Chapter 10 Mererid's Private Column

Mererid got to the weighhouse at six because Mererid was always first, and had been since she was seventeen, and had told a great many people that the reason was the fourpound-ten bus and had never once been asked what the fourpound-ten bus actually did. She went to Collow Ness on the Saturday, which she did most Saturdays, and which she had done for eleven years, and which nobody at the works understood the purpose of. "Dafydd," her mother said, at the door of the last house, with the coat half on. "You'll want to tell him I took his tea in the porch or he'll have it in the kitchen and he'll have it cold by the time you go." "He's inside?" "He's in the porch," said her mother, "with the radio, and he's had it on too loud, and I've not had the heart." He was twenty-one and he was in the porch because it was warm, and he had the radio on a station from further up the coast that played organ music, and he turned it down when she came in, which took him a moment to do and which was the only thing about his manners that was still exactly as it had been. "Mererid." "Dafydd." "You've got a new coat." "I've had this coat two years. You gave me this coat." "You've had it made again." He turned the radio down another notch. "Is the works closing?" "They've put it up on the board. Twenty-ninth of August." "Right." He looked at the door of the porch, at the light coming off the water through it. "Then you'll be out of work as well." "I didn't say I would." "You didn't have to." He sat forward on the chair with his elbows on his knees, which he had never done as a boy and had learned to do in a place like this. "Is that the bell out there?" "No." "I can hear it." "Dafydd, there's nothing out there but mud and forty thousand tonnes of water." "You tell them that at the office," said her brother, "and then come and tell me it." His mother put her head round the door. "There's your tea in the porch, and it's in the enamel mug, and don't let him have it off you because he'll have two." "Mam—" "Don't let him have two," said his mother, and went. Mererid sat on the arm of the chair with the mug in both hands. "Was it the small one in March," she said, "or was it the August?" He looked at her. "I don't know," he said. "You'd know. You were out at the causeway with your father and you were fifteen and you had a lamp and you came back at about four and you were sick over the wall of the pan house and Mam got you with salt water." She had never once told him that and she told him now, and watched his face while she did it. "You'd know if it was one or the other. You were there." "I was there." "That's not the same as knowing." "No," he agreed. "It isn't." Outside, a gull went over, and the radio organ played four bars and stopped, and in the gap between the bar and the next one Mererid thought about a long sheet of paper in a roll in a front room on the bank at Sallowry, and about a girl of nineteen putting it on a desk under a lamp. "There's no book," she said, "that says what happened to you." "No." "There is one. I went and asked for it in 1974 and the woman told me there was a stub and nothing on it that concerned me." Mererid put the mug down on the sill. "Dafydd, I've got a piece of paper in a bag upstairs that she copied out for me by hand, and it is the only page of that book in the whole of Wales that I've ever seen, and I have looked at it every night for eleven years, and I've never told anybody I've got it. And I've had to decide this week what to do with it." "Are you telling me about it because you want me to go and get it back?" "No," said Mererid. "I'm telling you about it because the whole of my life I've had exactly one question and it's never been answered, and I have never once been in this room and asked it out loud, because I thought if I asked it here then I'd have to hear the answer. So I'm going to ask it here." She stood up. "Did the tide take you," said Mererid, "or did it give you back?" Her brother looked at the door of the porch for a long time. "I was fifteen," he said. "I had a lamp in my hand and I had a whole lot of beer in me and I was with my father, and I went out on the Steps with about forty other people and every one of them came back." "And you heard it afterwards." "In February. In the school corridor at Ildwater." He said it quite levelly. "I heard it and I couldn't remember Mam's face. And after that it kept going, and whatever went out of me went in order, and the first thing to go was a November and the next thing was the twenty-first of August, and the last thing to go was the name of the dog." "What dog?" "I don't know," said Dafydd Threave. "That's what I mean. There's a hole where the dog was and there's a hole in about four other places and the holes don't join up, and I've looked for thirty years to see whether they do." Mererid picked the mug up. "I'm going to do something with that page," she said. "I'm not telling you what, and it's got nothing to do with you, and you'll be at the house on the Thursday because it's your day. If somebody comes and says they're going to burn it you will say nothing. You will sit in this chair and you will look at the radio." "That's the only thing I've got left to do," her brother said. "Look at the radio. It's a good programme." The machine in the office was a Gestetner that the company had bought in 1968 for the invoices and had been kept for nineteen years under a dust sheet, with the drum rollers furred and smelling of oil and of a smell like a sweet-shop. She had turned up on the Saturday to find that the key to the office cupboard was still on the same nail, where it had been on the Saturday before, and where in nineteen years it had never once been moved. She lifted the dust sheet. It came up like a held breath. Her hands were not steady, and she was a woman who had never in her life been unsteady about anything, and she sat down on the floor of the office with her back against the cupboard for a while before she did anything at all. There was a stack of copy paper in the machine. There was a roll of ribbon still in it. There was the drum turned to the top of a page that said INVOICE NO. 4001 in the same typed style it had said INVOICE NO. 4001 since 1968. A page of the Ebb Ledger made a poor photograph of itself. Mererid had worked out that on the Saturday while she sat on the weighbridge with her sandals off and her feet on the hot plate. She wrote in a copy of the works' own invoice book, in the boxes where the sum went, and she did it with the top of her thumb-nail because the pen the office kept had a habit of drying out between one letter and the next, and a thumb-nail cannot dry out. She wrote the year first, because she did not trust herself to remember which one she was looking at if she went round the page. Then the names down the column, in the order they stood, thirty-one of them, with their marks, in the order of the marks. Then she wrote what was at the foot of the page, because that was the part nobody ever asked for. *Gone down and not brought back:* Three names, that year. And then the line under it, in a smaller hand, with a date: and one returned, not questioned. Mererid stopped there with the nail on the paper and stayed there a long while, with the machine ticking as it cooled and the dust sheet lying on the floor beside her knee where she had put it down without noticing. Then she wrote the sheet out properly, all of it, in her own careful hand, and did the second page, and the third, and came to the front of the roll where the house's own standing entry was on a sheet sewn in behind the first leaf, and that one she did as well, because she was in the mood for the whole of it. That was where she found it. The stitch on that sheet had been done twice. You could see it if you held the page to the window, which she did. The first line of stitching was brown, and old, and had gone through the paper in eleven places, and it sat thirty-two hundredths of an inch further in from the fold than the second line, which was black and newer and had gone through in ten places, and had pulled the paper a very little toward it as though it had been pulled out and put back and the hand that had put it back had not known how it had been the first time. Somebody had cut a leaf out of the roll at the 1893 section. Somebody had done it with a blade held flat, along the stitch, so that the sewing was cut through and not dragged, and then somebody had put new thread through and made the same ten holes a little wide of the old eleven. And there was a stub. There was always a stub when a leaf went; the fact of the going was kept and the thing that had gone was not. Mererid wrote that on her own sheet as well, because she was a woman who wrote things down. She wrote: 1893 leaf gone, sewn again, stub kept. Then she thought about the fact that she had just sat on the floor of a company office and stolen a complete account of the only thing her village had ever been afraid of, and she took a great deal of trouble to convince herself that this was right, and she managed it. She could name the year her brother went. She could name the hour. She could name the colour of the coat. He had been fifteen and had gone out on the Long Ebb of 1973 with their father and about forty other people, because in 1973 every family on that bank went out to see the Steps, and there had been a great deal of beer at Bellrigg and men with lamps and the whole thing had the air of a fair. He came back. They all came back; there was nobody out that night but the ones in the tally, and the tally that year held three names and none of them was Mererid's brother. The thing that happened to her brother happened after, at school in Ildwater, in the February. He began hearing a bell. Not a church bell and not the clock: a bell out at sea, in the middle of the village, with the wind in the wrong quarter and no wind at all. He heard it in the corridor. He heard it in the loft. He heard it in his sleep, and when he woke he could not remember his mother's face, and after that he could not remember the year he had been eleven, and then he could not remember the afternoon of the twenty-first of August, and then he could not remember the whole of a Saturday in November, and it went on like that until there was a great deal of him gone and a great deal of him left. He carried a thing. That was the rest of it. Everyone who comes back with the bell in their head carries a thing, and Mererid's brother carried a piece of rusted iron about the length of a hand, flat and thin, with a hole punched in one end, and nobody at that school or afterwards could tell anybody what it was or what it belonged to, and his mother put it in a drawer and moved the house in 1981 and took the drawer with her and it was still in there, and she was still alive, and she would not have it looked at. That was what the village calls the Sounding, and Mererid had never once said the word out loud in her life, because the word for it belonged to the people it had happened to and she was one of them. And she had gone to the house at Sallowry in 1974, a girl of nineteen with a book under her arm, and put the book on the desk under the lamp, and asked the woman sitting there whether the family's account had a line for the night the Steps were out in 1973. And the woman had said: there's a stub, and the stub's all that's left of a year, and there's nothing on it that concerns you. And Mererid had asked what her brother was, then. And Cerys Saltwyke had said: a boy of fifteen who went out with his father and came home, same as forty other people, and there is no mark against him. And Mererid had said: he came home and he heard the bell at Ildwater and he's lost eleven years and he's twenty-one and he's in a home at Collow Ness, and I want to know if there's a book that says what the bay did to him. And Cerys Saltwyke had looked at her for a long time, and had not written anything down, and had not looked up the book, and had said: if I opened that book for you, what would you do with it. And Mererid had said: I'd know. And Cerys Saltwyke had said: no. "Miss Hesper," said the door. Mererid came up off the floor so fast that the invoice book went over. Hesper Saltwyke stood in the doorway with her coat on and a holdall at her feet and the light behind her. "Morning," said Mererid. "Mererid. What are you doing on the floor." "Checking the invoice stock." "There's no invoice stock, Mererid. Deakin stopped the invoice books in January." "Then I'm checking the invoice cupboard," said Mererid, and put her hand flat on the copy of the roll she had not yet thought to do anything with, and then took her hand off it, and put it on her knee instead. Hesper looked at her for two seconds longer than anybody who has not been looking at you for thirteen years ever does. "Deakin says the office goes to the county on the fifth," she said. "Box, label, signature. He's asked me to do it." "Are you going to do it?" "Yes." "Then I'll help you carry it down." "You'll do no such thing," said Hesper. "You'll help me decide what's in it." Mererid picked up her copy book from the floor and squared the edges of it against her knee. "There's a page gone," she said. "Out of the front. Nineteen hundred and ninety-three. Somebody cut it out along the stitch and sewed it up again after, and the thread's black and it's the only black thread in the whole of that thing." Hesper did not move at all. "Who told you that?" "Nobody," said Mererid. "I held it up to the window." ---