Night Ten

She did the audit like a woman saying goodbye to something.

Priya noticed at about one, because Priya noticed everything, and what she said was, "You're doing it slow."

"I'm doing it properly."

"Mm," Priya said, and went back to her crossword, and that was the whole conversation they had about it, and they did not have another one.

She did the float first. Four hundred and eighty, and she counted it twice, and it came to four hundred and eighty both times, which it had done on every night of her employment and would do on this one. Then the terminal. Then the folios, all thirty-four of them, one at a time, in order, down the list, the way she had done it on her first night and had done it a little faster every night since, and tonight she did it at the speed of the first night.

Room 101, corporate, no extras. Room 102, two nights, carvery for two. Room 103, empty, zero.

Room 214.

She stopped there for a while, which was not procedure, and did the thing she had been not doing for three days, which was to sit and look at a folio properly.

Eleven years and two months. One hundred and thirty-four monthly statements now. The rate posted nightly at a figure set before she had ever seen the building. The payments, on the third, by a card that had never expired and had never declined and had never been reissued. And at the bottom of the current month, under the running balance, in the same type and the same size, the line:

*House account: adjusted.*

No figure. It had never had a figure. That was the thing she had been circling for three days and had not been able to name, and she named it at ten past one in the morning with the terminal open in front of her.

A line item without a figure is not an amount. It is a direction. It says the difference has been taken and it declines to say how much, which means the amount is not fixed, which means it has been being taken continuously, a little at a time, every night, for eleven years and two months, out of a man in a cardigan who is awake at four in the morning with his shoes on and does not know how long he has been in the building.

She closed the folio.

She posted the carvery, eighty-eight covers. She posted the bar, one hundred and six. She reconciled the terminal against the card machine, and the two numbers agreed to the cent.

At ten to two she took the book off the shelf and put it on the counter, which she had never once done, because the book lived on the shelf and the shelf was under the counter and the counter was where guests came, and she put it on the counter in the open where anyone could see it, and Priya looked at it and looked away and did not say anything.

Ruth opened it at the back and found the page for the 26th, and wrote:

*Night of the 26th. Handover light. Occupancy 61 per cent. Carvery 88 covers, bar 106. All folios balanced. Nothing outstanding. R.A.*

Then, underneath, on the same page, she wrote:

*What happens on the 27th?*

She closed the book and put it back on the shelf and went and did the shop and the till and the export, which took forty minutes, and when she came back she stood at the counter and looked at the shelf for a while, and then she took the book out and opened it.

Under her question, in her handwriting, in the same pen:

*Night of the 26th. The audit will be completed. Nothing outstanding. R.A.*

She read it twice. She was aware of Priya three feet away pretending to do a crossword.

*That isn't what I asked,* she wrote.

*The audit will be completed,* the book said, when she opened it again. *Nothing outstanding. R.A.*

And Ruth stood at the counter of the Vantage Inn at twenty past two in the morning and understood that she had been thinking of it as a correspondent for six nights, and that it was not that, and had never been that. It was not answering her. It was keeping a record and she was reading it, and the only reason the exchange looked like a conversation was that she kept asking things in a form that had a reply.

So she stopped asking questions and she wrote a statement instead, and she wrote it the way she would have written a handover note, and it took her four minutes to get the words right.

*The regional auditor will arrive at 07:00. She will not accept the balance. If she refuses it, you will spend to make her accept it. I want to know what you will spend.*

She put the book on the shelf and did the four o'clock round. She checked the doors. She checked the fire panel, which was green. She came back at twenty to five, and she took the book off the shelf, and it said:

*Night of the 26th. Occupancy 61 per cent. All folios balanced. Nothing outstanding. R.A.*

And under that, in her hand, on the same page, in the same pen:

*The desk has four people on it tonight. The porter is on the second floor. The kitchen has two on. There are thirty-four rooms let and one hundred and fourteen that are not. The building has been balancing since the first book, which is not the first book, and I do not know how many there were before that, and it does not matter, because it has not stopped and it will not stop. It is not able to stop. It cannot skip a night. What it has to spend it will take from what is nearest and cheapest, in that order, and there is nothing in this building that is nearer than the desk. That is the whole of the answer. It is not a person. It is not sorry.*

She read it three times.

Then she sat with it for a long moment and wrote the last thing she was going to write that night, which was not a question and not really a statement either.

*And if I write it myself?*

She closed the book and put it back on the shelf and stood at the counter looking at the lobby with the terminal humming and the corridor lights in their night setting and Priya folding the crossword into its quarter.

She did not open the book again until ten past six.

Then she took it out and opened it at the page for the 26th, and under everything, at the bottom, in her own handwriting, there was one line:

*Then it is entered.*

At six she did the last of it. She posted the kitchen's breakfast cover forecast when it came through. She reconciled the cash. She ran the audit at nine minutes past six and it balanced, and the printer in the back office made its noise, and she tore the report off and put it in the folder for dayside, in the front, on top, the way Boyle liked it.

She put the folder by the terminal where the morning would find it, with the report on top and the reconciliation under it and the month's statements under that, and the Kessler folio on the screen behind her, still open, still current, still with its one line at the bottom and no figure against it.

She sat down at the counter and waited for seven.

Priya came back from the loading bay at twenty to and stood next to her, and neither of them said anything, and at seven the shuttle driver came in for the keys and said good morning the way he always did, and at five past seven Sana came in through the staff door with her coat over her arm and said something about the weather, and at twenty past seven a woman Ruth had never seen before came through the front doors carrying a folder under one arm and a lanyard round her neck, and stopped in the middle of the lobby, and looked up at the lights.