Chapter 10 The First Night in the Open

On the seventh evening they stayed past sunset, and neither of them had the nerve to suggest it, which Wren thought about for a long time afterwards. It happened the way weather happens. He arrived with the last of the daylight still on the water and she was already on the middle boards with her back to the west end, and he sat down two planks away, and neither of them mentioned that an hour earlier he had been standing at his own end with the lamp off. They had a week of daylight in them by then. Seven mornings on the deck, in boots, with a thermos between them, mending what they could. Miles had a short bar of iron and a hammer and he had taught her to find the soft end of a nail by tapping it, and she had taught him that a sedge wren is not a sparrow, and he had been getting it wrong on purpose for three days so that she would keep correcting him. Tonight the sky over the west bank was going the colour of a knife blade and the mill windows were throwing one long yellow bar down the water. Wren could see the bar. From her own bank she had only ever seen the mill as a scatter of small separate lights. It lay across the Hales and lay across the reeds and lay across Miles, and he did not seem to notice any of it. "You are going to freeze," she said. "I have a coat." "You have had that coat since September." "My father bought it in 1994." He pulled the collar up anyway. "I have been warmer at the bend in December." "December was not a cold month, it was a wet month." "You have been keeping notes." "I have kept notes since the day I found that bottle." She said it lightly and then heard how it sounded, and it had sounded the way it sounded, and he turned his head and looked at her properly for the first time that evening. "Sorry. That is a strange thing to say to somebody." "It is a strange thing to say to nobody," he said. "You are the only person alive I can say that to. It is a very crowded life we have got." She laughed, and this time it did not need stopping, and the laugh went out flat over the water the way a bird call goes out from a hedge, and neither of them said anything for a while in case something answered. He told her about the mill. He told her the way a boy tells a thing he has never had to arrange into sentences: the torch, his uncle at the workshop in Whitlow, the three generations of men in the family who had all held the same orange fire over the same kind of steel. His father had a plan. The plan had a shape and the shape had a name, and Miles had known the shape since he was small enough to reach the bench, and the plan did not contain a question anywhere in it. "It is a good plan," Wren said. "Does it have a wage?" "It has a house." "That is not a wage, that is a wall." "It is a wall with my name cut into the lintel," Miles said. "My father did it in 2009, when I was nine. He got a chisel for it. I remember because I was disappointed. I thought he would have waited." Wren put her hands in her sleeves. The mill bar had thinned. Somewhere below the bridge a fish took something off the surface and the water closed over it. "What would you do?" she said. "If it were yours to decide and nobody had already decided it for you." "I do not know. That is the honest answer and I have hated it for two years." He turned his hands over and looked at the ridges on them. "I used to think about quitting. Getting on the coach on a Monday with a bag. Whitlow has a foundry and a foundry takes anybody who can hold a torch. My uncle would have got me on. I got as far as the timetable." "What stopped you?" "The bench going cold." "You could relight a bench." "You cannot relight a bench," he said. "It is a whole fire, laid for the winter, and if you go out of that room in the morning and the fire is out, that is that. My grandfather used to say a cold bench is a thing you only hear about from somebody who did not have to hear it." She let that sit. Down the reach the water moved round a stump and made the one sound it makes. "You first," she said. "Tell me the one you have been sitting on all week. I can hear you not saying it." He was quiet for long enough that she thought he had decided not to. "It is the letter," he said. "The first one. The J." "Your grandfather's J." "I did not know that when I answered it in August. I want that on the record, Wren. I read it at the west end at two in the morning with a torch in the other room and a bottle of my uncle's beer going warm in my hand, and I wrote back to a stranger because the sentence at the end of it, the one about still being sorry, was a sentence I could not leave on the bank." "What does it say now? That you know?" "It says I have been carrying a thing that belongs to my family and I did not know whose." He picked up the thermos and put it down again without opening it. "There is a strongbox in the back of the workshop. It has not been opened since I was small. My grandfather put things in it. My father has never touched it and neither have I." "Then open it." "Not tonight." He looked at the black water going under the middle boards. "Tonight I have got a girl on a bridge telling me about cold benches, and I am not spending it on a box." Wren looked away first. She had a whole reply ready about how that was not how people were allowed to talk, and how her own father had a radio he never turned off, and how the two of them were the same sort of house. She said none of it, and instead she told him about the notebook. She had had it eleven years. It began in the September her mother walked out, in the same week the car was sold. The first thing in it was a list of the things she was going to keep doing. After that it turned into poems, and she had never read one to a living person. She read him the shortest. It was about the table her mother left the note on, and about how the note said she was sorry in the same hand she used for shopping lists, and how a person can be sorry in the wrong handwriting and it still counts for something. Miles listened with his hand flat on the deck and his eyes on the mill bar. When she finished he did not say anything at all for so long that she started to wonder whether she had got the words wrong. "That is the one about your mother," he said at last. "Yes." "You have not read that one to anybody in eleven years and you read it to a stranger on a bridge in the cold." "You are not a stranger." "I have had your name in my pocket for two months," he said. "I do not think that is the same thing." The wind came off the water and moved the reeds on both banks at once, which from the middle of the deck looked like the two banks were agreeing about something. Wren got up and put her hand flat on the last dry plank, the one the bottles had gone under, and knocked twice on the wood with her knuckle because there was nobody to knock for. Miles watched her do it and did not ask. "Right," she said. "Next Saturday. Bring a lamp that runs on a battery and a bag of nails, because I am not doing another week of your shouting at the rail." "You have opinions about my rail." "Your rail is shouting at me in a language I am too tired to learn." They got up. He went as far as the west end and stopped with one boot on the gravel, and she was four planks behind him with her hands in her sleeves, and neither of them said goodnight, because saying goodnight would have meant that the seventh evening was an evening like any other, and it was not. "Wren," he said, to the dark. "Yes." "That poem you read. The one about the table." "Yes." "Do you have another one about me?" She was three steps from the reeds before she answered him, and she answered him honestly, because it was nearly nine o'clock and she had decided that she was going to be honest with this boy for as long as he kept showing up in the cold. "I have nine," she said.