Don't Give Me a Job

Bea said goodbye to Pim, not to me. She held on to his sleeve and told him to keep the watch dry, and to bring it back, and to bring the rest of us back with it. Then she let go and looked at me over his shoulder, and didn't say anything at all, very carefully.

Ansel was already picking through the coal in the cart, turning the lumps over in his big hands, putting the stone on one side. He didn't look up.

"Not you, Marlow," he said. "I'm not telling you anything." He nodded at the others. "The rest of you, go on."

So the rest of them went, and I went with them.

The road above the air door was the only place in Pit Nine where you could talk without working. Hardly any miners came up it, and you could hear a cart coming a long way off. The cold made our breath show in the lamplight.

Pim made the rules on the way. He'd decided he was in charge of everyone's mouth but mine.

"Nobody says anything to him that sounds like a job," he said. "Nothing. Not 'mind your head'. Not 'pass me that'. If you want him to do something, say it to me, and I'll decide."

"That's stupid," said Gus. "Marlow, get the..."

Pim's hand was over his mouth before the next word. Gus stopped walking. He looked down at Pim's hand, and then at Pim, the way he'd look at a dog that had bitten him.

"Get the what?" said Pim.

Gus pulled the hand off. "A move on. Get a move on. It's a thing people say."

"Not to him," said Pim.

Gus opened his mouth, and shut it, and walked on.

He tried, after that. I'll give him that. "Somebody who isn't Marlow," he said once, "might want to watch the rails here."

Tamsin walked behind us and didn't say anything. When Gus said "somebody", I thought I heard her breathe out through her nose. When I looked round, her face was the same as always.

I didn't laugh. I wanted to, which was strange. Bea was lying in a cart in the dark behind us with her leg tied to a shovel, and Tobin was somewhere in the deep gallery with a lamp on his helmet, and I wanted to laugh at Gus Pell saying "somebody". I think it was because, for the first time since the haulage, the plan was mine.

The haulage bottom was where the rails met: ours from the main road, and the other set curving in from the slope below the gate. There were miners there, hooking full carts onto the rope, and as soon as we came round the bend we were working. Pim and Gus and I took the back of a full cart. Mags took the side. Tamsin came behind, scraping spilled coal off the rails with her shovel.

We went up the way Gus had shown us in the afternoon: hands on the back of a full cart, pushing, walking up the slope with it while the rope did most of the pulling. I kept my hands on the cart. I didn't look at the rope. Somewhere up in the dark, the eight at the drum were humming.

Halfway up, the rope jerked.

It wasn't much. Somewhere up at the drum, one of the eight must have shifted his hands, and the rope jumped and went slack for half a second, and the cart rolled back an inch onto us.

"Hold..." Gus shouted.

My hands started to close.

I felt it. Not the burn in my palm. Further in than that, like a door in my arms starting to swing shut. My fingers had begun to curl round the cold iron edge of the cart, and they weren't asking me first.

"Pim," said Mags, very clearly. "Hold it, Pim."

And it went past me. Whatever had been closing stopped closing and went away again, and my hands were my own, still on the cart, still pushing. The rope came tight. The cart went on up.

Pim had his shoulder in the back of it and his eyes shut. "I'm holding it," he said. "I'm holding it, I'm holding it."

Gus didn't say anything for the rest of the haulage. Nobody needed him to.

I looked at Mags over the top of the coal. She'd gone back to pushing. She'd been quicker than any of us. She'd been ready. I was grateful, and I didn't like it.

Near the top of the slope, on the left, the wall was smooth.

All the rest of the haulage was rough coal, cut and chipped. This bit was smooth and black from the floor to the roof, about the width of a boy.

I'd known it would be there. I hadn't known what I was going to do when I got to it, and the answer was nothing. You can't stop, on the haulage. You can't stand still in front of a piece of wall with your hands at your sides, not in sight of eight lamps. So I pushed the cart past it, and I looked at it the whole way, and then it was behind me.

Pim had looked too. He didn't say anything. He changed sides on the cart so he was next to me.

At the top, the eight miners hauled on the drum, hand over hand, humming. The brake was still snapped. The broken end of it stuck out of the drum where it had gone in the afternoon. Nobody had mended it. They just held on.

The left tunnel went up and up.

It had gone down a long way, the afternoon before, and it went up a lot longer. We pushed a full cart the whole way, all four of us on the back of it now, because one man can't push a full cart up a hill, and two men can't do it for long. Tamsin came behind it, scraping the spilled coal back on with her shovel.

Gus's vent was in the wall halfway up, a black square with a grille on it and cold air pouring out. He looked at it as we passed. That was all. He didn't tell us about it again.

"Ten to," said Pim, with his head down, reading the watch in his own lamplight.

We weren't going to make it.

I didn't say so. I pushed. My arms didn't ache. They never did any more, while I was working. But the others were shaking, Pim and Gus and Mags, and a cart only goes as fast as its slowest pair of hands.

I thought about Bea. Ansel would still be picking stone, and talking to her to keep her awake, telling her things about the Dunmore she didn't want to know. Crib was twenty minutes. If we missed it, there was no other crib. The next whistle was six o'clock, and that was the end.

"Five to," said Pim.

The tunnel flattened out. Ahead there were lamps, a lot of them, and the brick arch of the pit bottom.

We came out into it as the whistle went.

Two short blasts, the way it had gone at ten in the morning and six at night, and everybody stopped. The miners at the pit bottom stopped. We stopped. We let go of the cart, and it sat there on the level, and we sat down on the floor beside it, because that's what you do at crib.

There was the cage, at the far side of the brick room, empty. NO MORE THAN 12. The last time I'd seen it, Hester had been in it, going up.

"We're not at the desk," said Pim.

"Walking's not work," said Mags. "I told you."

I hoped she was right. She'd done it once, the length of the deep gallery. This was the whole main drift.

We left the shovels against the cart, to be safe. Then we walked.

Down the main drift, past the carts standing where the whistle had left them, past the miners sitting on the rails with their tins open and their lamps tipped down into them. Nobody looked at us. We were walking, at crib, with our hands empty. We were nothing.

The signs went by on the walls. SAFETY FIRST. NO SMOKING BELOW THE GATE. NO MAN TO LEAVE BEFORE THE WHISTLE. And the long one, in smaller letters.

WAGES PAID AT THE END OF EACH SHIFT TO MEN ON THE BOOKS.

THE FOREMAN MAY NOT WITHHOLD A MAN'S PAY.

I put my hand on it as I went past. It was cold.

The great gallery was quiet.

Twenty or so miners sat on the steps of the coal face, both sides, with their tins open on their knees, eating. Their lamps were tipped down at their food. One electric bulb hung from the dark, and under it was the tall desk, and past the desk the gate.

The Foreman was sitting on a stool at the desk with his back half to us. He had a tin open in front of him, and he was eating a piece of bread, slowly, looking at it. Next to the tin the book lay open. Beside the book stood a little glass inkwell, and in the inkwell stood the pen.

"Seven minutes past," said Pim, behind me.

We'd stopped at the mouth of the gallery, at the end of the rails. The others sat down. Gus sat with his back to the wall and his hands in his lap. Tamsin sat a little apart, with her book on her knee. Mags sat where she could see the desk, and she wasn't looking at the Foreman. She was looking at the book.

Nobody told me to go.

I went.

It was about forty steps from the mouth of the gallery to the desk. I counted them. I hadn't meant to, but Tobin had counted everything, and I was walking past twenty dead men eating their crib, and it was either count or run.

Eleven. Twelve.

A lamp lifted on the steps to my right. It touched me and went back down to the tin.

Twenty. Twenty-one.

The bulb was very bright after the drift. I could see the Foreman's grey moustache moving as he chewed. I could see the crumbs on his waistcoat, and the chain of his watch, and the neat grey parting in his hair.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.

I was standing at his elbow.

He didn't look up. He looked at his bread. Close to, he smelled of soap and coal and old paper.

The book lay open at the last page with writing on it. I could read the bottom line from where I stood.

T. Ashe.

I didn't look at it for long. I couldn't. I reached past the Foreman's shoulder, very slowly, and put my fingers round the pen.

It was warm. As if somebody had only just put it down.

I lifted it out of the inkwell. A drop of ink fell off the end of it and landed on the desk.

Beside me, the stool creaked.

The Foreman was turning round.