The Census Form

The census form had been lying on the kitchen table for almost three weeks, half hidden under a fruit bowl. It was only on the last Wednesday night in November, with the collection due the following morning, that Fern finally sat down to deal with it. Her father, Abel, who had spent forty years as a draughtsman and still regarded a pen as a commitment, insisted that every answer be drafted in pencil first and gone over in ink only once it had been checked. So she sharpened two pencils, poured them both a cup of tea and began.

Most of it was mercifully tedious: the number of rooms, the type of heating, whether the house was owned or rented. Fern read each question aloud and her father answered without looking up from the crossword he was pretending to do. Then she turned the page and found herself reading, rather more slowly than she intended, the question that she had been dreading since the envelope arrived. "List everyone who usually lives at this address," it said, "including anyone who is temporarily away."

Neither of them spoke. Seven months earlier, after an argument that had begun over Rafe's decision to abandon his law degree and ended, as such arguments tend to, somewhere far more painful, her brother had packed a rucksack and left. He was sleeping on a friend's sofa on the other side of the city. He answered Fern's messages, though seldom at length, and had not answered a single one of their father's calls.

"He doesn't live here," Abel said eventually, laying down the crossword. "He made that perfectly clear." Fern pointed out, as gently as she could, that his room had been left exactly as it was and that his post still arrived every week. His toothbrush, too, was still standing in the glass in the bathroom, where nobody had had the heart to move it. Her father replied that a toothbrush was hardly proof of residence. She reached for the guidance notes, hoping, absurdly, that the government had anticipated their situation, and read out that a person was to be counted if this was the address where they spent most nights or to which they intended to return.

"Intended," her father repeated, and gave a short laugh with no amusement in it at all. "And how exactly are we supposed to know what he intends? He's never told me anything. Not once." Fern did not say that Rafe had once tried to tell him a great deal, at this very table, and that it had not gone well. She simply waited, and for a long time the only sound in the kitchen was the refrigerator humming and the rain against the window.

Then her father held out his hand, and she gave him the pencil. He wrote slowly, in the small, careful capitals he had used all his working life for labelling plans, and when he had finished, he did not reach for the pen to go over it. Fern did not ask him to. She went on to the next question, about languages spoken at home, and he answered it as though nothing had happened. When the last page was done, he went back to the beginning and traced over every answer in ink, line by line, passing over his son's name without a word.

When she went up to bed, the form was still lying open on the table, every line in black ink except one. Her brother's name was written in pencil, faint enough to be rubbed out in the morning and dark enough to be traced over.