Gannet
Nineteen days to the weld. Morning.
Bryony said I wasn't paying the ice-house, and she said it at the top of the stair, and again at the turn, and a third time at the bottom, by which time I'd stopped answering because I'd run out of ways of saying I was.
I'd not slept. I'd lain with my feet off the end of the bed doing sums, and the sums all came out at my mam, and somewhere in the small hours I'd come up with the second lot, the one Captain Haverill has promised me when the writ's closed clean, and I'd thought: well, if this one has her, there's another day of her coming. And I'd been so ashamed of thinking it that I'd got up and eaten the end of a cheese standing at the window, in the dark, and not tasted it.
The ice-house is under the fish market. You go in by a trapdoor behind the eel stalls and down forty steps, and the cold comes up to meet you like a dog that's been shut in all night and hasn't forgiven anybody. It was midsummer. Up top the gulls were panting. Down there my breath went out in front of me in clouds, so I could see every word I said, which for a man in my position is a bit much.
They cut the ice off the river-ponds in January and pack it in sawdust, great blocks stacked to the roof, and by now it had sunk to half. The whole place ran. A thread of water down every wall, and a channel of it along the floor going off to a drain in the dark with a noise like somebody pouring tea in the next room.
The ice-man took us down. Broad, brown, in a leather apron, with his beard gone white with rime, and he said, "You'll be quick," and then, "Please," like he'd been told to add it. He'd a barrow of fish due at noon, and every hour we stood there a hundredweight of his winter went down the drain.
The clerk came down last in a muffler up to his eyes with his bottles in a basket, and stopped at the bottom step, which is where he stops.
A lane had been cut through the stacks, shoulder wide, and where it ended there was the door. Set in the back wall between two grey slabs of ice, with the little square of the plate at chest height furred white with frost. I'd no idea how a man puts an iron door into a pond. I didn't ask.
On the stone at the foot of the plate there was a saucer.
A chipped white saucer, full of milk to the rim, and not a drop spilt.
"That's not ours," said Bryony.
"Nor mine," said the ice-man. "It's there at five when I come down. Every morning. I don't put it, and I don't ask." He'd decided long since that there were things in a cellar you leave be, and I liked him for it. I looked at the milk longer than I should have. I'd given my breakfast to the clerk, and what I'd had was a mug of tea you could read through. I stepped round it.
When I looked back Bryony was down on her heels at the edge of the lane with something in two fingers.
"Burnt tinder," she said. "Off a splint. It's dry, look, and everything else in here's dripping." She turned it over. "Somebody struck a light. After the ice-man shut up. Stood here and looked at the door."
A bit of sawdust. I couldn't have told you if a man or a goat had stood in it.
"Tobin carries a tinderbox," she said.
"So does every cook in Vessel."
"Cooks didn't ask me yesterday which door was next. I told him. Ice-house, tomorrow. I told him myself, in the Lane, and he nodded." She put the bit of black in her pocket as carefully as if it had a name. "Everybody asks, you said. Fine. Everybody didn't turn up in the dark with a light."
"He asks me every day. He asks everybody. He's—"
"He's what?"
"He's Tobin," I said, and heard how it sounded.
I do know him. I've known him a year, and he's never once taken a thing off me, and I've given him plenty, and he's been frightened of something since the audit and has been telling jokes at it ever since, the way you whistle past a dog. I'd meant to ask him what.
"I'm paying this one," I said. "I'm telling you, so you can't say I crept."
"You'd get stuck creeping."
"I'm telling you."
"And I'm telling you no."
I'm a head and a half taller than she is and twice as wide, and there's no clever way to put it, it's only arithmetic. I got my hand to the plate. She got both of hers round my wrist, and then one boot up on the ice beside the door, and leaned back with her whole weight, and I'll say it was a fair try. It was like being hauled on by a terrier that's seen a rabbit.
"It'll have her," she said through her teeth. "You know it'll have her."
"I know."
"Then why?"
It was none of her business, but she'd asked. So I told her.
"Because you've paid four," I said. "And I've written them all down."
She stopped pulling.
She didn't let go. And the plate went cold under my palm, and then it wasn't, and there were the teeth.
It isn't biting. I keep saying that. It's more like being counted. It went through me quick and careful, like a sheepdog going through a flock, head by head, past the supper and the bed and the yard, and I knew where it was going before it did. Up the hill. Into the long room. Down the beds to the window. I stood in the cold with her hands round my wrist and thought, there she is, and I thought, goodbye then, Mam, and I'd my mouth open to start—
And it stopped.
It stood at the foot of bed thirty-one, and it looked at her, and it turned round. It went back down the hill, and across the yard, and into somebody's back room, a place I'd never have thought of in a hundred years, and sat itself down at the long table.
"The chandler's," I was saying. "The back room, the breakfast. Eggs and a rasher each. The range at the end, the black one, and two lightermen at the far end with their elbows out. And there's a kettle on the hob, and it starts, and it whistles flat as a dropped scone. And she laughs."
I couldn't have stopped it with both hands.
"It goes off like a cork. A bark. And her hand goes up over her mouth, she's furious, she's that cross with herself, and the lightermen look up from their eggs. And I'm looking at her face. I'm just looking at it. It's like somebody's taken the shutters off a house I'd thought was shut for the winter, and I can see right in, and I go red from the collar up, and I eat a rasher so I'll have something to do with my face, and she says, What. And I say—"
I said, Nothing.
That was the last of it. The word, in my own mouth, and a rasher.
I stood there. You put your hand out in the dark for the salt, where the salt's always been, and there's a bare shelf, and you can't think what you were reaching for.
Bryony had let go of my wrist. She was standing with her hands hanging.
"What did I say?" I said.
"You said I laughed," said Bryony. "At the chandler's kettle."
"Oh."
And she told me the rest, flat and quick, in the voice she'd used to read the beads out in the flood. I stood in the cold and had it told to me. It's an odd thing, being handed your own letter by somebody else.
"I would have gone red," I said.
"You said that too."
I thought it over, in the cold, with the water going down the walls. Then I felt for my mam. Not the door. Me. I put my hand into myself and felt for her, and there she was, all of her. The window. The bed. Every grey hair on her. I said it over twice in my head to make sure of it, and then out loud, because I couldn't stop, and Bryony let me.
"It's still there," I said. "All of it. It went round her."
"Yes."
I waited to be glad. I'd braced for the other thing so hard, all night, that I thought gladness was owed. It didn't come. What came instead was worse, and since it was only the pair of us, I'll say it. I'd made my peace with giving her up. I'd done it at the window with the cheese.
"It had my mam right there," I said. "And it took the laugh."
"I didn't ask you to," said Bryony.
"You never ask."
She looked at me. Then she looked at the saucer of milk, which hadn't moved, and said, "Your clerk's waiting," and went to get him.
I'll be quick with the count, because the ice-man asked me to be. The clerk came down the lane sniffing and drew the beads up one by one, six of them, dull old strangers' with the cold gone into them, and then mine on top. Mine was the colour of weak tea with milk in. He held it up and squinted.
"What did it take?" he said.
I told him, from her telling, which is a strange thing to do, like reading out a recipe for a cake you've been told you ate. He wrote it down with his lips going. The smith knocked the wedge out, two blows, and the door went round on its hinges, and the ice-man watched it shut and said, "Right."
Tobin was on the quay.
He was leaning on a fish barrow at the top of the stair with his hands in his pockets, and I knew something was wrong before he'd opened his mouth, because they were empty. Every day since I joined the Guild he's turned up with something in them. A bun. A twist of whelks. A pie with the pastry gone to glue. He'd come with nothing, and he'd a shine on the end of one thumb where a blister had been at it.
"Morning," said Tobin. "What did it take?"
"Where were you last night?" said Bryony.
"The vats."
"All night?"
"All night. I was at the vats all night. Ask the vats, they'll swear to it, they're very reliable, they never move." He grinned. "Why? What's happened?"
She held up the black scrap. "Burnt in there. By the door."
He took a long look. "Well," he said. "That's a bit of string."
"It's a tinder-wick."
"I've never seen it in my life." He said it a shade too quick, like a man taking his hand off a hot pan, and then he turned to me. "Go on, Colm. What did it take?"
I told him. Everything, in order, the kettle, the lightermen, the rasher. Bryony turned round and stood with her back to us looking at a basket of whiting.
"That's a good one," said Tobin, quietly.
Then he said he'd the vats, and he was off up the quay at a trot.
I wrote it in the book before the yard. I sat on the edge of the horse trough, in the drizzle, with the little black thing on my knee, and put: Door five. The ice-house. Paid by Sergeant Gannet. A memory of the sergeant's own.
It was true. Nobody had asked me to put the rest.
The yard's never empty at that hour. The clerk with his bottles. Two constables and a smith, a man with a note for the captain from Esk, the gate guard eating a pasty, which I looked at. The captain came out on the office steps.
"Door five, Sergeant," said Haverill. "Say it plain."
"Her laughing," I said. "My own. A kettle at the chandler's."
He doesn't write it. He stands and listens like a man listening to a bad engine, and when you're done he says dismissed, and that's all. He said it.
Up over his head the office casement stood open, and Ivo Dace was at it with a pair of pliers. Doing something to the bit it hangs on. He'd got a pin out of it. He doesn't work for us, and he didn't look down. He looked like a man who'd slept in his boots and not been fed since the weekend. I thought about taking him a pie. I thought better of it.
Bryony wasn't in the yard. She'd said she'd a spring to see to. I'd have known that was a story, if I'd looked for it, and I didn't.
Wenna took me across the basin in the rain, as she does when the yard's done. The Guild's bit of the quay is on the dockyard side and the Steps are on the other, and I row like a man stirring porridge, so I've stopped being allowed. There was an eel-man in the stern with a basket on his knees, and the pair of them both asked me what it took, and I told them. The eel-man said that was a hard one.
It had nearly stopped by the Steps. The cloud was going off to the sea in long grey rags and the stones were all shining.
She was sat on the top step under the chandler's eaves, with a brazier beside her, the little black iron pot of coals the lightermen warm their hands at, and balanced on the rim of it, on a bit of grating, was the kettle.
I stopped three steps down.
She didn't turn round. "The chandler's wife says I can keep it till morning if I give it back with the spout the same," she said.
"Bryony, what are you doing?"
"You've lost one." She'd her hands in her coat. She'd been at something since noon, I could tell, there was a red print round her mouth where she'd held a hand over it, and her voice was cracked at the edges like a girl who's been calling over a wall. "I can't give you that one. It's gone. It's in a glass in the Guild's cellar with your name on it. So you can have another."
"You can't just—"
"Come up."
I came up. It's a lot of steps. She was looking at the kettle, hard, like she was waiting for it to do something rude, and it did. The water got hot. A bit of steam found the dent in the spout and out came the whistle, flat right through.
Bryony opened her mouth.
"Ha," she said.
I've not got a word for it. I've had a whole afternoon to look for one. It was the worst laugh I've ever heard on a human woman. Three notes, all the same, with a gap between each, and her teeth set the whole way through and her eyes on me, glaring, like she was daring me to get out of the way.
"Ha. Ha." A breath. "Ha."
"Bryony."
"I'm not done."
"Ha."
"Well?" she said. "Was it any good?"
I'm sworn, and I did try, with my whole face. I'd have said it was grand. I'd have said it was the best I'd ever heard. What came out was:
"It was terrible. I'm sorry. It's the worst I've ever heard in my life."
"Good," said Bryony.
And that was it for me. I laughed till there wasn't a breath in me, and then I laughed without one. My knees went. I sat down on the wet step with my head on my arms and the whole of my back going, and every time I looked up she was stood there with her hands in her coat and her mouth shut tight, trying not to, and failing, and the kettle was still going.
It went on whistling flat. Nobody took it off the fire.