The officer takes off his shoes on the landing before she can tell him to, because he is one of those who know that in some houses shoes come off and in others they do not; he has learned to read a house from the door, from the mat, from the way the door opens halfway first and then all the way; when he goes in he carries the bag in front of him, not at his side, so that whoever opens sees the bag before they see him, because the bag is the reason he is there, whereas he is nobody, or rather he is someone who in the houses he enters never has a name that anyone repeats, and indeed he almost never says it, although it is written on the card he wears round his neck, which nobody has ever read.

She goes to fetch the water, which is what one does.

She comes back with the glass and with the cork coaster.

On the table he opens a lined notebook that is not the ministry's, the kind you buy in any stationer's for two dollars, then he says the number, fifty-two, and he says it only once, the way one says a thing already said in fourteen other kitchens; she had heard that number on Thursday evening on the television, spoken by the woman on the news between two items that had nothing to do with it, one about the price of electricity, one about the monsoon, and for a moment it had seemed to her the kind of number one says on the news, not a number that contains a person who slept in this house until the first of September.

The officer says that he has seen them all, that they are well; or rather, that he is authorised to report only what he saw, and what he saw was that they were all standing.

Then he says Thursday, that on Thursday the lawyer goes in.

The guarantee on the flat was signed on Tuesday morning in an office in Toa Payoh, in front of a clerk who asked twice whether they were sure, and in this house nobody has said it aloud yet, not she, not the daughter, not the sister who brought the papers, although all three of them know it, although in the evening, when the daughter lays the table, she lays it for three and not for four without either of them ever having settled that it should be done that way.

(The son's room has the door ajar. Inside, the bed is made. The desk chair has been moved against the wall, and it was not she who moved it, nor did she ask the daughter why she had done it, nor did the daughter tell her: the chair against the wall is the way it has been decided in this house that the bed is not to be seen from the corridor.)

The officer asks what she wants to send word of; she asks what may be sent word of; he answers that she may send word of whatever she likes, provided she says it herself first, word for word, because what leaves this kitchen he writes down without smoothing it, and what he writes down will be read out in a room where her son will not be able to ask for it to be repeated.

The officer reads aloud again the sentence she has just dictated, at home everything is fine, we are waiting, then reads it a second time more slowly, the pen held two fingers above the paper; and he does not set it down. He does not set it down not because the sentence is wrong, nor because the service allows him to refuse it, nor because he is waiting for a correction he has no right to ask for, but because the week before, in another kitchen in another city, another mother had dictated a sentence almost identical to this one, that at home everything was fine, that they were waiting, and three days later that mother's son, inside a room he has seen and cannot describe, had signed a paper in Chinese that had been read out to him in English, convinced, because his mother had had him told so, that at home the money for the appeal was still there.

She stands up, takes the full glass from the cork coaster, carries it into the kitchen; she does not empty it, she sets it down on the sink, and on her way back she passes the ajar door of her son's room, where the chair has stood against the wall since the first of September.

She sits down, draws the empty coaster towards her.

“Write this,” she says. “The flat is pledged. On Thursday the lawyer goes in. Don't sign anything.”

The officer writes, then reads it back a third time, slowly, raising his eyes at every word, and she confirms with her head word for word, flat, pledged, Thursday, lawyer, don't sign anything; when he reaches anything he closes the notebook with its elastic, stands up, goes out to the landing to put his shoes back on, and she stays standing in the middle of the room with the cork coaster in her hand, which is the only thing left on the table.

In the kitchen the glass is still full; she empties it into the sink, and the water makes the noise water makes.

From the corridor the daughter asks whether she told him, that thing about the flat.

She asks which thing.

The daughter goes to her room, and the door stays ajar like the other one, and the corridor light stays on, which is for the daughter, and in this house nobody has ever contradicted her about it.