Chapter 12: What He Carries Back

He had not run since Bristol.

He had run for trains there, often, down the long ramp at Temple Meads with a laptop bag banging on his hip, and he had been bad at it in the way of a man who had always assumed he would be good at it if he ever had to. He found, in the red corridor of the Calloway, that the body remembered how. It did not remember how to enjoy it.

Petris ran beside him and slightly ahead, and it was not like watching a man run. It was more as if the warden had simply decided to arrive somewhere sooner and the corridor was seeing to it. Stair-keepers stood up off their stools as he came. A footman with a tray turned side-on against the wall without being asked. Aini went past them both on the left, scarf out behind her, watch in her fist, and was through a knot of people at the next vestibule before it had finished being a knot.

“Nine,” she called back. “Not Seven, they’ve struck Seven for the freight. Nine.”

“How far?” said Elliot.

“Three.”

Three carriages. Three minutes at a walk. He did the sum without meaning to, and it came out fine, and he ran anyway, because the corridor was running. The whole red had turned towards the deck. People who had spent four hours on the wrong train were finding out that four hours was not as long as it had sounded at nine o’clock this morning, and were going home with their arms full, and the corridor had filled with them: a woman with a rolled mattress, a man with a cage of something that complained, two boys in Meridian jerseys carrying a Calloway clock between them with the anxious faces of people who had not yet decided how to explain it to their mother.

Upstairs, through the railed wells in the ceiling, someone had started the piano again. It was the same tune, played no better, and with if anything more feeling.

The deck door of Carriage 9 stood open, and the wind came in through it with the light.

He came out on to the crossing deck and stopped, because he had to, because there was a wall of people in front of him and a rail and the gap.

The deck had emptied while he was in the court. In the morning it had been a market three trains wide, a fairground with shutters. Now it was a platform at the end of a long day, with litter on it. The stalls had folded. The crates had gone, or were going, on shoulders and trolleys, over the gangways in one direction or the other. Along the flank of the train, as far forward and aft as he could see, the gangways still lay across the gap like the rungs of a ladder laid flat, every one with its knot of last crossers at the Calloway end and a marshal with a slate, and every one of them shorter than it had been, the queues breaking up as the people in them got where they were going.

Across the three feet of air, the Meridian.

He had not seen it from outside since the morning, and even then only its flank at Carriage 40, brown and cream and matte, plain as a work coat. Here it was different. Here it was the First Carriages: two storeys of it, the cream picked out with a thin line of gold that somebody kept polished, real glass in every window, curtains at the glass, and behind one of the windows on the upper floor a woman in grey sitting perfectly still with a cup in her hand, watching the Calloway as one might watch a parade one has been told is vulgar. There were no banners. There had never been banners. The Meridian did not have to tell anybody it was there.

On the board above the deck, a boy at the top of a ladder rubbed out a figure and wrote T + 3:53.

The red carriages were long two-storey saloons, each worth three or four of the Meridian’s, and three of them took longer to walk than three carriages had any right to. Gangway Nine had a yellow 9 painted on its red end and three people still waiting to cross: a man with a parcel, a woman with a baby asleep on her front, and a girl with a letter in an oilskin who was standing very upright and trying not to look as though she were about to change her mind. The marshal had his slate under his arm and a hand up, palm out, holding them, while two Meridian hands at the far end lifted a crate off the slats on to their own sill.

“Mr Marsh.”

Aini was at his elbow. She had her watch open in one hand. In the other, held between two fingers the way a conjuror holds a card he wants you to see, was a brass token, a little bigger than a chit and a good deal heavier, with the Office’s seal struck deep on one face.

“Yours,” she said. “I think.”

“I know it’s mine. You touched your pocket at me.”

“I did.” She seemed pleased that he had noticed. “Professional courtesy. You’d not have liked to find out at the gangway.”

“I found out in a dead man’s berth, in front of a clerk.”

“Well,” said Aini, “that’s on you, for being in one.” She held it out.

He took it. It was warm from her pocket, as it had been warm from Albion’s at nine o’clock, and the blank face had the same shallow dip worn into it, and his thumb found the dip without being asked and stayed there. He had not known until that moment how much he had minded it being gone. It was not his. It said whose he was. That was not, he found, the same thing at all, and the second one was the one he had missed.

“What do I owe you?”

“For the token? Nothing. That was mine to return.” She snapped the watch shut. “For the advice on the deck this morning, two chits. For the advice about the plate after Twenty-four, one. For carrying it four hours without losing it to anybody who wasn’t me, I’d say three, but I’ll take two, because you’re Meridian and it’s not your fault.”

“That’s five.”

“Five,” Aini agreed. “Only I wouldn’t take your chits today. Not at today’s rate. Pay me at the next crossing.”

“In seven years.”

“Seven and some. I’ll be standing on this deck. Not as a runner, if I’ve anything to say about it.” She looked at him sidelong, quick and appraising, as she had in the morning, and found something in him she seemed to approve of. “I’ll be dearer by then. You’ll have noticed inflation.”

“I’ll bring chits.”

“Bring the right ones.” She was quite serious. “Do not bring Meridian chits and assume the rate. I’ve seen better men than you cry on this deck about the rate.”

At the head of the gangway the marshal dropped his hand. The man with the parcel went across. The woman with the baby went after him, sideways, one hand on the rail and one on the baby, not looking down.

Petris had not said anything since the court door.

He stood a little apart from them, at the rail, with his back to the Meridian and his face to the deck, and he was watching the people go over as a warden watches anything, as if it might at any moment need a report. When Aini stepped back he came forward, and Elliot saw that he had a pen in his hand. It was a plain black pen, a little worn at the clip, and Petris was turning it over in his fingers as Albion turned the token, without seeming to know he was doing it.

“Two things,” said Petris. “Then you’ll go.”

“Go on.”

“When you cross. Don’t look back.”

The wind came along the deck and pulled at their coats. Elliot waited, because there was plainly more of it, and Petris was plainly going to say it at the speed he had decided on.

“The bell goes. The crews strike. The trains part. It isn’t fast, the parting, but it isn’t slow either, and the gangway goes with it.” Petris looked at the slats of Nine, at the iron frame and the pins, at the gap underneath with the ground going by in it in a streak. “Every crossing somebody gets to the middle and remembers someone behind them, and turns to wave. And their feet go where their eyes go. They always do. Feet are loyal like that.”

“How many?”

“Since I’ve had the coat? Two.” He held up the pen, very slightly, so that Elliot could see it. “I wrote them both up. On the pen that lives in this coat.” He put it away in an inside pocket, and buttoned the pocket over it. “I’d rather not write the third.”

“I won’t look back.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Then I’ll be the one who meant it.”

Petris looked at him for a moment from under the grey brows. It was the look from the court, the morning look, of a man being added up and the sum carried forward; but the sum, Elliot thought, had come out a little differently this time.

“And the second thing,” said Elliot.

“The bread,” said Petris. “I’ll be taking the dark. Mornings. I said so.” He said it to the deck, not to Elliot. “I’ve never liked the dark. It’s a long time to learn to like a loaf.”

He did not say thank you. He had been told twice today not to thank anybody on this train without working out first what they had done for him. He had worked it out.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said.

“I expect so. I’ve got the time.”

Aini, beside them, had opened her watch again.

“Four,” she said. “Mr Marsh. Four minutes.”

The girl with the letter had gone over. There was nobody at the head of Nine now but the marshal and his slate. All along the deck, the knots at the gangway heads had thinned to ones and twos, and the Calloway crews had come up to the hinged arms below the deck’s edge and were standing at them with their mallets hanging loose in their hands, the way men stand who have done a thing many times and have never yet done it early.

Petris held out his hand.

He had not, in the court that morning, offered it. He did now, and Elliot took it, and the grip was dry and brief and exactly as firm as it needed to be, and no firmer.

“I will, in seven years,” said Petris, “brew the tea.”

He said it as he said everything, with no more weight on it than on any other sentence, as if he were telling Elliot the time. But he had not let go of the hand.

“I’ll hold you to that,” said Elliot.

“I’d expect you to.” Petris let go. “It’ll be better than Tarn’s.”

“Everything’s better than Tarn’s.”

“Not everything,” said Petris, with great seriousness. “But the tea.”

Somewhere a long way aft, down the length of the deck, a marshal began to shout a word over and over, and the next marshal took it up, and the next, coming forward along the train gangway by gangway, as a word goes down a row of bunks. Last over. Last over. Last over. The marshal at Nine took it up as it reached him, and looked at Elliot, and jerked his head at the slats.

“Go on, then, Meridian,” he said. “You’re the last over.”

Elliot looked at Aini. Aini put two fingers to her breast pocket, where there was nothing now, and smiled. He looked at Petris. Petris had stepped back to the rail and folded his hands behind him, and his face had gone back to doing nothing at all, and it was doing it, Elliot thought, rather less well than usual.

He stepped up on to the slats.

The gangway bucked under him, a long slow give and take, the two trains disagreeing about a rail joint and making it up again. The rail was cold. The wind came straight along the gap and filled his coat. Three strides. He had done it once already today, and he knew the length of it now, and the first stride went down on wood that felt exactly like wood, and he did not look down.

The bell went on the second stride.

It came from somewhere forward on the Calloway, big and brass and pleased with itself, a bell that had been waiting four hours to be rung and meant to be heard by everybody, and a moment after it, thinner and further off and from the other side of the gap, the Meridian’s bell, once.

Behind him, the mallets.

He heard them all down the train, iron on iron, a long ragged stammer of it running forward and aft. He heard the one at Nine, close behind him and under him, a heavy double knock that he felt in the slats through his boots, and the slats moved. Not much. The Calloway end of the gangway dropped an inch on its arm and swung, and the whole thing slewed under him, a few degrees, as the arm began to come in.

The gap was opening.

He could feel it more than see it. He had been told that the trains ran a few feet apart for four hours, and they had, near enough to step across, near enough to hand a baby over, and now they were not going to. The rails beneath had begun, very gently, to want different things. The Meridian’s sill, ahead of him, was where it had been and also an inch further away, and then another inch, the iron end of the gangway grinding along its plate. Three feet of air under him, with the ground in it. Then something more than three. Then very nearly four.

Behind him, somebody shouted his name. He thought it was Aini. He thought, for half a stride, about whether he ought to answer.

His feet were loyal. He kept his eyes on the white number painted on the Meridian’s door.

The third stride was a long one. It came down on iron plate, scored and bolted, with a flat dead ring, and a hand he had never seen before took a fistful of his coat at the shoulder and hauled, and he went in over the sill and off his balance and into the carriage, and caught the folded door, and stood.

Behind him, the gangway swung away. He heard it go: a long iron groan, and a clatter, and then the wind closing over the place where it had been.

He did not turn round.

The hand let go of his coat. It belonged to a Meridian deckhand in a jersey, a man of fifty or so with a coil of rope over one shoulder, who looked at Elliot as if he were one more crate that had come over at the last minute and needed stacking, and then went back to the sill and began, without hurry, to coil the rest of his rope. On the folded door beside him somebody had painted a large white 1, a long time ago, and somebody else had touched it up more recently, with a different white, and not quite managed to stay inside the lines.