Big Eddie Pratt, who did the early mornings and the bins, had asked her once — not about the wall, about her — whether she minded the nights. "Greta, you're fifty-two, you're mopping a cage at midnight, tell me you don't mind it and I'll call you a liar to your face."
"I mind the bins," she had said. "The nights are fine. At night nobody explains anything to me."
Eddie had laughed and repeated it to the day staff as evidence that she was, in his phrase, a deep one. She was not a deep one. She was a woman who had arranged her life into a shape that did not require her to be looked at, and who guarded that arrangement the way the wall guarded its photographs: without drama, by simply standing where she was.
Her locker was in the staff room at the back, a narrow metal box among narrow metal boxes, and in it she kept her work shoes, a thermos, a spare cardigan, and, at the back, under the cardigan, a pair of hand wraps gone the colour of weak tea. They were not hers. She had never used them; they would not have fitted the purpose anyway, being a man's wraps, cut long. She took them out perhaps twice a year, on no schedule she admitted to, and held them, and put them back. The cloth remembered a shape her hands did not ask it about. That was all. That was the whole ceremony.
The rest of the night had its own small ceremonies, and she kept them as faithfully. She liked the bags best of the equipment, the heavy bags especially, because a bag that has been hit ten thousand times develops a character, softer in the middle where the combinations land, and she wiped each one down with the respect due to an old sparring partner who never complains. She liked the ring when it was empty and lit only by the corridor spill, the canvas swept, the ropes still. A ring at rest is an honest piece of furniture. It does not pretend the things that happen in it are anything other than what they are.
She worked, as she had always worked, without music. Eddie liked the radio and sang; Greta preferred the building's own noises — the dehumidifier's tick from the cold store where old Barlow kept his tapes, the heating pipes knocking softly in the walls like someone thinking about getting up, the gulls settling on the roof and resettling. On the far side of midnight the cannery bones of the place made their small sounds, wood and iron contracting in the harbour cold, and she had come to read them the way she read the shipping forecast: ordinary information, calmly given, that kept a person from being surprised by weather.
Twice a night she stepped outside the side door for the air. Port Ellery at night was a working town asleep with one eye open: the ferry terminal lit and patient across the water, a forklift beeping somewhere in the dark of the yards, the smell of low tide and diesel and, from the bakery two streets up, the first bread. She stood with her tea gone cold in her hand and her face turned to the water, and if the town had opinions about its night cleaner it kept them, as she kept hers, to itself.
At two in the morning she made tea in the office and drank it standing at the high window, watching the harbour lights smear on the wet street. A ferry was coming in late, lit up like a small town, and she thought of Freya on the dispatch desk guiding it home, her daughter's voice calm in the dark wheelhouse of some tired captain. Twenty-eight years old and already the person other people steadied themselves on. Greta had steady hands herself once, in a different grammar. She did not think of it as loss. She thought of it the way you think of a language you no longer speak: it existed, it was hers, the words were still in there somewhere behind the newer ones, and that was enough.