第14章 One Kilometre

They hung Osred Corbett at eight o'clock that evening in the yard at the Weighhouse Steps, and the yard was the one place in Halbeck where anybody would come. Ryam got there at seven with Bilbe, and they went up through the crowd on the outside of the ring because Bilbe knew how crowds are built. Nine men off the night shift had been stood outside the rail and turned away, and the ward's own men were on the rail, and the clerk's stool had been brought out of the counting floor and put under the gallows beam, which was the way the city did it, because there was no gallows in Halbeck and there was no reason there should be one. The Warden's man read out the account. It took eleven minutes and it was very well written. It had a name at the top and a name at the foot and a column in between, and the column was the band number of a tally-collector in the service of the south ward, and every second line of it said *collected by hand*, and at the foot of the page in a bigger hand it said that the said collector had this night been of unsound mind and had refused the correct account, and that the account of the night was therefore to be taken from the paper of the counting floor, and that the said collector had been withdrawn from the roll of collectors for the good of the ward. Bilbe's hand closed on Ryam's sleeve. "They are not saying he lied," she said. "You understand that. They are saying he was mad." "I understand." "That is worse than saying he lied." "I know." Ryam watched the clerk folding the paper. "It is worse because there is nothing to argue with. You can argue with a man for a whole morning about a number in a third column. You cannot argue with a warden's account of a man's mind." They hung him at five minutes to eight with the sun still up. It took a long time. The wardens had made a rope noose and put it on in the counting floor and burnt the rope through and welded the loop, and that was in the account too, and the wardens had a sheet for it, and it was the first sheet the new wardens had ever got. "Coll," said Bilbe. "Coll, look at me." "He is not looking at you because he cannot look at you, because he is fifteen and he has been on a yard for three nights without sleep and he has just told nine men that he opened a gate." "He is looking at you." She took Ryam's arm off her own and put it round the boy. "Look at him. Look at him, Coll, it is me, it is Bilbe, and here is the man who opened the gate behind you, and he was the man in the shaft, and he is telling you that as sure as there is a band on your arm." Coll looked at him. "Take me home," he said. They got him home. It took four hours and it was mostly Bilbe doing the talking in the doors, and at two in the morning they left him with Sook on the fourth floor and came down through the stairs together, and outside on the Coalstair the whole sky had gone the colour of a brass plate. "We could have stopped it," Bilbe said. "We could have got in front of him." "You had the account. You read it." "And it was already written when I read it." She turned and looked at him, and her face was not kind. "All right," she said. "Then what did we get?" "We got that the yard's gate was open half before eight o'clock this morning with nobody in the yard at all." He held up the copy. "That is in their account. It is the second line of it. They have written that in their own hand and stamped it, because they could not leave it out, and so every copy of this account that has ever been made carries the sentence *the gate was open*." "And nobody will read it." "Somebody will read it." "Somebody." Bilbe started down the stair. "Ryam. A woman at the stall opposite has been copying accounts out of the fair copy for nineteen years. She is seventy-one. She has four hundred pages in the loose leaves and she has been waiting nineteen years for something to happen and there is nothing happening and I am not going to stand here and wait with her for you." They walked down the Weighhouse Steps at a pace that was neither fast nor slow, and Bilbe stopped at the second flight with her hand on the rail and looked back up at the yard, and there was still a lamp burning in the gate. "Ada Toft," she said. "Second storey off Cinderbell Row. Forty-seven. In the room three years. The room was four a month for the first year, which the ward took out of my band as the ward fund, and the room was four a month for the second year and the fund took eleven, and the room was four a month for the third year and the fund took seventeen, and at the end of the third year the fund took twenty-nine, because the fund does not take a percentage, the fund takes a number, and the number goes up when the number of names in the ward goes up, and there are thirty-one names in the ward who have been in the ward for three years and none of them are owed a room and the fund will not say so and the room will not say so and the ward will not say so, and the fund is the only thing that has to say it." "Twenty-nine a month," Ryam said. "Twenty-nine a month for a room that is four a month. That is a difference of seven and two fifths, which is eight and a half an hour a day, which is eight and a half an hour a day for thirty-one people, which is two hundred and sixty-two hours a month, which is a thousand and sixty-one hours a year, which is the band of a man born on the north slopes who has never once worked a day in his life." She turned back to the yard. "And that is what the twenty-nine is for. It is for the room to cost twenty-nine a month and the cough to be in her for three years and then four years and then five, and then for the cough to be gone, and for the ward to give us a letter that is four pages long and says that the said collector's wife had been removed from the roll for the good of the ward." "That is not a collector's wife," Ryam said. "No. That is the whole of it. It is not a collector's wife, and the ward will not say it is my mother, and the ward will not say it is Ada Toft, and the ward will say *collected by hand*. And I am twenty and I have worked a scale for four years and I have never once been able to put a name in the third column of a book, because the book does not have a third column, because there are only two men in this city who have a third column, and one of them is dead and the other one is in a corridor." She put her hand on the rail and held it for a while. "Osred Corbett was the ward tally-collector for thirty-one years," she said. "He read my band off on a stool every morning for four years and he never once put the number down. His wife had the cough first, and then he had the cough, and then his daughter had the cough, and the ward took the twenty-nine a month off all three of them and they all three died in rooms that cost four, and at the end of it he was the one on the stool with the book on his knees and he was the one who said *collected by hand*, because it was the only thing he had left to say, and that is what a tally-collector is, Pellam. That is the whole job. You stand on a stool and you read the number and you say *collected by hand*, and if you are very unlucky the number is your own." ---