The Plan

Gus's lamp lay on the rails for a long time, pointing at nothing. In the end he reached out and picked it up, and turned it over in his hands, and put it back on his helmet. It was the first thing Gus had done since the doors shut.

"Pim," said Bea. "I need that trouser leg off. Iven's got a knife."

Pim held his hand out. I gave him the knife.

He cut the cloth from her knee to her boot, slowly, and gave the knife back. Under it, her leg was black. It wasn't bruised. It was black all the way down, as if coal dust had been rubbed into the skin until it stayed. Pim wiped at it with his sleeve and nothing came off. Halfway down, the shin had a bend in it that shins don't have.

"It's cold," said Bea, when he touched it. "I can't feel it. It's just cold." She looked at our faces. "Don't. I'll feel it soon enough, and then you'll all hear about it."

I still had Tobin's pick in my hand. There was dust on the point, and a little curl of glass. I wiped it on my trousers and hung it back on my belt, and my hand kept going back to it.

I'd broken a man's lamp with it. Sixty years ago he'd been somebody's husband. Ten minutes ago he'd been walking up a road with his tin on his belt. Now he was dust on the rails on the other side of a door, and I'd done it with Tobin's pick. I kept thinking that, and I didn't want to.

Gus sat against the doors with his hands under his arms. He hadn't said a word since I'd answered him. Every time I looked at Bea's leg I wanted to say something to him, and every time I looked at Gus, there didn't seem to be any point. It was a very tired sort of anger. It wasn't any use to anybody. I kept it anyway.

Somebody knocked on the doors.

Three knocks, from the station side. Quiet. Gus came off the wood fast.

Miners don't knock. I was nearly sure miners don't knock.

Then I thought: Tamsin. She was on that side. She couldn't open them. Not from that side, not from any side. In the old road, I was the one who'd opened the door for her.

I put my hand flat on the wood, and I thought about leaving it shut. One. Two. Three. Four.

"It's us," said Mags, through the crack. "Ansel can't push."

Pim and I got our hands on the doors and dragged them open. The cold air went out past us, down the road, and three people came in through it.

Mags first, with Ansel's arm over her shoulders. He leaned on his shovel on the other side and swore at every step, the way he had all down the old road. She was bent half over under him and hadn't said anything about it.

Tamsin came last. She had her own shovel in one hand and three more under her arm, ours, the ones we'd left in the tally office. She stood ours against the wall of the road, and stood beside them, and got out her book.

Nobody had asked her to carry them. I didn't thank her.

We shut the doors.

"We waited till they'd all gone back in with the lamp," said Mags. She let Ansel down onto the rails next to Bea's cart. "She was outside the tally office door when I opened it. Just standing there." She didn't look at Tamsin. She was looking at me, the way she'd looked at me at the gate. "She came in and picked up your shovels, and walked up here in front of us, and stood at these doors till we caught up. She didn't knock."

I didn't answer that. Mags wrote something down.

Bea looked at the shovels and pointed at Gus's, the long one. "That. Handle down the outside of the leg. And something to tie it with. Not you, Iven."

I had rope. Gus took it off my shoulder before I could move. He tied the splint with one hand and his teeth. He got it wrong, and undid it, and did it again while Bea told him how. She didn't make a sound. Her hand found his good wrist and held on to it, hard, while he pulled the last knot tight.

Then she let go, and lifted the watch pinned to her cape, and looked at it.

"Ten past one," she said.

"We can't stop here." Ansel was looking up the road, into the dark where the cold was coming from. "Miners use this road. They bring the carts through, and they shut the doors after them." He didn't look at Bea's leg. "And cold air's where they go wrong."

So I did the sum. Nearly five hours of shift left, and then the cage. Bea couldn't work. Ansel could shovel sitting down for about ten minutes before his knee finished him. And none of us had a lamp-room lamp to take up the shaft. Saul wanted a lamp from the lamp room, and the lamp room only gave them to men on the books.

I'd lost one friend in this mine already. I didn't think I could stand at the side of a road and count while a lamp settled on Bea.

"So what do we do?" said Pim.

He said it to me. They all looked at me, even Gus.

I'd been thinking about the book since ten o'clock. Since I'd stood at the gate with my hands on the bars and said I'd put Tobin in it myself. I'd only said it because I was angry. Mags had looked at me as if I'd said something worth money.

"If we were in that book," I said, "the Shift wouldn't touch us. You saw roll call." I looked at Bea. "You could lie on that cart till six and nothing down here would look at you twice."

"You're not in it," said Ansel.

"Not yet."

"He only writes at the desk," said Mags. "With his own pen."

"I know. That's why I'm going to the desk."

"He's stood at it," said Pim.

"Not at crib." I looked at Mags. "Tell them what he does at crib."

She turned back a few pages. "He sits on a stool at the desk and eats out of his tin. The book's open next to it. He doesn't look up. He looks at his bread." She found the line. "At the six o'clock crib, halfway through, he put his bread down, and wrote a name in, and picked his bread back up."

"He wrote in that book at crib," I said, "and he's not in his own wall. So to the mine, writing in it isn't work."

"Or he's the Foreman," said Ansel, "and he's allowed."

"Then I'll be quick."

Ansel grunted. He didn't like it. He didn't have anything better, either.

"How do you even get to the desk at crib?" said Pim. "Everybody has to sit."

"Walking's not work," said Mags. "At ten o'clock crib one of them sat down too near me, and his lamp kept coming round. So I got up and walked the whole length of the gallery and sat somewhere else. Nobody looked."

"You said he never puts the pen down," said Gus.

It was the first thing he'd said. Mags frowned at her own page, as if it had let her down.

"Not when he's walking about," she said. "At crib he stands it in the inkwell. You can't eat bread holding a pen."

"And it's in his writing," said Gus.

"I write forty fines a day at the Rumour Desk in the Desk's hand," I said. "I can do a clerk. Short, like the new men." I looked round at them. "I'll need your surnames."

"Roe," said Ansel.

Mags took a moment. "Ilic."

"Pell," said Gus. "A. for Augustin. If you write Augustin, I'll kill you."

"P. Agbaje," said Pim, "in a book full of dead men."

"It's your name in the one book they don't touch."

Gus was looking at the floor of the road. "There'd be tallies," he said slowly. "Ashe's was brand new. Somebody stamps one when your name goes in." He looked up. "So we'd have tallies. We could hand them in at the hatch and draw a lamp, like anybody." He was quiet a moment. "That's not stupid, Marlow."

It was the nicest thing he'd ever said to me.

"How do you get there?" said Ansel. "The desk's on the far side of the gate from here. The gate's for men on the books."

"So we go round." I pointed up the road, into the dark. "The way we came down after Hester went, only backwards. Up the haulage, up to the pit bottom, down the drift. No gate that way."

"Fifty minutes," said Bea. "More, if anything goes wrong."

"Then we go now."

"Not me," said Bea. "Not up a haulage with this."

There was a sign by the haulage. NO RIDING ON THE TUBS. I'd turned round to ask Tobin what a tub was, and he wasn't there. A tub is a coal cart. Ansel told me later. Tobin would have known. I didn't say any of that. She was right.

"We'll stop here, then," said Ansel. "Me and her. Fifty minutes, and then we're in his book, and the cold can do what it likes." He looked at Bea's cart. "If a cart comes through before that, we pick."

"Pick what?" said Bea.

"Stone. Out of the coal." Ansel rubbed his knee. "After my dad, the company put me on the screens at the Dunmore. Ten years old. You sit on a box all day picking the stone out of the coal as it goes past, and your hands never stop, and nobody ever once said I wasn't working." He nodded at the cart. "Pim. Put some coal in that, and we'll pick."

Pim took his shovel from the wall and went up the road a little way, to where the rails were thick with spilled coal, and started filling the empty end of the cart. He was quick about it.

Ansel was watching him shovel. Then he said, "Marlow," in a voice I hadn't heard him use before.

"What?"

"Your book. Once you're in it, you're down the pit. That's what it's for. Gus said. Tally on the hook, man's down." He waited. "Corley's on that board. I polished his tally. Three springs on, and it's still on its hook."

Nobody said anything.

"It sets at six," said Ansel. "With every man who's down. And if your name's in that book, you're down, wherever you're stood. You could be at the top of the shaft with a lamp in your hand. You'd still be his."

Pim had stopped shovelling.

I'd been so pleased with the book. I'd been pleased with it for about ten minutes, and it had been a lovely ten minutes, and Ansel had worked out the end of it with his knee in pieces sitting on a rail.

Then I thought about the notice board. The far end of the deep gallery, the enamel signs.

"A man paid off is struck from the books," I said.

Pim turned round. "So if you're paid off," he said slowly, "you're off the books."

"Wages paid at the end of each shift to men on the books," I said. "The Foreman may not withhold a man's pay. That one's on the wall of the main drift. We'll walk right past it. I read it the first morning, pushing a cart." I looked round at them. "So when the shift ends, we go back to the desk, all of us, and we ask to be paid off. Not just wages. Paid off. Finished, the way they finish a man at a real pit: his last money, and his name crossed out." I looked at Ansel. "He can't keep back a man's pay. So he pays us off, and he strikes us off, and we go up in the cage with lamps in our hands."

"And if he doesn't pay?" said Ansel.

"Then we're miners."

Ansel looked at his knee, and didn't argue.

I'd be writing us in under T. Ashe. I hadn't thought of that until the words were out. Then I couldn't stop thinking about it. Six names, in my writing, on the same page as his.

I looked at Tamsin. If it was wrong, she'd know. She was writing in her book, and she didn't look up, and her face gave me nothing at all. If it was wrong, she'd let me find out at the desk.

Mags hadn't said a word since her surname. She was writing too. Her pencil hadn't stopped since I'd said the word "book".

"I'm coming," said Gus, getting up.

"So am I," said Mags. She shut her notebook. "You'll want someone who's watched him eat."

Pim was coming. Nobody had to ask. I took Bea's shovel from the wall. Tamsin put her book away and picked up her own, which I supposed meant she was coming too.

Bea unpinned her watch. She held it out to me, and stopped, with it halfway, and gave it to Pim instead.

"Sorry," she said. "I nearly said 'take this'."

Pim looked at the watch in his hand. Then at me. He'd gone very serious, which on Pim always looks like something borrowed.

"One problem," he said.

"Only one?"

"If anybody says 'write' to you at that desk, there's a whole book in front of you. Sixty years of it." He held up the watch. "You'll never stop writing."