Good Standing

The city won. That is where the trouble starts.

Over sixty years it stamped out murder, robbery, arson, and the fear that used to make an old woman carry her keys through her knuckles from the bus stop to the door. There have been no prisons for forty years. Children walk home alone at eleven at night. All of this is true, and none of it is offered as an irony.
But an institution built to the scale of murder does not shrink when the murders stop. Every November the Descent Review meets, weighs the evidence, hears from the public, and adds to the Schedule of Scheduled Conduct the worst thing left. There is always a worst thing left. Two thousand three hundred and nine items, and every single one of them was proposed for a good reason by somebody entirely sincere.
Terrence Nye is a Municipal Damp Inspector. He is forty-four, patient, literal, and extremely good at working out where the water goes. His Standing is nine hundred and eighteen, which is respectable, and which he has never had to think about.
On a cold Tuesday in December he sits at the end of a bench with a sandwich he has made too big, next to an old woman in a wool coat who is not shivering, at four degrees, which anybody who works in unheated voids knows is the bad sign.
He offers her the last of it. She takes it. The whole thing lasts ninety-one seconds.
By seven o'clock that evening he has lost a hundred and fifty-six points, his band, and the permission that lets him do the only job he has ever wanted.
What follows is not a fight against tyranny. There is no tyranny. There is a Warden with the best clearance rate in the city who watered her own plant and gave him the honest advice; a Deputy Registrar who votes for the worst provision in the Schedule and makes them minute that she knew exactly what she was doing; a laundryman who kept an extract fan running for six years for a woman he never spoke to. Every one of them is right. Every rule is correctly applied. Nobody lies to him once.
And somewhere underneath all of it, in the ceiling voids and riser shafts and Victorian culverts that Terrence Nye has been crawling through for twenty-two years, there is another city entirely: older, wetter, and completely unwatched, and there is exactly one man alive who knows where it is, because he is the one who filed the paperwork.
*Good Standing* is a dystopia with no dictator in it. It is about how a place gets there one defensible step at a time, what a decent man will spend to keep a single conversation, and the extraordinarily narrow gap, roughly one politeness wide, through which a life can fall.

For readers of Orwell, Ishiguro, John Lanchester and *A Man Called Ove*, and for anybody who has ever read a rule, agreed with it, and been unable to sleep.