The Setting

Up on the face, every miner had stopped.

Picks in the air. Shovels half full. The same as at a change, the same as at two o'clock on Monday when Hester went up, except that the whistle didn't end. It went on and on, one long low note, and under it the groan came up through the floor and into my boots.

"Change," said Ansel. "They stand still at the change. Nobody has to work." He was already up off his cart, leaning on his shovel. "Cage comes down at the change."

"It's not the change," said Mags.

"Cage comes down anyway." He looked down the gallery to the mouth of the drift, where the way went up. "We go. Now."

I put my old shovel in Bea's cart, beside her bad leg, and got Ansel's arm over my shoulders.

The last thing I saw of the great gallery, from the mouth of the drift, was the desk under the bulb. The Foreman was standing at it with his hands folded, the way he'd stood every shift for sixty years. Beside the closed book, Tobin's lamp was still burning.

Then the gate behind the desk bent in the middle, and I stopped looking.

The main drift went up toward the pit bottom, rails in the middle, the enamel signs on the walls. On Monday morning we'd come down it pushing a cart so slowly it took an hour. Now we were pushing one up it with Bea in it, and the mine was closing behind us.

You could hear it before you could see it. A long grinding, deep down, and then nearer. Props cracking, one after another, nearer each time. The rails under our feet jumped and settled and jumped again.

Pim and Gus and Mags had the cart. Gus pushed with one shoulder and swore with every breath. Ansel's arm was round my neck and his good leg did the walking and his bad one did nothing at all.

Halfway up, the cart stopped dead. The front wheel had dropped into a gap where a rail had buckled. Pim and Gus heaved and it didn't move, and Bea said "Leave me," very calmly, and Mags said "No," and got her shoulder under the front corner with Pim, and they lifted, and it came up over the bent rail with a bang that jarred Bea's leg and made her shout. Behind us, the rail it had been stuck on folded in half and went into the floor.

I looked back once.

The drift behind us wasn't the shape it had been. The roof had come down a foot. Then two. The walls were leaning in, slowly, and the signs on them were folding into the coal one by one. The last was the long one, WAGES PAID AT THE END OF EACH SHIFT, which I'd touched on my way down at crib. I watched it bend, and crack, and go under.

"Eyes front," said Ansel, through his teeth.

I kept walking.

The pit bottom was where we'd left it. The brick room with the arched roof, the rack of shovels, the four tunnels. Three of our shovels still leaned against a cart by the left tunnel.

The cage was down. It sat at the bottom of the shaft with its sliding gate shut, an iron box with HARROW COAL CO. NO MORE THAN 12 on it, waiting.

Tamsin was standing in front of it.

She had her shovel in one hand and her book in her pocket. Her coat was grey with dust to the elbows. She'd come the long way, alone, and got here before us.

She saw me.

I let go of Ansel against the wall and went to the cage and dragged the gate open. It screamed on its runners.

They got Bea out of the cart between them, Pim and Gus and Mags, and lifted her into the cage, splint and all. She bit her lip and didn't make a sound. Mags took my old shovel out of the cart and threw it in after her, without asking anyone, and went in after it. Pim went in. Tamsin stood by the gate and waited.

The four tunnels were going dark one after another. The left tunnel first, the roof sliding down over its mouth. Then the air road door at the back of the room. The grinding was right under us now. The brick arch overhead gave a long crack, and dust came down out of it.

I went back for Ansel.

He'd got himself off the wall. He was coming on his own, leaning on his shovel, eight yards from the cage, then seven.

Then his knee went.

He didn't cry out. He just went down, sideways, onto the rails, and the shovel went skidding away from him. And the floor of the pit bottom, the old bricks and the coal dust between them, went soft under him and black and wet, the way the walls had for Tobin, and began to take him.

His legs went into it to the knees.

I got hold of his arm. Gus got the other one. We pulled, and nothing moved. The floor didn't care. It was setting, and he was inside, and anyone still inside when it sets stays inside.

"Go," said Ansel. "Get in. I'm thirty. It was my last go anyway."

"Shut up," said Gus.

"That isn't true," I said.

Nothing happened. One time in five.

The coal was at Ansel's waist. The roof was a yard lower than it had been. Somewhere behind me Bea was saying my name, over and over, not as a job, just as a name.

I thought about the rule. A mine that closes on the men inside it and keeps them. A company that tells their wives they're still working. A man who sets out a pay box every shift for sixty years and nobody comes. I thought about Ansel's dad, and the envelope that stopped at eleven o'clock, and Ansel on a box at ten years old, picking stone, with his hands that never stopped.

It wasn't true. None of it had ever been true.

"That," I said, "isn't true."

The setting flickered.

I felt it the way I'd felt it at the gate and on the haulage. A stutter, all through the room, as if the whole mine had forgotten for one heartbeat what it was in the middle of doing. The grinding stopped. The roof stopped. The black floor round Ansel went loose.

Gus and I pulled, and he came out of it, all at once, and we fell backwards with him onto the rails.

Then the heartbeat was over, and it all came back. The grinding. The roof. The floor where Ansel had been closed up smooth.

We dragged him the last yards into the cage between us, his bad leg trailing. I fell in after him. Gus fell in after me.

Tamsin came last.

She stepped in, and turned, and took hold of the gate, and slid it shut. The iron clanged.

Nobody rang for it. Over our heads, the winding wheel began to turn on its own, the way it had come.

It's a hundred and nine seconds up. Tobin started counting it on Monday, and I finished it for him.

Nobody spoke for the first part. The shaft walls slid down past our lamps, black and wet. Below us the groaning went on, further away every second, and then I couldn't tell if I was hearing it or remembering it.

Bea was crying, very quietly, with her face against Mags's shoulder. Ansel lay on the floor of the cage with his eyes shut and his hands flat on the iron, and they were still. Gus was holding the bars.

Pim had his back against the wall. He was shaking.

"Do you know," he said, "why nobody ever robs the Rumour Desk?"

Nobody answered.

"Nobody believes we've got any money."

Bea laughed into Mags's shoulder, a wet, startled laugh. Ansel's mouth twitched without his eyes opening. Even Gus made a sound.

I waited for the rest of it.

Pim was looking at me. He'd been looking at me the whole time he said it, the way he does when he tells a joke he's told me before, waiting for me to laugh first.

"Is that it?" I said.

His face changed.

"That's the joke," he said. "From Sunday. At the Desk. You laughed so loud Mrs. Odell looked up."

I remembered Mrs. Odell looking up. I could see her, at the far end of the room, with her cigarette. I didn't know what she'd looked up at.

"Sorry," I said. "Tell me again later."

Pim reached over and took hold of my sleeve, and held on to it the rest of the way up.

The cage stopped.

There was light through the gate. Grey and cold and thin, the light you get at a quarter past six in the morning. I hadn't seen daylight since six o'clock on Monday, except one grey square at the top of a vent. I stood and looked at it until Pim pushed me.

He slid the gate open. We got Bea out, and Ansel, and stood on the landing under the winding wheel, blinking, with the wind coming in on us off the hills.

Tamsin came out last.

Behind her, the gate slid shut on its own, and the empty cage dropped away down the shaft, and the cable ran after it, and then the shaft went down into the dark with nothing in it. Over the mouth of it, on great iron hinges, stood a pair of heavy wooden doors, folded back against the frame, the way they must have stood all night.

She took her glove off with her teeth, the way she had in the old road. She put her bare hand flat against the nearest door, and pushed.

They came down across the shaft, both of them together, slowly, and met in the middle with a sound like a book being shut. Then there was nothing there but wood, old and black and solid, as if it had always been a floor.

She put her glove back on.

Pit Nine was gone until the next season.

I turned round.

Across the yard, past the chain fence, the flap of the big canvas tent had been tied back. The sheet was off the thing that had been under it on Monday morning. It was a scale, a big one, brass, with a round glass face and a polished foot, standing just inside the open flap in the grey light.

Beside it, with a cup of tea in his hand, Saul Greaves was waiting.