Gannet
Four days to the weld. Noon.
I took her up the hill to see my mam because I couldn't think what else to do with a woman who'd just told a captain she'd drunk her own mother. I told myself it was so she'd have somewhere quiet, and I wanted somebody to look at her who wasn't going to write it down.
She'd stood in the road outside the yard with her hands up her sleeves, looking at the gate, and I said, "Come up the hill," and she said, "Why?" and I said my mam likes visitors. "She doesn't know anyone," she said. "She likes them anyway," I said. It's the truest thing I know about my mam and the poorest thing I've ever offered as an argument. She came. I'd have liked her to say no, and then I'd have been left in the road with my good intentions, which is where I keep them.
Captain Haverill had said glad. That was in my head all the way up. I'd stood in his yard and thought, I've worked ten months for that man and never heard him say he was glad about a pie. It sat in me like a stone.
The quiet ward at noon is the best of it, with the sun right down the room and the windows up and the sea coming in over the sills. Somebody had put the orderly's cocoa tray on the end of thirty-one, and the orderly was folding a sheet with her mouth full of pins.
"She's had her porridge and half an egg," she said, round the pins, "and she's been at the window since nine, looking out for something. Does the captain still send the oranges? Only that's the last of them, look, in the bowl, and I'd not like her to go short."
"What oranges?"
"Oh." She took a pin out. She looked at my face and I watched her decide it was good news. "A basket on the first of the month, with a Guild ribbon on it. Since before you were sworn, near enough. He never signs it. I thought he'd have said."
"No," I said. "He's not said."
I stood by the bed turning my cuffs over, which is what I do with a hat when I've got one. I'd a captain who knew which bed and a captain who sent oranges, and I was warm all down the middle of me like a pan left on a back plate.
Bryony was looking at the bowl and not at me.
"Colm," said my mam.
She'd turned her head on the pillow. Her face came up slow and then all at once, like milk in a pan. "Colm, you've got so tall."
"I have, Mam."
"You've never." She said it to the room, delighted, as if the room might not have seen. "Look at you. Isn't he tall?" And then she saw the other one, stood at the foot of the bed with her hands up her sleeves, and she said, "Oh! You've brought somebody."
"This is Bryony, Mam."
"Bryony." She tried it in her mouth like a boiled sweet. "That's a plain good name. That'll wash." She looked at her a while, my mam, the whole length of her, boots to hacked-off hair, with her head on one side and her hands quiet on the blanket. Bryony stood and was looked at. I've seen her face a ward lock and a flooded cellar with less in her shoulders.
"Sit down, dear," said my mam. "He never sits. He's always standing about."
Bryony sat, on the edge of the bed, on the very edge, as if the bed might be wanted back.
"Is she your sweetheart, Colm?"
I've told you what I am. I'd the answer before the question was done, and I've never once been able to hold it back, any more than you can stop your knee when the doctor taps it. There are a hundred things I could have said that would have been kind to the pair of us. She's a friend, Mam. She's my captain's opener. She's helping me with a door. Every one of them was a lie.
"Yes," I said.
It came out of me quite quietly. It filled the whole long room.
"I thought so," said my mam, pleased. "You've gone the colour of a plum."
I had. My ears were like two coals. I looked at the window, where the sea was, and a gull went across it. I didn't look at Bryony, because I'd no idea what was on her face and I'd a very clear idea of what was on mine.
She didn't say anything. The bowl moved. When I did look she had an orange in her lap and she was peeling it. I've watched her take a lock to bits and I've never seen her hands go so slowly. The peel came off in one piece, a long curling ribbon, which I've never managed in my life, and she laid it down on the blanket beside my mam's fingers.
"Well, that's clever," said my mam. "Isn't that clever, Colm?"
"Yes, Mam."
"It's a clever thing, a whole peel."
Bryony broke the orange in two. She put a segment into my mam's mouth like a woman feeding a bird she'd been warned about. My mam shut her eyes and made the noise she makes about a plum, and for a bit nobody said anything at all. The orderly went down the ward with her pins. The sea came in. I stood with my cuffs in my fists and was as happy as I've been since the Sunday.
"Will you take her to the sea?" said my mam, with her eyes still shut.
"I will."
"Mind your hat."
We stopped till the second half of the orange had gone, and then she was asleep, with sugar on her chin.
At the door of the ward Bryony stopped. She was looking at the front of me, at my badge. It's been pinned on crooked since the day I was sworn, and nobody in the whole Guild has ever said a word about it. She reached up and unpinned it and put it back on straight. It took her about three seconds. She did it with her thumb and the side of her hand, the way you'd set a cup straight on its saucer. Then she went down the stair in front of me, and I came after, with my ears hot, and the best of the day gone by half past twelve.
The boy found us at the bottom of the town. He was a Guild boy in a Guild cap, running, with his breath in bits. The captain wanted the sergeant at the dockyard, at once, at Dace's bench, to witness.
"Not her," said the boy, looking at Bryony as if she'd been written on the list in a different ink. "He said, not her. He said she's to go home."
"I'm going," said Bryony. She turned off by the fish stalls without looking back, with her hands in her pockets, and the crowd closed in behind her, and I stood and watched it do it.
Ivo Dace keeps a tidy shop. I said so to myself, standing there, because there was a great deal else going on and it was the only kind thing I had.
Haverill was in the middle of the floor. Two constables stood by the bench with the drawers out, and Ivo's boy, who is twelve, had been put against the wall out of the way and was trying to be a coat. The clerk had been fetched, and sat on an upturned bucket with his basket and his chest, looking like a man who'd been asked to a christening and told it was a hanging. Half the dockyard had found it had a reason to be at the door.
Ivo stood against the wall with his arms folded and his rule in his back pocket. He didn't look at me. He had the face he'd had on the pier, closed like a shop, and tar on both cuffs.
"Sergeant," said the captain. "You're here to see what's found. You'll say what you see and not what you think."
"I only do the one, sir."
"I know," said Haverill, not unkindly. "Go on, Constable."
They went through the lot: the blanks, the drawing, a tin of pencil stubs, a chisel. A heel of bread, wrapped in a cloth, in a lunch-tin with a lid, and under the bread—
The constable lifted the bread out and put it on the bench. In the bottom of the tin there was a bit of rag, and in the rag a key.
"Sergeant."
I went and looked. It was about as long as my finger. It had a bit on the end like a fork that's had ideas, and it was dark with handling. Somebody had tied a loop of tarred twine through the bow of it, and in the twine, where it twisted, there was a thread of weed.
"Is this the key he showed us at the pier?"
"Yes, sir."
"Say what you see."
"It looks it, sir. I'm no hand with keys." I looked at the weed. "The twine's new. That wasn't on it before."
"The weed."
"It's green, sir. It's wet. It's not dried, nor gone stiff; it's still got the harbour in it."
Nobody said anything. At the open end of the shed a dockyard man took his cap off, I don't know why, as if it had gone quiet in a church.
"Then it's been in the water these last days," said Haverill. He took it from the constable's rag between his finger and thumb and held it up to the light like a fish he didn't trust. "Dace. That's the hatch key to door four."
"It is."
"Where have you had it?"
"I went for what's mine," said Ivo.
"At whose hatch?"
"Mine."
"When?"
"When I pleased."
The captain waited. He's good at it. He'd have waited a boat in. Ivo looked at the ceiling beams and at the stove and, for about the length of a breath, at me. It wasn't the face of a man caught with something. I'd seen that on a hundred men in the Bank's corners. It was the face of a dog that's gone back to where it buried a bone and found the hole. I'm sworn to what I see, and I'd no word for that I could give a captain.
"Pask," said Haverill, "stood at this bench two days ago and told the whole yard that you'd drunk her mother and she'd drunk the rest."
"I heard her."
"You did. And this morning a report came to my office that a woman had drunk from door seven."
"I'd not have put my name to it."
"I never said you did." Haverill dropped the key into the constable's sack himself, slowly. His whole back eased, as if somebody had lifted a yoke off it. "Constable. The key, the blanks, the drawing, the lot, in the sack. Dace goes to the yard."
"On what?"
"On a Guild writ and a key with the harbour on it."
"It's all one to me," said Ivo.
The constable took his arm. He let him. They went along the shop between the dockyard men, who made a lane for them without being asked and looked at their boots, and one of them said "Ivo," very low, and Ivo didn't turn. Somebody laughed once and stopped.
I followed at the back, across the cobbles and in at the yard gate, with the gulls going up off the horse trough and the sun on the steps. The captain was at the top of his steps before the rest of us were through the wicket. He waited there with the constable's sack under his arm and looked down at me.
"Sergeant. Pask is to keep out of my yard from now to the close. The guard's to ring if she shows at the gate. You'll tell her tonight, and you'll tell her it's my order and not my pleasure."
"Yes, sir."
"That's all." He went in, with the roll in his walk, and shut the door.
The cells are along the back by the basin, the long way round. The constable took Ivo that way with a hand on his elbow, and I stood at the foot of the steps with my hands behind me and nowhere in particular I'd been told to be.
Ivo came by me.
He didn't turn his head. I had his profile, long and sour, and the tar on his collar. He didn't slow down. He said it to the cobbles in front of his boots, quite flat, in the voice a man uses to give his name to a clerk.
"It was empty when I got there."