The public bench was low, the wood came up to just below my knees, and it was glossy in the middle, where so many people have sat, and dull at the two ends where nobody sits, and between two boards there was a gap, and into the gap I had slid the corner of the envelope, because an envelope on your lap bends and I have never bent other people's envelopes, and inside it were Ousman's birth certificate and the photocopy of my sister's identity card and the sheet with the case number and a receipt from the shop that had nothing to do with anything and that I had put in there so as not to leave it on the counter.

I had arrived an hour early, and I always arrive at offices an hour early, and I know the opening hours of the offices in Banjul and of those in Serekunda, and people in the street ask me for them and I correct them even when they don't ask, and that afternoon my nephew was keeping the shop open, and my nephew doesn't know the price of cables.

Fatou sat down on my right and put her bag between the two of us, and then moved it onto her knees.

The clerk read out the conditions and he read the way one reads a list of goods, and he said a recognizance of five hundred thousand dalasis, and he said a Gambian surety for the same sum, and he said reporting to the police station nearest the residence every two weeks until further order, and he said prohibited from leaving the country, and at each condition I shifted my weight and the bench answered under me, a short creak, and there was no other sound in the courtroom, and so everything I was about to do reached the room before I did.

Five hundred thousand dalasis are my mother's compound in Bundung, the well, the wall at the back and the room at the far end where she has slept since my father died.

Ousman was standing in the dock on the right hand side, holding the sheet with the order folded in two, holding it with both hands, and on the sheet the judge had written that keeping him inside was against the constitution, and he had been inside since May 2024 and in all those months there had been no hearing on the merits and there had been no date, and the paper that said he shouldn't be there had been put into his hand in there, through the bars, by an official who had then sat back down.

Then the clerk said "let the surety come forward from the public," and the public was me and Fatou and two women at the back waiting for another case, and the bench I was sitting on had entered the procedure, and now it was a word a man in a gown was saying out loud, and when he said from the public, the public was me.

What he was accused of, nobody said. The clerk didn't say it, he read the conditions and didn't read the charges. The counter hadn't said it to my sister in two years and four months, and my sister went to the counters, and brought water, and waited standing, and asked, and left the shop's number.

The clerk asked who stands surety.

Nobody answered.

He asked a second time, in the same voice, without raising it.

Fatou closed her hand on my arm. Her fingers were cold. She wasn't looking at me.

"Lamin," she said, her mouth close to my ear. "In 2019. He signed for Sanna's son."

Everyone in Bundung knows that story.

"And the compound belongs to someone else now."

Then she said the second thing, her mouth closer still.

"We don't even know what they're accusing him of."

Nobody in that courtroom could answer her. Not the clerk. Not the judge, who had signed the order in the morning and was no longer there.

My sister was standing near the door and did not turn round.

Ousman was holding the sheet with both hands.

For twenty years I have carried other people's papers to the counters and I have said we must, we have, they told us, it's best for us.

Fatou's hand was still on my arm.

I stood up.

Her arm stayed raised for a moment, then she let it fall onto the bag.

"Modou Sanneh," I said to the clerk. "I stand surety."

I said it to him and not to her.

The clerk asked me to repeat the name. I repeated it.

I stayed on my feet. Nobody told me to sit down.

The wood, at the spot I had risen from, made no sound.

On the bench the warmth of my body remained. Beside it, hers. In between, for the first time since we married, there was a gap.

Then there was the office and at the office there was the form with the photograph, and the photograph I had brought from home because I always bring the photographs, and there was my signature in three places and the clerk's in one, and there was the wait in the corridor while in there they looked for the register, and my sister was crying against the wall without making a sound, and at a quarter to five they brought Ousman out through the side door with a plastic bag and his shoes without laces, and he looked for me first, before his sister, and put his hands on my shoulders.

And I turned round to look for Fatou.

She wasn't in the corridor, and she wasn't at the taxi rank either, and her bag hadn't been left on the bench, and I could see the bench from the door the usher was closing, and on the glossy wood there were two darker patches, two prints, and one of the two was already closing over, and it wasn't mine.