Conflicting Reports

by Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The tasks came in overnight, and Lorraine Hirst looked at them in bed before she put the light on. They arrived as pins on a map. A green pin was a business to be confirmed open. A grey pin was one somebody had reported closed. An orange pin was a Conflict, which meant that two or more people had said two or more things about the same place, and the system, which could not go and look, wanted someone to go and look.

Green paid three pounds eighty. Grey paid the same. Orange paid six pounds ten, plus mileage at nineteen pence once you had done more than fifteen miles in a day, and Lorraine liked the orange ones because they were usually wrong in an interesting way. A nail bar that was also a funeral director. A Methodist chapel listed as a gym. A bus shelter in Mossley that had collected eleven reviews as a restaurant, two of them five stars.

She had done this for fourteen months. Before that she had done the meter readings for an energy company that had since stopped existing, and before that she had been married. She lived over a vape shop in Stalybridge, where the smell came up through the floor at about ten in the morning, sweet and chemical, like a fairground somebody had boiled. She drove a 2011 Corsa with a cracked rear light and a phone cradle that did not grip. The work was not bad. You were outside. You were nobody's. Nobody came round the end of an aisle and asked you how you were getting on.

That Tuesday there were nine pins. Eight were round Hyde and Dukinfield, a cluster of greys in the same parade, where the landlord had evidently given up. The ninth was orange and was a long way off on its own, up on the top road where the map turned from cream to the pale brown it used for nothing in particular.

THE HALFWAY. Café. Conflicting reports: permanently closed (3), open (5), does not exist (1). Please verify. Storefront photo with signage required.

She opened the listing. There was a photograph that had been taken from a moving car, of a low pebbledashed building with a flat roof and a sign she could not read. It had been taken in sun, which on the top road meant it was old. Under the photograph were the reviews. Best bacon barm on the tops. Proper tea, in a pot. Closed for years mate dont bother. Lovely lady, warm in there. Gone, just a slab. Brilliant after the walk from the dam. The newest of the good ones was nine days old.

She did the greys first. It took her until half past one. The parade in Hyde had a closed bakery, a closed bookmaker, a closed shop that had sold wedding dresses and still had one in the window, gone the colour of weak tea, the hem pinned up with a clothes peg. She photographed each one through the glass, with the date on the screen, and pressed the button that said Permanently closed, and watched the pin go from grey to nothing. You looked at a place, and you said what it was, and it went out.

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Up on the top road the weather started at the cattle grid. Below it, the afternoon was flat and white and ordinary. Above it, the cloud came down onto the moor like something laid there to cool, and the Corsa went into it and the hedges stopped and there was only the wall on the left and the white line on the right and the wipers going. She drove at twenty-five. Lorries came out of it at her with their lights on and went by, close enough to rock the car, and then the road was empty for a long time.

The blue dot on the phone slid along the line. The orange pin came up on the right. She slowed and indicated to nobody and pulled into the lay-by.

The Halfway was there.

It was the building in the photograph, more or less: one storey of pebbledash the colour of porridge, a flat roof with a lip of rotten felt, a bay window running with condensation so that the inside was a pale yellow blur. There was a board on the wall with the name on it in red capitals, the paint gone soft at the edges, and under it a smaller board, hand-lettered, TEAS · BREAKFASTS · WALKERS WELCOME. Two cars in the lay-by besides hers, both very wet. A smell of fat and coal smoke. Somewhere, a radio.

She got out and took the photograph. Signage, entrance, the window, the date at the bottom of the screen. The app asked her to confirm her location, and she confirmed it, and it thought about it and showed her a message she had seen before only in town, between tall buildings. GPS accuracy low. Your position may be approximate. On the map the blue dot was out on the moor, four hundred metres north of the road, with nothing round it.

She went in because it was cold.

Inside it was a café. That was what she would remember afterwards, when she tried to: that there had been nothing to notice. Eight tables with wipe-clean cloths in a pattern of lemons. A counter with a glass case of sandwiches under cling film and a tea urn the size of a dustbin, ticking. A calendar from a feed merchant, still on the right month. A man with a dog under his table and his boots off, his socks steaming against the radiator. A couple in waterproofs, not talking, sharing a newspaper by holding half each. The radio was on the shelf behind the counter. It was playing the kind of song that is always on in places like this, a woman singing about a train, and the reception kept going under and coming back.

The woman behind the counter was about sixty. She had a fleece on with the name of a quarry company on it, and reading glasses on a cord, and she looked at Lorraine with the patience of someone who has seen every possible person come through that door wet.

"You're open," Lorraine said.

"Well," the woman said. She looked round the room, at the man with the dog, the couple, the fogged window. "Looks like it."

Lorraine laughed. She hadn't meant to. "Sorry. It's my job. I check places. You've got people online saying you've shut."

"Have I." The woman did not seem much interested. "What can I get you?"

She had tea, which came in a metal pot with a dent in the lid, and a bacon barm, which came with the bacon hanging out of it on all sides and the butter gone into the bread. It was very good. It cost three pounds forty for both, which was cheap but not stupidly cheap, not the sort of price that means something. She sat in the window. Her coat began to steam. The song about the train finished and another came on, and then a man talking about a road closure somewhere she had never heard of, and then the reception went under altogether and there was only a soft roar, like the sea, or like the urn.

Outside the bay window the fog stood very close to the glass. Once it thinned, and she saw the moor going up behind the lay-by, heather and bent grass and a line of old grouse butts, and a long way off the flat shine of a reservoir, and then the cloud came back. She thought, afterwards, that the reservoir had been on the wrong side. The dam was south of the road. She had driven across it. But she had not been sure at the time, and she was not sure afterwards either, and in any case you could not tell anything up there in that weather.

When she went to pay, the woman was wiping the counter in long slow strokes.

"How long have you been here?" Lorraine asked.

"Since about seven."

"I meant the café."

The woman stopped wiping and looked at her over the glasses, as if Lorraine had asked something slightly impolite, like her age.

"It's always been here," she said. "Somebody has to be."

In the car Lorraine pressed Open. The pin turned green, then disappeared, which meant it had been accepted. Six pounds ten. She drove down out of the cloud with the heater on full and her hands smelling of bacon, and at the cattle grid the afternoon came back, flat and white and ordinary, the same afternoon, as if it had waited.

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The following Tuesday the Halfway was back on the map, orange.

Conflicting reports: permanently closed (4), open (6), does not exist (2). Please verify.

There was a note under it in a different colour, the first time she had ever seen one. Your previous report for this location conflicts with the consensus of verified contributors. Repeated conflict may affect your Trust Score.

Her Trust Score was ninety-one. She did not know what it did. It had been ninety-four.

She opened her photographs from the week before. They were all there: the porridge pebbledash, the red capitals, TEAS · BREAKFASTS · WALKERS WELCOME, the steamed window with the yellow blur inside. She looked at them on the bed with the vape shop opening up underneath her, someone dragging out a sandwich board, and she enlarged the window until it was only squares of colour, and there was nothing wrong with it at all.

She did her greens and greys. She did a fish bar in Ashton and a chiropodist in Denton that turned out to be the chiropodist's house, a semi with a brass plate and a wheelie bin with the number painted on in white gloss. Then she drove up to the cattle grid.

It was clear that day. It was so clear you could see the turbines on the far edge going round, small and slow and white, like something in a mobile over a cot. The moor was brown and gold and very large, and the road went across it with nothing on it but her, and she could see the lay-by from half a mile off, and there was nothing in it.

She stopped anyway.

There was a slab. It was a concrete slab about the size of a tennis court, cracked across, with rushes coming up through the cracks and a sheep sitting on the far corner of it chewing at nothing. At one end there were two rusted steel posts where a sign had been. Along one edge there were the stubs of a wall, two courses of blockwork, a drainpipe broken off at the height of her knee. In the corner of the slab, where the counter might have been, if you wanted it to have been, somebody had dumped a mattress, and the mattress had been out there long enough to go the colour of the ground.

She took a photograph. It was a good photograph. The light was beautiful. The sheep looked at her.

GPS accuracy low, the app told her. Your position may be approximate. The blue dot was out on the moor again, four hundred metres north, on its own.

She stood on the slab for a while. The wind came over the top with nothing to stop it and went into her coat and through it. She could hear a curlew somewhere, and the far-off noise of a lorry gearing down on the Yorkshire side, and under it, if she let herself, something that might have been a radio, a woman singing about a train, the reception going under. She did not let herself. It was the wind in the posts. It was the wire fence. She walked out to the end of the slab and back, and counted, and it was thirty-one of her paces.

The options came up on the screen. Open. Temporarily closed. Permanently closed. Does not exist.

She sat in the Corsa with the door open and looked at them for a long time. She thought about the woman wiping the counter. She thought about the man with his socks steaming, and the couple holding half a newspaper each, as though they had agreed long ago on a way of sharing everything that left them both with half. She thought about the bakery in Hyde going out, and the wedding dress in its window with the hem pinned up.

She pressed Open.

---

After that it came up every week, and every week she went. She did not always go on Tuesdays. Sometimes she drove up when there was no pin at all, in the evenings, after the greys, and sat in the lay-by with the engine running and the radio on, and once, in rain, she thought she saw the yellow blur of a lit window through the cloud on the right of the road, and drove on another mile before she understood that it was a farm, and had always been a farm, and that she knew the farm, and had verified it in the spring. Open. Free-range eggs. An honesty box.

The note under the pin got longer. Your reports for this location have been flagged for review. Contributors with a low Trust Score may receive fewer tasks. Her score went to eighty-six, then seventy-nine. The tasks thinned. Instead of nine pins in the mornings there were four, then three, all of them grey, all of them a long way apart, so that the mileage ate the money. She did them. She photographed a shut carpet warehouse in Glossop, a shut social club with the snooker table still in it under a dust sheet, a shut garden centre where somebody had kept on watering the hanging baskets by the door. She stood in front of each one and said what it was, and it went out.

Her daughter rang from Leeds on a Sunday and asked how the job was going, and Lorraine said it was going fine, and her daughter said, "You sound miles away," and Lorraine said, "I'm in the car," which was true.

In November there was a review on the Halfway that had not been there before. It had no stars. Was up there last week, no café, just a woman sat in a red car in the layby for about two hours. Engine running. Thought she was going to do something stupid. Rang it in but they said no one was there.

She read it several times. She did not remember anybody stopping. She had not seen another car all afternoon. She went back through the photographs on her phone, the slab, the posts, the mattress, the beautiful light, as though she might be in one of them, at the edge of the frame, waiting.

---

The account was suspended at the beginning of December. The email was very polite. It thanked her for her contribution to building a more accurate picture of the world. Her outstanding balance of thirty-eight pounds ninety would be paid in the next cycle.

She drove up anyway. She did not know what else to do with a Tuesday.

It was the short end of the afternoon, and the cloud was down to the cattle grid, and she went into it at twenty-five with the wall on the left and the white line on the right. There were no lorries. The lay-by came up out of the white where it always did, and she pulled in, and there was nothing in it that she could see, which meant nothing, since she could not see further than the bonnet. She turned the engine off. Then she turned it back on, for the heater, and sat.

The app still opened. It would not give her tasks, but it would still show her the map, the cream and the pale brown and the thin line of the top road, and the blue dot that meant her. GPS accuracy low. Your position may be approximate. The dot was four hundred metres north, out on the moor, on its own, where it had always been.

She put the phone in the cradle, which did not grip, and propped it with her purse.

The fog moved against the windscreen. Somewhere out in it, very faint, a radio was playing, and going under, and coming back.

On the screen the blue dot moved. It was not much. It went a few metres further north, and stopped, the way you stop when you have heard something and are listening. Then it went on, slowly, at the speed of somebody walking on heather in bad light, picking their way, not in any hurry, away from the road and the lay-by and the car, into the part of the map that was only colour.

Lorraine sat with her hands on the wheel and the engine running and watched it go.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Fictiōnis Sōlācium Recūsantis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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