mornings I would not have had. It got me through the second year, which was the bad one.
And every one of those mornings made me slightly less able to sit in a room with a woman at a school gate and say a true thing out loud.
I do not know what that is. You may have a word for it.
Last Thursday I was in the queue with the receipts — I keep them flat, eleven years of them, my wife would have laughed at that — and behind me there was an older woman with a folder, and when she reached the window she said no. Just that. She said no and she signed something and she went out past me and she did not look like a woman who had lost anything. She looked like a woman putting her keys in her pocket.
I have thought about her every day since. I would like to ask her how it is done. Not whether. How.
I am going to renew this month. I want to say that plainly so you do not write me down as braver than I am.
The panel does not always take my thumb the first time. It is dry work, my trade. I lick it. Eleven years and I have never once done that where anyone could see.
I am not asking whether it is her. I stopped asking that in the third year. I am asking whether I am still the man who would pay, and every month I answer it with my thumb, and the answer is yes, and I do not know anymore what the yes is for.
That is all. You can stop it there.
No — one thing. If you find her. The woman with the folder.
Do not tell her I asked.