Since You're Already in the File

If I ever need a digital forensic investigator to examine my drafts, I hope I get one who reads on the train. Somebody with forty minutes between stations and no particular interest in the scenery. I have a story that might suit him. It has a woman, a suitcase, and a man who ought to know better than to open it.

I understand that reading the story might not be part of the job. He could have perfectly good reasons to examine the files without caring what happens in them. This is an obstacle, but I have faced worse. My brother once read eleven pages of a manuscript because I had left a parking receipt in it and he wanted to know whether I was lying about where I’d been.

He kept going after he found the receipt. I count him among my readers.

The suitcase story has been through five versions. In the first, the woman brings home somebody else’s suitcase by mistake. In the second, she does it on purpose. In the third, there is no woman. I had got angry with her, which was unreasonable, since I had been making all her decisions. I gave the suitcase to a man at a bus station. He opened it immediately. The story was over in six pages and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to call that economy.

The woman came back. Her name was June. She worked nights and had a habit of answering questions from the next room. You could spend an entire evening with her and never quite have a conversation. I knew that much about her before I knew what she had brought home.

For a while it was money. Then it was somebody’s clothes. The clothes were better. She tried on a green dress and it fitted. That caused more trouble than the money had.

This is the sort of thing I would like to discuss with the investigator. Not necessarily during the paid portion of his visit. I have no objection to keeping the accounts straight. But when he shuts his equipment and asks whether I have any questions, I will have a question.

Did you get as far as the dress?

There is a possible answer I dislike more than no. It is that he did, but cannot remember it. A busy man. Many files. Perhaps he was hungry.

I am usually hungry myself, so I can excuse almost anything done before lunch. I have a harder time excusing a reader after it.

The old drafts used to lie around waiting for me to steal from them. A decent exchange on page nine could be removed from a failed story and put to work in another one. Nobody in the new story objected. They hadn’t known each other long enough. Sometimes I took a whole room: the chair, the window, the man refusing to sit down. I changed the weather and let them continue.

Now there is another possible use for those files. They might help establish that I wrote the finished thing rather than turned the job over to a generator. I can see myself gathering them with the eager care of a man who has finally found a reason to send somebody the attachments.

Here are the earlier versions, I would say. Here is the development.

And here, if you happen to open the second one, is the best conversation I ever cut.

June is wearing the dress. Her husband asks where it came from. She tells him it belongs to a woman who has somewhere to go. He asks if that is supposed to mean something. She says she doesn’t know yet.

It wasn’t good enough to keep. I liked her answer too much. I had given her a sentence she could stand behind while I avoided finding out what she wanted. In the next draft she tells him it was on sale. He asks how much. She gives him a price they can afford, and he goes back to what he was doing.

I think that version is better. I have also just spent a paragraph telling you the other one.

I haven’t finished with June. There is a version in which the suitcase’s owner comes to the door. He is a small man in a wet coat. He looks past her husband and sees the dress. I kept expecting him to be angry. I gave him several angry things to say and took them all away. In the version I have now he asks whether she has found a pair of glasses in the side pocket. He needs them to drive home.

I like him. That is inconvenient. I had wanted him to make the husband jealous, then disappear.

So there will be another file. I would have kept it anyway. I want to see what the little man does once he can see properly, and whether June changes out of the dress before she brings the suitcase down.

If you open that one, you don’t have to finish. But don’t tell me you liked it just because you want to leave. Tell me where you stopped.

Primary statement: Caine Prize confirms 2026 winner following suggestion of AI use.

Source: African writing award probe finds ’no evidence’ winning story was AI generated