The Lamp Tally

There was a man behind the hatch.

I hadn't seen him from the door. He'd been further back, among the shelves. Now he came and stood at the hatch with a cloth in one hand and a lamp in the other, the way a man behind a counter comes over when the shop bell goes. No face, the same as the rest of them. His helmet lamp settled on us and stayed.

Nobody needed telling. But there was nothing to dig. There was a wall full of brass.

"Somebody keeps them polished," I said.

So we polished them, with handkerchiefs and shirt strips and sleeves, one tally at a time, and hung each one back exactly where it had been. Ansel couldn't stand any more. He sat on the floor under the hooks with his bad leg out, and Pim handed tallies down to him.

The man at the hatch watched us. After a while he started cleaning the lamp in his hand, but he didn't go away from the hatch.

Tamsin had stopped just inside the door from the old road. She looked round the room once, at the hooks, the hatch, the sign, the man.

"It's keeping its rules in here," she said. "Containment's mended."

Then she took a tally down from the hook nearest the door and polished it, slowly, with her book open in her other hand. Watching. Not helping.

"Lucky us," I said.

She didn't answer. I hadn't expected her to.

Gus polished with one hand, a tally pressed against his chest with his bad arm, and he read while he did it. First the sign over the hatch. Then the hooks.

I watched him do it. He read them like a ledger, top left to bottom right, and his face got sharper as he went.

Under every hook there was a little brass plate with a name stamped into it. A. HOYLE. S. KETT. W. BRYCE.

"They're all here," said Gus. "Everyone from roll call." He tapped a tally. "A man comes to that hatch at the start of the shift, hands in his tally, gets a lamp. His tally goes on his hook. That's how the company knows who's down." He looked at the sign. "Lamps issued by tally. No tally, no lamp. And you don't get a tally unless you're in the book."

I looked at my palm. Mine wasn't the kind you could hand over a counter.

"What about one off a hook?" said Pim.

"A tally on a hook's already got its lamp out. You'd be handing in a man who's down the pit." Gus shook his head. "No."

"So we can't just take one," said Bea.

"Taking one without a tally breaks the rule on the sign." He smiled, not at anyone. "That's the catch. That's the whole trial. Saul tells you to bring a lamp up, and he knows you can't."

"So nobody can pass," said Pim.

"Nobody stupid."

"People pass," said Ansel, from the floor. "Not many. You sign a paper after, saying you won't tell how." He rubbed a tally with his thumb. "Nobody ever told me."

"My father passed this," said Gus.

He said it to the hooks, not to us. Then he went back to reading them.

The names went on and on. Most of them full. Then, toward the end of the last row, short ones. J. PASK. A few hooks on, D. CORLEY.

The last hook in the last row had a tally on it that was different from all the others.

It was new. The brass was bright, the yellow kind that's never been handled. The edges were still sharp. The number stamped in the middle was so clean it looked like it had been done that evening.

The plate under it said T. ASHE.

I stood there with my sleeve over my hand.

At the Rumour Desk there's a board behind Mrs. Odell's chair, with a hook for every clerk's key, and Tobin always used to stare at it while he waited in the queue. He told me once he wanted a job with a key. Any job. Just so he'd have a hook with his name on it.

He'd got one.

I took the tally off its hook. It was cold, and heavier than it looked. I wanted to put it in my pocket. I wanted it so badly my hand closed round it on its own.

The wages of a man unable to attend may be collected by a mate on presentation of his tally.

I didn't know why I thought of that. It was just there, the way the signs always are.

The man at the hatch had lifted his head. His lamp was on my hand.

I polished the tally, and hung it back on the last hook, exactly where it had been.

Gus had finished with the hooks. He went and crouched by Ansel, still rubbing a tally with his thumb.

"Your rule," he said. "From the slope, after the shot. On the gate, not on the mine."

Ansel looked up at him. "What about it?"

"A rule's only where the lie put it. That's what you said."

"That's what I said." Ansel frowned. "Why?"

Gus didn't answer. He stood up and pulled the strap of his canvas case tighter on his shoulder.

"What's the plan?" I said.

"Mine."

"Gus."

"I'm not sharing a plan with the Rumour Desk boy," said Gus. "You'd fine it." He looked round at all of us, Bea, Pim, Mags, Ansel on the floor. "You lot are good at polishing."

"You can't go on your own," said Bea.

"I don't carry passengers." He said it the way he'd said it in the tent, nearly. Not quite. "And I've told enough people what to do today."

There was a second door in the right-hand wall, a narrower one. He opened it and went through, and it swung shut behind him.

Tamsin watched him go. She wrote one line in her book. She didn't move from the wall.

Mags hung a tally on its hook and looked along the row at the last one.

"You put it back," she said.

"It's his."

"I'd have kept it."

"He'd have taken you for it." I nodded at the hatch.

"Probably." She rubbed the next tally. "I'd still have wanted it."

She didn't say it to be cruel. She just would have. She was twenty, and she'd been on her own down here for sixteen hours with her face blacked, and she'd crossed Tobin off with one straight line and then told us his mother's maiden name. I didn't know what to make of Mags. I still don't.

She was working nearest the second door. After a minute she stopped with a tally halfway to its hook, her head on one side, listening.

"His boots went left," she said. "Round to the front. The lamp room's open at the front, onto the rails. I saw it through the hatch." She looked up at the sign over the hatch. "He thinks the rule's only on the hatch."

The rule's on the gate. It's not on the mine. Lies are lazy like that.

I looked at Ansel. Ansel had gone grey.

"I said that," he said.

"It's not about the hatch," said Mags. "Miners don't steal lamps."

And then I understood the rest of it. Gus hadn't needed a plan to share. He'd needed us in here, working, so the man at the hatch would stand at the hatch and watch us polish, with his back to the front.

He hadn't told us, because we'd have said no.

"Gus," said Bea. She'd stopped polishing. She was looking at the narrow door.

Through the hatch, I saw the lamp-man's head come up.

His lamp swung away from us, all the way round, toward the far end of the lamp room, where the shelves opened out onto the dark.

In its light, on the end shelf by the open front, there was a gap in the row of lit lamps.

Above the front of the lamp room, out of sight, a bell began to ring.