Chapter 120: The Papers
The application is called Form NP-1. Application for Appointment and Commission as a Notary Public.
It is four pages.
I ordered it by post, because the online system wanted a card I did not have.
Question 11 asks whether the applicant has ever been convicted of a felony.
There is a strict answer and a true answer and for once in my life they were the same answer.
I disclosed it anyway.
I attached the vacatur, the nolle prosequi and the sealing order. All certified. Three dollars each.
Brandt said I did not have to. I said I would rather they knew from me than found it in a database that was wrong.
The office took eleven weeks.
A woman named Perpetua Cardew called and asked three questions and was polite throughout.
Then a letter. Approved. Commission number, term of four years, and instructions in a numbered list.
Sixty dollars for the application. Fifty-four for the surety bond.
Thirty-two for the seal, ordered from a firm in Ravensport.
Eighteen dollars and ninety cents for the journal, which they do not supply and which the statute requires you to keep.
I went to the county clerk's office on a Tuesday in October, room 210, which is where you go to buy your own case file for twelve cents a page.
I have been in that room forty or fifty times. I have never been on that side of the counter.
The oath is administered by a deputy clerk.
Mine was a young man with a lanyard and a cold he kept apologising for.
He asked me to raise my right hand and he read it off a card, and it takes about twenty seconds.
Support the constitution, discharge the duties, faithfully and impartially. Then he said, “That's it,” and turned the card round.
There is a line at the bottom of the card for the signature of the appointee.
And under that line there is a second, shorter line, and the shorter line is for the date.
He put a pen down on the counter. A blue biro, chewed at the cap, chained to the counter with a bit of beaded cord.
I picked it up.
My mother said one thing to me about paperwork and she said it more than once, and she said it in a kitchen.
Before you sign anything, read the date three times.
I was twenty-four the last time I signed a document that mattered, and I did not read the date at all.
A man had already written it in for me. Two days early. I did not look at the top of the page.
I read the date on that card three times.
I read it once for what it said. The second time for what it was. The third time because she told me to.
Then I filled it in myself, in the blue biro, in my own hand, in the small careful letters I use for indexes.
Then I signed my name above it. Cass Mercer. Not initials. The whole thing.
The deputy clerk stamped it, and took his copy, and gave me mine, and said, “Congratulations, I guess.”
I said thank you and went out and stood in the corridor on the third floor.
There is a window on that landing that looks down on the car park and the lift lobby is behind it.
I did not stand there long. It is a corridor, not a place.
The seal came in the post four days later, in a box with foam in it.
It makes a good hard sound. I pressed it into a scrap of paper eleven times.
The journal came the same week.
It is bound, not spiral. Four hundred and ninety-six numbered lines.
The inside cover has three printed fields at the top of the page.
Name of notary. Commission number. And a line that reads: Journal commenced on.
I filled in my name.
I filled in the number off the letter, checking it twice against the letter and once against the seal.
Then I came to the third line.
I sat at the oak veneer table with the shimmed leg, in the flat on Delph Street, with the kettle going.
I got the calendar down off the nail and put it flat on the table beside the book.
I read the date on the calendar. Then I read it again. Then I read it a third time, out loud, in an empty room, like a woman checking a lock.
Then I wrote it in the book.
I blotted it with the edge of a paper towel, because a wet date can be smudged and a smudged date can be argued about.
The second drawer of that table has the rent receipts in it, and under the receipts a small resealable bag with nineteen grams of gold in it.
I did not open the drawer. I have not opened it in a long time.
I closed the journal and pressed the cover flat with my hand until it stopped wanting to open.
Then I weighed it on the kitchen scale, because I weigh things, and I always have.
Four hundred and ten grams.
I put it in my bag, on top of the folder, and I put the bag by the door, and I went to bed.