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The Two Birth Certificates
Marrow Quay is an estuary town of eleven thousand people, a register office on Quay Street, a depot at Ashgrove where carriage doors are fitted, and a flat at number four on Wren Court with a kitchen that is the only warm room in it.
- ~406 min (estimated)
- 89390 words
- 75 scenes
- 22 branch points
- 5 endings
38 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Wren Aldiss, 41, works at the register office counter. She has spent nineteen years issuing certified copies of birth and marriage certificates to other people, correcting transcription errors in the index, and explaining to strangers what a document can and cannot prove. She knows the mechanism. She can describe, in eleven minutes, every route by which a person becomes a document. Her husband, Bo Ferreira, 43, was born on 4 March 1983 in Ilorin and was registered on 11 September 1991 in Oyo, eight years and six months late, because the register was not sitting. The person who filled the notification slip that night was his aunt Ngozi Iwu, 74, a ward clerk, who was angry with a rent collector named Oluwole Adeniyi and wrote that man's name on the slip because it was the name in her mouth. The registration went through. It says Oluwole. It says born in Ibadan, ninety-four kilometres from
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- A false civil registration and a declaration of truth made in a prescribed form in 2014
- A marriage that is annulled on paper and cannot be copied in any future
- A woman's body altered by surgery at 36 and a loss of a pregnancy that never happened
- The death of a woman of 71 in Lagos, described in a letter and not depicted
- Vascular dementia and a left-sided stroke in a woman of 74, and her giving evidence by video link in court
- A fire in a registry annex in 1994 that destroyed six thousand registrations and was never reported
- A public correction published as item 41 of a monthly notice, and a stranger's search in Lagos
- Financial distress, a house sold, and a credit union emptied
Cast
- W Wren Aldiss Counter and records clerk at the Marrow Quay Register Office, nineteen years, and the woman who verified the certificate the marriage was made on no portrait yet
- B Bo Ferreira Motor fitter on carriage doors at Ashgrove depot, nights, four on four off, and the person named in every document in the file no portrait yet
- P Priti Sandhu Solicitor and partner at Naylor Crombie, estates, nationality and family, and the person who states the true thing on the first meeting no portrait yet
- R Ruairi Donnelly Retired registrar who solemnised the marriage at 12 Quay Street on 7 June 2014, keeps eleven boxes of copies in his son-in-law's garage, and can recite the entry no portrait yet
- N Ngozi Iwu Ward's aunt, ward clerk at Baptist Medical Centre 1979 to 1989, writer of the notification slip in 1983, and the only witness and the only person who knew the father no portrait yet
- Y Yvette Okonjo-Hall Indexer and records officer at the General Register Office, Fishpond Lane, who found the discrepancy in the eleven-monthly audit and who is entirely correct no portrait yet
- M Marianne Holt Counter assistant at the register office from 2 December 2024, who followed the rule correctly and is not a villain no portrait yet