The First Door

I'd shoved the notebook in my pocket and grabbed my prop, and now I dropped it. Everybody did. You can't run with a pit prop on your shoulder in a tunnel built for men who walked.

Behind us, the props in the roof were going one after another. Crack. Then a heavy, sliding roar. Crack. The roar again, closer. Each crack was a few yards nearer than the last, and the gaps between them were getting shorter.

I ran in the dark. I had no lamp, so I ran at Pim's, jumping about in front of me, and tried not to think about the roof.

"Keep going," Gus shouted from the front. "It slopes down. Keep going."

Then Ansel went over.

I heard it more than saw it. A grunt, and a thump, and his lamp spinning across the floor of the tunnel. His knee had finally given up. He'd been walking on the side of his foot for hours, and it had held out longer than anyone had any right to expect.

I turned back.

Bea was already there. She got under one of his arms and I got under the other, and Ansel was saying, "Leave it, leave it, go," and we didn't, and he was very heavy.

Behind him, the roof was coming. I could see it in the light of his lamp on the floor. The tunnel just ended in a moving wall of black, and the wall came down the road toward us like something walking.

Then Tamsin stopped running.

She'd been at the back, behind Ansel, the nearest of all of us to the fall. Now she turned round and faced it.

She dropped her shovel. She pulled the glove off her right hand with her teeth. I'd never seen her without the gloves. Her hand was pale and ordinary.

She held it out in front of her, flat, fingers together, the way you'd put your hand on a door to push it shut.

And she pushed.

The fall hit the air a few yards from her hand and stopped.

It didn't slow down. It stopped. Rock and coal and splintered wood came down and down into the space in front of her, and all of it stopped at the same place, at a line I couldn't see, as if it had hit something. The noise went on for a second after, rumbling, settling. Dust rolled out over us, and settled.

Then it was quiet.

Tamsin stood with her hand out for another moment. Then she looked round.

She looked at me first. Before Ansel, who Bea and I had let down onto the floor. Before any of us. Just for a second.

Then she put her glove back on and picked up her shovel.

"Falls don't do that," said Ansel.

He was sitting against the wall with his bad leg out straight, and Bea was already feeling his knee. He said it to Tamsin.

"No," said Tamsin.

"Falls come down where they come down. They don't chase you."

"No."

"So what was it?"

She didn't answer that. She said, "A land keeps its own rules. That's containment. When it stops keeping them, I stop keeping mine." She looked at all of us. "Until I say it's mended, you stay where I can see you."

Gus opened his mouth.

"All of you," said Tamsin.

He shut it.

I went and looked at the fall.

The face of it was flat. Broken rock and coal and the ends of snapped props, all jammed together, and the front of it as flat and straight as a door, from the floor to the roof. I put my hand on it. It didn't move. It felt like it would never move again.

The deep gallery was on the other side of it. The buffer and the notice board and the stack of props. A cart going back and forth on the rails. Tobin.

"Can you open it again?" I said.

Tamsin was behind me. I hadn't heard her come.

"No," she said.

That was all. She didn't say sorry, or why, or that there was another way round. Just no.

I turned round.

"Where was this when Tobin went?"

The others had gone quiet behind us. Tamsin didn't look at them.

"When Tobin went, the mine did what it always does," she said. "That was its rule. This wasn't."

"So if it had broken its own rules to take him, you'd have stepped in."

"Yes."

"But it took him the proper way. By the rules. So you watched."

"Yes."

I wanted her to argue. I wanted her to give me something to push against. She just stood there with her gloves on and her shovel in her hand and let me look at her, the way she had at the top of the haulage. She'd just saved Ansel's life, and I knew it, and I didn't care.

I got my notebook out. Pim, without being asked, came and held his lamp over the page.

About midnight. The old road came down behind us and chased us. Ansel says falls don't do that. Tamsin stopped it with her hand. She called it containment. She can't open it again.

I wrote it small and fast. When I looked up, Tamsin was watching the pencil.

"You still write everything down," she said.

Then her face did something, very quick, and was still again.

"Still?" I said.

She'd watched me write all day. That wasn't how she'd said it.

She turned and walked past me, up toward the front.

"We're going," she said. "Bea, can he walk?"

"No," said Bea. "But he's going to anyway."

Pim went and fetched Ansel's lamp from where it had rolled, and put it back on his helmet for him.

We went on down the old road. No miners were watching us, so nobody had to work. That should have felt like a rest, and it didn't.

Tamsin walked at the front, and looked back at us every few steps. I walked right behind her, because I was angry and it was the only place I could keep being angry at her properly. Gus came after me, then Mags, then Pim. Bea and Ansel came last, slowly, Ansel leaning on his shovel and swearing under his breath with every step.

Still.

I'd never met her before Monday. I'd have remembered. She wasn't someone you'd forget.

I'm good at noticing when somebody's said more than they meant to. I do it for a living. And I could feel it sitting there, that one word, like a stone in a boot.

The road sloped down. The air got warmer. Up ahead, the light from Tamsin's lamp found a wooden door.

It was an ordinary door. Old planks, black with dust, an iron latch, and LAMP ROOM painted across it in the same white as the arrow. Light came out round the edges. Not lamplight from a helmet. Steadier than that, and whiter.

Tamsin stopped in front of it.

I stopped behind her. So did everyone else. We waited for her to open it.

She didn't.

She stood there with her hands at her sides, looking at the door. She didn't reach for the latch. She didn't look back at us. She just waited, very still.

"Well?" said Gus.

Nothing.

I reached past her and lifted the latch and pushed the door open.

I didn't think about it. It was a door and she was standing at it, so I opened it. Anyone would have.

She went through without looking at me.

Behind me, I heard the small scratch of a pencil. Mags was writing something down.

The room on the other side was small and made of brick, and every inch of one wall was covered in hooks.

Row after row of them, and on most of the hooks hung a small round disc of brass, with a hole at the top and a number stamped in the middle. They shone. Somebody kept them polished.

I knew exactly what they were. I had one burned into my palm.

On the far side of the room there was a wooden counter with a hatch in the wall behind it, the kind you buy a train ticket through. The white light was coming through the hatch, steady and bright, and behind it I could see the edges of shelves, and on the shelves, lamps. Rows and rows of lamps, every one of them lit.

Above the hatch, there was an enamel sign, white on red, cleaner than any sign I'd seen in Pit Nine.

LAMPS ISSUED BY TALLY TO MEN ON THE BOOKS.