第9章 Water Under a Crate

On the fifth evening Ryam took two empty barrels up on his back and did not think about money. Sook's rain barrel had been full since Tuesday and there were four people in that building who ought to have had water and did not, and the pump was new and Ryam did not trust a pump. So the water came up in barrels, eleven flights and two turns, on a Thursday, because Thursday was the day the wash water went up in the wash house off Cinderbell Row. He had it on the fourth landing when the man below said, "You are carrying it on your back." "Aye." "Not with a yoke?" "There's no yoke." "There is a yoke in this building. I put it there." The voice came from a doorway at the top of the stairs. "Third floor, on the hooks. Two hoops and a pole. I will show you in a moment." Ryam went up because there was no sense in standing on a landing arguing with a man about a yoke. The room was full of light and full of smells: carded wool, tallow, wet stone. A wide woman in her fifties stood by a table with a bowl of melted tallow going cold in front of her. There were people on the floor. "You are Pellam's boy," she said. "Who?" "Wenna's. She has told me about you for nineteen years. Come in, sit, drink this." She put a cup of something hot into his hands without asking, and it had milk in it, and he had not had milk in a year. "You have carried two barrels up eleven flights when there is a yoke on the third floor that a man put there for exactly this work. That is nine hours. Where did you get nine hours?" "The ward kitchens." "You cannot pay for milk with the ward kitchens." "Then I will pay for the milk with the ward kitchens." She laughed at him, and then she stopped, and looked at him a good deal harder, and he felt hot and clumsy and about eleven years old. "Halberd Jessop," she said. "I am a clothier here and a laundrywoman on the north side, and I own this room and the room below it and half of the coal contract for the Ropewalk tenements, which is more than most of the ward will earn between now and Newyear. Do you know why I still live here?" "No." "Because I have four hundred and six names in this building and thirty-one of them are south-ward, and if I move up to a ward where the bands are long, thirty-one people have nowhere on the day they stop work." She put her hands on her hips. "That is the answer. It is not a good answer and it is the only one there is, and I have stopped apologising for it." "How many hours has your building got?" "South-ward ones mostly. Fewer than north-ward. Every year for four years." She said it flatly, the way a woman says how many nails she has left. "And every year I say to the ward that we are full up, and every year I say it again, and the answer comes back from the Hourhouse that we are full up. That is what it means when they say we are full up. It means nobody in the building wants to spend what the building is asking." "Spend it on what?" "Nothing." "What?" "Nothing, sir." Halberd Jessop's voice did not go up at all. "That is the trick of it and it took me nineteen years to see it. The band does not have to be spent on anything. It can be spent on paper. You put a paper in front of the band and the band goes down and nobody in this building gets a bed, or a pot, or a physician, or a winter, and the paper is very small and very clean and it is not in the Handsomest room in Halbeck." Ryam sat on her floor with a cup of milk in his hands and looked at a door on hooks. "Who do I show this to?" he said. "That," she said, "is the correct question." She turned round and pulled down a hard-backed chair and set it in front of him. "That is the correct question and nobody in Halbeck asks it. Write it down. That is the other correct question. Write both." He got the slate out of his coat and the stub of pencil, and he sat on the floor of a woolcomber's room off the Coalstairs with somebody else's hot milk going cold in his stomach and he wrote down three things. The first was the number. One hundred and twenty hours, on each chit. Ten chits a quarter. The second was the number of days. He had been counting the quarter since Newyear. Nine days gone. The third was a name. Merek Coldspur's, written out twice so that he could be sure of it. And then Halberd Jessop leaned over and put one thick finger on the slate, on the third line, and said, "Now think about whether you can afford to keep that." He put the finger on the first line as well. "That number there is the one that will get you hanged. Nine days of it and no more. A man comes into a room with a number and a date and a name, the room stops being a room and starts being a room with a man in it, and everything after that is not arithmetic. It is a man being brave in front of people who are paid to write down how brave he is." "Who is paid to write it down?" "All of them. That clerk you asked. Me." She sat back down. "You write the fee's amount on a wall and nine days later eleven people ask what a standing fee is, and then the question is on a stair and I am a woman of forty-six on the Coalstairs with a milk jug. I have been the woman with the milk jug for nineteen years and I am telling you that I would very much rather stay that than be the woman with the number." She picked up her cup. "You asked the right question, and the right question is the one that makes you no money and gets you nothing and puts you in a room alone. Every man who asks it ends up in a room alone. It is not a failure of asking. It is the correct result of asking." "Then what is it for?" "It is for the person who comes after you." She drank. "You will not be. I have watched thirty years of it. It is for the person who comes after you, and there is no arrangement in the world by which the man who asks gets to be that person." ---