The Audit

Sometimes people think you can deduce something about a writer by reading their work, but of course, fiction is not autobiography. For example, nobody could read the stories below and identify which of them was written on the day I had a gastroscopy.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

I’ll leave a key under the mat for you, and one with the neighbours. I’ll send you one in the post. I’ll wait in, if I can, and if I can’t I’ll put a note on the door saying just where I’ll be so you can find me. I’ll leave a vase of sunflowers in the window so you know which house is mine, and a trail of petals all the way to your door. I’ll leave a key in the lock for you. I’ll take the door off its hinges. Please come. I can’t live locked up here any longer.

Tuesday

Once the tube was down his throat, Frank tried not to look at the screen. He knew it would make him faint or retch or both. But curiosity overcame him: how many chances do you get to see inside yourself? He tilted his eyes down until the picture came into view. But the light on the endoscope must have failed: he saw nothing but darkness. So why were they still going? Then there was a light: a star – no, a galaxy. As the tube pushed further he saw more, great spirals and distant fires, uncountable worlds, a universe within. A voice said we’re taking it out now, well done, and Frank wanted to clamp his teeth down so he could keep watching.

Wednesday

Halfway to the exit, a man she half-recognised put a hand up to stop her. “Hilary, perfect,” he said. “Do you think you can help me with something?” While the answer was still softening in her mouth, he led her into a meeting room, the blinds down, the lights low. She imagined a bag slipped over her head. Laid out on the table was a wooden boy, all in pieces, his eyes flicking this way and that. “I can’t work it out,” the man said, pulling anxiously at his lanyard. “I can’t get him back together.”

Thursday

We were almost done with the morning shift when the kids from the school trip arrived. They lined up along the wall and numbered off, well practiced but distracted. We kept turning the cranks. The teacher explained that they were in the main cranking room, and said a few words about how important the work was. We kept turning the cranks. It was nice to feel that we mattered, although the teacher said no more about what the cranks do than the boss tells us. We kept turning them anyway. One of the kids asked if they could have a go, and the teacher looked round at us, and Si waved him over. The rest of us kept turning the cranks. I don’t know why they bring the school trips in. They’ll all be turning the cranks here soon enough.

Friday

We spray-painted empty ice cream black and strapped them partway up lamp posts. That is, Tom painted them and Lou shimmied up the streetlights. It was my job to start the rumours, but I never had to. By the end of the week I’d heard they were scanners to check you weren’t rat running and pest control for plague-carrying Chinese bats. We thought one would get smashed down, they’d see it was empty but for a smear of Neapolitan, and that would be that. But the fire didn’t leave much evidence. And when I said it had gone too far, Tom shrugged and said: “Maybe they’ve got a point.”

Saturday

A year after it happened, I saw they had put bollards in where the car hit him. I stopped to give them a shove, a shake, a kick. I wanted them to break loose. I wanted them to crumble into powder. If they stayed standing under my bloody knuckles it meant they worked. It meant they would have stopped it, if they had been there twelve months earlier.

Sunday

The playground is the best place to go. You sit on a swing and look at the empty climbing frame and you can't forget the way things are. In the cafés and the streets it is not so strange that you don't see children. We made them that way on purpose for a long time. So there, you just feel the quiet, and the ending of things, without really knowing it. In the playground, you can watch the slide turn to rust, and have something to grieve.

I have been reading...

• The Colony by Audrey Magee. I love how Magee's narration flows freely between points of view, building her characters through its shifting style, which is inventive but not showy. I enjoyed this book a lot.
• Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. This short novel opens with a prologue depicting a human sacrifice in ancient Britain, before jumping to the story of Silvie, a teenage girl dragged along on an experiential archaeology trip by her abusive father. For the first half or so I thought the prologue was heavy-handed and wished it hadn't been there, but the work it does is much more subtle than I had realised. It's a foil that lets the facets of Silvie's understated, traumatised narration show.

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The Audit

It started with a letter, which I tucked away in the post rack in case I needed to refer to it later. The letter was the first thing they took when the day came. They took the rest of the post rack's contents along with it, all the old bank statements and takeaway menus and money-off vouchers and flyers and receipts and invitations I had stuffed in there. It all went in a big box file with colour-coded tabs, and into the back of a seafoam-green van. For half a minute they considered the rack itself, then replaced it on the table by the front door.

It had been worth keeping the letter, even though I had put the date on my calendar, because it said what I should do to prepare. Which was, chiefly, nothing at all: only to phone if the appointed time was not possible. Any items I held on behalf of others, or that were awaiting disposal, could be tagged with the enclosed sheet of stickers, but this was not mandatory. I placed a sticker on the broken lamp, and another on my brother's pressure washer, then slid the rest in behind the letter, in case I thought of anything else.

They worked methodically, in a way that made me think of a dissection. They walked once through the house, looking. Then a second time, opening doors and drawers and boxes. Only then did they reach in and take. There were two of them, a man and a woman, and for the most part he worked downstairs and she upstairs. When they were together they talked principally about Formula One.

I had expected they would sit me down at the kitchen table and talk it all through, perhaps presenting me with something to sign so that I might feel involved. I had feared that they would barge in like the police, shouldering past me in the doorway. Instead they were friendly but terse, in a manner that made me want to stay out of their way, for fear of disappointing them. It was fair enough, since all had been explained in the letter.

The two F1 fans who had taken temporary ownership of my little semi-detached were completing a survey and reallocation of items held just in case. Once they had completed their walk-throughs and emptied the letter rack, they quickly collected a quantity of one-day-to-be-useful screws, cables, plastic bags and instruction manuals that even I could not quite believe. From the kitchen, they took spices I didn't know how to use and spirits I didn't like to drink. Into another crate went the waffle iron and the utensil for slicing cheese, along with several other implements whose purpose I was no longer sure of.