第19章 Ninety Hours

He put the fireback in his coat and went out into the Coldmoot with the wind coming off the weir behind him, and he had got to the head of the Coalstair when a voice at his back said his name, and it was his mother's voice, and it was a great deal steadier than it had been in six weeks. "Ryam Pellam." She was standing in the road with her shawl on and no basket and her shoes in her hand, and she had walked from the Grey Stile by herself in the dark. "Mother, you are not out of the ward." "I am out of the ward." She came and put her hand on his arm above the band and turned it over in the light of the lamp, the way she had been turning it over for nineteen years. "Do you know what I did this morning?" "You were in the Grey Stile." "I was in the Grey Stile and there is a woman at the bottom of the stairs with a slate and a bit of chalk, and she had been there since before the light, and she was asking names." His mother's hand stopped on his arm. "She asked me for mine and I gave it to her and I told her what our band was cut at and I told her when it was cut, and she wrote it down, and then she asked me for your name and I told her that too, and then she told me mine." "What is yours?" "Ninety." His mother said it quite plainly. "Thirty-fifth on the list. The eleventh of next month. And I want you to tell me what ninety hours is, because I have been a woman in Halbeck for forty-one years and I know what everything in this city is except that one." He could not answer her. There was nothing to say that would not be either a lie or a noise, and he stood on the Coalstair in the dark and his mother waited with her shoes in her hand and would not go in. "You will tell me," she said, "or you will tell me you cannot, and the second one is all right, and then you will come in and I will make the tea." "Mother." "Say it properly. Do not stand there and do not do the thing you have started doing." "I cannot tell you," Ryam said. "That is the true thing. If you had it in your hands you would be safer without it, and I have worked that out over eleven weeks with a piece of stone in my hands, and I have not managed to get it out of my hands, so I am not going to pretend to you that it is out of my hands." His mother looked at him for a moment. Then she did something she had not done for a long time. She reached up and put her hand on the side of his face and turned his head to the light and looked at his eyes the way she had looked at them at the swilling house when they were telling her what he had been born with. "You are not going to do anything stupid tonight," she said. "I am going to do something tonight." "You are going to do something tonight and you are going to come in and eat and you are going to tell me what it is in the morning, and I am going to have heard you say it, and that is the whole of what a mother is for." She went in. He stood at the gate and listened to the bolt go across and then he took the fireback out of his coat and put it in the inside breast pocket where the brass band did not lie on it, and he went up the Coalstair on his feet. They had him in a room at the south end of the counting floor with two warden's men in it and a clerk at a desk and the door shut. They did not take anything off him. They had not come for the fireback. They had come to tell him what would be found, because the number of the account on his mother's arm and the number of the account on his own arm were the same four digits and a letter, and that was all they needed to say. "Two thousand two hundred and thirty-one renewals on the south ward account," the clerk said. "In nine years. Every south-ward prentice in the city, every quarter, for nine years. Against a fund with no credit to it for eleven years." "And I have got it out of the office myself," Ryam said. "You have got nothing out of the office. You are an apprentice in the counting floor on the ledger gang." The clerk put the pen down. "You are going to be asked to put your name to an account. The account says you were asked by a person of no name and no office to take a fair copy and make a copy of it and carry it out of the building. That is what the account says. If you sign it, it is finished this morning. If you do not sign it, you will be held here until the counting floor is closed and then you will be carried out and set down on the steps of the Weighhouse, and the account will say that too, and it will be true, and there will be nobody in this city who will be able to say that it is not." The lamp on the desk had a green shade and the light of it came up into his face from underneath. "If I sign it," Ryam said, "the renewals go on." "The renewals go on," said the clerk, "and in March there will be thirty names on the list of the ward, and after that there will be thirty more, and in a year there will be four hundred and twelve names in the south ward and they will all have paid, and none of it will be in the Rolls for a man to find, because that is what a renewal is. And you will be a journeyman in a coal company with the rate and the chit and a master seal on the end of it, and the letter of the office on the wall behind you, and you will be forty-one years old in a house on the north side." "And Halberd Jessop?" "The Grey Stile goes on the list on Thursday," the clerk said, "and it goes on the list on Thursday whatever you do tonight, and nobody in this building is going to ask why, and you have written that on a stone in a woolcomber's room and you can keep it." "Ninety hours," Ryam said. "My mother is thirty-fifth." "Thirty-fifth," the clerk agreed, and drew the account towards him, and uncapped the ink, and put the pen on the line, and turned it, and gave it to Ryam handle-first. It was the old one. It was the thumb he had cut at the first gate. He took it. The nib sat on the line and there was a drop on the point of it, swelling, waiting. Thirty names on the list of the ward. Thirty-first a woman with a wool business and four hundred names and a slate and nineteen years. Thirty-fifth a woman with a cough and a shawl and no basket. Two hundred and forty prentices a year whose bands would be a hundred and twenty lighter every quarter for the rest of the city's life, and four people in a house on the Coalstairs who would have a roof and a doctor and no arithmetic. And a man in a corridor who would be forty-three and would read the fair copy and would see a number with four digits and a letter on it and would put his own name against it for nineteen years, and would do it because somebody would have done it to him. "Go on," the clerk said. "The ink's wet." Ryam turned the pen round and gave it back handle-first with the nib facing him. "I have not signed it," he said. "You said the account says I was asked by a person of no name and no office and made a copy and carried it out. I have not carried anything out of this building and I am not going to, because you have written it down in your own hand and stamped it and it is true, and that is the last true thing in this city that belongs to anybody but me." "You are signing it," the clerk said. "I am not signing it." Ryam stepped back from the desk and put his hands where the clerk could see them, which was an old trick he had learned off Osred Corbett and it worked, because it gave a man with a pen in his hand something to do with his eyes. "You are going to write down that a person of no name and no office asked me nothing, and that I carried nothing out of this building, and that the fireback is on a hearth in a woolcomber's room on the Coalstairs with a number on it and a name on it and no name under it, and that it is going to be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and that every morning of every month until the eleventh I am going to stand in front of the woman at the bottom of the stairs and read the name off my mother's band to whoever comes past." He picked the pen up off the desk and turned it and put it down with the nib back in the ink. "You can write *offered*," he said. "I have read enough accounts in the last eleven weeks to know that there is a word for that, and you had better use it, and I had better be right, because if you do not use it then there is a man in this city who does not know how to spell his own account." Then he put his hands flat on the door and waited for it to be opened, and it was, and he went out into the corridor and along it and down the stone stair past the ledger press with its brass and its oil and its two children, and out through the door of the counting floor into the yard of the Weighhouse Steps. The sun was up on the weir. The plate on the stair wall said DUE AT, QUARTERLY IN ADVANCE. And on the rail, where he had stood in the rain eleven weeks before with his mother's chit in his hand and a hundred and twenty hours in his teeth, there was a stone, and the stone had a number on it, and the stone had a name on it, and under the name there was nothing whatever written at all. ---