She came two weeks later, for the shoes and for no particular reason, and she had a cardboard folder in her hands.
"Tell me, have I gone mad?"
Tamara put the folder on the counter and opened it. Inside lay a town map, glued together from four sheets, covered all over with pencil dots, and pinned to the map was a slip with a list of streets.
"I'm counting them. A hundred and nine already. Of those you can sit on sixty-two; the rest are either broken, or by the bins, or somebody's sleeping on them."
In the folder there was also a map measurer, small, with a little wheel and a dial, the kind used to measure distances on a map. Brass, evenly worn, without the least hollow for a finger. Nobody's at all.
"It turned up in my overall pocket," said Tamara. "At first I thought one of ours had left it."
She spread the map out properly, weighted the edges with the ticket book and began pointing: here are three in a row, and all three under lime trees, and in summer you can't sit under limes because of the aphids; here's one, but there's a stop behind it, and the people waiting always sit down on it; and here, by the bridge, you can sit, but nobody does, and she hasn't worked out why yet.
"And why does it matter?" I asked. Not doubtfully; I really was interested.
"Because they put them in the wrong places." Tamara pointed with the pencil. "Here's a rise, three hundred metres or so, and not a single one on it. And two at the top, side by side. At the top you don't need it any more, at the top you've arrived."
She explained that a person with a heart condition needs to sit down in the middle of a rise and not at the end, and that anyone who walks knows this and nobody who installs them does.
"I've written to social services."
"And?"
"Nothing so far. On Monday I'm going to the district office as well."
She looked worse than last time. Under her eyes lay the grey that doesn't wash off over a weekend, and she spoke faster than usual.
"I sit up at night," she said with pride. "There's no time in the day. I go to bed at two, get up at six, but in two weeks I've done the whole centre."
I told her it was a splendid piece of work and that nobody had done it before her. That was true, and she was glad.
That she needs to sleep I did not say.
It simply didn't occur to me then: for the first time in many years a person had something of her own, and I had no intention of spoiling that with a remark about sleep.
Tamara folded the map in four along the old creases, put it in the folder, tied the tapes and only then took the shoes.
"I'll tell you when it's a hundred and fifty," she promised.
She left in good spirits. It was forty minutes home on foot, and she walked it, I found out later, because she didn't take the bus that evening: she was saving for the map she meant to print in colour.
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