第4章 Four Hundred Pounds of Water

The slack crew worked the seventh hour of slack, which was the hour between the last wagon off the boards and the closing of the tide gate, when the lighters lay still and there was nothing to do but clear what the day had left behind. Ryam signed the waiver at the start of it. That was the arrangement. A prentice who put his name against a slack-crew slip went onto the extra hour and gave up his claim on the hour he had already worked, and the claim was worth nothing to him anyway if he was too tired to use it, which was the whole design of the thing. The slip was a long strip of blue paper with a printed box at the top and a line at the bottom, and the line was where his name went. Coll had told him once, early, that a slip was a receipt for work that had not happened yet. Ryam had not understood it then. He understood it now with the coal dust sitting on his tongue, because the entire object of the strip of paper was to write down that an hour already worked was not owed to anybody. The wharf paid eight for a night of it and kept the ninth for the fund, and the fund did the pipes. He had asked Sallowby about the ninth hour once in his first week, and Sallowby had given him the long answer about the cost of a burst main and then the short one, which was that you do not read the box on a slip, only the ward reads the box. There had been a year, about eight years back, when a man off the Coalstair had refused to sign for twelve months running on the same principle. He had been paid for the ninth hour and had kept the eighth as well, on paper, and had let the slip go unsigned and had said out loud in a yard that he would take his eighth hour in hand like a man takes a jug. In the winter a floor came down under him in the ward kitchens and the bill for the boards came out of his band, one hundred and sixty hours, and the ward clerk at the south desk had entered it in the free column without comment and the man had gone up the flats that spring with a band that said nine hundred. That was the whole of what the box was for. Ryam had signed the slip. He had put the date at the top because the date was printed and not the claim, and the date was the only part of the strip that anybody was ever meant to look at. That night he moved coal up from the flats for the ward kitchens, four hundredweight at a stretch, across a plank and up a stair, into a bin. The bin was a steel one with a lid on a hinge and the lid was up, and the man who came to close it at the end of the shift counted the shovelfuls by the noise they made coming off the blade, and he had once refused to sign for a load of ninety-one shovelfuls because the ninety-second had been half, and he had been right, and the kitchen had paid for the half because the kitchen could not argue with a man who counted by ear. The first hundred he felt in his shoulders. The second he felt in his teeth. By the third his legs had gone to water and the skin of his forearm had gone hot under the new brass, and somewhere in the fourth hundred he stopped being able to make his hand open on purpose. He carried the four hundred anyway, and put the last shovelful in the bin, and sat down on the outside step with his arms hanging between his knees. The band on his left arm had cut a white line across his wrist where his sleeve had ridden up, and the line was wet with sweat and had started to bleed at one end. He did not have to be told what the ninth hour had cost him. He had done the sum on the step before he sat on it. Four times a week, fifty weeks a year, sixteen hundred hours a year off the top of the south ward's labour and into a place the ward did not say out loud, and he had been putting it there one hour at a time for eleven years without once being asked, and the only party to the transaction who had ever named it was a clerk at the south desk who used a word like a man closing a drawer. His mother would have called the hour a good one. That was the trouble with the arrangement. He could put eight hours into her pot in a week and she would set the pot on with something in her face he could not stand to see, and the thing that had bought it would go out of his arm for ever, and the two numbers would sit in the same room for the rest of her life. "That is not an injury," said a voice. "That is a wage." He looked up. An old man was standing at the bottom of the steps with a book under his arm and a brass rule in his hand, and it took Ryam two full breaths to place him: the tally-collector out of the Coalstairs yard, the grey band gone green, the limp that came and went. Osred Corbett. "You shouldn't be out here," the old man said. "The kitchen wants coal." "The kitchen wants a sixth of what it asked for and they've asked for four hundred every night for a year." Corbett opened the book to a page with a soft black gutter down the middle. "You took the waiver. Good. Waivers are honest money. Nobody owes you anything on a waiver." "How much is a waiver worth?" "Nine hours at the flats, four at the ward kitchens, six on the boards." He wrote a short line with a pencil worn to a stub. "I'm obliged to ask you questions about this hour. The Hourhouse funds the coal by buying the claim. It doesn't come out of thin air and it doesn't come out of the ward. It comes out of the hour that you signed away. It goes into the fund that keeps the pipes from freezing, and then it comes back down the line to the ward at the end of the quarter at about a fifth of what it went out at." He looked up. "Do you follow that?" "That I paid nine and got back two." "That's it exactly. Don't let anyone tell you the ward is skimmed. The ward is skimmed. Not by me." He shifted the book against his hip. "And don't let anybody tell you it's not being skimmed because you'd never see the skimming. Nine hours a night, four nights a week, fifty weeks a year. Write that down. Sixteen hundred hours off the top of this ward's labour and into an account with a name that has four digits and a letter, and not one man on this walk has ever been asked to sign for it. They don't need to. It comes out before the wages are counted and the wages are counted after." "How do you know that's where it goes?" "Because I read it," Corbett said. "And I'll tell you exactly what I know and what I don't, because I've found in twenty-two years that a man who can't tell those two things apart is a fool, and I've been one already." He held up a finger. "I know the number. Sixteen hundred a year off the slack hour, plus the standing fee on every advancement the office has ever written, plus the water rate the ward is charged and does not drink. I know the sum because I add it up in the winter with a pencil and I get a figure that is a town." "And what don't you know?" "I don't know where it stops." The old man put the finger down. "That's the part that keeps me in this walk. Everyone in Halbeck can tell you the number. Nobody can tell you the name at the bottom of the column. I have looked for it since the year of the big water." "Why would you want to know?" "Because a number with nobody's name on it is an accident," Osred Corbett said, "and a number with somebody's name on it is a business, and there is a very great deal of difference in how you deal with the two." "How is your knee?" "How do you know it isn't you?" Corbett looked at him for a while. Up close his eyes were the pale blue of a thing that has been washed too often. "Because I have been the one taking it for twenty-two years," he said. "And I have never once been able to find a line in the Rolls that says Osred Corbett took anything." He shut the book. "In twenty-two years. That's what I am. A man who can't find his own name in a building that keeps every name in the city." "Why don't you take their money then?" "Because I can't find my own name in it, and I know what that means, and I've got a band and a bad knee and two rooms over a chandler's shop." He started down the lane, then turned. "You'll be at the south desk again in a fortnight. When you are, read the footer on the page. The footer is a running tally of the quarter and it's signed by the desk. Count what your waiver was worth and count what the footer says it was worth, and if they don't agree, you'll have the number you'll need." "What number will I need?" Corbett thought about it. "The number that makes everything else add up," he said. Then he was gone, and the kitchen door opened and shut, and Ryam sat on the step in the coal smell with his arms shaking and the wet white cut on his wrist going tight. ---