THE OFFICE OF MARSH COMMUNICATIONS

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a quest that is entirely a corridor, undertaken by a woman who needed one form and got an education.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The notice on the door of the Office of Marsh Communications at Murkminster reads, in full:

THIS OFFICE IS CLOSED. Enquiries to the Office of Marsh Communications.

It has read that since 1902. It is one of the four or five great documents of this realm and it is on a door in a corridor and most people who pass it laugh, which is correct, and go away, which is the part this tale is about — because one woman did not go away, and what she found is the best account anybody has of how this kingdom actually works.

Her name was Bel Harrow and she needed Form 9.

Not for anything dramatic. Her brother had drowned in the Drownings — properly drowned, no mystery, a boat and a bad night — and the parish needed the death notified to three places, and two of the three would take a letter, and the third required Form 9 of the Office of Marsh Communications, which is the office that carries word between the flooded parishes and everywhere else, and which is closed, and whose enquiries go to itself.

She was thirty-four and she was tired and she had buried a brother and she wanted one piece of paper.

She was in that building eleven days.

Day one. She read the notice. She laughed — she is very clear that she laughed, and that it was a real laugh — and then she knocked, because a person has to try the door.

Nobody answered. She tried the handle. It was not locked. There was nobody in the room. There was a desk, and a chair, and a stove that was cold, and a shelf of forms, and no Form 9.

Day two. She went to the Chancery, who told her the Office of Marsh Communications was not their office and that they could not issue its forms, which is true and is not obstruction; a Chancery clerk issuing another office's form is how a realm ends up with two Form 9s and no way of telling them apart, and this realm has enough of that.

Day three. She was sent to the Toll Bench, who sent her to the Exchequer, who were kind, and gave her tea, and explained that the Office of Marsh Communications had been reorganised in 1902, and that the reorganisation had never been completed, and that as far as anyone could establish it had been reorganised into itself.

"Then somebody works there," said Bel Harrow.

"Somebody must," agreed the Exchequer man, "because the forms get printed."

That is the sentence that turned it from an errand into an expedition, and I think anybody would have felt it: the forms get printed.

Somewhere in this city there is a press, and a print order, and a person who signs it, and a budget it comes out of. The Office of Marsh Communications is closed, and has been for a hundred and twenty-one years, and it is still ordering its own stationery.

So Bel Harrow, who had come for a piece of paper about her brother, stopped asking for Form 9 and started following the money, which is the only reliable way to find anybody in Murkminster.

Days four to nine are the corridor, and I will compress them, because the tale is famous for being long and I have never thought that its being long was the joke.

She found the print order. She found the printer, who has printed Form 9 for thirty years, four hundred a year, and has never once been asked for a receipt because the invoice goes to a department that pays it without querying, on the grounds that it is small and has always been paid.

She followed the invoice. It goes to the Office of Establishments, who confirmed — after two days, and with great courtesy, and by consulting a book that had to be fetched — that the Office of Marsh Communications has, on the establishment, one post: a Clerk, Grade Two.

"And who holds it?"

They looked. It took an hour. The post is held. It has been held continuously since 1902. It draws no wage, because the wage line was struck in the reorganisation and never restored, and the post has therefore never been formally vacant and never formally filled, and nobody has been able to do anything about it for a hundred and twenty-one years because doing anything about it would require the office to apply, and the office is closed, and enquiries go to itself.

Day ten she went back to the corridor and sat down on the floor opposite the door, because she had run out of other places to be, and she waited.

Day eleven, at about four in the afternoon, an elderly man came down the corridor with a key and a string bag, and let himself into the Office of Marsh Communications, and lit the stove.

His name was Mr Pightle. He was seventy-six. He had held the post since 1971.

He was not a mystery. He was not a ghost, and he was not mad, and he was not hiding. He came in twice a week, on a Tuesday and a Friday, at four, for an hour and a half — a fact which about nine people in that building knew perfectly well and which nobody had thought to tell Bel Harrow, because nobody had ever asked them the question in a form they recognised. She had been asking where is the office. The office is behind that door. She had never once asked when.

He was appalled to hear she had been eleven days. He made her tea on the stove. He asked about her brother, properly, and let her talk, and did not hurry her, and then he opened a drawer and took out Form 9, of which there are, by his own count, something over eleven thousand in that room, and filled it in for her himself because his hand is better, and stamped it, and gave it to her, and it took four minutes.

He had held the post, without pay, for fifty-two years, because his predecessor had asked him to and because — he said this quite matter-of-factly, stirring the tea — "somebody has to be here when they come about a drowning. They always come about a drowning. That's the whole of what this office is for."

The notice is still on the door. Bel Harrow asked him about it, at the end, and he said the only funny thing he said in the whole of that hour, and he did not mean it to be:

"Oh, I've applied to have it changed. Twice." He blew on his tea. "Enquiries go to this office, you see. So it comes back to me, and I'm not authorised to approve it, because the post that approves it was struck in '02. I keep the applications." He nodded at a drawer. "There's forty-one."

Some doors in this realm say CLOSED and are not, and the whole difference between a bureaucracy and a kindness is that somebody has quietly kept coming in, unpaid, on a Tuesday and a Friday, for fifty-two years, in case anybody comes about a drowning. Do not read the notice. Knock at four.