Chương 23: The Chalk Ladder

Riddell was standing outside his own shop at a quarter to six on Saturday morning with his coat buttoned to the neck, and he did not say one word about Thursday.

"Come on then," he said. That was it. Abe had a whole plan for Monday morning that started with cornering Sefton in the history room, and it lasted right up until a quarter to six on Saturday. They went down the Corn Road in the dark. The shops were shut and the gulls were up, and Riddell walked at one speed with his hands in his pockets, same as he did everything.

"Do you get seasick?"

"I don't know."

"You'll know by ten," said Riddell. The road stopped being a road about a mile down. The cobbles gave out into hard mud and then into boards, and past the boards there was the water, black and flat and enormous, with the tops of things standing up out of it in the dark. The muster shed sat at the end of the boards with every light in it on. It was the loudest building Abe had ever been in at six in the morning. Forty or fifty people, most of them men, all of them in gear that had been mended more than once.

Wet rope and diesel and frying onions from a hatch in the corner. Somebody's radio going, and three separate arguments, and a dog. An old man called Mullen was telling anybody who came near the hatch that his hip had gone funny in the night, so the wind would come around by noon, and they could all write that down. Two people did write it down. Nobody looked at him. Abe stood in the doorway and enjoyed that more than he'd expected to. Being nobody again turned out to be almost restful.

The whole back wall of the shed was a board, and the board was covered in names. Not printed. Chalk, in a hand that had been writing the same names for years, in columns under crew numbers. Behind every column was a rubbed gray ghost where twenty years of other names had been wiped off and put back. A small round man in glasses stood in front of it with a slate and a stub of chalk, arguing with two people at once and winning both.

Abe had spent three months of his life looking at boards with his name near the bottom of them. He looked at this one and felt his stomach turn over, and it wasn't the bad kind.

"Dolan?" Sefton, from school, in waders, holding a mug with both hands like an old man.

"You're joking," said Sefton.

"You're actually here. Since when?"

"Since now."

"Right." Sefton looked him up and down and laughed.

"You've got school shoes on."

"I've got school shoes on."

"You'll lose them. Everyone loses them." He drank some of his tea.

"Half share till Dobbs says otherwise. Forty odd a day, more if the day's good, and Fenn does the book so nobody argues about it twice."

"What do you actually do out there?"

"Carry things," said Sefton.

"Sacks, rope, whatever's coming up out of the houses. It's hauling, that's the whole job. Something has a go at the boat every now and again and the lead deals with it and then everyone goes back to hauling."

"Is it awful?"

"It's freezing and it's boring and I fell over in front of nine adults in October," said Sefton.

"I'd do it if it paid nothing. There's a guy on crew four who's got a boat with a fridge in it, Abe. A fridge." Forty a day. Abe had swept Riddell's floor for a year at fourteen a shift.

"Who's Dobbs?"

"You'll know," said Sefton. Riddell went across the shed to a man in a green jacket who was reading a tide sheet and drinking out of a jam jar, and said nine words to him. Abe counted them, because he counted things.

"This is Tom Dolan's boy. He'll do a day." The man in the green jacket lowered the tide sheet. He wasn't large, and that was the first surprise. He was somewhere past forty with a face like a fence post and hands that had stopped being any particular shape a long time ago.

"Riddell," he said.

"Dobbs." And that was the entire conversation. Riddell turned around and walked back to Abe and did up the top button of his coat again. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Right," said Riddell.

"I've got a shop."

"Mr. Riddell."

"Don't." He was already going.

"Do the day. Don't be clever in the water. If you get hurt down here nobody's ringing your aunt for you, they'll ring me, and I'll have to go up those stairs and say it." He went out into the dark, and the door banged, and Abe stood in a shed full of strangers on his own. Dobbs took his time coming over. When he did, he brought the whole shed with him. Everybody in it had worked out at the same moment that Dobbs was about to size somebody up, and there was nothing a shed liked better at ten after six on a Saturday.

"School?"

"Yes."

"Awakened?"

"October."

"Hm," said Dobbs, and it was impossible to tell what that meant. He walked to a stack of ballast sacks by the ramp doors. They were the dull gray of old canvas and each one had a number painted on the side in white, and the number was forty.

"Take one." Abe took one. It was heavy, and that was all it was. It sat on his shoulder and didn't do anything else.

"Down the shed and back." He went down the shed and back. One of the men by the hatch made a bored noise.

"Take two." Two was different. Two pressed his feet down into the floor and made it hard to get a full breath. He went down the shed and back with his eyes forward and his heart doing something, and when he set them down the noise in the room had dropped by about half. Dobbs looked at him for a while.

"Three," he said. The shed stopped arguing. Abe got the third sack up with both arms and a knee and settled it. Then he stood there with a hundred and twenty kilos of wet canvas on him and couldn't for the life of him find the part that was supposed to hurt. He walked it down the shed. He turned around at the ramp doors. Turning around with weight on is the part that beats most people. Abe didn't have to think about it.

A wall guard's book had spent a month teaching his feet that turning around with weight on is the entire job. He walked it back and put it down. Then a man at the back said a word, loudly, that would get you sent out of a lesson. The shed came apart. Half the shed was already telling the other half what they'd just watched, at volume, as though the other half hadn't been standing right there. The old man with the hip banged his mug twice on the counter and shouted that he'd said so.

Sefton had his hand over his mouth.

"That's three, Dobbs," said the small round man in glasses, already writing.

"I know what it is, Fenn."

"Nobody does three on a first morning."

"I know that too." Dobbs didn't look impressed. Abe had been braced for that face and it never arrived, and afterward he decided it was the best thing that happened to him all morning. Dobbs looked interested instead. Abe would rather have had the unimpressed face.

"Crew nine," he said.

"Sunday, six o'clock. Boots, not those. Bring food." He walked off. That was the whole of the interview. Fenn went up the ladder with his stub of chalk while the shed was still noisy, and wrote DOLAN at the bottom of crew nine. The letters were the same size as everybody else's, and for some reason that was the part that got Abe in the chest. Third board of his life. Bottom of this one too. He stood and looked at it for a bit.

"Four's the shed," Fenn said, without turning around.

"That's Dobbs, and it's been Dobbs for eleven years, and he'll tell you it doesn't count because he did it in summer."

"Has anybody done five?"

"A man in Witherby, allegedly." Fenn blew chalk dust off his fingers.

"Allegedly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Your name's spelled right, is it?"

"It's right."

"Good. I hate doing it twice." He was nearly at the door when Dobbs said his name.

"Dolan." Abe turned around. Dobbs had gone back to his tide sheet and his jam jar and hadn't moved off the bench.

"Your father was on the wall when it went." It wasn't a question, so Abe didn't answer it.

"I was out on the water that morning. We watched it from about a mile off." Dobbs turned the tide sheet over.

"There wasn't a thing anybody could do from where we were. We stood on the boat and watched, and I've thought about that morning most weeks since." The shed went on being loud around the two of them.

"He was on the far tower," Abe said.

"With Ackroyd and two others."

"That's right. That's who it was." Dobbs nodded, once, and went back to the sheet.

"Six o'clock. Don't be late, don't be early, early's worse." Abe walked back up the Corn Road in daylight with his school shoes ruined and nine days to go before the board read the year again, and he wasn't thinking about either of those things. Down here he'd arrived as somebody's son. That had never once happened to him anywhere else, and he turned it over most of the way home. Then he remembered to check, because he always did.

Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 6 (1, 904 / 7200) Abe stopped dead on the sidewalk outside a bread shop. He hadn't been training. He'd been carrying sacks up and down a shed for a man in a green jacket, for about twenty minutes, in front of an audience, and it had paid him better than most of Wednesday night had. He stood there working out how many hours of a stopped yard that was. The answer made him feel strange and a little sick, and he started walking again.

Tench had said it in a classroom in September and Abe had written it down and not understood one word of it. Get a trade. A trade pays you for the hard part of your day, and you were going to have the hard part anyway. June listened to the entire thing without saying a word. She didn't ask him to go back to the beginning anywhere. Then she put both hands flat on the kitchen table.

"Right," she said.

"Say the bad bit."

"There isn't a bad bit."

"Abe."

"It's shallow water. It's a licensed crew. There's a man called Dobbs who's run it for twenty years and he doesn't let anybody do anything daft, including me."

"And?"

"And things live in it," Abe said.

"That's why it pays." June looked at the wall over the kettle, where the list had been taped since their mother died, with two columns on it and a face she'd drawn in the gap sticking its tongue out.

"Go," she said.

"You mean that?"

"No." She said it straight at him.

"I hate it. I've hated it since about the word shed." She turned her mug around once.

"Doesn't matter though, does it." Then she held up one finger, and Abe knew that finger.

"Terms," said June.

"Every water day. All of it, start to finish, the same as the duel. Bad bits included, and I'll know if you leave one out, because you're a terrible liar and you look at the stove."

"Deal."

"I haven't finished." Second finger.

"If Dobbs says get out of the water, you get out. Not in a minute. Out."

"Deal." She stopped there. She turned her mug the whole way around once, and did not put up a third finger, and Abe watched her decide not to.

"We don't tell Peg," she said. It was the first time in his life he had heard June say we about a thing like that.

"She'd have to go and stand at the shed and worry all day," June said.

"She'd do it. She'd get a bus down there on her half day. You know she would."

"I know."

"So we don't tell her yet." They sat in the kitchen with the potatoes going and the two of them on one side of it for the first time ever, and neither of them liked it, and neither of them said so. Peg came in at half past six and asked how the shop had been.

"Fine," said Abe.

"Fine," said June, at exactly the same moment, and then had to go and be very busy in the hall.