Second Shift

The change lasts about fifteen minutes. For fifteen minutes the Shift stands still, and nobody has to work.

Bea sat Gus down against the iron frame of the cage shaft and unwrapped his arm. He let her, which tells you how bad it was. There was a long cut from his elbow nearly to his wrist, deep and ragged, the edges black with coal.

"A slow one," he said, before anyone could ask. "In the left tunnel, by an old vent. It goes down a long way, past the gate, the back way. I killed it." He watched Bea's hands, not his arm. "There was nothing in the dust. They don't all carry something."

He looked at my palm when he said it. He'd noticed the burn already. Gus notices things. I keep forgetting that, because he's so annoying about everything else.

Pim gave out the last of his sweets. Ansel lay flat on his back on the floor with his knee up and his eyes shut. Tobin sat beside me, rubbing his leg, which had gone from black to grey and was coming back to the right colour very slowly. Tamsin stood by the air road door with her book.

Down the nearest tunnel, the Shift stood frozen where the whistle had caught them. Picks in the air. Shovels half full. One of them, not far off, was humming. A low, slow tune with no words, coming out of a face with no mouth. Over and over.

I'd told myself on the train that I'd write all of this down properly. I had fifteen minutes and nothing to do with my hands. So I got out the notebook, turned to a clean page, and started.

Pit Nine. Second shift. Writing this on my knee by lamplight.

The dead men don't talk much. Sometimes they hum. If you stop working, they look at you, and if they look at you for long enough, they take you into the wall.

I've learned a lot of rules today. I'm going to write them all down, from the start, while I still remember them. I forget things. That's my other problem.

So. Back to yesterday. Sunday.

I got as far as Sunday when the whistle went.

"There's a haulage," said Gus.

We were on our feet, holding tools, and the Shift was moving again all round us.

"Down the left tunnel, at the bottom, past where I met the slow one. It's a long steep slope with rails. They haul the full carts up it on a rope. The lamp room's under it. Under the bottom of it." He picked up a shovel with his good arm. "To get past, you have to work the haulage. You have to be on the rope or on the carts all the way down. One man can't do it."

There was a short silence.

"Are you asking for help?" said Pim.

"I'm telling you the way," said Gus. "Do what you like with it."

He'd come up because he was bleeding and alone. He'd have died before he said so. I could tell the same way I can tell when a man at the Rumour Desk is lying about where he heard something. He looks at the floor a certain way.

"We'll come," I said.

Ansel opened his eyes. "Course we will. I didn't watch that cage go up to sit here."

The left tunnel went down a long way.

We carried props again. Gus walked ahead with his shovel, not looking back to see if we were keeping up. Tamsin walked behind. Tobin walked next to me and talked, mostly about money.

"When you pass," he said, "I get forty back. That's the bet. Twenty doubled."

"That's not how betting works."

"Coat's twenty-two. That leaves eighteen. I'm going to get her gloves, too. The good ones, with the fur inside."

"You bet on me at the laundry as well," I said. "Didn't you."

He looked at his boots. "Eight to one."

"Tobin."

"Eight to one's good odds! If you pass, I'm rich." He moved his prop to the other shoulder. "Anyway, you owe me. You fined me six times. That's six crowns. That's the gloves, that is."

"It's the law."

"It's your law," said Tobin. "You like it. You like stamping things."

He said it lightly. He didn't take it back, and neither did I. We walked on without talking for a bit, which with Tobin is a long time.

"I'll get a pie as well," he said in the end, as if nothing had happened. "From Hobb's. You can have half."

"Who's Hobb?"

He looked at me sideways. Then he laughed, because he thought I was joking.

I let him.

The haulage was the biggest thing I'd seen in Pit Nine.

The tunnel opened out at the top of a long, steep slope. The bottom was just dark. Full carts came up the slope on a rope as thick as my arm, and empty carts went back down on a second set of rails. At the top, the rope ran round a huge wooden drum, and eight miners stood in a line hauling it in, hand over hand.

They hummed while they hauled. The same tune. All eight of them.

"We work our way down," said Gus. "Push the empties down, then walk back up with the full ones. Down a bit further each time."

It worked, for a while. We worked in pairs. Bea and Ansel. Pim and Tobin. Gus took the rope, near the drum, because he could lean his weight on it with one arm and he wasn't going to stand and watch. I took it next to him.

It was hard. The rope was rough and wet. The carts were heavy, and they came up the slope out of the dark slowly, swaying, with eight dead men and two live ones leaning back against their weight.

The burn in my palm didn't hurt. My arms didn't hurt either, which was strange, after a whole morning of shovelling. I hauled, and hauled, and didn't get tired at all.

Pim and Tobin were halfway down the slope, shovelling spilled coal off the rails. A full cart had just gone past them on the rope, and was fifty yards above them, nearly at the top.

Then the brake on the big wooden drum snapped like a shot, and the rope jumped, and the full cart dropped back down the slope a yard, two yards, and the rope began to run.

The eight miners let go.

All of them, all at once, as if they'd been told to. Ansel told me later that's what you do when a haulage runs away. You let go, or it takes your hands off. They'd been doing it for sixty years.

Gus didn't let go. Neither did I.

The rope burned through our hands. Below us, the cart was rolling back down the slope, gathering speed, and Pim was standing on the rails right in its path, looking up the wrong way.

"Marlow!" Gus shouted. "Keep hauling! Don't let go!"

So I didn't.

Gus had given me a job, out loud, and my hands took it. They closed on the rope and stopped sliding. The rope dragged at me, and my arms just took it. No ache. No burn. No limit. I leaned back and hauled, hand over hand, and the rope came in, and the cart slowed, and stopped, about ten feet from Pim.

Pim jumped off the rails. Tobin grabbed him and they both fell over.

Gus had let go somewhere in there. His bad arm had given out. He was on his knees by the drum, staring at me.

I kept hauling.

The cart came up. Up the slope, away from Pim and Tobin. Up over the top, where it bumped to a stop, and the miners came back and unhooked it, as if nothing had happened.

Another full cart was coming up the other rails.

I took hold of the rope and started hauling that one too.

I couldn't stop.

That's the price. I worked it out about an hour later, when Bea tried to pull my hands off the rope and couldn't. When Ansel put his big arms round me from behind and lifted, and I didn't lift. When Gus stood in front of me and shouted "Stop! Marlow, I'm telling you, stop hauling!" and nothing happened at all.

As long as there was work in front of me, I would do it. Somebody had given me a job, out loud. Tireless didn't care whose voice it was.

Ansel put a name to it. "Like my dad's mate," he said. "The fall. Somebody told him, and he couldn't stop till the work was out of sight."

"Then put his lamp out," said Gus.

"On a rope? On a slope, with a full cart on the end of it?" Ansel shook his head. "In the dark he goes over the edge with it. Or the rope takes his hands off."

"So what, then?"

"The change. Ten o'clock. Everything stops, the carts stop coming, there's nothing on the rope. We get him off then."

Bea looked at the watch pinned to her cape. Then at the rope in my hands.

"It's twenty past four," she said. "Crib's at six."

The worst part was that it felt like me. Just me, holding on to something because I'd been told to and I couldn't stand to let it go. I've been like that my whole life.

So I hauled. The rest of them worked round me, down the slope and back up, so they'd stay near. Tobin wouldn't leave. He stood by me and counted the carts out loud, because there was nothing else he could do.

"Thirty-nine," he said. "Forty. Forty-one."

The hours went past. I didn't feel them. Bea had her watch, but I didn't ask her the time. The rope came in. The carts came up. The humming went on and on.

Tamsin stood at the top of the slope by the drum and watched. Once, I saw her open her book and write something, and close it again without reading it back.

"Fifty-six," said Tobin.

Then the whistle blew. Two short blasts.

Crib.

All along the rope, the miners let go and sat down. All down the slope, the Shift put down its tools, and sat, and opened its tins.

I kept hauling.

I couldn't do anything else. There was a full cart on the rope and work in front of me, and my hands didn't know what crib was.

And all down the long, dark slope, one after another, every lamp in the haulage turned toward me.