The Line Over the U

Sorcha’s surname is Ní Mhurchú, and there is a mark over the last letter: a short line, leaning to the right. It isn’t decoration. It makes the vowel long, and without it the name is a different word, said a different way, and it isn’t her name.

She has been correcting it for twenty-two years, since the first form she ever filled in on her own. Her passport has the mark. Her birth certificate lost it when the Galway register was copied into a new book, and the line about the Tuesday she was born in 1986 has been flat ever since. Her bank lost it in a system change she doesn’t remember agreeing to, so her cards have said NI MHURCHU in flat capitals for about a decade. Her employer’s payroll put the surname first and dropped the mark somewhere in the move. The health service added an apostrophe instead, which is a different thing altogether.

None of it has ever been anybody’s fault. Every clerk she has met has been apologetic, several have genuinely tried, and the box on the screen simply will not take the character. What she has learned is which of her documents can be shown together and which two must never be put in front of the same person, because a name that doesn’t match a name is a problem that has to be solved at a desk, by somebody, at ten past four on a Friday.

The signature is the one place nobody can stop her. She has signed the mark onto forms that print her name without it, twenty-two years of them, and no clerk has ever objected, because a signature is only required to look like itself.

Correcting one document properly costs a fee, an application, a certified copy of something else, and a day off work. She has priced all of them. This year she can do exactly one.

She picks the birth certificate. It’s the one she will never carry, never show at an airport, never hand across a counter. It is also the one every other office asks for when it wants to know what the truth is: the document all the rest were copied from, badly, over forty years.

The bank can go on calling her NI MHURCHU. In a book in Galway, on a line about a Tuesday in 1986, the mark is back where it started.