Fresh Ink

The bars were cold. I kept my face against them anyway, because the cold was good on the burns.

During the change, Pit Nine is the quietest place I've ever been. No picks. No carts. No humming. Behind us, down the slope, the Shift stood wherever the whistle had caught them. On the far side of the gate, the gallery was full of them again. Somebody had cleared the shot while we were at the haulage. There were miners on every step of the face, tools on their shoulders, lamps pointed at the desk, waiting.

The Foreman turned a page. Then another. He was looking for his place.

"Two minutes past," said Bea. She'd started telling us the time whether we asked or not. I think it helped her to have something to say.

Then one of the miners on the slope turned its head.

There were four of them, a few yards down from us, by the wall. They'd been clearing the coal from the shot when the whistle went, and they'd stopped mid-swing, shovels full. Three of them were still stopped.

The fourth turned its head. Then it lowered its shovel and leaned it against the wall.

Nothing moves during the change. I'd seen the whole mine stop twice now, every lamp, every man. I'd never seen one move before the whistle.

It walked toward us.

Pim made a small noise. Gus got his good hand on the strap of his canvas case. Ansel lifted his shovel off the ground, slowly, as if a fast movement might count against him.

It stopped a few feet away. It was small. Its lamp was pointed at the ground.

"If you hit me with that," it said to Gus, "I'll put it in my notes."

It wiped its face with its sleeve. Under the coal dust there was a mouth, and a sharp chin, and two eyes that were very red round the edges.

"Mags," said Bea.

A few yards down the slope, Tamsin hadn't moved. She didn't look surprised. I didn't ask her why.

Her hands were wrapped in strips torn off her shirt. The strips were black, and in places where the blood had come through, they were blacker.

"Where have you been?" said Bea.

"Here." Mags looked down the slope. "Down there. Up here. Wherever they were."

"You followed me this morning," said Gus. "I saw you."

"I wanted to see which way not to go." She looked at his arm. "I was right."

She told it quickly, the way she'd asked our ages in the tent. There was a door at the back of the brick room that nobody else went through, so she went through it. Two hours of ladders. She came out on this slope at about eight in the morning, rubbed coal dust into her face and her coat and her hands until she was the same colour as them, picked up a shovel, and stood in a line of miners. When the man in front of her dug, she dug. When he sat, she sat.

"At crib?" said Pim.

"He opened his tin. I opened my hand." She held one up, the black rags round it. "I ate nothing. Same as him."

"We were at crib this morning," said Bea. "In the gallery at the bottom."

"I know. I was about ten yards from you."

"Why didn't you come over?"

"Eight people in one place," said Mags. "They look harder."

That was Ansel's rule, from the first hour. Ansel looked as if he'd have liked to argue with it, and couldn't.

Then Mags looked at us properly. She went from face to face, and I watched her lips move. I know what counting looks like.

"Where's the boy with the jokes?"

Pim told her.

He did it short. Pim is good at telling things, and that night he told it in about six sentences and didn't make any of them funny. The rope. The crib whistle. The lamp. The wall. He left out the part where Tobin forgot my name. I couldn't tell if he did that on purpose.

Mags didn't write while he talked. When he'd finished, she took out her black notebook and found the page with all our names on it in small capitals, and she drew a line through one of them.

One straight line. The same as the name at the very top of the page.

"He had a name, you know," said Pim. His voice went up in the middle.

"I know," said Mags. "I wrote it down this morning." She closed the notebook. "His mother's maiden name was Linney. He told me. I didn't ask."

Pim opened his mouth and shut it again.

"He was working at crib," said Gus. He said it flatly, to the bars, not to any of us. "That's all it was. He knew the rule and he worked."

Mags shook her head.

"Everybody thinks it's about working. Look busy. That's what Saul told us." She pulled the rag tighter round one hand with her teeth. "It's not about working. It's about being a miner. Miners take crib."

For a second I couldn't get my breath properly.

At six o'clock I'd been the hardest-working man in Pit Nine. And every lamp on the haulage had turned on me, because a miner would have sat down.

"What else have you got in there?" I said, nodding at the notebook.

Mags looked at me. I've seen that look across the counter at the Rumour Desk. It's the look of someone deciding what a thing is worth.

"Am I with you?"

"Of course you are," said Bea.

Mags kept looking at me.

"Yes," I said.

She opened the notebook again and turned to a page near the back.

"He walks about with it under his arm. Up on that walkway over the slope. He reads it all the time. He runs his finger down it." She pointed through the bars at the tall desk. "But he only writes in it there. Never anywhere else. Always with that pen. He doesn't put the pen down and he doesn't lend it to anybody."

"Who'd he lend it to?" said Pim.

Mags ignored him.

"At six o'clock I sat right here, by the gate, for crib. He has his crib at the desk. He sits on a stool and opens his tin, and he leaves the book open next to it." She turned the page. "Halfway through, he put his bread down and wrote one name in. Then he picked his bread back up."

Six o'clock. Crib.

Bea looked at me. I didn't look back.

The Foreman took out his watch, checked it, and put it away.

"Albert Hoyle," he read.

Up on the steps, a miner came back to life. That's the only way I can put it. His head came up, and his hand.

"Here."

The Foreman made a small mark in the ledger. The miner walked down the steps and past the desk, and the gate swung open for him without a sound. He came through onto our side.

We got out of his way, all of us, pressed against the left-hand wall of the slope. I stayed at the end nearest the gate, where it was hinged to the rock, with my face to the bars. He walked down past us close enough to touch, his pick on his shoulder and his tin swinging at his belt. He didn't look at us. Nobody had blown the start whistle yet, and until somebody did, nobody had to work. Not even him.

"Samuel Kett."

"Here."

"Walter Bryce."

"Here."

The same names as the morning, in the same order. A few of them I could tell apart now. Kett had a limp. Bryce carried his pick on the wrong shoulder. I counted them as they went past. I couldn't help it.

Near the end of the page, the names changed.

"J. Pask."

"Here."

"New men," said Ansel, very low. "The company writes new men short. Just a letter and a name. You get the rest when you've been there long enough." He rubbed his knee. "My dad was short for six years."

Next to me, Mags's lips were moving again.

"D. Corley."

"Here."

My sister's going to ask me. About Corley.

I'd heard that name read out this morning. It hadn't meant anything then.

The miner who answered came down off the steps and through the gate, and as he passed, Bea's lamp went across him. I looked at him the way I'd look at a sign on a wall, top to bottom, every word. His face was gone, the same as theirs. His lamp burned the same. But every man in Pit Nine had his trousers tied at the knee with string, the way they did it sixty years ago.

Corley's weren't.

He went on down the slope into the dark. I decided I'd never tell Hester. Then I thought about her sister asking her, every spring, and I didn't know what I'd decided.

The Foreman turned to the bottom of the page. I could see it over his shoulder. The bulb hung right above it.

The last line was blacker than all the others. Newer than anything else on the page.

"T. Ashe," he read.

On the highest step of the gallery, a small miner lifted his head.

"Here."

The same voice as all the others, low and grinding, coal going down a chute. I'd been waiting for it to be his voice. I'd have known his voice anywhere. It wasn't.

He came down the steps. He was small and skinny, and he had a shovel on his shoulder, and the handle of the shovel was split.

My old shovel, the one I'd given him that morning. I'd been digging with Bea's ever since crib. I hadn't once thought to look for mine.

The Foreman made his small mark. The gate swung open, and Tobin came through it onto our side and down the slope toward us.

He went past me so close his sleeve nearly touched mine. His lamp went across my face and on, the same as all the rest. Coal dust from his hairline to his chin. Nothing there at all.

Pim's lamp followed him down. In it, the fingers of his free hand were moving against his leg as he walked. One, then the next, then the next, then back to the first.

"Tobin," I said.

He didn't stop.

Beside me, Gus had taken off his helmet. He held it against his chest with his good hand, the lamp still lit and shining into his coat, and he stood up straight and looked at nothing until Tobin had gone by. He'd been to eleven of these. He knew how you stand.

Then he put the helmet back on and didn't look at any of us.

I looked back at the ledger. T. Ashe.

He'd left out the Edward.

Tobin told everybody his whole name. He'd told Saul in the tent like he was being knighted. And down here, in the only book that mattered, he was a letter and a name, the same as a man who'd been there five minutes.

"Tobin Edward Ashe," I said to the bars, quietly. "If I could get at that book, I'd put it in myself."

Mags turned her head and looked at me. She kept looking.

"Is he safe now?" said Pim. He was watching the slope where Tobin had gone. "They can't take him again. Can they?"

"No," I said.

I hadn't known I knew it until I said it. Then it was all there at once, and I said the rest out loud so I'd hear whether it was stupid.

"Everybody in that book is a miner. That's what the book's for. This morning, at roll call, fifty of them stood on those steps with their tools on their shoulders for ten minutes, not working at all, and not one lamp looked at them twice. Because they were in the book." I put my hand on the bars. "The Shift doesn't touch a name in there. Not ever. He's a miner now."

"So he's safe," said Pim.

"Yes," I said, and wished I'd said anything else.

Thirty-two names. I'd counted. This morning there'd been thirty-one.

The Foreman shut the ledger with a soft thump that went all round the gallery. He took out his watch again.

The start whistle went, the long shriek, and all over Pit Nine the Shift woke up.

We went down the slope with coal on our shovels, because carrying coal counts. Mags had picked her own shovel up from the wall, and she carried it at the same tilt as the miners in front of her. She'd had fourteen hours to learn it.

At the bottom, the deep gallery was working the face. I went along it until I found a place near the far end, and I started to dig.

"Iven," said Pim.

"I know."

I stayed where I was.

Tobin was ten yards from me, pushing a full cart along the rails with another miner on the far side of it. Pushing, and pushing, and not stopping.

I had no lamp. I dug by the light of everyone else's. Now and then one came across me, the way they always did, and touched my hands on the shovel, and saw the work, and slid away. That's what happens when you're working. They see you, and they see the work, and they move on.

Tobin's lamp came round with the rest.

It touched my hands. It came up to my face.

I kept digging. Down the face, one after another, the other lamps moved on.

His didn't.