Chapter 4: Where the Fish Comes From

The board said ask for Vey, so Elliot asked for Vey, and was directed by three separate people to the same cart with the same jerk of the chin, which told him something about Vey before he ever got there.

She was in the yard with a pair-cart half loaded, going along the load with a strap in her hand. Forties. Built by the job — the particular squared-off strength of someone who lifts things all day for a living rather than on purpose — with a hat that had been rained on for a decade and boots that had been resoled by somebody who cared more about the boots than about how they looked. She did not stop working when he arrived, and she did not look up, and she said, “You’ll be the one wanting water.”

“News travels.”

“Ellie told me.” A nod at the girl with the tally-board, away by the dock. “She thinks you’re a bit simple.” She hauled the strap, put a knee into a barrel, and hauled again. “You’re not, though, are you. You’ve been stood in front of my board for the best part of an hour.”

Elliot had, in fact, been stood in front of her board for the best part of an hour, twice, with a break in the middle to talk to a clerk who had brought him a ledger against regulations. He decided he liked her.

“Corrin Vey?”

“Mm.”

“You carry letters.”

“Letters, barrels, cordage, fish, oil, salt, a piano the once, and a woman who wouldn’t say why.” She got the buckle where she wanted it. “One chit the bundle for letters. Seven for a loaded pair. Three for a single. It’s on the board, and the board’s not for haggling, before your friend in the coat starts.”

Elliot looked round. Fixer was fifteen yards away with his hands behind his back, examining a barrel with the studied disinterest of a man appraising it.

“He’ll try anyway,” Elliot said.

“They do.” She straightened, and for the first time gave him her whole attention, which was a heavier thing than he’d expected. “Go on then.”

“Where do the letters go?”

“Down the road.”

“And where does the road go?”

Corrin Vey looked at him for a moment. It was not a hostile look, and that was the part he thought about afterwards, on the deck of something he had no word for yet: she wasn’t being cagey, and she wasn’t gatekeeping, and there was no gleam of at last, an outsider asks. She simply looked at him the way you look at someone who has asked you which end of a hammer to hold.

“Where do you think the dried fish comes from?” she said.

The trouble was that Elliot had an answer to that. He’d had one for four years and had never once examined it, and the answer was the same place everything comes from — a station town, a valley, some arrangement of fields and sheds and people that existed off to the side of the rails and produced things which came aboard in crates. He had never followed it further because nobody did. The train’s world was the track: forward and rear, the loop, the halts along it, and the wilds in between, which were scenery.

“A river?” he said.

“Sixty mile of hard water and nothing in it.” She said it without triumph. “Rivers don’t do fish in that quantity, love. Rivers do a bit of fish. You lot take four hundred stone of it off Halverston every loop, and Halverston buys it off a factor, and the factor buys it off me, and I fetch it up from the water. Eighteen mile.” She pointed with the strap, down past the gate, where the two grooves ran out of the flags and into the valley. “Two days if it’s dry. Three if it isn’t. And I’ll want paying either way.”

“From a lake?”

“From the sea.”

She said it the way you’d say from the shop.

Elliot stood in a stone yard on a shelf of scrub and had the very specific experience of a floor he had not known he was standing on going out from under him. It was not that he didn’t know what the sea was. He knew exactly what the sea was; he had been to Weston-super-Mare with his aunt and eaten chips in a wind that took the paper. He knew what the sea was in the way you know things about a place you’ll never need to think about again.

He had simply never once, in four years, wondered whether this world had one.

The maps in the administrative carriage stopped. That was all. Every chart he had ever leaned over — and he had leaned over a great many, this last year, in a small office with a woman who drew for a living — showed the loop, and the halts, and the country the loop ran through, and then at the western edge the ink ran out and the paper was paper. He had read that edge as the end of the useful part, which is exactly how you are supposed to read it, and which is not what it says at all.

“There’s a sea,” he said.

“There’s a sea.”

“Eighteen miles that way.”

“Nearer twenty, but the road bends.” Corrin Vey went back to her load. “You’ve a whole sea,” she said, to the barrel, in the mild tone of someone making conversation. “What did you think was on it?”

What he thought was on it, when he thought about it at all, was nothing. He said so, because there was no dignified alternative, and she accepted it without visible contempt, which was somehow worse.

“Boats, then,” he said, trying to catch up. “Fishing boats.”

“Boats.” She allowed it. “Aye, there’s boats. Hundreds. Little ones, out of the coast towns — they do the near work, they’re the ones I buy the fish off, mostly.” Buckle. Haul. “And there’s ships.”

There was a distinction being made. He could hear it being made and could not hear what it was.

“What’s the difference?”

Corrin Vey stopped, and considered, and then did the thing that Elliot would remember for the rest of his life, which was to turn round and look, without any particular expression, at The Meridian.

It stood along the three sidings with its length going away in both directions past the limits of the yard, dark green and black-iron and soot-streaked, stove-smoke rising from forty chimneys, its brass numerals dulled, its farm carriages breathing out the smell of straw and animals, three thousand people arguing about what day it was inside it.

“About that,” she said. “Bigger, some. The Fathom’s taller.”

Elliot’s mouth was open. He shut it.

“They’re—” His voice came out wrong and he started again. “They’re the size of the train.”

“They’re the same as the train, love, that’s what I’m telling you. They go round.” She turned her hand in a slow flat circle, the universal gesture, the one Vashti made over a chart and Hessa Marrow had made over a valley. “You go round on your rails. They go round on the water. They stop where there’s people, they take what they want, they go on. Yours takes fourteen month, near as. The Fathom’s is shorter — nine, thereabouts — so she’s in about every nine month, which gets you two calls in some years and one in others, and the carters keep a count because it matters to us if it doesn’t to you.” Buckle. “There’s a couple more on the long southern reach that I’ve never seen and don’t care to. Cities, they are. Same as that.” A short nod at the train. “Except they can turn round.”

“They can what?”

“Turn round,” said Corrin Vey. “Put about. Go back the way they came.” She looked at his face and something in her own softened by perhaps a degree. “You’ve gone a funny colour.”

Fixer had come up. Elliot became aware of him at the edge of things, and became aware, further, that Fixer had stopped pretending to appraise the barrel and had gone very still, and that this was rarer and more significant than any question Elliot could think to ask.

“How long,” said Fixer, “has this been going on?”

“How long’s what been going on?”

“This.” He gestured at the yard, the board, the grooves in the flags, the road. “You. Us. Them. The fish and the barrels and the letters.”

“My father did this road, and his mother, and hers.” Corrin Vey said it without pride, the way you’d give directions. “There’s Veys in the weigh-house book back six of us. Before that it was Tarrows and there was a dispute, and I’ll not go into it because I’d only get it wrong and my aunt’s still alive.”

“Six generations.” Fixer’s voice had gone strange and quiet. “And in all that time, nobody from the train—”

“You are the train,” she said, reasonably. “You buy the fish. You’ve bought the fish off us for longer than anyone’s counted. It comes up on my cart to the factor and the factor sends it round to Halverston and you take it aboard and eat it and I get paid.” She spread her hands: the whole arrangement, entire, obvious. “What did you think that was?”

And there it was. Not concealment; not a secret; not one single lie anywhere in the chain. A century of correct entries, four hundred stone a loop, a line below the line that nobody was paid to look at, and at the human end of it a woman with a strap in her hand who had answered the only question she had ever been asked and had never been asked another.

“Nobody’s hiding anything, love,” said Corrin Vey, and went back to her load. “It’s just none of your business until you ask.”

He got two more things out of her before the water was on and the whistle went.

The first was the road. She could take a cart down it in two days and a bit; there was a halt-house at the top of the pass where the carters slept, and water at the second stream, and after that the country went thin and salt-bitten and then there was Wrackmouth, which she described, with what he would later understand was accuracy rather than unkindness, as “a hole, but a working one.”

The second he had not gone looking for.

“Has anyone from the train ever gone down?” he asked. “Ever? In six generations?”

Corrin Vey took longer over that than she had over the sea.

“There was a man,” she said at last. “Family story, so take it how you like. In my great-great-grandmother’s time — she was a girl, so she’d have had it off her mother, so it’s already worn thin. A train came down the branch, in the old way, when they did that. And there was a man off it. A clerk, is what she said. Not crew. He came down the road with the carts, and he went out on the water, and he came back up, and he wrote it all in a book.” She scratched her cheek with the buckle-end of the strap. “He was here a fortnight, on and off. Helped lash a load, which is why she remembered him at all. Good hands, she said. That’s the whole story, that’s all there is, and my aunt tells it wrong on purpose.”

“And then what?”

“And then he went back up on the train,” said Corrin Vey, “and the train went away, and no train ever came down here again.”

The yard went on around them: barrels, chalk, the slow drum of a plank, somebody laughing at the dock.

“Until today,” she said.

She had the load strapped by then, and she checked it the way she checked everything, with a flat hand and no ceremony, and then she looked up at the train and the smoke and the three thousand people who did not know they lived beside an ocean, and Elliot watched a thought pass over her face that he could not read, and which, in the six generations of her family, might never have needed a word.

“You’ll be wanting to see it, then,” she said. “The water.”

“Yes,” said Elliot.

“Seven chits for a loaded pair,” said Corrin Vey. “Five if you walk.”