Maps of Imaginary Towns

Backstreet Nursery, 2050

The letter came one morning as Paul was feeding the baby. He was still only half-dressed. Wearing most of his clothes, one unlaced shoe. "Oh no," he said. "No way."

The baby hammered her feet, made demanding noises.

Paul read the letter twice, and it said the same thing both times.

"I can't," he told the baby, because there was nobody else there to speak to. "There's just no way."

A woman from the neighbourhood, Maryam, ran a backstreet nursery four streets down.

He went, knocked on the door, and her nut-wrinkled face appeared, screwed up in the crack. She was old, about eighty. "Can you mind Hana today?" he asked.

Looked through the gap into the hallway, and through that past the open kitchen door. At the back of the kitchen, the back door was open, leading out into the garden. A number of children, he couldn't count how many, were hurling themselves down a wooden slide in Maryam's back yard. "We'll see," she said. "But I'm full, and you haven't booked."

He could hear one of the children opening and closing cupboard doors in the kitchen. Maryam didn't have child closers on anything. Children often came away from her house with black eyes, bruised fingers. But it was cheap, cheaper than the registered places, and she always had space to take extra children at short notice. "Please," he said. "I'm supposed to take a seat on the council this year, and I need to go down there and talk my way out of it."

"Take her with you, then." She started closing the door.

"It's not allowed. See here where it says: no children under nine allowed in civic buildings."

"Stupid rule." She snatched the letter, squinted at it. "Why not?"

"I don't know. Please, Maryam."

"Huh," she said. Slammed the door. On the other side, bolt and chain rattled as though telling a story. Then she opened it, the sun spiking into her eyes. "Ok. Give her here."

The civic hall was grey, broad, and didn't seem to want him there. It was double the footprint of a secondary school, only one storey high, and there was no obvious way in. He walked all the way around it. The North and West sides channelled a warm wind, the South and East a cold shade. He found no doorway the first time he walked around it, so he went around it again a second time, and found no way in that time, either.

He stood on one of the street side corners until a woman arrived, carrying a wide, flattish cardboard box. She walked to a point about halfway along the west side, held a lanyard up against the wall, and a door, which until then had lain completely flat up against the building, opened up and let her in.

On either side of the enquiry desk inside were two blank walls, each with a doorway cut out of it. These looked like the start of a maze.

Paul showed the boy behind the desk his letter. "This came today."

"Then you're early," the boy said. "You have to start on the date it says." It sounded as though he was tired of telling people this. "We have the system for a reason."

"But you see, I can't take up the council seat, although obviously it is an honour to be selected," he added quickly. "I've got a little girl, she's only thirteen months old, and I've got nobody to look after her while I'm here."

The boy gave Paul a sharp look. "Where's this daughter of yours while you're here trying to wriggle out of it?"

On the first Monday, the baby looked at herself in one of the mirrors on Maryam's scarf, then pulled one of the tassels towards her and into her mouth. "Don't let her do that," he said.

"Do what? She's fine."

"Her clean clothes are in there," he said, handing her Hana's bag: "A bottle, the carrot soup she likes-"

"She'll eat when she's hungry, like the rest of them do." Maryam bounced the baby on her hip. "You know, you should do something about the elderly. Look at me, still having to work at my age. It's not right, is it? Look at the state of this place." She pulled at part of the wall. An entire strip of wallpaper came away, like skin peeling from rotten fruit. "Why can't you make your new law be something about that?"

"New councillor, are you?" A tall, barrel-shaped man at the enquiry desk looked Paul up and down. "Where's the other one?"

A dried-up leaf of a woman almost hiding in the corner unfolded herself. "I'm here," she said. "I'm Safiya."

"Right, come on then." Without even a nod, the man led them through the right-hand door, then on down a corridor. He was faster than he looked, his voice disappearing as he told them: "When you think about the system we used to have - stupid. They didn't even know what they were voting for half the time, so what was the point?" Paul was having to jog frantically to keep up. He looked for landmarks, something to guide him back out again when they finished at four o'clock. But the walls all looked the same. Dirty white, no arrows or posters or notices, everything looking exactly the same as the corridor before it. "The new way is much better. More efficient. Everybody's happy."

Paul glanced back. Safiya was keeping up: she glared at the man's back as though it had a target on it. She was shorter than he was, and had to take twice as many steps to keep pace. "Slow down, can't you?" Paul said, but there was no response.

A greying wall narrowed to a point. The murmur of voices was growing louder. Then an abrupt left, and they came out into the sound of voices, a large office full of people.

They seemed to be in the centre of the building. Inside the room were smaller cubicles, all fenced off at chest height. Small square and L-shaped cubicles tessellated off central corridors, each with a worker or two inside. Housing, he saw. Road infrastructure. Schools. Everybody seemed to be doing something, busy, and they all knew the tall man.

"Monday, eh?" one of them said.

"Don't I know it?" The man paused, smiled, but he didn't introduce Paul or Safiya.

Paul looked back to see where Safiya was. She had paused a few metres behind, next to one of the cubicles, taking it all in with an unreadable expression on her face.

Their office, the one he and Safiya were to share for the next year, was a dark internal room. Desks, a lounge area with sofas, a bright red coffee machine. When they arrived, the two outgoing councillors were sitting with their feet up on the desk.

"Jim," said one of them. He had a handshake like a pneumatic drill.

Paul moved around, trying to get a sense of where he was in the building. "So, what are we supposed to do?" he asked.

Jim and the other councillor slid each other a knowing glance. "You'll want these." Jim tried to slide two ring bound folders across the desk, volume one, and volume two. "You'll have to read that before you do anything, and it's not supposed to leave this room."

Safiya flicked through the binders, then closed them with a slam. "First thing I'm doing is ending this stupid system," she said. "After I'm done, nobody's spending twelve months in this shithole ever again."

Hana seemed an ounce or so heavier when he picked her up that afternoon. "Did she have a good day?"

The wallpaper from earlier lay in a curled strip over the hallway floor. "Not too bad, not too much crying," Maryam said. "Here's what you could do. You could give all the old folks a certain amount of money a month, more than they have at the moment." Her eyes were beady, questing. "Then people like me wouldn't have to work. It's the least you could do."

"But then what would I do for childcare?" he said. "Besides, it's complicated. There are a lot of rules about what we can and can't do."

"Like what?"

"You're not supposed to do anything that benefits you or your own family. Plus, you can't undo anything that was brought in within the last five years-"

"You know, there never used to be all this," she said. "We'd vote them in and then they'd do more or less whatever they felt like. It didn't matter whether they'd promised to do it or not. We were stuck with them for the rest of the time." She started to close the door. "Not that it makes any difference."

"Maryam."

"What?" Her face was a sliver of suspicion in the doorway. "It's late. Getting dark. Do you want me standing out here in the street with my door open? You never know who might be hanging about."

"Why don't you put the lights on?"

"Huh," she said, and shut the door.

"We could ban primary schools from having a class pet," Paul suggested.

Safiya's knuckles, the colour of Earl Grey, were on the rule book. "Who cares? Who cares anything about whatever stupid rule we...