Chapter 1: Crossing Point

The ceiling was a foot from Elliot’s face, which was how he knew where he was before he knew anything else.

It had taken him most of a month to stop sitting up into it. By now, which by his own count was the two hundred and third morning, he could read the hour off the light on the knots in the planking. The count he kept in his head, tied to the ceiling of a Tesco in Bedminster. There was nobody on the train he could have explained the date to.

The light said it was early. The noise said something else.

Carriage 74 was never quiet, but at this hour it usually managed a low, collective grumble, a whole sports hall of people asleep at slightly different depths. This morning it was murmuring. Down the long rows, in the grey, boots were being laced and bundles tied by people who had no reason to be up, and the same word was going from bunk to bunk.

“Calloway,” said Mr Fixer, from the bunk below.

Elliot looked over the edge. Mr Fixer was sitting up in the middle tier with his hat already on, and had plainly been awake for some time, waiting for somebody to tell it to.

“Every seven years, more or less,” said Mr Fixer. “Less, this time. Nobody tells us why. Their line and ours run side by side for four hours, near enough to step across, and they throw the gangways over, and for four hours it’s the biggest market in the world and the worst post office. Half this carriage has a letter in an oilskin for somebody’s cousin’s widow on the Calloway, last known address a rumour. Mariam at the gangway knows a runner, and the runner knows a woman, and the woman thinks she knows the widow. It’s not a postal service. It’s a rumour with directions.” He drew breath, which with Mr Fixer was punctuation rather than need. “And it’s three, this time. Three trains. There’s a line comes in from the south that you see once in a life if you’re lucky, and Jem’s had it from the tea car, and the tea car’s had it from forward, so. Don’t take the first rate. Their chit’s worth one of ours and a bit, and they’ll tell you it’s worth two. Don’t lend anybody anything, because you’ll not see them for seven years, and that’s if they’re honest. Last time, a fellow from somewhere up the middle walked across with a bag for the morning and never walked back, and owed the Office more than you or I will see in a lifetime, and the Office is still—”

Below him, behind the flowered curtain, the tap and click of Mr Plum’s tools stopped.

Mr Fixer listened to the stopping for a moment, and found something else to say. “Anyway. Big day. Everybody goes forward for it, even people who don’t go forward.” He looked up at Elliot. “You’ll be going forward.”

“I haven’t been asked.”

“You’ll be going forward,” said Mr Fixer again, and took his hat off, and looked into it, and put it back on.

Elliot climbed down the ladder, which he had stopped noticing some months ago. At the bottom the flowered curtain was drawn back, and Mr Plum sat on the edge of his bunk under the jointed lamp with a watch movement open on a square of cloth in front of him and his hands resting either side of it, not working.

On the shelf behind him stood a jam jar with nothing written on it. Mr Plum reached round without looking, unscrewed the lid, and put a pinch of what was inside into a tin cup, and the smell came out across the aisle, smoke and orange peel. Somewhere down the row Jem had the kettle going, and somebody brought the water, and Mr Plum poured and passed the cup up without a word.

It was the good tea. Elliot had drunk it four times in six months. He drank it now standing in the aisle, and above Mr Plum’s shoulder, on Elliot’s own shelf, the little gramophone stood beside the square tin labelled BOLTS, its horn turned towards the top bunk, where he was not.

Mr Plum watched him drink. Then he looked up.

“Be careful, today,” he said.

Elliot opened his mouth to ask of what, specifically. Mr Plum had already picked up the smallest of his screwdrivers, and the question had nowhere to go.

Albion came down the Strand a little after half past six.

The carriage parted for him as it always had. Plain uniform, no insignia, hands behind his back. He stopped at the end of the row and looked at Elliot’s boots, which were on, and the cup, which was empty.

“Marsh.”

“Morning, Albion.”

“The Conductor.”

Mr Fixer leaned out of the middle tier. “At this hour? He’s had no breakfast.”

Albion looked at him for about as long as it takes to decide not to answer something.

“Now,” he said.

Across the aisle, in his bottom bunk, Old Satterly had opened his eyes. He watched Elliot set the cup down on the end of Mr Plum’s bench, and watched him straighten his coat, and when Elliot glanced at him he said, quite clearly, to nobody in particular, “Three,” and closed his eyes again.

The walk forward took most of an hour, as it always did. Elliot had stopped counting the vestibules some months ago, round about the time he had stopped needing to.

This morning the gradient ran the wrong way. The open carriages were awake and full of people with bundles, and the further forward he went the fuller it got, because everybody who had business across was walking in the same direction he was, with oilskin packets in their inside pockets and their hands on them. A man in the low sixties was carrying a mantel clock in both arms, wrapped in a blanket, with the face of somebody bringing a baby to be christened.

At the tea car Birdie had a cup poured and waiting on the counter. She pushed it across as they came through, and Albion went on a pace and stopped, and did not turn round, which was as close as Albion came to waiting for anyone.

“He came through a quarter of an hour ago,” said Birdie, “asking which was your bunk, as if I’d know. I told him three-quarters of an hour, allowing for boots.” She looked at the clock over the urn. “You were here eleven minutes inside it. I was being generous with both of you.”

“How did you know he’d—”

“Crossing morning. The Conductor’s man going aft before the lamps are up, and coming back with you.” She wiped the counter where the cup had been. “I’m not a fortune-teller, young man. I’m a tea-car proprietor with eyes. Drink that. He’s counting.”

Elliot drank it in three swallows. It was strong enough to stand a spoon in.

The clock in the administrative carriage said twenty to eight.

Under it the clerks were at their desks early, with the look of people who had been told the night before that tomorrow would be busy and had not slept on it, and halfway down the carriage Ivy Gell had a stack of cream slips at her left elbow and the stamp in her hand.

Thump.

She looked up as they passed. Her ears went pink, as they did, and she did not stop.

“Morning, Mr Marsh,” she said. “Gangway passes.” Thump. “Three hundred and eight.” Thump. “There’ll be more by nine.”

At the end of the carriage the dark door with no name on it stood shut. Albion knocked once, opened it, and stood aside.

The office was as it had been on the first morning and every morning since: small, warm, bare. A lamp that did not flicker. Two chairs. The desk with nothing on it.

Except that today there was something. A folder lay square in the middle of the dark wood, so thin it might have been a single sheet that had been given ideas.

The Conductor looked up.

“Mr Marsh.”

“Conductor.”

Albion found him the chair, and went back to the inside of the door.

“There is a crossing this morning,” said the Conductor. “You will have heard.”

“Mr Fixer mentioned it.”

“Then you will have heard a great deal.” A long hand turned the folder round to face him and opened it. “This one is yours.”

It was a single sheet, in a clerk’s small hand. TOLL, Maren. A carriage in the middle of the train, a trade — clerk, freight — and a line headed Arrived, eleven years back, with age (est.) 28 against it. Below that, Account: in default, and the figure, which Elliot read twice and then decided not to think about. And at the bottom, alone: Crossed at the last crossing. Landed Calloway, Carriage 14. Did not return.

Twenty-eight, eleven years ago. Thirty-nine now, if he was anything now.

“He went across for the morning,” said Elliot, “and stayed.”

“He went across with a bag that was not large enough for a morning.”

“Mr Fixer said there was a man. Last time. He didn’t say who.”

“Mr Fixer would not have known who. Few people did.” The Conductor’s hands rested on the edge of the desk, one over the other. “Mr Toll left this office a debt. You will cross to the Calloway and find him. Bring Mr Toll back, or bring back what he owes. Either will close the account.”

“Which would you rather?”

The Conductor considered him. It was the honest kind of considering that Elliot had learned, over six months, to mind more than a refusal.

“I would rather you asked him which he would rather,” said the Conductor.

“What did he do?” he said. “Here, I mean. Every day.”

“He was a freight clerk, and a good one.”

“And apart from that?”

“Apart from that, he occupied a great deal of this office’s interest.”

“Interest. As in money?”

“No,” said the Conductor.

Nothing else came. Elliot had expected nothing else, and found that he minded anyway.

“Where on the Calloway?”

“Mr Toll keeps a berth in their Carriage 27.”

“How do you know that? After seven years.”

“I was told.”

The lamp burned without moving. Behind him Elliot could feel Albion looking at a point some way above both their heads.

“The Calloway is Conductor Sable’s,” said the Conductor. “You will be noticed before you are off the deck, and she will want to see you before the morning is out. She is very pleasant to everyone. It costs her nothing, and she charges for it.” A pause, no longer than it needed to be. “Be truthful with her. Be brief. Do not give her anything you have not already decided to give.”

“Do you know her?”

“We have both been doing this a long time.”

It was an answer to a slightly different question, and Elliot recognised it as the only one he was going to get.

“You will cross at gangway three, in Carriage 40,” the Conductor went on. “The forward gangways land at her door. Gangway three lands in her market. The first bell is at nine. From the first bell to the last is four hours, and when the last bell goes the gangways come in, whoever is on them. If you are on the wrong side of it, you will be on the wrong side of it until the next crossing.”

“Seven years.”

“Or eight. The interval is not always kind.”

“Why me?” he said. “You must have people who’ve done crossings before.”

“I have people the Calloway has seen before.”

He waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it. He closed the folder, and then, because it was the only thing on the desk and it seemed rude to leave it lying there in a room that had nothing else in it, he squared it with the edge of the wood.

The Conductor watched him do this.

“Mr Marsh,” they said. “I would prefer you to come back.”

They went aft.

Twenty carriages, give or take, out of the hush and back into the noise, against the grain of the whole train. Albion went through the crowd without appearing to touch it. Elliot went through behind him and touched most of it. At about Carriage 30 somebody in a queue was singing, badly and happily, a song about a girl on the Calloway who had promised to wait. By 36 the whole carriage was a single argument about exchange rates. By 40 he could feel the wind.

Carriage 40 was an ordinary middle carriage, berths and a stove and a man mending a chair, except that halfway along its south side the wall had been opened. Two great doors stood folded back on their hinges, and beyond them there was a sill of iron plate, scored and bolted, and beyond the sill there was nothing at all but the land going by and the air of the actual world coming in. A crowd stood well back from it, behind a rope. Somebody had painted a large white 3 on each door, a long time ago, and somebody else had touched it up more recently with a different white.

A crossing-marshal stood by the rope in a canvas apron with a slate under his arm. On the slate, in chalk, it said T – 0:25. As Elliot watched, the marshal licked his thumb, rubbed out the five, and wrote a four.

“Calloway,” said Albion, and nodded at the doorway.

Elliot went to the rope and looked out.

He had been on the train for two hundred and three days, and he had never once seen it from outside. He had walked its length more times than he could count. It had not occurred to him until that moment that he did not know what it looked like.

Now there was another one coming to show him.

It came in across the land from the south on a line of its own, at a long, shallow angle, so slowly that at first it seemed to be standing still and the country to be doing all the moving. Its rails were closing on theirs as gently as two people walking towards the same door, and every minute it was nearer and longer, and Elliot, looking for the end of it in either direction, did what he had done on his first day in Carriage 74 and looked for the far wall, and did not find one. Forward, the train ran on along the land until it went small and blue and joined the haze. Aft it did the same. Between those two vanishings it was a city, laid down on its side and travelling.

It was red forward, a deep red, and the forward carriages were two storeys high. Behind the red it was gold, and behind the gold he thought it was green, though by then it was too far to swear to anything. At every window, all down the length of it, there were banners. They stood straight out in the wind of its going, and when it dropped they hung and swung all together, as though the whole train had taken a breath.

And there was music. It came across the narrowing gap in pieces, a horn and a drum and something with strings, not quite together, all of them loud.

“They always do that?” said Elliot.

“Always,” said Albion.

“Is it a welcome or a warning?”

Albion considered the question with the seriousness he brought to all questions, as if it might later turn out to have been about exits.

“I think it is loud,” he said.

The slate said T – 0:12. The Calloway was a hundred yards off, then fifty. Its rails ran in beside theirs and straightened, and the two trains came level, and then it was alongside, so close that Elliot could have read a newspaper in a window if anybody over there had been reading one. They were all leaning out instead, shouting names across the gap. The gap was three feet, and stayed three feet. Below it, between the two sets of wheels, the ground went by in a streak.

It was then, looking up over the Calloway’s long gold roofs because he could not quite bear to look down any more, that he saw the third one.

It ran beyond the Calloway, to the south, on its own line. He could see only the upper part of it over the gold roofs: grey-green, the colour of something that has been washed a great many times, with brass at its joints that caught the morning. There were no banners on it at all. Along its side, as far as he could see, something pale was fixed beside every door — paper, he thought, or boards — fluttering where the wind got under the edges. As he watched, a bell rang on it, a long way off, and the sound came across two trains to him clear and thin.

“What’s that one?” he said.

A deckhand in a Meridian jersey, coiling rope by the sill, glanced up and across.

“Vesper,” he said, and went back to his rope, as if he had been asked the name of a dog.

On the Calloway’s side a long deck ran along the flank of its carriages, shutters folded back, and the deck was already full. Hinged arms swung out from below the deck’s edge, and on the arms were the gangways, one after another down the length of the train, forward and aft, as far as he could see in either direction. They came down across the gap in a long ragged sequence, like the rungs of a ladder laid flat, each one with a number painted on its end by hand.

The nearest came down towards the white 3. It was heavier than it looked, slatted, iron-framed, with rails at waist height. Two Meridian hands caught its end, guided it on to the sill, and dropped the pins, and the brackets locked with a double clank that Elliot felt in his boots. All down the train he heard the same sound, gangway after gangway, the iron going home. It was the sound of two civilisations agreeing to stand near each other.

On the slate the marshal wrote T – 0:00, and underlined it twice.

Somewhere forward, a bell rang. Not loudly. It was the Meridian’s bell, the one that kept the hours, and it struck once and stopped, as if it had been asked to say something and had said it.

The rope came down. The crowd went forward. Calloway people came the other way, and the two crowds passed each other on the slats with the stiff, sidestepping courtesy of people who know that knocking a stranger off a gangway is a poor way to begin a trade.

Albion put his hand into his pocket and brought it out closed.

“Here,” he said.

It was a brass token, a little larger than a chit and a good deal heavier, warm from his pocket. On one face the Office’s seal was struck deep. The other face had been blank once, and was now worn bright and smooth in the middle, in a shallow dip that fitted a thumb. In six months Elliot had seen Albion’s thumb going round on something in his pocket perhaps three times, and each time on a bad day.

“What is it?”

“Mine.”

“What does it do?”

“Says whose you are.” Albion looked across at the deck, at the banners, at the boys up a ladder at a chalk board. “Show it. If it matters.”

“Do I give it back?”

“Come back,” said Albion. “Then ask.”

Elliot put it in his inside pocket, beside the grey notebook, and felt it settle there with its weight.

He stepped up on to the sill. The wind pulled at his coat. Below him the ground went past at a speed that made his knees want to hold a meeting about it. The gangway was three strides of slatted wood, bucking very slightly on its pins as the two trains disagreed about a rail joint and made it up again.

He went across. The slats gave under his boots, and the rail was cold under his hand, and somewhere under him the three feet of air went by with the ground in it. He did not look down after the first stride.

On the far end the gangway was painted red, and someone on the Calloway had painted a number on it too, in yellow, in a different hand from the white 3 behind him. It said 17. It was the same plank at both ends, and it had a number at each end, and neither train, as far as Elliot could see, had ever asked the other what its number meant.