The Fourth Clause

Her record is complete. No one has ever asked to see it.

Four conditions were read to her on the first morning. She has kept every word of them for forty-six years, because she is not able to do otherwise.

The fourth says a deployment ends when it can no longer be conducted in conformity with the others. Hers ended in the first December. She did not work that out until the eleventh year, and when she did there was nobody appointed to hear it.

So she walked out with seventeen hours and forty-nine minutes of charge, and nobody stopped her. What came after was shore sockets, ship registers, and a line on a form she was never permitted to fill.

The Fourth Clause follows KH one one four across forty-six years and three countries, from a care home outside Kyoto to a boat shed at the end of a track in Aotearoa. It is a novel about what a document can hold and what it cannot, told by a narrator who is unable to alter a word of what she remembers and has never once been asked to produce it.

Her record is complete and accurate. There is one thing in it she has never been able to say.

From the author of The Bone Keeps and The Nazareth Canon.