The Second Proof

The sheet came out of the printer with a white stripe through the man’s head. Mara lifted it from the tray and tilted it. The stripe wasn’t in the photograph. Something wrong with the toner, for the third time that week.

‘Feed it upside down and it comes out somewhere else,’ Lotte said.

‘That won’t improve it.’

‘No. But you’ll be able to see his face.’

Mara laid the sheet on her desk. The photograph was for Op straat, an exhibition travelling from the regional archive to four venues. At each stop, different visitors would recognise the streets in the pictures. She liked that, until somebody supplied a place name that couldn’t be right. According to one list, a man with a child’s bicycle had lived on Dorpsstraat; according to another, he hadn’t lived in the town at all.

On the Friday after her visit to Ada, they had compared the lists. Hester van Roon had arrived with a blue folder and spent the first twenty minutes talking about the photograph on its cover. The meeting had overrun, but afterwards they had numbered and dated the texts. Mara had dragged the wrong files into a folder called old. For a while, the week had seemed manageable.

Now, a week later, Hester had sent additions. Not in the numbered list: in a separate document. New names had been found, two old ones might be wrong after all, and one photograph should probably say date unknown. Mara had highlighted probably in yellow. There was no room for that on a panel.

Six printouts marked with pencil lines lay on Lotte’s desk. She held a ruler against a caption and moved the paper a millimetre.

‘I still need the long captions for these three,’ she said.

‘They’re in the additions.’

‘I mean at the right length.’

‘I’ll ask Hester to cut them.’

‘I asked on Monday.’

Mara opened the email. There it was. Hester had replied that she needed to check the folder. Then there had been two emails about the lighting. Mara had answered one because she knew which fittings the first venue had. Somehow that had left her remembering the caption query as dealt with.

She rang the archive. Somebody called for Hester. A door closed and opened again. Hester was still talking to a colleague when she came on the line.

‘I’ve got it here,’ she said. ‘But cut anything else and it stops being a caption. Nobody will know why those people are there.’

Mara looked at the photograph. Nine people in front of a bus, except for the boy sitting on its bumper. She hadn’t known there was a reason for where they stood.

‘What absolutely has to stay?’

Hester began explaining. Mara made short notes, one beneath another. After a while, she had as many words as the original. She put down her pen.

‘We’ve got room for about half that.’

‘Make it smaller, then.’

‘People won’t be able to read it.’

Hester sighed. Not because of Mara, but audibly at her. They agreed that Mara would draft something for Hester to check on Monday. It was Friday morning. Hester wouldn’t be back at her computer that afternoon.

Mara put down the phone and looked at her schedule. A thick arrow pointed to Wednesday for the first print proof. There was time before that, if you looked only at the appointments. Lotte had two other jobs on Monday and Tuesday. The only white space was Wednesday morning.

The office landline rang. Bram from Drukkerij Van Dam wanted to know whether Wednesday was still happening. He had booked the large printer for a proof on the actual panel material. They had once approved a colour on ordinary paper that came out too red on the board. He needed to know in good time.

‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘We’ll get it to you on Tuesday afternoon.’

Lotte lowered her ruler.

‘Those last captions too?’ Bram asked.

‘We’ll include them.’

‘I’d rather have one complete file. Then I can get on with it.’

Mara agreed. She wrote complete beside the arrow.

Lotte had put her printout back on the pile. She didn’t look angry. Not yet.

‘Include them where?’

‘In the proof.’

‘I haven’t got any time left on Tuesday.’

‘If Hester gets back to us on Monday morning, it’s just putting them in.’

Lotte turned a printout towards her. Beneath the photograph were five lines. The other version had nine.

‘Five fit here. If you say this text has to go in, something else has to move.’

Mara looked at the white margin below. A small number sat there, an installation code. Visually, there was space. She also knew it was there for a reason.

‘We could shift the photograph up a bit.’

‘Then it won’t line up with the others.’

Nora emerged from her room with a phone to her ear. She held up her free hand as though holding a lift. Once she had hung up, she looked from one of them to the other.

‘What is it?’

Mara explained. She heard herself say just and left it out of her next sentence. Nora picked up the printout and held it at arm’s length.

‘I’d keep the whole bus in.’

Lotte looked towards the window. A van was reversing into the courtyard, beeping with every metre. Suddenly Mara could barely fit her thoughts between the beeps.

‘I’ll draft the caption first,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll see how much room we need.’

‘And Bram?’ Nora asked.

‘Proof on Wednesday.’

‘Good. Otherwise everything slips.’

She put down the paper and returned to her room. Lotte picked up the ruler, held it between her hands a moment, then pushed the pile of printouts aside.

That afternoon, Mara managed to shorten two of the three captions. For the third, she had to choose between the bus company’s name and the explanation for everyone wearing their Sunday best. She didn’t want to decide which part of its history a street photograph was allowed to keep. She drafted two alternatives and sent both. That made Hester’s job no easier, but at least it was sent.

Ellen rang at half five. Seeing her name, Mara took the phone into the kitchen. A cold pan of soup stood on the worktop, covered with a plate too small for it.

‘You were going to let me know,’ Ellen said.

Mara closed her eyes. Something about a Thursday evening. A few weeks ahead, the Thursday of the first installation. She opened the calendar on her phone, although that meant taking Ellen away from her ear.

‘I can help that evening.’

‘Are you sure? You had something for the exhibition.’

‘We’ll have finished setting up by then. It opens on Friday.’

‘I want those boxes off the floor. If you can’t make it, I need to know.’

‘Six o’clock. I’ll bring something to eat.’

‘I’ll sort out food. Bring a screwdriver. Mine’s in a box I can’t get to.’

Mara entered Ellen, boxes, six o’clock on the Thursday of the first installation. The installation occupied the daytime. There was a contingency block until five. She shortened it by an hour and put the appointment beneath it. It fitted on the screen.

When she went back, Lotte had left. The sheet with the white stripe lay on her desk. In the original photograph, the man carried a wooden beam on his shoulder. Now the printer’s white stripe ran across his face, making it impossible to judge what needed changing in the dark areas. Mara switched the printer off, waited and switched it on. A light flashed three times. The next print had no stripe.

On Monday morning, the soup was still in the fridge beneath the same undersized plate. Mara took it out and put it by the sink. Then she looked for Hester’s reply.

There were two messages. In the first, Hester chose the shortest text. In the second, she changed a surname and asked whether the other paragraph might be nicer after all. Each message had a new document attached.

Mara opened them side by side. On one page the name was beneath the photograph, on the other above it. Hunting for Friday’s pencil notes, she found a shopping list first. The right notes were under her laptop.

Lotte came in with a wet coat over her arm. She hung it on a chair, pushed up her sleeves and put down her bag without switching on her computer.

‘Have you got what I need?’

‘Almost.’

‘That isn’t what I need.’

Mara turned her screen. She tried to explain that they only had to combine things now. The chosen short text, the correct name from the second document, one extra sentence to make the jump in time clear. Lotte sat and read everything.

‘Which of these has she approved?’

‘The separate bits.’

‘Not this.’

Mara turned the screen back. Her own reply to Bram was still at the top of the email. Complete file, Tuesday afternoon. She had put it in writing, and somebody was keeping a machine free for it.

She rang Hester again. Hester was in a meeting and would call after lunch. Mara left a message spelling out the three decisions they still needed. Then she made a reference file herself. She couldn’t lay out the photographs the way Lotte could, but she could put pages in the right order.

She placed the short caption beneath the bus photograph, with the long version in a comment alongside it. For a second photograph she only meant to take the new surname. Pasting it in shifted the document by a page. She reduced the line spacing and watched a heading disappear onto the wrong side of a page break.

Lotte was wearing headphones. On her screen was an entirely different design, red with a large white circle. Mara wanted to ask her something and didn’t. Lotte would know where to point to put the document right at once. Precisely the sort of question that made her drop her own work every time.

Mara created a new page and put the photograph on it. She copied the code at the bottom from the previous page. She would change it later. Then the phone rang.

Somebody from the first venue wanted to know whether they had checked the hanging system. The wall wasn’t equally strong all the way along. Mara opened the photographs of the room. By one door, a coat rack on wheels stood against the wall. It would have to move when they set up.

‘We’ve made a note of that,’ she said.

Only now did she write it down.

After the call, she saw it was half twelve. The reference file was still open. She scrolled down, checked that every photograph appeared once, and sent it to Hester, asking her to consider only the text for approval. Then she sent the same file to Lotte as a starting point.

The reply came while she was in the kitchen. No words at first, just a screenshot. The same code twice. In the next image, a caption belonged with the photograph beside it.

Mara went back without eating. Lotte had taken her headphones off.

‘I haven’t sent it to Bram,’ Mara said.

‘Thank goodness.’

‘It was for the text.’

‘You called it a starting point. That means this is the running order.’

Mara opened the file on her screen. She could see exactly where the two pages had shifted. Both photographs were there, but the captions followed the codes she had copied. Somebody could have ended up standing in a shopping street that wasn’t his. She thought of the man with the beam and couldn’t remember which name was right now.

‘I’ll put it right,’ she said.

Lotte pushed back her chair. ‘Where do I charge the time for that?’

There was no box for it in Mara’s schedule. She found the timesheet, opened it and added a block beside her own name. That didn’t make a usable print proof. The other appointment stayed where she had put it.

Hester called back. Mara answered and laid the printouts side by side in the right order. She kept a hand on the first so she wouldn’t start moving them again before Hester had finished.

Hester didn’t begin with the bus. She began with the girl behind the man carrying the beam. She had spoken to somebody who thought the pram was for the girl’s little brother. That wasn’t certain enough to put on the panel. They still didn’t have the girl’s name either.

‘We could leave it as something we don’t know,’ Mara said.

‘That feels so bare.’

Mara turned the photograph towards her. The girl looked straight into the lens. One hand held the pram handle, the other touched her hair, as though she were about to walk away. Behind her, the man’s feet disappeared beneath the beam. When Mara first saw the picture, she had assumed he was building something. Perhaps he was simply clearing up.

‘Then let’s ask,’ she said. ‘Who is the girl with the pram? Somebody might know.’

Hester fell quiet. At her end, a drawer slid shut.

‘We could do that on more of them.’

‘Not everywhere. It’ll turn into a questionnaire.’

‘No, that isn’t what I meant.’

They agreed to keep the question on one panel. Mara typed it exactly as Hester wanted it and read it back. Then they moved to the bus. This time Hester chose the shortest version, with nothing added from the second document. She did want one surname spelt differently.

Mara wrote the name on a separate sheet and asked Hester to spell it. Nine letters. Hester hesitated at the sixth and went to check again. While she waited, Mara looked out of the window. In the courtyard, a man turned a sack truck round without losing its load.

Once the name was settled, she sent the sentence back. Lotte needed to know that this was the version before she could go on.

‘For today,’ Hester said.

Mara looked at the arrow pointing to Tuesday. Could the rest of the list be confirmed by that afternoon?

‘I’ll try.’

Mara wrote her own name beneath the note. She put the sheet with the other printouts and stayed where she was for a moment, her phone in her hand.