Night of 1 to 2 Floodmonth 3214. Pacer Post Nine, Bell Ridge. Rate 6.0.
H. A. P. P.
Uncle’s shutter sticks on the longs, so every long he sends across the Soak comes with a hitch at the end of it, like a man clearing his throat before the next bit. I read him under my breath. Y. Then a gap while he thinks, or blows on his fingers, which on the Hesk ridges tonight would be fair.
HAPPY NEW YEAR CORRIES.
I put my hand on our shutter and give it him back. AND YOU UNCLE. Then HOW IS AUNTIE, because I always ask, and there isn’t one, as far as anybody on Bell Ridge knows. It was a joke the first night somebody sent it. Now it’s just what we send, the way the up train whistles at Brannock cutting whether there’s anyone on the line or not.
His lamp goes dark. Comes back.
AUNTIE FAT. COLD. YOU NEPHEW.
COLD, I send. LONG NIGHT.
That isn’t lamp talk, that’s the truth. It went dark on Bell Ridge eighteen hours ago by my clock, and there are two days and a bit of dark still to come. You can’t hurry a night at sixes. You can only eat your way through it.
Uncle’s lamp goes off and on again, which means he’s still there and has nothing to say. I like him for that. Most men on a lamp at night will send you their whole family rather than leave it dark.
Below the platform the ridge drops away east, down through our wire to the Soak: drowned meadow and old cuts and black standing water with a skin of frost at the edges, then the Bars, then the river, then their bank and their ridges, low and long, with the pump chimneys standing up out of them and a dull red eye at the top of each. The pumps go all night. Thump, and a wheeze, and thump. They thump at our speed, because Uncle’s lot are at sixes too. Everything between us is the deads.
Where our wire meets the Soak the air won’t keep still. It wobbles in the frost the way the air does over a firebox, and anything you look at through it wobbles too, a picket, a tin, the white post the patrols go out by. That’s the Smear. You stop seeing it after a month. Then one night you’re tired and you see it again and it turns your stomach, and Hoole says that’s how you know you’ve been here too long.
I look at my wrist. I always do, after Uncle, before anything. The lived clock sits under my cuff where the brass keeps warm, and the little drum in the window turns so slowly you’d swear it was painted on. Fifty-four days to go, lived, by my sums, less some hours I don’t count because they’re the part that creeps.
Above my head, on the mast at the tower’s south-west corner, our pacer lamp blinks. Ten seconds, its own ten. Four kilometres north, up the spine of the ridge, Post Eight’s pacer answers it a breath later. It has done that every night since I came to Nine in Deepwinter, ours and then theirs, like two guards passing a flag down a platform. I don’t time it. Nobody times it. That’s what the Table is for.
Then the bells start.
They come over the back of the ridge from the west, from Marrish, the temple on the terrace ringing in the New Year’s night service, and by the time they’ve come across the Backwater and up to us at sixes they aren’t bells. They’re one long low note that goes down through the boards and into your boots and stays there. You can tell a man’s rate from fifty metres if he’s swearing; you can tell a temple’s from the far side of the Backwater if it’s ringing. Sixes sound like a kettle. Evens, from here, sound like a cow that’s had bad news.
The first stroke hasn’t finished when Hoole comes up the steps.
He’s got the book under his arm and his lamp knife in his teeth, and he takes the knife out to talk and puts it behind his ear with the pencil. Corporal Bastian Hoole, thirty-one lived and twenty-seven on his papers, Port Sennet born, a bookmaker’s son, our lamp man, and the only man on the Flats who can trim a wick by feel in a wind.
“Hear that?” he says. “That’s the chaplain’s lot down on the terrace, ringing us a good year. Takes them all night.”
“It’s one bell.”
“It’s one bell to you. To them it’s twelve and a hymn and home for supper.” He opens the book on the parapet. It’s a pay book he won off a quartermaster at Coldharbour, and he’s ruled it into columns in red ink, and the red’s gone brown the way it does. He finds a clean page. “Right. How much lived have you got?”
I put my thumb over the glass of the clock before I look at it, which is a stupid thing to do with a sealed brass counter, and I do it anyway. Then I take my thumb off.
“Fifty-four.”
“Fifty-four lived.” He licks the pencil. “Nine on the board.”
“If the ridge holds.”
“Ridge always holds.”
“That’s what they said about the last one.”
He writes PELL across the top of the page in capitals and underlines it twice, and under that, TENTH-DAY TRAIN OR WHAT. Then the odds, down the left in a column, the way his father must have chalked them on a board at the dog track while Hoole sat under it with a bun.
“Evens the Tenth-day,” he says, writing. “Two to one the eleventh. Six to one the twelfth. Ten to one anything after that. A hundred to one you go home tonight because the Measurer’s taken a shine to you.”
“Who’s on the eleventh?”
“Me. I lay off everything.”
“On what?”
“On you being the sort of lad who misses trains.”
“My father set every station clock between Brannock and the coast.”
“And there’s still men miss trains,” Hoole says. “That’s what keeps my family in boots.”
The bell’s second stroke comes in under the first one and lifts it, a long way down. Out on the Soak a flare goes up from their side, a little white one, and hangs over the drowned meadow the way they do, like it’s forgotten what it was for.
“Nell’s in,” Hoole says. “Two days’ pay on the ninth.”
“The ninth’s not possible. It’s arithmetic. Fifty-four at six is nine days, and that’s the night of the tenth at the earliest, and there isn’t a train from the railhead before the Tenth-day up.”
“She says you’ll cheat.”
“How do you cheat a sealed clock?”
“Lie under a pump.”
“You can’t get faster than six, Hoole. Nobody gets faster than six.”
“Not with that attitude.” He writes something in the margin I can’t read upside down. “Three Platoon’s in for the twelfth, most of them, on account of they think the Smear’ll come up and put you to sleep for spite. Cook sergeant’s on the Tenth-day. Chaplain’s on the twelfth.”
“The chaplain bet?”
“The chaplain said the Measurer weighs every man in his own time and you’re a light one. I took that as the twelfth.” He blows on the page. “The rate moves, the odds move. That’s what makes it a book and not a calendar.”
“The rate doesn’t move.”
“Then you’ll be on your train and I’ll be out of pocket and you can send me a postcard of the Junction.” He shuts the book. “You’ve a face on you.”
“It’s my face.”
“It’s a face.” He takes the knife from behind his ear and turns it over and puts it back. “Every one of these I’ve run, they went home. Six books. Six trains. Not a man of them left behind.”
“And you?”
“I’m the bank,” Hoole says. “The bank doesn’t go anywhere.”
Down in the Soak the flare’s still up, over the same cut it went up over.
The return’s due at twenty-one hundred Marrish, so I leave Hoole on the lamp and go down the steps into the dugout. Twelve steps, cut in the gravel and boarded, three metres of ridge over your head and the gas blanket at the bottom to push through. It smells of carbide and wet wool and the coke brazier, and under all that of gravel, which smells of nothing until you’ve lived in it, and then smells of here.
Nell is at the board. She has her back to me and the headset on and a cord she hasn’t plugged looped over her left wrist, and she’s reading a letter pinned flat under the lamp with her thumb.
“Brigade’s asking,” she says, without turning round. “Brigade wishes us the compliments of the season. Took him the best part of a minute to say it. I had to tune him up so far he sounded like a choirboy.”
“Nine o’clock.”
“I know what o’clock it is, Kit.”
The night log hangs on its nail on the post at the head of Sergeant Brede’s bunk, and Brede is asleep under it, flat on his back with his boots on and his arms crossed on his chest like the stone men in the Brannock temple, breathing through his nose. The log is a board with the sheet pinned to it and a pencil on a string. Twelve rows, nineteen hundred to oh-six-hundred Marrish. Columns for the tick, the pacer, the dip, the rate.
The tick column is empty. So are the pacer and the dip. The rate column says 6.0 twelve times, top to bottom, in Hoole’s hand. Hoole does his sixes with a little curl on the top like a pig’s tail, and he did all twelve at dusk with his tea, sitting on the ammunition box, so he could sleep through his share and so could the rest of us. Twelve pig’s tails, down the column, like a fence.
I don’t need to read it. I read it anyway, because the return is meant to come off the log, and I’m a signaller, and that’s the procedure.
“Post Nine,” I say. “Twenty-one hundred. Six point nought.”
Nell’s key goes. She sends faster than anyone I’ve ever heard, and cleaner, and blind: her eyes are on her letter. The sounder answers from Marrish, slow and thick through the rate key, and she reads it off without a pencil. “Received.”
While she’s writing the time in the traffic book the tick comes in. One click on the sounder, brigade’s master clock telling every wire on the Flats that another minute’s gone at Marrish. Six of ours. I stopped hearing it in my first week, and it only gets through to me now because the dugout’s quiet and Nell’s pencil has stopped.
“All sixes, son?” Brede says.
He hasn’t opened his eyes. He hasn’t moved his arms.
“All sixes, Sarge.”
“Then shut that blanket. You’re letting the Smear in.”
I shut it. He goes back to breathing through his nose. Brede is forty-one lived and thirty-four on paper, and he’s the only man I know who can give an order asleep and check it was carried out in the same breath.
On the box by the brazier there’s the Comforts tin. It came up with the New Year rations, a flat red tin of honey cakes from the Ladies’ Comforts Fund of Brannock, and on the lid it says A FORTUNATE NEW YEAR TO OUR SOLDIERS ON THE FLATS in gold, and on the bottom, stamped small, BEST WITHIN ONE MONTH OF PACKING. Hoole worked it out at dusk. A month in that tin, at sixes, is about five days of Brannock’s. We ate them in an hour. So the Ladies can rest easy.
There are crumbs in it still. I lick my finger and get them up.
Pim’s bunk is empty. His blanket’s gone with him.
“He’s up,” Nell says, as if I’d asked. She folds her letter in half, and in half again, and puts it in her tunic. “He’s been up most of the night. Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I wasn’t going to make a thing of it.”
“You were going to make it a thing in a voice,” she says. “Go on up. And don’t eat all the crumbs.”
Pim is on the fire step under the lamp platform, lying on his side with his blanket up to his ears and his boots sticking out the end, looking out through the loophole over the Soak. I know he’s awake because his eyes are open. He’s nineteen lived and eighteen on paper and he’s been on the ridge since Hungermonth, and he still sleeps like a boy at home, with his whole face.
“You’re meant to be asleep,” I say.
“I was.” He doesn’t look round. “Then I wasn’t.”
The flare’s lower now, finally, and down under it in the shallows by the old cut something grey is getting up off the water. It takes its time. The wings go up and come down like a pump handle on a hot day, and its legs trail, and the water it lifts off the meadow hangs under it in a sheet that won’t fall.
“Grey heron,” Pim says. “They come in off the Bars at the turn of the year.”
“Is it going to make it?”
“It’s going to make it.”
It takes about a minute to get its feet off the Soak. I count it, because I can’t help it. Sixty-one. Then it’s up past the frost line and into the dark over the river, still flapping like it’s being paid by the hour, and Pim lets his breath out through his nose the way Brede does. I think he likes birds. He’s a Flats boy; they all like birds.
Up on the platform Hoole is on the shutter, sending, and laughing at what he’s sending.
“Uncle wants in,” he says. “He’s heard there’s a book.”
“Uncle can’t want in. Uncle’s a Hesk.”
“Uncle’s a man with a lamp and an opinion. He wants the twelfth.” Hoole sends something long, with a hitch in it; he’s caught the habit off Uncle’s shutter. “I’ve laid him six to one. Payable after the war.”
“In what?”
“In whatever we’ve got left.” He gives me the shutter and takes his book and goes to the head of the steps. “I’m going to eat. Then I’m going to sleep through my share of this. Wake me if anything happens.”
“Nothing happens.”
“Then I’ll sleep well,” Hoole says, and goes down.
I’ve got the lamp to myself.
Uncle sends GOOD NIGHT NEPHEW, which he doesn’t mean, because he’s on for as long as I am and longer, and I send GOOD NIGHT UNCLE, which I don’t either. Then the ridge over there is black where his lamp was. The pumps thump on. The bell from Marrish has stopped, or it’s between strokes, and with the bell you can’t always tell.
The lamp pad comes off its hook and I write HAPPY NEW YEAR CORRIES on it and the time, because lamp traffic goes on the pad, even Uncle’s, even that. My father wrote down every clock he set, the station and the minute and how far it was out when he got up the ladder, in a book with a black cover that he kept in his coat. Nobody ever read it but him. He kept it anyway.
Over my head our pacer blinks.
I look north at Eight.
Eight answers. Late.
Not much. A hair. Not a breath after ours but a breath and a bit, the kind of late you’d forgive a man for if he’d come a long way. I put two fingers on my wrist and find my pulse and wait for ours to blink again. When it does I count. One, two. Eight. Ten seconds later, ours. One, two, and a shade over. Then Eight.
I count it through six times, a minute of ours, and every time the gap is a little longer. Not so you’d swear to it. By the sixth I get to three before Eight comes.
The stopwatch hangs on its nail by the lamp pad. It’s a good stopwatch, a Survey one, brass, with a crack across the glass that doesn’t reach the hand. I could take it down. I could time Eight against ours, ten blinks, and divide, and have a number.
I leave it on its nail.
Eight’s clockwork wants winding. That’s one thing it could be. They’re asleep up there the same as we are down here, and the spring on a pacer runs tired if nobody minds it, and a tired spring is a slow lamp. Or it’s me. Nineteen hours in the dark and four kilometres of frost to look through, and I’ve seen the Smear tonight when I’d stopped seeing it, and Hoole says that’s how you know. A lamp goes slow when the ground goes wet. It’s the water. It’s always the water. And there’s been no water. It hasn’t rained on Bell Ridge in ten days of the calendar, which is two months of mine, and the river’s lying in its bed like it’s been told to, and the evening wire from Marrish said the gauge was where it always is.
So it’s my eyes. Which is fine.
The pencil’s on the paper. I’m holding the pad. Below me in the dugout the night log hangs over Brede’s face with a 6.0 already in it for every hour from now till morning, the twenty-two hundred included, in Hoole’s hand, with the curl on the top.
I put the pencil behind my ear.
On the fire step Pim has turned over. His eyes are open. He isn’t looking at the Soak any more. He’s looking north.
Ours blinks. I count four of my pulse. Then Eight.
