Crib

We'd been sitting on the rails for about a minute when I remembered what happens to people who sit down in Pit Nine.

I stood up so fast I hit my helmet on a roof beam.

"Up," I said. "Everyone. Work."

Pim looked round. "At what?"

It was a fair question. The cart was on the other side of the gate, under a lot of coal. There was nothing on our side but the rails, the dust and us.

There were no lamps on our side either. Every miner who'd gone through the gate had kept walking down the slope, and their lights were a long way below us now, small and yellow, moving away. Nobody had been watching us sit. We'd been lucky. I didn't like how much of today was turning out to be luck.

The blast had thrown lumps of coal through the bars, all over the rails. So we cleared them. Bea and Pim shovelled them into a heap against the wall, and Tobin and I carried the big ones by hand, and when the rails were clear we moved the heap a few feet down the slope and started again.

I've done stupider jobs. At the Rumour Desk we once spent a whole afternoon stamping forms that had already been stamped, because the first stamp was the wrong red.

Up by the gate, Tamsin had found a heap of her own.

Ansel and Hester came out of the wall.

That's how it looked. One moment the slope was empty. The next there was a lamp in a black gap in the rock about twenty yards down, and Ansel was climbing out of it backwards, then turning to pull Hester after him.

The gap was a passage, low and narrow. Cold air came out of it. Real air, the kind that smells of outside.

"How did you get down here?" said Pim.

Ansel was breathing hard, and his bad knee was shaking. He leaned on his shovel and pretended it wasn't.

"Air road," he said.

"What's an air road?"

"Every pit's got two ways. One for the coal and one for the air." He nodded at the passage. "Only a fool and a company trust one way out. It's a long way round. Ladders, mostly." He looked up the slope at the gate. "We heard the shot."

"We were on the other side of it," said Bea.

"Thought it might be," said Ansel. "Thought that was the end of you." He looked at me. "How'd you get through?"

"Never mind that," said Pim. "You're telling me there was a back way the whole time?"

"Two hours of ladders, with my knee. You had a shot going off." Ansel shrugged. "The rule's on the gate. It's not on the mine. Lies are lazy like that."

"We got lucky," I said.

Pim opened his mouth, then shut it again. For Pim that's a lot of effort. I was grateful.

Ansel looked at me a moment longer. Then he nodded at Hester. "She needs to sit down."

"We can't sit down," I said.

"I know that, son."

Hester was holding her water flask in both hands again. Her face was grey under the dust, and her eyes kept going back to the gap in the rock, the way you look at a door you want to go back through.

We followed the rails down together, carrying coal in our arms, because that counted as work too. Tamsin came behind, at her usual distance.

The slope ended in a long, low gallery. All the miners from the gallery had come down here, fifty or so, and they were working the face, picks going in slow, even strokes. Nobody looked at us twice. We found an empty cart and started to fill it.

We worked until my arms stopped shaking and started aching instead.

Then the whistle went.

It wasn't the long shriek from the morning. It was two short blasts, close together.

Every miner in the gallery stopped.

Not slowed down. Stopped. Picks that were halfway up hung there for a second, then came down gently and were laid on the floor. Shovels were leaned against the wall. Fifty men sat down where they were, on the rails and the edges of the carts, and opened the tins on their belts.

"Crib," said Ansel. "Sit down."

Bea sat. Pim sat so fast he nearly missed the cart. Tobin sat. I sat on a rail with Tobin's little pick across my knees.

Hester didn't.

She was still shovelling. Fast, the way she'd been shovelling all morning, coal from the floor into the cart, scrape and throw, scrape and throw. She wasn't looking at anything. I think she'd stopped hearing things a while ago, and the whistle hadn't got in.

"Hester," said Ansel.

Scrape. Throw.

Across the gallery, a lamp turned toward her.

Then another.

"It's crib," said Ansel, louder. "Sit down. NOW."

She didn't. The lamps were turning all round the gallery now, and every one of them stopped on her. The nearest miner put his tin down on the rail beside him, carefully, the way you'd put down something you mean to come back for. He stood up.

I counted. I couldn't help it.

One. Two.

Ansel got there on three. He didn't shout again. He took Hester round the waist from behind, lifted her off her feet with his bad knee folding under them both, and sat down hard on the floor with her in his lap. Her shovel fell and rang on the rail.

The miner stood there.

Four. Five.

Hester sat very still in Ansel's arms with her mouth open. Ansel put his own hands flat on the floor where everyone could see them. Not working. A man taking his crib.

Six.

The miner sat back down and picked up his tin.

One by one, the lamps went back to the tins.

"So during crib," said Tobin quietly, "working kills you."

He wasn't asking. He was working it out loud, the way he counts things.

Ansel let go of Hester. She slid off him onto the floor and stayed there with her knees up and her face in them.

"During crib," said Ansel, "working kills you." He rubbed his knee. "My dad never once missed his crib. I used to think he was just greedy."

Tobin nodded slowly. He didn't listen to details. He never had. It's why I'd fined him six times. But I watched him take that one and put it away somewhere safe.

Crib is twenty minutes. It was the longest twenty minutes of my life, and for a while in the middle it was almost nice.

That's a strange thing to say. But the miners left us completely alone while we sat still, and it was the first time since six o'clock that nobody had to hold a tool. Pim handed round his boiled sweets. Bea broke what was left of her loaf into pieces and held one out to Tamsin, who was sitting a little way off with her book. Tamsin looked at the bread for a long moment. Then she took it and put it in her coat pocket.

The miners ate.

That is, they opened their tins, and inside each tin was bread and cheese, or bread and an onion, fresh as this morning. Each man lifted his hand to where his mouth should be and moved his jaw under the coal dust, chewing. But his hand was empty. The bread stayed in the tin. They ate nothing, slowly, all of them together.

"That's the saddest thing I've ever seen," said Bea.

Nobody argued.

So we talked, quietly, so we wouldn't have to listen to the chewing.

Tobin talked about the coat. He described it the way other people describe a girl. The big buttons. The collar. How it came down past your knees. His mum coughs every winter, November to March, and every winter she says it's nothing.

"This winter she won't have to say it," he said. "She'll say it's too good to wear. She'll hang it on the back of the door and look at it. I'll have to make her put it on."

Bea talked about her husband. His name was Tom. He'd been a soldier, a real one, not a Warden. Six years ago his company had been sent to march a road in the north that was supposed to go to a town. A land had grown over the road in the night, and they'd marched into it. Some of them came out. Tom didn't.

"Everybody says he's dead," said Bea. "Nobody says it to me. But they say it." She brushed crumbs off her knee. "I passed the Doubt test at twenty-two. You're not supposed to be able to, that late. I think I just doubted it so hard it counted."

She smiled at me when she said it. I'd passed late too. She'd remembered.

When it was my turn I said I wanted a flat with a door that locks.

"That's it?" said Pim, who has heard about the door four hundred times.

"It's a good door."

"What's behind it?"

I opened my mouth and found I didn't know. A room. A bed nobody else had slept in. Quiet. I'd never got further than the door.

"Mind your own business," I said, and Ansel laughed, which surprised everybody, including Ansel.

"Do you want to hear a joke?" said Tobin. He said it to Bea and Hester.

"No," said Pim and I together.

He told it anyway.

"Why did the miner bring a ladder to the pub?"

Nobody answered. Tobin didn't need them to.

"Because he heard the drinks were on the house."

Bea groaned. Pim threw a sweet at him. Ansel looked at him as if he was something he'd found in the bottom of a crib tin.

And I laughed.

I don't know why. It was a terrible joke on Sunday and it was a terrible joke now, and I'd heard it at least five times. Maybe because we were sitting at the bottom of a dead mine, watching dead men eat nothing, and Tobin had brought a joke about a pub. I laughed until I had to put both hands over my mouth so the lamps wouldn't turn.

Tobin looked so pleased with himself.

"See?" he said. "It's good."

Across the gallery, Tamsin had looked up from her book. When I looked back at her, she was writing.

Near the end, Hester lifted her face out of her knees.

"I want to go home," she said.

She didn't say it to anyone. She said it the way you'd read a sign out loud.

Nobody tried to talk her out of it. Ansel looked at her, and then at his own hands.

"Two o'clock," he said. "There's a change whistle. The cage runs. It's a long way back up, with my knee." He paused. "I'll take you."

Hester nodded into her knees.

Then the start whistle blew, the long shriek, and the gallery stood up.

Picks went up. Shovels went into coal. Fifty men went back to their day as if the crib had never happened. We grabbed our tools and worked, all of us, even Hester, slowly this time, with Ansel next to her.

Every miner went back to work except one.

On the far side of the gallery, one miner hadn't picked up his pick. He was standing with his crib tin still open in his hand. His lamp was pointed at our group.

I followed the light.

It wasn't on me. It was on Tobin.

Tobin was working. He was shovelling as hard as anyone.

The miner kept looking at him anyway.