Chapter 12: Morrow

The bell for the dawn watch went at four, and Elliot was awake for it because he had never once managed to sleep through it, and at twenty past four somebody up forward began shouting in a way that was not an emergency.

That was the first thing that told him. He had been aboard six days by then and had learned the ship’s registers of noise the way you learn a language you will never speak: the shout for look at this, the shout for come here, the shout for get out of the way, and the flat carrying two-note call that meant a thing had happened which the ship had a procedure for. This was the last one. There was no running.

He went up.

The sea at that hour was the colour of a knife and moving in long low hills with no wind on them, and the light was coming up somewhere behind the weather without committing to anything. Forty or fifty people were at the port rail, which on a ship that size is not a crowd, and they were all looking down and out at a patch of water perhaps two hundred yards off, and Bosun Osk was up on the boat deck with her hands cupped round her mouth, and what she called down was:

“Boat away. Six hands. Take up a soul.”

The Fathom hove to for him.

Elliot stood at the rail with his hands on the wet iron and watched a city stop moving for one person, and it took him a moment to understand why his chest had gone tight, and then he understood, and it was very bad.

She did it as a matter of course. The Master was not called; Osk signed for the boat at the lectern afterwards, in the ordinary way, and by then it had been in the water for a quarter of an hour. Nobody argued. Nobody weighed it. Four thousand people, a schedule, a season, ice waiting at the top of the leg — and a shape in the water at twenty past four in the morning, and the whole enormous apparatus simply paused, because that is what you do.

Two hours, Elliot thought.

They had given Della Roan two hours, at the top of the world, on a quay in the cold, and then the Meridian had pulled out because a train that stands too long stops being a train, and everybody aboard — including him, including him, standing at a window watching the platform recede — had understood the arithmetic and had not been able to fault it. Three thousand lives against one woman. You cannot hazard the many for the one. That is not cruelty; that is the shape of the thing you live inside.

And here was another thing you live inside, and it had stopped for a stranger without anybody having to be brave about it.

The two shapes were not doing different sums. That was the part he could not put down. They were doing the same sum, in different mediums, and getting opposite answers — and every person on the Meridian would have said, with total sincerity, that stopping was impossible, and every person on this ship would have said, with equal sincerity, that not stopping was unthinkable, and both would have been describing the machinery rather than themselves.

The boat came back at five. They got him up the side in a sling because he could not use his arms properly, and they had him under three blankets on a grating in the lee of the galley within four minutes, with a mug of something hot held for him by a woman who had clearly done this before and knew that you hold it rather than hand it over.

He was about forty. Ordinary dark hair going grey at one temple, ordinary face, big across the shoulders. Barefoot. Wearing trousers and a shirt of no cut Elliot had ever seen on the Meridian or in Wrackmouth. Perfectly conscious. Not distressed.

Not distressed. That was the thing.

“Three or four a year,” said the purser, when Elliot asked, in the tone of a man giving you the annual figure for anything. “Some years none. The year before last we had seven, which was remarked on.”

“Alive?”

“Always alive.” The purser was writing as he talked; the purser was always writing as he talked. “You don’t take up the dead. The dead don’t happen.” He said this without any particular weight. “They come up in the water, out on a leg, in the open, generally in the small hours and generally on the north side of the Round, which the old hands will tell you means something and it doesn’t. Never near land. Never in a boat, never on wreckage, never with a mark on them, never cold enough to be dying of it, whatever the water’s doing.” He turned the page. “Ask a lighterman and he’ll tell you they come up out of the deep like a cork. Ask me and I’ll tell you they go in the book.”

“And they don’t know anything.”

“They know how to talk and they know how to eat.” A shrug that was not unkind. “They don’t know a name. They don’t know a place, they don’t know a year, they don’t know a soul, and if you push them on it they get a look on them like a man who’s put something down in a room he can’t remember going into, and then it passes off, and by the week’s end they’re not troubled by it. Some of them settle better than folk born aboard.” He blotted. “We’ve a third bosun who came up in my father’s time. Best seaman on this ship. Doesn’t know what he was.”

“What do you call them?”

“By the watch that took them up.” The purser reversed the book without being asked, the way Bask had, the way Sarn had — Elliot had stopped being surprised by this; on the water a record was a thing you showed people — and there, at the back, on ruled paper, was a page headed DRAWN, and under it a column of names and dates and watches in a dozen different hands.

Middle. Morrow. Dogged. Morrow. Forenoon. Middle. Graves — the graveyard watch, which they don’t much use, on account of.

It went back. It went back to the front of that volume and, said the purser, through eleven volumes before it, and if Elliot wanted the older ones they were in the strongroom, and there had never been a year without a line on that page except the one they still called the dry year, when there were none for eighteen months and the ship talked about nothing else.

“He came up on the dawn watch,” said the purser, “so he’ll be Morrow. There’s four Morrows aboard already, so he’ll be Morrow the fourth or Morrow Tall or whatever the mess decides, and the mess always decides. Then a rating and a hammock and he’s on the ship’s roll by tonight.”

Elliot looked at the page and the page did not do him the courtesy of being short.

“You don’t find it strange,” he said.

The purser stopped writing, which he had not done once in the whole conversation.

“You’ve come off a train,” he said, “and there’s people appear on your train, too. Don’t tell me there aren’t.”

“There are.”

“And what does your lot make of it?”

And Elliot, standing in a hot cramped beautifully organised office on the tenth morning since he had last stood on a train, had to say the true answer, which was: “We put them in the open carriages and don’t ask.”

“Well then,” said the purser, and went back to his book. “We put them in a hammock and give them a trade. I’d say that was one better, but I’d not push it.”

He went and sat with Morrow, because nobody else was going to and because he could not physically have stayed away.

The blankets had done their work. The man had his colour back, and the mug in his own hands now, and he was sitting up against the galley bulkhead with his bare feet out in front of him looking at the sea with a mild, tired, entirely undramatic interest.

“Morning,” said Elliot.

“Morning.” A nod. A swallow of tea. “Is it? It’s getting light.”

“About half five.”

“Right.” Pause. “They’ve been very good, this lot.”

“They have.”

“There was a lad brought me these socks.” Morrow considered his feet, which were now in socks. “I don’t know whose they are.”

They sat for a while. Down the deck two men were coiling something with the pointless perfection of men who have been told to look busy. The ship had already gone back to being a ship: within an hour of taking a soul out of the ocean, the ocean was scenery again.

“Can I ask you something?” Elliot said.

“Aye.”

“Do you know how you came to be in the water?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Morrow said it comfortably, the way a man discusses a stiff knee. “I must have gone in off something. A boat, I’d say. Only I don’t remember a boat, but you wouldn’t, would you, if you’d been in the water a while — I’ve heard the cold takes it out of you.” He turned the mug round in his hands. “Or I’ve had a knock. There’s a bit here.” He touched the back of his own head, without any real conviction, and Elliot did not need to look to know there was nothing there. “It’ll come back.”

“It might,” said Elliot.

“It’ll come back,” said Morrow, agreeably, and drank his tea, and did not mention it again, and did not appear to think about it again, and Elliot sat beside him and watched a man’s mind close over the hole with something reasonable, in about ninety seconds, in exactly the way that every arrived person on the Meridian had closed over the same hole, the way water closes over anything.

The feeling fades quickly. Everybody said so. It was one of the first things anybody had told him, four years ago, in Carriage 74, with a blanket round his shoulders and a cup of the worst tea in the world in his hands: don’t worry about it, it goes off.

It had not gone off. Not for him. He had been sitting in that carriage with a heart attack and a meal-deal sandwich and thirty-six years of a life all present and correct in his head, watching people be gentle with him for something he did not have, and it had taken him a fortnight to understand that the gentleness was for the blankness, and that the blankness was the normal thing, and that he was the broken one.

And now he was on the other side of it. That was the whole content of that dawn, and it took him the rest of the leg to be able to say it plainly, and he said it eventually to nobody, in a hammock, at night: I am Fixer, now, and this is the corridor, and he is me.

“You from aboard?” said Morrow.

“No. I came off a train.”

“A train.” Morrow turned this over. It went in with no more difficulty than the socks. “What’s that, then?”

So Elliot told him.

He told him about a thing the size of a city that runs on rails across a continent, and about the carriages and the numbers, and about tea cars and chits and the fact that people argue about what day it is; and Morrow listened to a description of the whole of Elliot’s world with the polite mild attention of a man being told about a place he has no reason to doubt, and said, at the end of it, “That’d be something to see,” in the voice of a man who did not especially need to see it.

And Elliot sat there with the thing he knew.

He could have said it. That was the horror of the morning, and it sat in him afterwards for weeks.

There were people in the world who knew what had actually been done to that pleasant tired man, and he could not have given you the number. A Conductor on his own train. A Conductor on The Calloway. A baker he had met once, in a bread alcove, on the worst morning of his life. A large gentle instrument-mender a fortnight and an ocean behind him. A woman standing at the end of a passage below decks with a leather case under her arm. And — this was the part he could never do the arithmetic on — a Conductor on a stopped train two seasons east who had looked at him across a cold office and said there are more of us than you’d think, and had declined, in the kindest possible way, to say how many.

Not one of them was within a thousand miles of that grating.

And he was the only man on that ocean who had come through the thing awake, and could therefore have told Morrow, first-hand, in detail, out of his own memory, what it was like on the other side of a door that everybody else walks through with their eyes shut.

He knew what it would do. He had watched Birdie Wren’s face when she warned him what people did to men like him. He knew what had happened to Maren Toll, who had known, and had told one person, and had been found dead in his berth an hour into the crossing, while the two trains still stood side by side. He knew that a leak is a person who has been handed a knowledge that cannot be put down, and that the only mercy anyone had ever been able to offer him was a small circle of people who agreed not to talk about it.

And there was this, too, and it was worse, and it was the reason he ended up going below in the middle of a sentence: Morrow was fine.

He was fine. He was warm, he had socks on, he had a trade coming and a hammock and four namesakes and a mess that would decide what to call him by supper. He would be a seaman, because Osk had looked at his hands and said “he’ll have pulled on a rope, look at that” — which was a callus and a guess and would become, in a week, his history. In a year he would be one of the drawn who settle better than the ship-born. Nobody was going to be cruel to him. Nothing was going to be taken from him that had not already, silently, somewhere out in the dark, been taken.

To tell him would be to hand a well man an illness in order to be honest with him.

“You want to eat,” Elliot said, standing up, because his voice had gone and he needed a sentence that was true and small. “Now, I mean, while they’re offering. You won’t feel hungry for a bit, and then you’ll be starving at the wrong hour and there’ll be nothing.”

Morrow looked up at him with vague good-natured surprise.

“That’s a kind thing to know,” he said.

“Somebody told me.”

“Then I’ll do it.” He settled back against the bulkhead. “Thanks. Er—”

“Elliot.”

“Elliot.” Morrow tried it out and put it away. “I’ll see you about, then.”

He went below and got as far as the passage outside the purser’s office and had to stop with his hand flat against a bulkhead until it passed.

Vashti found him there some minutes later. She did not ask, which he was grateful for, and she did not go away, which he was more grateful for. She stood with her case under her arm and waited with the enormous patience of a woman who had once spent thirteen years waiting for a number to come out.

“Same as us,” he said, when he could.

“Yes.”

“Not similar. The same. He came up out of the water with nothing and they gave him a name off the watch-list and a hammock, and it’s three or four a year, and it’s been three or four a year for as long as they’ve had a book to write it in, and nobody has ever once in the history of this ship asked why.” He was aware that his voice was not steady and did not much care. “Whatever it is that does it to us, it isn’t ours. It’s not the train’s. It doesn’t need rails.”

Vashti Kade was quiet for a moment.

“No,” she said. “It only needs a way of going round.”