The numbered drawers

Source: an original fiction extract.

For the first hour, the museum store was exactly as Anya had expected. There were shelves, labels and drawers that slid out with a dry whisper. She copied numbers from cards into a spreadsheet. A chipped bowl became 418; a wooden comb became 419. Behind her, the radiator tapped. The curator had promised that someone would bring tea at eleven. Anya watched the little clock in the corner of the screen and tried to make herself interested in the difference between a fragment and a shard. So far, the work seemed to consist of renaming broken things.

Drawer 420 contained a pair of children's shoes. They were brown, with soft soles and a row of tiny buttons. One toe had a pale crescent worn into the leather. Anya lifted the label, expecting a name and a date, but there were only two words: provenance unknown. She checked the next card. The shoes had been donated in a box with several kitchen utensils. Nothing explained who had worn them, or why they had been kept after they were too small. She entered the number but left the description empty.

Her own first shoes were in a biscuit tin at her grandmother's house. Last winter her grandmother had produced them after dinner, together with a photograph of Anya trying to climb a chair. Everyone had laughed at the round seriousness of her face. Anya had been embarrassed and asked for the tin to be put away. Now she remembered how the shoes had rested in her grandmother's palm, smaller than either of them had expected. She looked at the pale mark on the museum shoe and wondered what kind of floor had made it.

The curator arrived with two mugs. Anya asked whether they could put a possible story on the card: a child running indoors, perhaps, or learning to walk. The curator set down the tea. 'Possible is a very large word,' she said. She showed Anya how to record the materials, the fastening and the wear without inventing the missing life. They worked together on three sentences. The description was longer than the ones before it, but it contained no name, no room and no explanation for the crescent at the toe.

At closing time Anya saved the spreadsheet. The empty description box was filled, though the question that had stopped her remained. She wrapped the shoes and closed the drawer. On the bus she sent her grandmother a message asking her not to throw away the biscuit tin. Then she added a second message: could she write down who had bought the shoes? Outside, shop windows passed in bright rectangles. Anya watched her phone until a reply appeared, beginning with a name she had never heard.

Consider the whole source. Analyse how the writer structures the text to develop Anya’s interest in the lives behind the museum objects. You could consider shifts in focus and time, the order of information and the ending. Support your explanation with references to the source.