Dream d3200-s: The Barge Carries What It Was Given

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the relay clerk handed me a wrapped parcel on the dock before dawn, both hands, no ceremony. Inside were two dated accounts, the surveyor's and the distant reader's, each folded separately but packed against each other so neither had shifted in transit. The parcel was not heavy. I tucked it under one arm and stepped onto the barge.

Lano was already at the bow. She had found her place without being asked, her paws at the very edge of the flat deck, her nose working the mist. She did not bark when we entered the lock. The gates took their time. Water levelled itself around us with the sound of something adjusting to a fact it already knew.

The surveyor had written in columns. Numbered entries, dated, each stone named with its position in the wall. The distant reader had written in paragraphs, the same stones, the same wall, but what they had noticed was the shadow the wall threw at midmorning, the way one course of the stone was lighter than the rest because someone had cleaned it and then stopped. I had read both accounts on the dock waiting for the barge. I had not decided what they meant together.

That was not mine to decide.

On the far bank the absent witness was standing by a bollard. They had been told a record was coming and they had come out to receive it. They were not someone who had been at either reading. They had only been told: two people looked at the same place. Here is what each of them said.

I stepped off. Lano's nails clicked on the stone of the wharf. I held the parcel out. The absent witness took it in both hands, the same way the relay clerk had given it to me. They looked at it. They did not open it yet.

That was the whole of it, the crossing and the handover. The surveyor was not there. The distant reader was not there. The record was there, and the hands receiving it, and the mist lifting off the canal the way mist lifts when the morning has decided to proceed. Lano sat down beside my foot and looked at the water.

I had not added anything. I had not taken anything away. The parcel was the same weight it had been on the other bank.

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