‘Alec, I—’
‘Save it, you can explain to Malc. I’ve asked Sandra for an appointment for us to see him.’
‘But—’
‘Like I said, save it.’
She slumps her bag down on her desk, the buckles making an angry riposte.
‘I hope you got all that filing done last night?’ Alec says.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, that’s one good thing,’ he says, limping over to his desk and returning with a pile taller than the one that had taken her until ten the night before. ‘You can do mine now too.’
She spends the morning buried deep in the archive, keeping out of Alec’s way and working through his pile of files. It’s easy to hide there, among the filing cabinets that stand buttressed together, three in a row, back to back as if checking which is the tallest among them. There are four rows like that, each of them labelled A to Z with tales of the city. Everything is there, from the waggiest tail competition winners at village fetes to the secrets those names on the front would rather keep hidden: drink driving bans, domestic assaults. Chloe has read and filed it all. Most citizens of this city have no idea they’ve left a Helvetica trail of crumbs creating a picture of their lives, starting with their birth announcements and running all the way through to their own death notices. The archivist is the guardian of all that’s happened over the years, the first stop for reporters on deadline to write a story. No one knows this city and all its stories better than Chloe.
She surveys the archive, across the tops of the grey filing cabinets, up to the tomes containing back copies of every newspaper they’ve ever printed. It’s all going to be gone soon. Replaced with two computers. Just two. But what’s an archive without that human touch?
At lunchtime, Chloe stands in line for a coffee. On her phone she finds another missed call from social services. It makes her stomach turn over inside her coat and she quickly pushes her phone deep inside her bag. In front of her in the queue, a woman laughs loudly into her own phone. The woman has long blonde hair and, when she turns around, a perfect smile with teeth straight out of a toothpaste advert. She smells of a musky, confident perfume that Chloe would never think to wear.
The barista calls out her name – Amanda – and the woman steps forward for her coffee, still laughing loudly into her phone. Amanda doesn’t worry about answering her phone. Amanda has only good news from her phone. This makes Chloe think of social services again.
The cafe is busy, packed with bodies, and Chloe could say with all honesty that she didn’t see Amanda turn around so quickly, that she hadn’t realized she’d stepped straight into her path as she did. She could say she only realized what had happened when she saw the stain spreading across Amanda’s perfect camel coat.
‘Look what you did!’ Amanda says.
She’s not laughing anymore. Staff fuss around her, mopping at her coat with paper napkins instantly dyed tan.
Chloe steps past the chaos; she’s forgotten all about social services. Instead, with a smile, she orders her latte.
‘What’s the name?’ the barista asks, standing poised with a cup and a black marker pen.
Chloe watches the woman leave, now swearing into her phone. ‘Amanda,’ she says.
The barista scribbles it onto the side of the cup without question.
Alec leaves early to take his wife for one of her hospital appointments. Chloe has never asked him what’s wrong with her. It grates that he can take so much time off.
Once he’s gone, she starts sifting through the pile of cuttings that need to be scanned to the new system. She opens the flatbed scanner on her desk. Bright white light shines through the fine newsprint; she places the lid down again, clicks the icon on the screen, and watches as the image appears seconds later.
DOCTORS DIDN’T BELIEVE I HAD CANCER
Chloe enlarges the story, zooms in once, twice, and then starts reading.
FOR thirteen years, Karen Stanmore was fobbed off by doctors who believed she was making up stomach pains.
Chloe reaches for her own stomach.
The thirty-five-year-old city woman even convinced herself that her pains and tiredness were psychosomatic, but after being admitted to hospital with suspected appendicitis, surgeons found a cancerous tumour that had been growing inside her for more than a decade.
Chloe reads on as the office thins out around her. At the back of her mind nags a vague memory of a collection, talk of leaving drinks. Perfume spritzed at desks travels the length of the newsroom towards her, tangling together in the air around the archive. She hears a cork popped, plastic cups passed around. One appears at the edge of her desk filled with something pale and fizzy she hadn’t asked for. She doesn’t look up, too engrossed in the story about Karen Stanmore and her stomach cancer.
It’s almost 6.15 p.m. by the time she’s finished googling the rare cancer the doctors finally found. She ticks off all of the symptoms until she’s satisfied there’s nothing black growing inside her. The office is quiet when she next glances up, but there are still another five or six files to get through. The phone rings on her desk. Without thinking, she snatches the receiver from the cradle.
‘Archive.’
‘Chloe?’
Her stomach sinks into her seat.
‘It’s Claire Sanders, social services. I’ve been leaving messages on your mobile.’
‘Oh yes, Claire, sorry, I—’
‘We need to speak urgently about your grandmother’s care, the sale of the house . . .’
She starts talking without invitation, about ‘assessment reports’, ‘needs meeting criteria’, ‘care homes’, ‘financial eligibility’.
Chloe goes back to the article about Karen Stanmore’s tumour.
THREE
Nan shuffles through the cemetery, clutching the daffodils inside
