The remand wing closed when the city stopped remanding people and started invoicing them. For nine years nobody went in except for the copper.
Three feet of stone, a skin of brick. No confirmations get through. No corrections. No standard voice reading the weather. Inside, a wrist is only a wrist.
The first man tried the walls on Monday. Tuesday he came back with a bag. Cell nine, with the window. By the second winter, sixty on the landings.
A locksmith spent three weeks reversing every lock.
The doors close from the inside.
They call it the wing. A standpipe older than the metering. A chapel school, two hours each morning, no register. The yard-fire roster chalked by the gate.
At the school they still say grace over bread. A child says there is nobody listening. The teacher finishes the prayer and passes him a thick slice. She has cut off the crust where his new tooth hurts.
Couriers become billable when a wrist crosses the line. Nothing is delivered. Everyone walks. Nine hundred meters for flour on old shoulders. A doctor twice a month, unpaid and unrecorded.
They have heard of the wing across the water. Surveyed in spring, empty by autumn. A handcart of bedding at the gate, rained into the ground, nobody's to move. That part never changes.
At dusk they bar the gate with the old flagpole. Cell nine walks the landings. He rattles no handle. He says goodnight through every door.
Twelve stops singing when he comes. Fifteen's boy counts the stairs differently each time. Nineteen keeps the pipe working. Twenty-two is kept empty. He says goodnight to it too.
On the day they have agreed is Thursday, they count themselves. At the fire, everyone repeats the last arrival's count. Chalked up, then rubbed off.
Sixty-eight.
Two families have left over the school. A child on no roll. Somebody carried their things to the road.
The knock comes in February, at four. Two people with a tablet stand well back from the gate. They have brought a spare.
A hardship tier. The children back on the rolls. Arrears reduced to something payable. The former teacher from the school on the hill reads the terms through the bars twice. The offer is real.
Under attendance she finds a line. The visit is recorded whether or not the door is opened.
She reads it out.
The visitors leave them to talk. Their car is seen twice that evening, heater running.
The argument lasts two days. By the second night nobody can feel their feet.
A replacement companion goes round the fire. Rooms for the living. The former teacher asks who will run the school. They find no name.
"My girl's eight," twelve says to her mending. "Eight."
Three times.
"I'm not saying it right."
"You are."
"No."
The plumber talks about the pipe. Nobody makes the fittings anymore. A year to teach somebody how. He asks who will learn.
A child brings an empty pot from the standpipe. The plumber goes with her. The argument goes on without him.
He returns and explains the work again. They let him finish. He asks who will come with him. Nobody moves. He sits down. At last two people get up, and he goes with them.
The families stand across the fire from cell nine. Sixty-one, owing more than he will earn.
"Once they have the number they never stop knowing it."
The third morning they vote, walking to opposite sides of the yard. The children stand where they are put.
Thirty-one by the gate. Thirty-seven at the wall.
At noon they open the gate.
The visitors get the good chair from the chapel and tea. Unfailingly kind, they register nineteen households by dark.
Cell nine goes upstairs. He sits on his bed with the door open.
Someone has counted the counts. Thirty-one of them. They will not say what the first thirty were for.
That night the number goes unread. The chalk stays in its tin. Sixty-eight stays on the wall.
In spring people arrive who have heard there is room. In summer somebody paints the gate. Next winter a child born outside asks what the number means.
A woman with a good memory tells her.
It is how many of them there were on the last day nobody knew.