The Coat

You can't sit down to cry in Pit Nine. You cry with a shovel in your hands, or you don't cry.

Bea's "Dig" had done the same thing to my hands as Gus's "Keep hauling". I found that out about twenty minutes later, when the rails were clear and there was no more spilled coal in front of me, and my hands opened by themselves. Bea saw it happen. She went white, and said sorry, and I said it had helped, which was true. After that, everybody was very careful what they said to me.

We worked our way down the haulage for the rest of the second shift, pushing empties down and walking full carts back up, a bit further each time, the way Gus had said. I didn't have a lamp any more. I worked in the edge of Bea's light, or Pim's, and when they moved I moved with them.

I kept turning round to say things to Tobin.

Not big things. Stupid things. A miner on the rope had a patch on his trousers in the shape of a boot, and I turned round to show him, because he'd have laughed. There was a sign on the wall that said NO RIDING ON THE TUBS, and I turned round to ask him what a tub was. He'd have known. He always knew the useless things.

Every time I turned round, he wasn't there, and every time it was a surprise.

I counted. Eleven times, before I made myself stop.

The joke was worse.

When someone dies, you still have them. You have the way they talked and the stupid things they said. That's the deal. That's what you're supposed to get to keep.

I had a hole the exact shape of a joke.

I kept going back to it. A ladder. A miner, maybe. That was all. I knew he'd told it at my desk on Sunday, and that I'd laughed at it at crib with my hands over my mouth, and that he'd looked so pleased.

I had all of that. I had the laugh. I didn't have the thing I was laughing at.

Halfway up the slope, Pim came and walked beside me.

"I could tell you it," he said quietly. "The joke. If you want."

I thought about it for a long time. Long enough to push a full cart thirty yards.

"Don't," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because then I'll just have your version."

Pim didn't understand. I didn't really either. I just knew that if he told it to me, it would be words in Pim's voice, and I'd nod, and it would be a joke I'd heard once from Pim. And the real one, the one Tobin told, the one I'd laughed at, would be gone for good instead of just missing.

Pim nodded anyway. He's a good friend. He knows when to stop asking.

Gus didn't talk to anyone.

He worked on his own, with his good arm, at the far end of the line from me. He worked too hard. He swung his shovel like the coal had done something to him.

At one point Pim said, not loudly, "You told him to keep hauling."

Gus turned round so fast his bad arm hit the cart.

"I told him to hold a rope," he said. "That's all I said. Hold a rope." His voice was getting louder, and the nearest lamps were starting to move. Down here a shout sounds like trouble, and trouble isn't work. He heard it and dropped to a hiss. "So don't you dare..."

He didn't finish. He turned back to the coal and hit it again, harder.

I didn't say anything. He was right. He was also wrong. I couldn't work out which one I was angrier about, so I didn't say anything at all.

Tamsin was at the top of the haulage, by the drum, where she'd been the whole time.

At about eight o'clock, I walked a full cart up to the top, unhooked it, and didn't go back down. I went over to her instead, with my shovel, scraping at the floor so it would look like work.

"You were standing right there," I said.

She looked at me. Properly, in the face. She'd started doing that at the gate.

"Yes."

"You're a Warden. Deep rank. You've got two silver bars. You could have done something."

"Yes."

"Then why didn't you?"

The lamps on the rope turned toward my voice. I didn't care. Ansel's head came up from the slope below.

Tamsin didn't raise her voice.

"Wardens don't help candidates," she said. "Not unless the land breaks containment. If we help, candidates learn to wait for us. Then they go into their next land, and there's no Warden there, and they wait, and they die." She said it flatly, like reading out a rule. "That's why."

"That's a lovely rule," I said. "Did you write it down? How he died? You said you would. In the tent. If you get yourselves killed, I write down how. Did you write it down?"

"Yes."

"Did you spell his name right? It's Tobin Edward Ashe. He told everyone. Make sure you put the Edward in. He'd want all of it."

She didn't answer.

"You'd have stood there whoever it was," I said. "Wouldn't you? Anyone at all. If there was a rule."

She was the only person down there who could have done something and hadn't. I needed it to be somebody's fault, and it couldn't be Tobin's.

Tamsin took it.

She didn't look away. She didn't argue. She didn't tell me I was upset, or that I didn't understand. She just stood there and let it land on her.

Then she said, "Your lamp's broken. Take mine." And she unclipped the lamp from her helmet and held it out.

I didn't take it.

After a while she clipped it back on.

I went back down the slope.

At the bottom of the haulage the rails split. One set ran on down into the dark. The lamp room was that way, Gus said. The other set curved round and came out on the slope we'd fallen down that morning, below the gate. Nobody had a map. The whole mine was one long, ugly circle.

We took the slope. At ten there'd be a roll call, and the man with the book was the only one down here who might know where Tobin had gone.

We worked our way up the rails toward the gate. Ansel's knee was so bad by now he was walking on the side of his foot. Bea kept taking Gus's shovel off him to carry it, and he kept taking it back. Pim was very quiet. He'd stopped telling us things.

Halfway up, Pim said, "What do we tell his mum?"

Everybody stopped. Then remembered, and started working again.

I thought about Ada Ashe, who coughs every winter from November to March. I thought about the grey coat in the window of Fennick's on Coal Street, with the big buttons and the collar that goes up past your ears. Twenty-two crowns. Tobin had spent twenty crowns of his coat money on my trial fee, because he was betting on me, and the odds were terrible.

"She gets the coat," I said.

"Iven."

"Ada Ashe gets the coat. Fennick's, Coal Street. Twenty-two crowns. I'm going to pass this trial, and get paid, and buy it, and take it to her myself."

"You've got four pennies," said Pim.

"Then I'd better pass."

Pim looked at me. Then he nodded, slowly, and went back to his shovel.

The whistle went just as we reached the gate. Three long blasts.

Ten o'clock. The change.

All over Pit Nine, the Shift stopped where it stood. The haulage went silent behind us. The humming stopped. Fifteen minutes when nobody had to work, and then the third shift. The last one. At six in the morning, Pit Nine would set.

On the far side of the gate, up in the gallery, a single electric bulb came on.

By its light I got my notebook out and wrote under the day's page, in small letters:

Tobin Edward Ashe. 18. Laundry boy. He came and got me.

When I looked up, the Foreman was standing at his tall desk. He opened his ledger, took the cap off his pen, and began to get ready for roll call.

I put my face to the bars.