The company scanned the fronts of the cards. The backs were not data. For thirty-one years Hennie Steenkamp sold funeral policies door to door in a town of eighteen thousand people in the Free State. Four doors in eleven let him in. Once he was at a kitchen table the sale was already made, and everything after that was eleven minutes of paperwork and forty minutes of listening. He wrote what people said on the back of the client card. The hymn a man did not want. The son in Durban who does not speak to them. She asked me what happens if she outlives the policy. I explained. She asked again in a different way about twenty minutes later. I think she was asking something else. The branch closed in 2016 and the files went to Bloemfontein in a van. Four boxes in a back-office cupboard were marked for destruction, and a man read the instruction on the cupboard door, understood it completely, and carried them out to a bakkie in eleven minutes. They have been on a shelf above the paint ever since. Now he is retired, and there is nothing in the diary, and the death notices come on Tuesdays and Fridays. He goes to the funeral of a man he sold a Plan C in 1997, and a daughter takes his arm with both hands and says the sentence that everybody in that hall is saying — and on this one occasion out of three hundred and forty, it happens to be true. Within a year he is the most quietly consequential person at every funeral in that town, and he is holding four thousand people's private conversations in a garage, without consent, having removed them from an employer. Dry, funny and quietly devastating, Cover Note takes apart a condolence letter with a destruction instruction inside it, a governance template with a four-hundred-character box, a committee that deferred a matter twice because nobody could summarise it, and sixty-four years of funeral sandwiches financed out of a tin — and finds, underneath all of it, a shoebox behind the paint with a hundred and four living people in it. From the author of Table Eleven, The Second Call and Proof of Life.
