The remand wing closed when the city stopped remanding people and started invoicing them, and for nine years it stood with its windows out and its doors open, and nobody went in except for the copper.
The walls are three feet of stone with a skin of brick. That is the whole reason. Nothing gets through them: not the confirmations, not the corrections, not the standard voice reading the weather. Inside, a wrist is only a wrist.
They came one at a time and then in families. The first worked it out on a Sunday with a pencil, walked the nine hundred meters on the Monday to see whether the story about the walls was true, and came back on the Tuesday with a bag. He took cell nine, which has the window. By the second winter there were sixty of them, and the doors that had stood open for nine years began, in the evenings, to be closed.
They lock them from the inside. It took a locksmith three weeks to reverse the trade of every lock on both landings, and the reversal is the wing’s one law.
Nobody calls it a prison and nobody has found another word, so mostly they say the wing.
Cold, and legible. The rota for the yard fire is chalked by the gate and nobody has ever enforced it. The standpipe is older than the metering and therefore older than the charge, and a plumber among them keeps it alive with parts that are not made anymore. There is a school in the chapel, two hours a morning, and no register.
Carrying is billable the moment a courier’s wrist crosses the line, so nothing is delivered and everyone walks. Nine hundred meters, no rail, and the flour comes up on shoulders that are not young. Half a day for flour. A doctor twice a month, unpaid and unrecorded, which is the only way she can be either.
What they are afraid of is the survey: two people with a tablet and a lanyard, empowered to enter and record the number and condition of persons present at an address. Nobody here has seen one. Everybody has heard about the wing across the water, surveyed in the spring and empty by the autumn, having been found to be an address after all. The story carries one particular that never varies: a handcart of bedding at the gate, rained into the ground, nobody’s to move.
So at dusk the doors are locked, and the gate is barred with the beam they made from the old flagpole, and the man from cell nine walks both landings the way a warder walked them, and rattles nothing, and says goodnight through each door, and each door says it back, which is a thing they started doing without deciding to.
Twelve is the woman who sings while she mends and stops when she hears him coming. Fifteen is the family with the boy who counts the steps up and always gets a different number. Nineteen is the plumber, who has not slept properly since he understood that he is the only one who can keep the standpipe alive. Twenty-two is empty and is kept empty, and he says goodnight to it as well.
And once a week, on the day they have agreed is Thursday, they count themselves. Not out of any requirement. A number you keep yourself is a number nobody can surprise you with. The count is read at the yard fire and chalked on the wall beside the rota, and the last person to arrive says the number, and everyone says it back, and then it is rubbed off.
There are sixty-eight of them.
The children are the difficulty. A child inside the wing is a child on no roll. Two families have gone back out over exactly that. Nobody stopped them; somebody carried their things down to the road.
The knock comes in February, at four in the afternoon, in daylight, which nobody expected. Two of them, in coats, with a tablet, standing well back from the gate the way you stand back from a dog you have been told about.
They are polite. They have brought a second tablet in case one fails, which is the detail the wing talks about afterward. There is a scheme, there is a hardship tier, there is a route back onto the rolls for the children with the arrears written down to a figure that can be paid; and it is real. The woman who taught at the school on the hill reads the terms through the bars twice, and on the second reading finds, in the part about attendance, the line that says the visit is recorded whether or not the door is opened. She reads it out. Nobody asks her to read it again.
They say they will come back when the wing has talked, and go, and are seen twice on the road below in the meantime, waiting in the car with the heater on.
They talk about it for two days. It is the only argument the wing has ever had that goes past midnight, and nobody raises their voice, and everything anyone says is true.
The woman from twelve says it badly and knows she is saying it badly. —My girl’s eight. Eight. She says it three times over the two days and never gets past it, and on the second night she says, —I’m not saying it right, and somebody says, —You are, and she says, —No.
The man who does the standpipe will not talk about the children at all. He talks about the pipe. He says the fittings are not made anymore and that whoever comes after him will have to make them, and that this takes about a year to learn, and he goes through the whole of it twice, both times to the end, and both times somebody waits until he has finished. The families with children on one side. The man from cell nine, sixty-one, owing more than he will ever earn, on the other, saying the only thing he has ever said at the fire, and saying it now that it is no longer a fear: once they have the number they never stop knowing it.
On the third morning the vote is taken by moving to one side of the yard or the other, which is how a count is honest.
Thirty-one on the gate side. Thirty-seven at the wall.
The gate is opened at noon. Nobody says goodbye at any length, the goodbyes being for people who are going somewhere. The two in coats come in with their tablet, are given the good chair from the chapel and a cup of tea, and begin, and are unfailingly kind, and get through nineteen households by dark.
The man from cell nine goes up to the second landing while it is happening and sits on the bed with the door open, since there is nothing left to lock it against.
One of them has been counting the counts, and has thirty-one of them, and will not say what the first thirty were for. That night the count is not read at the fire. There is no argument about this either. The chalk stays in the tin, and the number on the wall is the old number, sixty-eight, and it stays there through the spring while the wing fills again with people who have heard there is room now, and past the summer, when somebody paints the gate, and into the following winter, when a child who was not born inside asks what the number means and is told, by a woman with a good memory, that it is how many of them there were on the last day nobody knew.