Wages

I didn't show anyone the line.

I shut the notebook and put it in my pocket, and sat with my hand on it. Across the tally office, Bea was telling Ansel the time again. Gus was looking at the props by the door and not touching them.

After a while I noticed I was polishing the glass of my lamp.

Round and round with the cuff of my sleeve, slow and careful, the way the lamp-man did at the hatch. It was already clean. I didn't know how long I'd been doing it. I stopped, and put the lamp down on the floor, and put my hands between my knees.

Tamsin went first.

She had the furthest to go. The gate wouldn't open for her, so it was the long way again: through the air door behind the first miner who brought a cart through it, then the haulage and the left tunnel and up to the pit bottom, working the whole way, with nobody to push a cart beside her. Fifty minutes, if she was quick. She was going to the cage, not the desk.

She put her book away and picked up her shovel and went to the second door, and stopped in front of it.

I was standing there with my hand on the latch before I'd noticed I'd got up. I opened it. Out on the station, lamps moved, and carts, and the bell hung still over the front of the lamp room.

She didn't go through at once.

"I'll be at the cage," she said. "I can't hold it for anyone."

She said it quietly, so the others wouldn't hear, and she said it to the doorway, not to me. Then she went out, scraping her shovel along the floor of the station as she walked, and I shut the door.

Mags was watching me from the wall. She didn't write anything this time.

Before we left, I picked up my lamp and went to the end of the last row.

T. ASHE. Under it, our six. I took his tally off its hook.

The lamp-man's head came up at the hatch. His lamp came round onto my hand, and stayed there, and I stood with the brass in my fist and waited. One. Two. Three.

It went back to the lamp he was cleaning. I was in the book. A man in the book can take his mate's tally off a hook, I suppose. Or nobody had ever tried.

It was cold, and heavier than it looked, the same as the first time.

On the train, after Ansel told us about the forty men, Tobin had stopped counting stations and leaned over to me.

"If I don't come up," he'd said, "will you take my mum something?"

"You'll come up."

"I know. But will you? Not money. She gives money to the church." He'd thought about it. "Something of mine. So she's got something."

"Fine," I'd said. "If you'll do mine."

"Deal." He'd shaken my hand, very serious, the way he did everything for about three seconds. Then he'd laughed, and gone back to counting, and I'd forgotten it by Harrow.

I put the tally in my pocket, next to the notebook.

"You kept it," said Mags, behind me.

"Yes."

She looked at my pocket, and then at me. "Good," she said, which I hadn't expected, and went to help Gus with Bea's cart.

We went back the way we'd come. The air door, the main road, round the curve, up the slope. Pim and Gus pushed Bea. Ansel leaned on his shovel on one side and on me on the other. The gate opened for each of us, without a sound.

It was twenty to six when we came out into the great gallery.

The Shift was on the face, both sides, picks going. The bulb hung over the desk. The Foreman stood at it, reading. He didn't look up.

We waited at the mouth of the gallery, by the carts. We didn't need to work. I kept forgetting that, and putting my hand out to a cart, and taking it back.

Ansel's hands were going in his lap again, the short swing and the pull. Pim was humming. He'd given up stopping himself. Bea held her watch and said nothing at all.

At ten to six the Foreman took out his watch.

He looked at it, and put it away. Then he took a little key from his waistcoat and unlocked a drawer in the side of the desk, and lifted out a black tin box and a wooden tray, and set them on the desk beside the book. He opened the box. He turned the book to a page.

Then he stood with his hands folded in front of him, and waited.

Up on the face, the Shift kept working. Nobody looked round. Nobody came down the steps.

He'd done this before. You could tell.

"Well," said Pim. "I'm first."

"Pim," I said.

"If it goes wrong, at least I won't have to hear you lot talk about it." He handed his lamp-room lamp to Gus to hold, and took it back again, because he didn't know what to do with his hands. "Right," he said. "Right."

He walked to the desk.

"Name?" said the Foreman.

It was a dry voice, and quiet. I'd only ever heard it read out names.

"Pim Agbaje." Pim swallowed. "I'd like to be paid off, please. Finished."

The Foreman ran his finger down the page and found it. He dipped his pen and drew one straight line through P. Agbaje, neat as a ruler. Then he took a coin from the box and something small and bright from the tray, and put both in Pim's hand.

Pim looked down at them.

"That's my number," he said. He turned round and held it up to us, a brass tally, the one he'd handed through the hatch at three o'clock. "That was on its hook an hour ago."

It had been. I'd seen all six of ours hanging there when I took Tobin's down. Now it was in his hand, off the hook, and nobody in the tally office had carried it anywhere.

Nobody asked for the lamps back, either.

The coin was silver, and old, and worn nearly smooth.

He stood there a second too long. A lamp on the face swung down toward him, slow. Pim caught it from the corner of his eye and went straight to the nearest cart and put his shoulder to it, and pushed it an inch, and back an inch. The lamp went away again.

He'd stopped humming. He noticed before I did. He looked at me across the cart with his mouth open, and shut it, and pushed.

Gus went next, and said "Augustin Pell" in full, out of habit, and the Foreman found A. Pell without any trouble at all. Gus looked at the coin in his hand all the way back. Then he put it in his pocket and went to Pim's cart and put his good shoulder to the other side.

Mags went after him. While the Foreman's finger went down the page looking for her, she wasn't looking at him. She was reading the page upside down, all of it, the way she'd read our faces on the slope. Then she took her coin and her tally and went straight to a cart.

Ansel went. His hands were still going when he got to the desk. When the line went through A. Roe, they stopped, both at once, and lay open on the desk in front of him. He looked at them. Then he took his money and limped back and lowered himself onto the edge of a cart full of coal, and started picking out the stone, one piece at a time, the way he'd done when he was ten.

Then Bea.

Pim and Gus wheeled her cart up to the desk, because she couldn't walk to it. The Foreman looked at her over the top of the book.

"Name?"

"Bea Marsh," she said. "Paid off. Please."

The line went through her name. He put the coin and the tally in her hand, and her fingers closed on them.

She didn't move for a moment. Then she said, very quietly, to nobody, "Tom was a soldier."

Just that. She said it like somebody checking the gas was off before bed. She had a lump of coal in her hand before Pim and Gus had turned the cart round, and she was picking the stone out of it all the way back.

Then me.

The Foreman watched me come the whole way. He hadn't done that with the others. He'd looked at the book and waited for them to get there.

"Name?"

"Iven Marlow."

He didn't look down at the page. He looked at me. Long enough that a lamp on the face swung round toward us, and away again, because I was still in the book and it wasn't any of its business. Close to, his eyes were tired and red at the rims, exactly as they'd been at crib.

"Don't look," he said.

Quietly. Not the way he'd said it from the walkway.

Then he looked down and found I. Marlow, and drew his line through it, and put a coin and my tally in my hand, frowning. He looked at the line he'd crossed out. Then he looked at it again.

My number. I could feel the edges of the other one in my pocket against my leg, cold.

I should have gone to a cart. The others were all at the carts, working, waiting for me. Up on the face, a lamp had stopped on the coal and begun, slowly, to come round.

I didn't go.

The page was still open in front of me, the six lines through our six names, the ink still wet on the last one. And above our six, at the bottom of the names that came before us, one short name in ink that had gone dry hours ago, with no line through it at all.

T. Ashe.