The map cabinet

Source: an original fiction extract.

At two on Thursday afternoon, Elsie reported to the town archive for her first volunteer shift. The archivist, Mr Khan, asked her to help sort a cabinet of street maps. He gave her a cotton cloth and a packet of blank labels. She was to begin with the top drawer and write each map's date on a separate label. There were eight drawers in the cabinet. Elsie placed her bag beneath the reading table and washed her hands before touching the first sheet. Rain tapped steadily against the high window above the shelves.

The earliest map showed a river bending through open fields. Elsie knew the river, but not the fields. In their place now stood a supermarket, a car park and the flat where her cousin lived. She followed a thin dotted line towards a small square marked School. The line ended at a bridge that no longer appeared on modern maps. She asked Mr Khan whether the map was wrong. He brought another sheet from the drawer below. This one showed railway sidings crossing the dotted route and a wider bridge farther downstream.

Elsie laid the two maps side by side. Places she had thought permanent moved or vanished between them. A pond became a yard; the school gained a new entrance; a row of houses stopped where the railway began. She tried to imagine walking the earlier route without meeting a fence. Mr Khan said that old paths sometimes survived in unexpected places: a gap between buildings, a turn in a boundary wall, a strip of ground nobody quite knew what to do with. She copied the date onto the label more carefully than before.

On Saturday she visited her cousin. From the balcony they could see a narrow passage behind the supermarket. Elsie had always assumed it led to the bins. Now she noticed how it curved towards the river. Her cousin said people used it to reach the footbridge, though delivery vehicles sometimes blocked the entrance. They went down to look. The passage smelled of wet cardboard, and a crushed drinks can lay beside the wall. It was not the pretty country path Elsie had imagined from the dotted line.

At the far end, however, the river appeared at the same angle she remembered from the old map. She took a photograph, careful to include the supermarket wall as well as the water. Back at the archive she showed Mr Khan. He said they could keep a copy with the local survey photographs. Elsie wrote the date and location beneath it. The image did not prove that every step followed the vanished path, but it recorded the passage as it was now. She liked that its next reader would not have to guess which year she had been standing there.

Refer only to the first paragraph. Choose one answer for each item. Write the four letters in order, labelling them 1 to 4.