Forgery

He didn't hurry. None of them ever did.

The stool turned on its iron foot a little at a time, creaking, and the Foreman came round with it, with his bread still in his hand. I had the pen. I had perhaps three seconds.

I could have put it back. I could have dropped it and run, forty steps back to the others, past twenty men eating their crib, and taken my chances.

I dipped it in the ink and wrote my own name.

I. Marlow.

Small and neat, under T. Ashe, in the hand I use for fines. The nib scratched. It was the loudest thing in the gallery.

I'd meant to write Bea first. I'd decided it on the haulage, pushing the cart, that she'd go at the top because she was the one who couldn't work. And when it came to it, with that stool coming round, my hand wrote me. I've thought about that a lot since. I'm putting it down so I don't get to pretend otherwise.

The Foreman stopped turning.

He was looking at me.

I'd only seen his face from a distance before, from the slope, from under the walkway. Close to, it was just a face. Pale, and long, and tired. Behind the round glasses his eyes were grey, and ordinary, and a bit red at the rims, the eyes of a man who'd done a lot of reading in bad light.

He looked at me for a long time.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I counted my heartbeats instead. On the steps to my right somebody's tin lid clinked. Eight. Nine. Ten. Nothing happened.

Then the Foreman looked down, past my hand, at the book.

He put out one long finger and ran it down the page, slowly, to the wet line, and stopped. Then he went back to the top and ran it all the way down again, the way he had on the walkway that first morning, when he'd been looking for something that wasn't there.

It stopped on the same line.

He took his finger off the page, and turned back round on his stool to his tin, and took a bite of his bread.

That was all. He didn't look at me again.

My hand was shaking so badly the second name came out wrong, and I had to go over the P. After that it got better.

P. Agbaje.

B. Marsh.

A. Roe.

I dipped the pen between every name, quick, every letter leaning the same way, the way you write when there's a queue out the door.

Between names, I looked up at the steps. Twenty lamps, all pointed down at twenty tins. Not one lifted. If writing in the book was work, it was the Foreman's kind of work, and it seemed to belong to whoever was holding his pen.

Beside me he chewed, and swallowed, and turned the bread round to find the next corner.

M. Ilic.

A. Pell.

Six.

I stood there with the pen over the page and looked at what I'd done. Six short names, in a dead man's book, in my writing. And above them, the one that wasn't mine.

T. Ashe.

He'd told Saul his whole name in the tent like it was a medal. Tobin Edward Ashe. I'd said it to the bars at ten o'clock. If I could get at that book, I'd put it in myself.

I was at the book. The pen was in my hand. There was room after the T.

I didn't touch it. I had no idea what one more word would do to him, and I'd already done enough things down here that I couldn't take back.

I put the pen back in the inkwell, standing up, exactly the way it had been. The drop of ink was still on the desk where it had fallen. I left it.

Then I walked back.

I didn't count this time. I didn't need to. It was a lot easier than the walk out, and I can't explain that properly, except that halfway back I noticed my hands weren't shaking any more, and I didn't like that either.

They were where I'd left them, at the mouth of the gallery.

Pim's face did several things at once and settled on none of them. Gus had both hands pressed flat over his own mouth, which I suppose was him being careful. He took them away when I sat down and still didn't say anything.

"Done," I said. "All six."

"He looked right at you," said Pim. "He looked right at you, Iven, I nearly..." He stopped. "I nearly said something."

"I know."

Mags hadn't looked away from the desk.

"He checked yours twice," she said quietly.

"How do you know which one was mine?"

"It was the first one." She turned her head and looked at me properly. "You wrote one before he turned round. The rest after."

I didn't answer. She didn't seem to need me to. She took out her notebook, and wrote something, and put it away again.

Tamsin was sitting a little apart, with her book shut on her knee. She was looking straight at me, the way she had at the gate. She hadn't done it since.

Then she looked down at her book, and opened it, and didn't write anything in it at all.

"Nineteen minutes past," said Pim.

Nobody moved. In a minute the start whistle would go, and the Shift would get up off the steps, and we'd have to be working, all of us, with our hands full, like every other time. That was what the last twenty hours had been. Every whistle, you grab something and you move it.

"Are we going to grab something?" said Pim.

I thought about Bea, lying in a cart at the side of a dark road, with Ansel's coal going stone by stone through his fingers. When this whistle went, she couldn't grab anything. She was going to find out if it had worked whether we liked it or not.

"No," I said.

Pim looked at me. Then he put his hands on his knees, where everyone could see them.

Gus did the same. Then Mags.

Tamsin got up. She walked to the nearest cart at the end of the rails, and put both hands on it, and waited.

She wasn't in the book. I hadn't written her in. She hadn't asked.

The whistle went.

One long shriek, from everywhere at once, and the gallery stood up. Twenty men closed their tins and hung them on their belts and picked up their tools, all at the same moment, the way they'd done it for sixty years. The Foreman put his crust back in his tin and shut the lid.

We stood up too, because standing isn't work. We stood at the mouth of the gallery with our hands empty at our sides. Behind us, Tamsin began to push her cart an inch forward and an inch back, the way we had on the first morning.

The lamps came up off the tins and swung out across the gallery, over the face, over the rails, over the desk and the gate, the way they did at the start of every shift, looking for what was out of place.

One stopped on Tamsin, saw her hands moving, and went on.

The rest went over us.

All of them. One after another, they slid across us and away and didn't come back. Not one stayed on us for a heartbeat, let alone ten.

For the first time since six o'clock on Monday morning, nothing in Pit Nine was looking at us at all.