the queue number

At the clinic there is a machine that gives you a number. You sit and wait for your number to be called. That is the whole system. It is a fair system. I decided to improve it.

It was a busy morning, the waiting room full, everybody sitting on the hard chairs with their little paper numbers, watching the red number on the wall click up, one at a time, slow as a tree growing. I took a number from the machine. Forty-one. Then I sat down and looked around the room, and I saw that the fair system was also a bit stupid. I had a low number and I was not in any hurry. I was only there for a small thing. And all around me were people who really needed to be seen soon, sitting on high numbers, while a girl with nothing much wrong with her sat on a good low one and did nothing with it.

So I started a swap desk.

The idea was simple, and I thought it was the best idea I had ever had. People trade numbers. If you are not in a hurry and you have a low number, you give it to somebody who is in a hurry and stuck with a high one. Everybody ends up better off. Nobody loses. I set up at the side of the room, on an empty chair, and I began arranging trades, matching the low numbers to the people who needed them most, a little market of pure fairness, and I was extremely pleased with myself, the way you are pleased right before a thing goes wrong.

Aiman was there, because Aiman is wherever a market starts, the way a cat is wherever a fish is being cleaned, and the instant he saw the swap desk he tried to take a commission on every trade. A small handling fee, he said, for the use of the desk, for the service. I told him the desk was free, that fairness is free, that you cannot charge people to be fair to each other. He sat back down looking like a man watching good money walk past him in the street and tip its hat.

Kavi helped, which is to say Kavi made it louder. Kavi only knows loud, and he appointed himself the announcer of the swap desk. Every time a trade went through he called it out across the whole waiting room like an auctioneer. NUMBER TWELVE TO THE AUNTY WITH THE COUGH. NUMBER NINE TO THE UNCLE WITH THE BAD KNEE. Soon the whole room had stopped watching the red number on the wall and started watching my desk, leaning in, following the trades like a game.

Divya kept the records, because Divya is my best friend and she is the only reason any plan of mine ever half works. She sat with her exercise book and wrote down the true order, who really held which number now, after each of my trades, because I had stopped being able to keep track of it in my own head somewhere around the fourth swap.

And the whole thing, the desk, the market, the announcer, all of it, was really for one person.

There was an old uncle sitting two seats down. Pak Hamid. Thin, neat, very old, with a walking stick held upright between his knees, and he had a high number, and he had been there a long time already, longer than me, and I had got it firmly into my head that he should not have to wait. That an old man should not have to sit on a hard plastic chair all morning. That the kind thing, the obvious kind thing, the thing any decent person would do, was to get him moved to the front. So most of my trading was secretly aimed at him. I kept trying to route the lowest numbers his way. I kept offering him my own forty-one, my good early number, pressing it on him.

And he kept saying no. Cheerfully. He said he was fine. He said he was in no hurry at all, that at his age a morning spent on a chair watching the world go by is not a wasted morning, that he would go when his number was called and not one moment before, thank you, and would I like a sweet. He had sweets in his shirt pocket. He gave me one. He gave Kavi one to make him quieter, which did not work, but it was a kind thought.

Then the whole thing fell apart, the way my best ideas always do, right at the top.

Because I had traded so many numbers, in so many directions, with Kavi announcing each one to the room and the whole waiting room joining in and calling out swaps of their own, that nobody knew whose turn it was anymore. The nurse came out to call the next number, and the next number had been traded three times, and the person now holding it had given it to someone who had got tired and gone home, and the whole running order was a knot. The nurse stood there with her list, looking at a room full of people holding numbers that no longer meant what they said, and it was my fault, all of it, my clever fair desk had taken a simple fair queue and tied it into a knot.

I had to fix it. In front of everyone. I had to go round the whole room and undo every single clever trade, hand the numbers back to whoever had held them at the very start, untie the knot I had tied with my own hands, while Divya read out the true original order from her exercise book and the nurse waited and the whole room watched the great fairness desk take fairness carefully to pieces again. A queue only works because everybody trusts it. I had been clever with it, and now nobody knew where they stood, and a kind old man who only wanted to wait his own turn could not even find his turn in the mess I had made.

And while I was on my knees untangling it, the door opened, and a young mother came in, late, with a baby. A real baby, a properly unwell one, hot and fretting and crying the cry that means it. She pulled a number from the machine right at the very back. A high one. The worst one in the room.

And Pak Hamid, who had refused my good low number all morning, who would not be moved to the front for anything I offered him, got up. Slowly, with his stick, one hand on the chair. He walked across the room to that young mother and he gave her his number. His place. The place he had been so patiently holding all morning. He pressed it into her hand, smiling, like it was the easiest and most ordinary thing in the world. Then he went and sat back down at the very back, to wait the whole thing out all over again, and took out another sweet and unwrapped it, in no more hurry than before.

I had spent the whole morning trying to move him to the front. He never wanted to be at the front. He wanted to give his place away, and you can only give your place away if it is still yours, if nobody has been clever and taken it off you first. He did it in about ten seconds, with no desk and no announcer and no exercise book, and it was the kindest thing anyone did in that room all morning.

I packed up the desk. I sat back down with my number forty-one and waited my turn like everybody else, the queue plain and fair and trusted again now that I had stopped improving it. I would like to be like that one day. Not the girl who runs the desk. The old man who, when it counts, can give his good place away and go and sit back down at the very end, easy, and unwrap another sweet.