Chapter 17 Eleven Minutes in the Counting Floor

The counting floor had forty men in it at ten past six in the morning. The press was at the south end. Ryam was on the loading side of it, on the ledger gang, which meant he stood in the aisle four feet from the press table with a book under his arm and waited to be given the figures to write in, and the press was working at about ninety sheets an hour and the noise of it was a solid thing you had to talk over. He needed eleven minutes in the accounts press itself. There were three ways in. The ledger gang was the one he had been put on, so he did that first. He wrote the figures the way Osred Corbett had taught him, the column to the column, no reading, the number as a number, and at the end of every posting he made the little mark that showed the line had been checked by the second man. "You will be quick at this," the second man said, looking at his book. "The slow ones are always the ones who read the line. Read the line and you are slow for the rest of your life." So he wrote for ten minutes and he did not read a line, and at the end of it he handed the book back. "There is the filing," the second man said. "Take the slips. They go into the press in the four minutes before the hour and the four minutes after it, and the press gang are all under eighteen and they do not look at anybody. Put them in and get out. And if anybody stops you, you have lost it, so do not hesitate." He hesitated at the press. That was the whole of it, and he had been in the building three weeks, and he had told himself it would be something larger. He stood in front of a machine with a wheel on a screw and a boy on the outside of it turning the wheel and a girl inside feeding it the sheets, and there was nothing in that machine at all but brass and oil and two children and the smell of hot ink. He put the slips in the slot the way he had put slips in a slot for eleven years, and the press turned them into a bonded sheet with the plate impression on the top, and the number 2147 went through the press onto a duplicate with a ruled corner on it. A fair copy. One of two. Made by accident, in four minutes, in front of forty men. "Move along," somebody said. He moved along. He got it out at twenty past six in the shape of a chit stub, because a chit stub is small and flat and goes in a book of stubs and no man has ever in the history of the world looked at the back of a stub. And on the back of it, in the reversed transfer that the press had put there because the plates were the other way up, he read: 2147 — ARREARS — SOUTH WARD — RENEWAL QUARTER. He did not breathe for about a second. Not arrears of charges. Not money owed and unpaid. Renewal. Somewhere in this building there was a form that said the renewal was due on a certain day and every south-ward family on the list had it written on it in the fair copy with a number and a date and nobody had ever asked to see it, because you do not ask to see a form about the renewal of the thing you live in. He had been in the building three weeks. He had walked past the door with the plate on it forty times. He went back and looked at the plate from the end of the corridor where the aisle came round, standing still, with his book under his arm, so that it was a man waiting for the change of the guard. DUE AT. QUARTERLY IN ADVANCE. The whole city ran on advance. Every hour in Halbeck was paid before it was worked, that was the first thing they taught you and the whole reason a band could be a band instead of a debt. Rent in advance. Coal in advance. The physician's nine a week in advance, standing on the stairs in February. And every south-ward prentice's band was being topped up by the Hundred and Twenty every quarter. He stood in the aisle and looked at the plate on the door and then at the press at the south end of the room and then at the two children on the wheel, and he understood that he was standing in the only room in Halbeck where a lie was being made into a thing with a ruled corner and a plate on a door, and he understood it in about four seconds, because he had learned in nine weeks what it was to understand a thing in four seconds. The boy on the wheel looked at him, because the boy on the wheel looked at everything, and Ryam looked back at him with his book under his arm and his face doing nothing at all, and that was the whole of the performance, and the boy looked away, and the girl inside the machine looked at nothing, and the press went on working at about ninety sheets an hour, and the number 2147 went through it again, and again, and again. Four minutes before the hour. Four minutes after the hour. He stood in the aisle for the second four minutes with the book under his arm and he counted the sheets going through the machine, and he got to the number that the fair copy said the south ward had advanced that quarter, and he got it by feeling the sheets come out, and he got it by the way the second man did not say anything, and he got it by the fact that a man on the ledger gang who had been in the building three weeks could count the sheets of an office he was not supposed to see. Two hundred and forty. Four in a quarter. And under every one of the two hundred and forty was a memorandum column that had not been in the book eleven years ago, and under every one of the two hundred and forty was a line that said the sum was to be drawn from the fund in accordance with the standing book, and the standing book was in a room on the third gallery with a man in it who had been in that room for nineteen years and who had told him in a kitchen off Cinderbell Row that he was a man in a corridor. Then the second man said, "There is the filing," and the four minutes came, and the press gang were all under eighteen, and they did not look at anybody, and he put the slips in the slot, and the number 2147 went through the press onto a duplicate with a ruled corner on it, and he took it out at twenty past six with a book of stubs under his arm and forty men in the room. Ryam counted. He was standing in an aisle at twenty-five past six in the morning with three hundred and forty men in the building and forty accounts going through the press and he counted the number of south-ward prentices the city cut in a year, out loud, silently, on his fingers, the way he had counted it in the Weighhouse Steps yard a month ago. It came to two hundred and forty. It had come to two hundred and forty when he did it before, on the rail in the rain. Two hundred and forty prentices. Four cut in a quarter. Two hundred and forty of them a year and every one of them was on the fair copy under 2147 with the memorandum column and the memorandum column was blank behind them all, and one line in the middle of it said the sum was to be drawn from the fund in accordance with the standing book. One hundred and twenty hours, twice a year, on a band of three thousand nine hundred, taken out of a fund whose credit was already a lie. The fund was not paying anything. The fund was empty and had been for eleven years. And nobody in Halbeck had ever asked what it was supposed to be paying, because you do not ask the ledger what it means when it is empty. An empty fund is a fund that has been drained. An empty fund is also a fund that never existed, and there is no difference between those two things in any building in the city. Which meant somebody had been taking it. ---