Read the following extract.

The card beneath the case — Nadia Rahman

At 5.12 each morning, the museum belonged to buckets. The marble entrance shone without visitors crossing it, the café chairs stood upside down and the glass cases reflected a woman in a blue overall pushing a trolley. During opening hours, signs instructed everyone: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. Before the doors opened, everything seemed to depend on my hands.

I had worked there for six years when I noticed the card beneath a small wooden box in the local industry gallery. The card read: “Object 61. Wooden container. Use unknown.”

Unknown to whom?

The box had rounded corners, a sliding lid and a dark stain where a thumb had pressed it thousands of times. My grandfather had carried one into the mill every morning. My mother still kept it in her kitchen cupboard, although she stored buttons in it now. “Your granddad’s dinner box,” she called it. Bread in the top, tea leaves wrapped in paper underneath.

I mentioned this to the assistant curator when he arrived. He was wearing gloves and carrying a clipboard, which made my wet yellow cloth feel like evidence against me.

“We need documentation,” he said. “Family stories can be unreliable.”

I looked at the printed card. “Use unknown” apparently counted as more reliable than a use somebody knew.

He smiled, not unkindly. “Just clean around the case, please.”

Just. It is a small word, but it knows how to close a door.

For the rest of the morning, I polished fingerprints from the glass while school groups moved through the gallery. A guide told them that historians examine objects carefully and ask questions about the past. I nearly laughed. My question had been examined carefully and placed in the bin.

The box took me back to waiting outside the mill as a child. At the end of a shift, the gates released people in a dark, tired crowd. My grandfather would hand me the empty box to carry home. It smelled of tea and metal. I liked the click of its lid and the importance of being trusted with something that had travelled into the adult world and returned.

That memory was not written on headed paper. It had no reference number. Evidence, I decided, wore polished shoes and a staff pass.

A few weeks later, I heard an elderly visitor speaking loudly beside Object 61.

“My father had one of those!” he said. “That’s a snap box. Every mill worker did.”

The assistant curator appeared almost immediately. This time there was no talk of unreliable stories. There were questions, a form and an invitation to return with photographs. I continued wiping the next case, moving slowly enough to hear everything.

The card disappeared soon afterwards. In its place was a new one: “Lunch container used by local mill workers. Commonly known as a snap box.” It was a better card. I read it three times and felt pleased, then foolish for feeling pleased. The visitor’s name appeared beneath the description as the source of the information. Mine did not.

By 5.12 the next morning, the museum belonged to buckets again. I unlocked the cleaning cupboard and took out the notebook I kept behind the spare cloths. It contained forty-seven entries: objects whose labels were incomplete, names recorded incorrectly, tools I had seen used and materials I recognised from home. Beside each entry, I had written what I knew and how I knew it.

I turned to Object 61. I crossed out “unknown” and wrote “known”. Then I closed the notebook, lifted the yellow cloth and began work on the glass.