The map she asked me to draw

Text: an original contemporary profile-style practice extract.

“Show me how you got here,” Mrs Vale said.

I had placed a recorder between us and prepared six questions about her career as a mapmaker. She ignored both. Instead, she turned my notebook round, pushed it back across the table and handed me a pencil. I drew the station, the square and what I thought was the correct sequence of streets. My lines collided at awkward angles. Mrs Vale watched without rescuing me.

“Where was the clock?” she asked.

I added a circle above the square.

“No. Where was it in relation to you?”

Her questions followed quickly. Which pavement had I used? Had the road risen or fallen? What stood opposite the narrowest building? Details I had passed ten minutes earlier had already been rubbed almost blank. I tried to defend myself by saying that I had found the house. Mrs Vale tapped the pencil against my unfinished route. “Arriving is not the same as noticing.”

Only then did she tell me about the maps she had drawn during forty years of work. She spoke briefly about measurements and street names, but became animated when describing the decisions that did not appear on the finished page: what to leave out, where to place an important building, how to make a complicated junction readable. A map, she said, was not a place made smaller. It was an argument about what somebody might need.

On the train home, I did not play the recording. I tried to rebuild my walk from the station. The clock returned first, then a wall covered in ivy and a delivery bicycle blocking half the pavement. I could picture Mrs Vale’s blue front door, but not the moment when it had come into view. Somewhere between the square and her table, I had arrived without noticing.