On the Books

Pim tested it first, because of course he did.

He walked out from the mouth of the gallery to the foot of the nearest step, where a miner was swinging a pick at the face, and stood right in front of him with his hands in his pockets. The miner's lamp came round. It lit Pim up from his boots to his hair, slowly, the way it would have lit up a prop or a cart.

Then it went back to the coal.

Pim turned round to us with a face like a man who's found a crown in the street. He took his hands out of his pockets and put them back in again, just because he could.

The gate was behind the desk, where it had always been. The Foreman had got up off his stool and was standing at it again, reading. He didn't look up when we went past him.

I went first. I hadn't planned to. The others were behind me, and nobody was going first, and it was my writing in that book.

I walked up to the gate, and it swung open for me on its own, without a sound.

The first morning, I'd broken this rule, and it had cost me a pie shop I can't remember. Now it just opened. I went through onto the top of the slope and turned round, and watched it close behind me, and open again for Pim, and close, and open for Mags, and for Gus.

Tamsin had come as far as the desk. She was pushing her cart an inch forward and an inch back, because she wasn't in the book and somebody had to keep her alive, and it was going to be her.

She pushed her cart along the rails right up to the gate, and it stayed shut.

I had my hand on the bars before I'd thought about it. I pulled. It gave about an inch, heavy, and then it pulled back against me, slow and steady. It wasn't trying hard. It didn't need to. It closed right through my hands and shut with a soft iron sound, and Tamsin was on the other side of it, and I was on this side, with my hands still on the bars.

The first time, she'd come through behind us when I broke it. I wouldn't have broken it for her now. My hands hadn't asked me.

"I'll go round," said Tamsin.

"It opened for me," I said. I don't know what I wanted her to do with that.

"I saw," she said.

She didn't look at me. She looked at the gate, still rocking the cart, at the sign on the top bar, and then she started pushing her cart back up the drift, the long way, alone. I watched the lamp on her helmet go up the rails until the drift took it.

"She'll be fine," said Pim, behind me. "She's a Warden."

"I know."

I took my hands off the bars.

The slope went down steeply into the dark, rails in the middle, the same slope we'd fallen down on Monday morning. The curve was where Gus said it was, a set of rails peeling off to the right, away from the deep gallery. I looked down the slope once before we took it. There was nothing down there to see but the dark. Tobin was somewhere at the bottom of it with a lamp on his helmet and my old shovel.

We walked. That was the strange thing. We just walked, with our hands empty, past miners pushing carts and miners shovelling spill off the rails, and not one of them looked at us for longer than it takes to look at a wall.

I'd been working for twenty hours. My body didn't know what to do with nothing. My hands kept reaching for things that weren't there. Pim talked the whole way, about nothing, the way he does at the Desk when the queue's slow. Gus walked with his good arm swinging and his face very straight, and didn't say a word the whole way.

At the haulage bottom we turned down the main road, and it got colder, and the air door was ahead of us in the dark.

Ansel was sitting on the rail by the cart, turning a lump of coal over in his fingers. Bea was propped up in the cart. Both lamps came up when they heard us.

"Two carts came through," said Ansel, before anybody asked. "One a good while back. We picked. And one just after the whistle."

"I'd stopped picking," said Bea. "I didn't mean to. I was so tired. I looked up and he was standing right there, with his lamp on me." She held up her hands, which were black with coal. "It went over me like I was part of the cart. I knew then. I knew when the whistle went."

Pim gave her back her watch. "Dry," he said. "Like you said."

She took it and held it, and didn't pin it back on for a while.

We opened the air door, Pim and I, and the cold went down the road ahead of us. Pim and Gus pushed Bea's cart down to the lamp station. There was no sign on the main road about riding on tubs. Ansel came after with his arm over my shoulders and swore at every step, softly, the way he had in the old road.

The tally office was the same as we'd left it, except for the end of the last row.

After T. ASHE there were six more hooks. They hadn't been there before. I'd polished that row myself, and I'd have remembered. Under each one was a small brass plate, stamped, clean and new.

I. MARLOW. P. AGBAJE. B. MARSH. A. ROE. M. ILIC. A. PELL.

The hooks were empty. On the counter of the hatch, side by side, lay six new tallies with sharp edges and fresh numbers.

The lamp-man came to the hatch and waited.

We each picked up a tally and handed it through. The lamp-man took them one at a time, and turned to the wall, and hung each one on a hook with a name under it, and came back with a lamp for every one of us, and put it in our hands.

Mine was heavier than the Warden lamp Tobin had broken. It burned white and steady, and it was warm through the brass, and it was mine. I hadn't had a light of my own since six o'clock on Monday night. I'd been walking in other people's light for nine hours, and I hadn't known how much I minded until I was holding my own.

Gus took his lamp and looked at it.

He turned it round in his good hand. It was the same as the one he'd stolen. It was the same, I suppose, as the one on his family's mantelpiece. And then Gus Pell laughed.

I'd never heard him do it. It started small, down in his chest, and then it got out, and he had to lean his hip on the counter to stay up. It wasn't a happy laugh, exactly. It went on too long for that.

Pim started laughing because Gus was. Then Mags, a little. Then me.

The lamp-man watched us from the hatch, with his own lamp steady on our new ones, and didn't seem to mind.

Bea did her splint again properly, with two short props from the stack by the second door and the rest of my rope, and Mags held the leg while she tied it. The black hadn't faded. If anything it had gone a little higher, past the knee. Bea looked at it, and pulled her cut trouser leg down over it as far as it would go, and didn't say anything about it, so neither did we.

Then we sat on the floor of the tally office with our backs against the wall and our new lamps lit, the lamps Saul wanted, and did nothing. Pim found the last of his sweets in his coat and shared them out, one each, with one over, which he gave to Bea.

It was the nearest thing to a nice time I'd had in Pit Nine.

Ansel was still turning his lump of coal in his fingers. He'd brought it with him from the air door. He didn't seem to know he had it.

I looked at the end of the last row. T. ASHE, and then us. I didn't get up. I looked at Tobin's tally from where I sat, and thought about Tamsin, somewhere up on the haulage by now, alone, pushing empties down the slope in the dark so the lamps wouldn't settle on her. I hadn't gone round with her.

Pim was humming.

I don't know how long he'd been doing it. Low and slow, with his eyes half shut and his head against the bricks, a tune with no words that went round and round and came back to where it started.

I knew it. It took me a moment to work out where from.

The haulage. The eight men on the drum, hand over hand. They'd hummed that, all afternoon, all through the hours when I couldn't let go of the rope.

"Pim," I said. "Where's that from?"

He opened his eyes. "Where's what from?"

"That tune."

"What tune?" He looked at me. Then he laughed, and shut his eyes again. A minute later he was humming it.

Bea had her watch in her lap. She was nearly asleep. Her voice when it came was soft and fond, the way you'd talk about someone who's gone out for the evening and will be back.

"My husband worked Pit Nine," she said.

Bea's husband was a soldier. She'd told us so at crib on Monday morning, with her bread in her hand. A road in the north, and a land that grew over it in the night, and Tom marched into it, and didn't come out.