Teun

Teun

I ask mine about everything. Courgettes, the mole on my back, whether to take the ring road. In eleven years I have never asked it about Teun.

People find this strange, but they find the wrong part strange. They think the strange part is Teun, who doesn't use his at all. His sits in the flat doing nothing, the way other people have a piano. It's on the shelf above the fuse box. I dust it.

I price things for a living. I price how long things last. Roofs, hips, container ships, marriages. You'd be surprised how similar the curves are.

On Tuesday I priced a bridge. They wanted sixty years. I gave them thirty-one. They took it badly. People always take it badly. They think a number is an opinion you can argue with.

Mine found eleven hundred euros the state had owed my mother since 2031. It read the lease on the Zuilenstraat flat and made them strike clause 14. I wouldn't have understood clause 14. It does my mother's prescriptions. It found the leak under the bath before there was a stain. When the neighbour's tree came down on the shed it wrote the claim, and I read the claim, and it was better than mine. I do this for a living.

When Teun's father was ill it gave me the four treatment options with the numbers on them. I sent them to Teun's sister. She called me crying and said she didn't know how to thank me. I said it was nothing. That was true. It took nine seconds.

Teun puts his hands on people. That's the whole job. Three times a week for four months, and then a woman who couldn't lift a shopping bag can lift a shopping bag. There's no faster way. Nobody has ever found one.

There's a woman called Ans who comes Tuesdays. She's seventy-something. In September she couldn't reach a tin on the top shelf. In January she could. That's it. That's the whole thing that happened.

He's proud of this in a way he'd deny if you said it out loud.

Everybody asks. My mother asked about my father in 2028. Sixty-one per cent. She stayed anyway and tells it at parties. Wies runs everyone she meets before the second date and says it's hygiene, like washing lettuce.

She asked me once, at this table, whether I'd done Teun.

"No," I said.

She waited. People always wait. They think no means not yet.

"You should," she said. "Then you'd know."

"I know," I said. That wasn't an answer. She let it go, because she's kind.

Last year at a wedding a man I didn't know told me he'd run his own children. Both of them. Eleven and nine, he said. He leaned in when he said it, the way people do when they want you to tell them it's fine. Then he ordered another drink. He didn't look sorry. He looked relieved, which was worse.

I could ask in four seconds. That's the part nobody understands. It isn't difficult and it isn't expensive and nobody would know. It's four seconds, twice a day, for eleven years.

In February Teun came home and said he wanted to buy into the practice.

"Twenty years," he said. "They'd want both names on it."

"I know how loans work."

"I know you know. That's why I'm asking you and not it."

He meant it as a joke. He's not a cruel person; he just doesn't know which things are made of glass.

So I asked. Not about him. About the loan. That's an ordinary question. It's the most ordinary question there is. I ask it about loans for strangers forty times a day and I have never once thought about it afterwards.

It came back before I'd put the kettle on. Three structures, ranked, tax handled, the practice's books pulled and checked. Recommended: take it, fixed, restructure at year seven.

Then underneath, in the assumptions, where nobody looks except people like me:

Household horizon: 9 years.

I read it four times. Not because I didn't understand it. Because it was a nine and the loan was a twenty, and I have spent my entire working life explaining to people what it means when those two numbers don't match.

I didn't ask it to explain. It would have. That's the thing about it — it always explains, it has never once refused me anything, it has been good to me for eleven years and it was good to me that afternoon. I asked a question and it answered the question. There was no other honest way to answer it.

Teun was in the kitchen standing on one leg. He does that while the kettle boils and he doesn't know he does it. Eleven years and he has never once noticed.

"Well?" he said.

"It's fine," I said. "Fixed. We restructure at seven."

He said great, and put his arms around me from behind, and I could feel the calluses through my shirt. They're on the pads under his fingers, not the palms. That's from the work. Everybody gets them somewhere different.

I haven't told him.

Not to protect him. If I tell him what it said, I have to tell him that I've been not asking. On purpose. Every day. For eleven years. And he doesn't know that. He thinks I just never got round to it, the way you never get round to the loft.

He thinks I'm somebody who didn't. I'm somebody who wouldn't. Those are not the same and I have never worked out how to say the difference out loud without it sounding like an accusation, or a gift, and it isn't either of them, or it's both.

The loan goes through in April. I've read the papers twice and they're good papers.

In the morning I asked about tiles for the bathroom. It gave me three and they were all fine.

Teun picked the wrong one. I let him, because it's a bathroom.