Chapter 6: Crane

The line closed at the ninth bell, and after the ninth bell Ledda Crane did the sums, and the sums did not come out, and she did them again, because doing them again was a thing to do with her hands and the alternative was to sit in the dark and think.

She had been good at this once, in the way a thing is easy when it is only arithmetic. Before, the sums always came out, because before there was a next halt at the bottom of every column — so many days of flour, so many of fish, so many of the dried green stuff nobody liked, and at the foot of it all the halt, the resupply, the moment the columns started again from the top. You did not have to make the food last forever. You had to make it last to Cardrey. Cardrey was a number. Everything was a number, and the numbers ran down to a halt, and the halt caught them, the way the floor catches you at the bottom of the stairs.

There was no halt at the bottom of the column now. That was the whole of it, written plain. She had so much flour and so many mouths and a rate of going-down she could not slow past a certain point without people starting to die of the slowing, and when she carried the division out it did not end at a halt, it just ended, in a week and a bit, in a blank where the resupply used to be, and below the blank there was nothing, because she had never in her life had to write a column that did not run down to a halt and she did not have the figures for what came after the food, only the date the food stopped.

The Meridian man would say there was more now. There was. She had walked to the rear in the dark and put her hand on the cold iron of his shunt and the warm wood of his relief carriage and smelled the flour through the planking, real flour, and it had moved her more than she’d let him see. It bought time. But time was the thing nobody on this train knew what to do with, and she was beginning to understand — sitting with the sheet and the dead scale and the boy asleep against the flour sacks with the pencil still in his hand — that the food had never been the worst of it.

The worst of it was the when.

They asked her. All day they asked her, down the line, and they asked it the way you ask a thing you believe has an answer: when do we move, Ledda, when’s it fixed, when’s the proper food, when do we get to Cardrey. And she had nothing to give them, because when was a question this train had always been able to answer and could not answer now, and she watched the not-answering do something to people’s faces that the short rations didn’t. A person can be hungry. A person born to The Vantage had been taught, in the marrow, that hunger was a thing with an end on it, that you were always travelling toward the end of it, that the train was the promise that somewhere ahead, on a schedule, it gets better. Take the schedule away and you didn’t just take the food. You took the ahead. You left them with a now that didn’t point anywhere, and they stood in her line holding it like a coat that didn’t fit, and she had no idea — none — how you were supposed to teach a grown person to stand in a time that wasn’t going anywhere, because nobody had ever had to teach her, because there had always been a halt.

We had whole rooms designed for it, the Meridian man had said, about waiting, and she had wanted to hit him and she had wanted, more, to ask him how. Whole rooms. What did that even mean. What kind of a world builds rooms for waiting in. A poor one, she’d thought, and then thought again, because the man who came out of it had walked into a dead train and talked a mob into sitting down, and there had to be something in a world like that worth carrying, even if it was only the one terrible useful skill of knowing how to be nowhere, going nowhere, for as long as it took.

She turned the lamp down to save the oil and sat in the almost-dark with the sums, and that was when she let herself think about Marra Wend.

She and Marra had shared the morning pot for eleven years. Whoever woke first set the water; you didn’t discuss it, you didn’t keep account, it was just a thing two women who slept four berths apart had done across eleven years of the train running, the small unspoken treaty of people who have decided to be kind to each other and not make a performance of it. And today Marra Wend had come up the line with her tins, and her two children behind her, and when she’d reached the counter she had not met Ledda’s eye. Had looked at the scale, and the scoop, and the sheet — at the measure Ledda gave her, which was the measure she gave everyone, exactly, fairly, the same scrupulous flat scoop — and had taken it and gone, with a stiffness in her shoulders, because Ledda was not Marra’s friend who set the morning water any more. Ledda was the woman who decided whether Marra’s children ate, and you cannot share a pot with the hand that holds the scale over your children, and they both knew it, and neither of them had said it, and the not-saying had been, eleven years ago, the very thing that made them friends, and was now the thing that had quietly ended it. The withholding that had been a grace was turning, all down the train, into a thing with its eyes narrowed. Don’t ask what people had before had always meant be kind. It was starting to mean watch them.

That was the sum that wouldn’t come out. Not the flour. The flour she could carry to a date. It was the other column, the one with no numbers in it, the one where eleven years of a morning pot went down to a blank in a single afternoon and there was nothing written below the blank.

She sat a while longer. Then she did the thing she had promised herself, the first day, that she would never do, the thing she would have stopped anyone else doing with the full weight of her authority and her scale: she opened the sheet to the marks against berth twenty-six, and Marra Wend’s two children, and she took the scoop, and in the dark, unrecorded, off no one’s ration but the margin she was supposed to keep as a hedge against worse, she made up two small measures of flour and folded them into twists of paper and set them where Marra would find them in the morning and know who, and never say, because the not-saying was all they had left of eleven years.

It was unfair. She knew it was unfair. She was the fairest person left on the train and she had just been unfair on purpose, in the dark, for two children, and she would do it again tomorrow if the margin held and hate herself by exactly the right amount, which was: enough to know it was wrong, not enough to stop.

She turned the lamp out. The train did not hum. She had never once in her life noticed that the train hummed, and so she did not notice now that it didn’t; that was a thing for the man from the other train, the one who’d been somewhere quiet before. For Ledda Crane there was only the dark, and the boy breathing against the flour sacks, and the sums that ended in a blank, and the long unscheduled night, going nowhere, with nowhere at the bottom of it to land.