Chapter 8: Skeptic’s Kit

I rang it off on the Thursday, and I want to describe how, because it turned out to be the most useful thing I did all month.

I had rehearsed it twice in my kitchen, out loud, like a bad speaker at a conference, and both attempts came out as an apology with a reason attached, which is the shape of a sentence that invites a negotiation. So I stopped rehearsing the apology and wrote down the correction instead, on paper, six words: I said yes in the rain. It was a doorway. Then I dialled, and when Dot answered I read the six words at her like a meter reading, and before she could say anything kind I said: “It was a doorway and I want to correct it. Can we do Tuesdays at St Aidan’s as normal?”

There was a silence long enough that I could hear her thinking, and I could hear myself thinking that I had insulted a seventy-one-year-old woman with a biscuit tin, and then Dot said:

“Good.”

Just that. And then, still not warm, which I found, oddly, like being graded: “Did you decide it twice?”

“Yes.”

“Where was the cat.”

“Behind me. He suggested the phone call.”

“Good,” she said again. “Corrected yes is still a yes in this room, Emily, but it’s yours now. Nobody’s done that to me before, in twenty-two years of running that hall, and I’ll tell you the honest part: the ones who never take a yes back are the ones I worry about.”

I put the phone down and said to Eight-Ball, “That went well,” and he said, “You corrected a woman with a clipboard,” and I said “Is that criticism,” and he said, “It’s astonishment. I’ve never heard you win an argument by being firm instead of right. Don’t get into the habit.”

I did not notice that the mat was still upside down that whole week, and I did not notice that nothing about that bothered me any more.

At work, Marcus’s fortnight expired on a Wednesday, and he sent me one line, which was all of it: “Keep the count. Ask Priya.” I kept the count at nine — nothing new had come from nothing in eleven days, which Yusuf, if he had known about it, would have called the worst result of all, because it means the system is aware of the measurement.

The wedge I was still working, and the working was stupid and simple, which is usually how you find things. Two hundred and eleven nights of a propped door means a habit, and habits have a population. I pulled the badge list for the east loading yard over the winter — forty-one people badge out through that door after eleven at night at least once, most of them for a cigarette, all of them in the habit. I put the list in a drawer rather than a folder, because I have watched what happens to folders, and I asked nobody anything, except that on the Friday I said, in the pod, mildly, “Has anybody in this building taken a rubber wedge off my desk?” and the silence was a specific shape. Nour said “not me” without looking up. Devraj said nothing and looked at his hands. Bex typed for the rest of the afternoon without stopping, which I have now seen twice, and both times the subject has been the door.

The wedge was still on the corner of their desk in an evidence bag that nobody had asked for. I have not mentioned that in any writeup. I keep meaning to.

The Tuesday after, the programme ran as normal — six steps, timer, candles, twelve true things, Ray on milk — and then Dot put her cards away and said, “Yusuf’s got a session after, if anyone wants to watch. It’s tests. Nobody’s being healed.”

Yusuf had a table set up at the side of the undercroft, and on it: a light meter, a thermal camera, an old cassette recorder, a tape measure, a notebook that was paper, and his tablet, which was the only thing on the table he trusted. He set up while the rest of us had tea, and he said, without looking up, “The tests are for two claims. One: that the things in this room are real, which I am on the council about, so it’s not popular, but it’s a claim, so it’s testable. Two: that Emily is in the second category, which I want to test on Emily, in front of people, because if I’m wrong I want to be wrong in public.”

Marguerite, who was stacking chairs with her usual hostility to furniture, said, “Nobody is a test subject in my hall,” and Dot said, “It’s a hall, Marguerite, that’s what halls are for,” and that was the last anyone said about it.

Now, I want to be exact about what happened next, because in the version I tell at parties — and I do tell it at parties now, carefully, as a joke — the glamour test is the spooky bit. It isn’t. The spooky bit is what the eleven minutes was for, and I did not find that out for three more days.

I was at the sink under the low row of windows, drying my hands — the sink is under the windows because the plumbing is under the windows, because it is a basement and basements are honest about plumbing — and the glass over the sink at seven in the evening is a mirror, and in the mirror I was still drying my hands.

I had stopped. My hands were still. The hands in the glass were a second and a half behind, going through the motions, and then they stopped when the real ones stopped, like a badly wired speaker.

I want to be clear that I did not believe it. Not disbelief as refusal — disbelief as method. Here is the list I actually ran, in the order I ran it, because Yusuf wrote it down afterwards and there is a copy of it in a drawer I own: