Four Hundred

On the third of every month, at a time that varies between ten past six and a quarter past seven, four hundred euros arrive in Judith Ancelin's account.

That is all she knows about it.

The description runs to three words and a number: TRANSFER IN — REF 4471002. No name. No reason. Not once, in eleven years, a word, a card, an acknowledgement, an error, a duplicate, a delay.

The third, between ten past six and a quarter past seven.

When the third falls on a Sunday, it comes on the Monday. When the third falls on the first of November, it comes on the second. That is the only liberty this money has ever taken, and it is not one: it is the banking calendar.

She has never touched it.

That is the part people do not believe, when she tells it — except that she tells nobody, so the question never arises.

On the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth if she is working, she opens her banking app, slides four hundred euros from the current account to a savings account opened in November 2013, and closes the app.

The action takes eleven seconds. She has done it a hundred and thirty-four times.

There are fifty-three thousand six hundred euros in that account.

Judith Ancelin earns two thousand two hundred and forty euros net a month. She has been a nurse in neonatal intensive care at the Bourges hospital for fourteen years. She is thirty-nine, with a terraced house she is paying off until 2039, an eleven-year-old car, and a seventeen-year-old son who lives at his father's every other week.

She has fifty-three thousand six hundred euros in a savings account and she has never counted them out loud.

The first arrived on the third of October 2013.

She remembers because she was a hundred and eighty euros overdrawn and had spent the week putting off a boiler bill.

She assumed it was a mistake. She called the bank the next day, and a very pleasant woman explained that an incoming transfer is not a bank error, that it is an instruction given by somebody, and that if she did not recognise it she could send it back.

Judith asked how you send a transfer back.

The woman said she would need the sender's address, and that the sender had asked not to appear.

— Is that allowed? Judith had asked.

— It is, madame.

The following month, on the third of November, there was a second one. That is the day she opened the savings account.

She told herself: I'll keep it to one side, and if somebody ever comes to claim it, I'll give it back.

She told herself that in November 2013. She was twenty-eight. She thought it a reasonable thought, and even rather honourable.

It will take her eleven years to notice that nobody, in eleven years, ever came to claim anything at all — and that this is not what stopped her looking.

The third of December was a Tuesday.

She was finishing a twelve-hour shift. She looked at her phone in the changing room, at ten to seven, taking off her clogs, because that is where she always looks at her phone.

The transfer had arrived at six forty-two.

TRANSFER IN — REF 4471002 — €217.43

She looked at the line for perhaps five seconds without understanding. Then she understood that something was missing, and assumed a display fault — a digit cut off, a decimal point gone wrong.

She closed the app. She opened it again.

€217.43

She remained sitting on the changing-room bench, in her socks, one clog in her hand, for a length of time she did not measure.

You have to understand what that figure does.

Four hundred euros is a decision. It is somebody who chose a round amount, sustainable, repeatable. Four hundred is a sum you can put aside every month without ruining yourself and without being noticed. It is a figure that means: I can keep this up for a long time.

Two hundred and seventeen euros and forty-three centimes is not a decision.

It is what is left over.

Judith Ancelin has spent fourteen years reading figures that do not lie: saturations, weights, infusion rates, inspired oxygen fractions. She knows a calculated number when she sees one. A calculated number has a decimal that comes from nowhere and therefore comes from somewhere.

Somebody, somewhere, had just come to the end of something.

She did the sum in the changing room, on her phone, starting again twice because her fingers were cold.

A hundred and thirty-four times four hundred: fifty-three thousand six hundred.

Plus two hundred and seventeen euros and forty-three centimes.

Fifty-three thousand eight hundred and seventeen euros and forty-three centimes.

She looked at that number. It meant nothing to her. It was not a price, or a salary, or a settlement, or any debt she knew of. It was a number that had come from elsewhere and stopped at her door.

She finished dressing. She said goodbye to Nordine and Sofiane. She went to fetch her car from the staff car park, in the dark of seven in the morning in December, and scraped the windscreen with a supermarket loyalty card because she never has a scraper.

She went home. She ate standing up. She slept until two in the afternoon.

And on waking, before she had even opened her eyes, she thought one whole sentence, perfectly clear, as if somebody had said it to her in her sleep:

Next month there will be nothing.