The Invoice Read Free Page A

went over to the kitchen window, which was open slightly. I’d left it open all night. Maybe a few days. I couldn’t remember. The heat had more or less erased the boundary between outside and in. The other day I had a bird in the kitchen for what must have been half an hour. I don’t know what sort it was, but it was very pretty. It fluttered to and fro between the kitchen cupboards, then sat on the kitchen table for a while before flying out again.
    “What can you see outside?” the woman on the phone asked.
    “Buildings,” I said. “And a few trees…”
    “What else?”
    “More buildings, and the street, a few cars…”
    “What else?”
    “I can see a blue sky, the sun, a few clouds, people, children playing on the pavement, adults, shops, cafés…People out together…”
    “Exactly. Can you smell anything?”
    “Er…yes.”
    I breathed in the smell of the street. It was sweet and warm with summer scents. Flowers, a shrub of some sort? Some old food? A faint smell of something slightly rotten, and petrol. Typical summer smells. Almost a bit Mediterranean. I could hear the moped again now.
    “You can feel something, can’t you?” the woman continued. “You’re feeling feelings, thinking of different things, friends and acquaintances. And I presume you have dreams?”
    She was no longer bothering to wait for me to reply.
    “What do you mean?” I said.
    “Do you dream at night?” she went on.
    “Sometimes.”
    “Hmm. Do you imagine all that is free?”
    I didn’t say anything for a while.
    “Well, I suppose I thought…”
    “Is that really what you thought?” she said.
    I tried to come up with a reply, but my thoughts were going round in circles without formulating themselves into any sort of order. The woman on the phone went on, giving a long explanation of the division of costs, resolutions, single payments, and deduction systems. It sounded almost as if she knew it by heart.
    “But how can it amount to so much?” I said, when I could speak again.
    “Well,” she said, “being alive costs.”
    I said nothing for a while, because I didn’t know what to say.
    “But,” I eventually said, “I had no idea it was so expensive…”

I looked at the payment reminder from the collection company. I ran my finger across the ice-cream stain. I felt foolish. Unmasked, somehow. I felt the same way I used to feel back in school many years ago when the teacher would ask questions designed to reveal how wrong your reasoning was. The children were heading off down the street, they were about to disappear round the corner. The sound of the moped was increasingly distant. A man had arrived on a bike and was busy chaining it to a lamppost.
    “But I’ve always paid my taxes?” I said.
    She laughed. I sank back down onto the floor. Somehow that felt like the most comfortable way to sit right now.
    “This isn’t a tax,” she said.
    She was silent for a few moments, as if she were expecting me to comment, but I didn’t know what to say so she carried on talking of her own accord.
    “Tax. That’s barely enough to cover day-to-day maintenance. Besides, I presume you don’t belong to the group that—”
    She stopped again, and I heard her tapping at a keyboard.
    “Let’s see, what did you say your date of birth and ID number were?”
    I told her, and heard her type in the numbers. She drummed her fingers gently against the phone as she waited.
    “Right. Let’s see, you’re…thirty-nine years old. Hmm…and you haven’t made any payments at all?”
    “No, I had no idea that—”
    She interrupted me midsentence. “Well, obviously it’s going to amount to a fair sum.”
    I heard her clicking, as if there were more pages to look through.
    “Hmm,” she went on, “that’s a lot of money.”
    Several rays of sunlight were falling across the kitchen floor. One of them reached my legs. I stretched my hand carefully back and forth, in and out of the light. Why hadn’t anyone said anything? I