Chapter 3: The Way Things Work

“Your ticket is everything,” said Mr Fixer.

They were walking forward. Mr Fixer walked everywhere with a slight forward lean, like a man who knew where the good stuff was and meant to get there first, and Elliot was learning to keep up with him and listen at the same time, which on the third morning of his second life was a lot to ask of one person.

“It says who you are, where you sleep, what you eat, and whether anyone minds if you fall off. No ticket, no standing. You’re cargo. Less than cargo.” He stepped round a child without looking at it. “Cargo has a manifest.”

“What happens to people without one?”

“Depends who finds them. A clerk, you get processed — farm labour, till you’ve earned a provisional. An enforcer, you get put off at the next station town.” He made a small downward flick with his hand, like brushing crumbs off a table. It was the most eloquent account of being thrown off a moving train that Elliot had ever been given. “So for now you’re a station-stop intake with his paperwork pending. Nobody argues with pending. Not at the moment. The Office is three months behind on everything.”

“Because of the stamp.”

“Because of the stamp.” Mr Fixer slowed, and turned, and for a moment the grin was put away. “Which brings me to the favour. I need you to not be interesting. No questions that make people remember you. No wandering where you’ve no business. You’re pending. That’s all you are. Can you do that?”

“I was a project manager,” said Elliot. “Being uninteresting was literally my job description.”

The grin came back, slowly. “Good man.”

They went on through Seventy-three and Seventy-two, and each was another Seventy-four and not: another hall of bunks and laundry and stove smoke, another dog, another argument at another stove plate, a different smell of onions. In Seventy-one a man was shaving in a hand mirror and nodded to Mr Fixer through the lather. In Sixty-nine a woman had hung a wind chime made of spoons, and the whole carriage had evidently decided not to mention it. Elliot stopped counting the people and started counting the carriages, because the people would not hold still to be counted and the carriages at least came one at a time.

Somewhere in the low sixties the floor changed. The boards gave way to something solid and level, and the gaps between carriages grew less draughty and more deliberate, the iron couplings giving way more and more often to vestibules — short concertina passages with double doors at either end, where the noise of the wheels came up for a moment and the floor plate shifted under his feet in a way that he felt in his stomach. The people changed too. There were more of them, and fewer were sitting down. A carriage near the tea car was half market: sacks of roots, a man selling buttons by the cupful, a woman with a tray of small brown cakes calling out a price that went up as Elliot looked at them. The crowd moved round him without interest and closed behind him without comment. Twice he lost sight of Mr Fixer altogether and found him again only by his voice, which carried.

He could have lost a man in that crowd. He could have lost himself. He kept close.

The tea car was long and warm and full, with a counter that ran most of its length and an urn at the near end that hissed to itself continuously. The chairs did not match and the tables did not sit level, and the customers did not match either: open-carriage coats beside the sturdier cloth of the middle, a woman with a toolbelt next to a boy with nothing, two men in aprons arguing amiably over the price of eggs. It sat at the border between the cheap carriages and the working ones, and both sides came to it, and neither side pretended the other wasn’t there.

Behind the counter stood Birdie Wren. She was a small, upright, grey woman who appeared to have been issued to the tea car along with the urn, and to have outlasted it twice.

“Fixer,” she said. “And who’s this?”

“Elliot. New. Station-stop intake, paperwork pending. He needs tea and education, in that order.”

Birdie looked at Elliot, and kept looking. Her eyes were dark and quick, and they went over his borrowed clothes and his hands and his face, and Elliot had the feeling of being entered in a ledger in a column he would have preferred not to be in.

She filled a tin cup from the urn without looking at it and set it down in front of him.

“Drink that. Don’t comment on it.”

He drank. The tea was good. It was good with no fuss about it — hot, strong, faintly smoky and a little sweet — and it tasted of leaves rather than of the vague memory of leaves. Something must have happened on his face, because Birdie gave one short nod.

“Right,” she said. “So you’re new, you’re lost, and Fixer’s brought you here so I’ll explain the things he can’t be bothered to. Correct?”

“That’s—”

“Don’t answer. It was correct.”

Mr Fixer put two small metal discs on the counter. Birdie took one, slid the other back with a sticky bun on top of it, and the transaction was over before Elliot had quite seen it begin. He picked up the change. It was dull grey, a little smaller than a ten-pence piece, stamped on one side with an arrow over a circle and on the other with a number, and worn smooth by a great many thumbs.

“Chit,” said Birdie. “Money, if you want to call it that. You earn it working — hauling, cleaning, farm detail, anything the train needs doing. You spend it forward. Down your end it’s mostly favours. You mend someone’s boot, they give you bread. You carry a message, they save you a place at the stove.” She took the chit back off him and dropped it into Mr Fixer’s palm. “It works, mostly, because if you cheat someone today you have to sleep three bunks from them tonight.”

The door at the forward end opened, and two people came in who changed the temperature of the room.

They were young and fit and wore dark grey, better cut than anything Elliot had seen aboard, with a band of dark red round the upper arm. Conversations did not stop when they walked down the car, but they went quieter, and a man at the corner table found his tea suddenly absorbing. Birdie filled two cups without a word and without any of the warmth she had shown Elliot. The taller of the two drank his standing. The other looked at Elliot — a flat, professional look, the kind that logged a face — and then both of them were gone through the rear door, and the noise in the tea car came back up to where it had been.

“Enforcers,” said Birdie, collecting the cups. “The Conductor’s. Most of them decent. A few not. They don’t pay.”

“For tea?”

“For anything.” She rinsed the cups. “They’re the part of the system that comes and finds you, young man. For people with tickets, that’s a comfort.”

The man at the corner table got up, put a chit beside his cup, and came to the counter on his way out. He was middle-aged and neat and had machine oil worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles.

“Pump’s gone in Thirty-one, Birdie.”

He went out. Birdie watched the door close behind him.

“Hargreaves,” she said. “Repair shop. Electrical. Comes in twice a day and never says more than four words.” She considered. “That was five. He’s upset about that pump.”

A young woman came in a little after that, slight and pale, in a clerk’s grey jacket with the cuffs inked blue. She came to the counter like someone reaching the end of a long day that was somehow still the morning. She put a folded paper on the counter. Birdie’s hand covered it and it was gone.

“You didn’t see that,” said Birdie, without turning round.

“See what?” said Elliot, and in the curved brass of the urn Birdie’s stretched reflection smiled.

The young woman took the cup Birdie poured her and sat on the stool next to Elliot’s, holding it in both hands. She had a pencil behind one ear and another in her hair, and seemed to have forgotten about both.

“Still?” said Birdie.

“Two thousand three hundred and sixteen,” said the young woman. “Mr Tullis was in yesterday. He’s very nice about it.”

“Ivy Gell,” said Birdie to Elliot. “Receiving desk, the Office. Ivy, this is Elliot. He’s pending.”

“Oh,” said Ivy Gell, with real sympathy. “Aren’t we all.”

It came out over the next ten minutes, partly from Ivy and partly from Birdie, who corrected her twice and was right both times. The Office had one receiving stamp. It was brass, with a wooden handle, and said RECEIVED across the middle. Everything that came into the Office — every transfer, every claim, every maintenance request, every report from every carriage — had to be stamped with it before anyone was allowed to act on it, because until it was stamped it had not, officially, arrived. Three months ago the stamp had gone missing. The desks had been searched. The drawers had been searched. The bins had been searched, twice, and the senior receiving clerk’s coat had been searched, to his lasting offence. Every clerk in the carriage had been asked who had it last, and every clerk had said it was on the desk the last time they saw it, which was true and no help at all.

“Can’t they make another one?” said Elliot.

“They’d have to order one,” said Ivy. “From the workshops.”

“And?”

“And the order would have to be received.”

There was a short silence at the counter.

“Word lives on this train, young man,” said Birdie. “Babies, debts, who’s sleeping in whose bunk — I hear it all by teatime. And that stamp’s been gone three months and not one word about it has come down that urn. It’s not anywhere.”

“In the meantime I write them down,” said Ivy. “Everything that comes in. Received, awaiting stamp, with a number, so that when it turns up I can do them all in order and nobody’s lost their place.” She looked into her tea. “It’s in my own hand. It doesn’t count. But they’re in order.”

Elliot thought about Tullis, four hundred and something, walking forward every third day for most of an hour. He thought about the brown stain on the roof of Seventy-four the shape of a county. He felt Mr Fixer, two stools along, go very still, like a man watching a cup roll towards the edge of a table.

“What was the last thing it stamped?” said Elliot.

Ivy looked at him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just mean — everyone’s been asking who had it. Has anyone asked what it did? Last? Before it went?”

“I don’t—” Ivy stopped. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.”

“Do you write down what comes in? Normally, I mean. When there’s a stamp.”

“The receiving book.” She said it the way other people say the name of a church. “Everything goes in the book. Date, what it is, who it’s from.”

“Is the stamp in the book? As well as on the document?”

“Every line. You stamp the paper and then you stamp the book, beside the entry. So there’s two.” She had put her cup down. “So there’s a — the last line with a stamp on it—”

“Is the last thing it did,” said Elliot. “Probably. And then whoever did that, and whatever they did next.”

Ivy Gell sat looking at nothing for a moment, with her lips slightly parted, like someone working out a sum on the inside of her head.

“Nobody looked at the book,” she said. “We were all looking for the stamp.”

Something kicked the leg of Elliot’s stool, not gently.

“I’ll look,” said Ivy. She stood up, and then remembered she was holding a cup, and drank the rest of it in one go, and put it down. “Tonight, after the desk shuts. I’ll look.” She stopped at the door and turned back. “Thank you. Elliot. From — where did Birdie say?”

“Seventy-four,” said Birdie, before Mr Fixer could stop her.

They walked back in the early afternoon. Mr Fixer said nothing for nearly four carriages, which Elliot was beginning to understand was a great deal of nothing for Mr Fixer.

“What did I say?” he said, in Sixty-eight.

“Not to be interesting.”

“And what were you?”

“Helpful.”

“Same thing,” said Mr Fixer, “forward of the tea car.”

He did not say anything else about it, but at the vestibule into Seventy-one he put a hand on Elliot’s arm and steered him round a man in grey with a red band, without seeming to look at either of them, and kept the hand there for a carriage longer than he needed to.

What Mr Plum had been doing all morning, it turned out, was a clarinet.

It lay in pieces on his bunk in a careful order — keys, pads, joints, small screws in the lid of a tin, the dark wood in sections — and Elliot could no more have put it back together than he could have put back together the train. Mr Plum’s hands moved over it without hurry. They were very large hands, and they did very small things, and there was no contradiction in that once you had watched them for a minute.

“Whose is it?” said Elliot, sitting on the end of the bunk opposite.

“Woman in Fifty-two. They play for the dances, on rest days.” He held a key up to the lamp and turned it. “This pad’s gone. I’ll need to cut a new one.”

“Where do you get the leather?”

“Farm carriages.” He took a blade so small it vanished between his fingers, and cut a sliver of cork from the stores to the shape of the old pad. “The wood’s harder. You can get close, if you take the time.”

He went on working, and Elliot watched him, and for the first time since the ceiling of the Tesco the clenched thing in his chest let go a little. It did not go away. It loosened, the way a hand loosens that has been a fist so long it has forgotten how to be anything else. It was the order of it — a man doing a thing he understood entirely, with tools he could find without looking, in a space he had made for exactly this. The world was mad and the sky was the wrong colour and the money had wheels on it, and here was someone who could take a broken thing and make it whole, and seemed to think it was worth the trouble.

Mr Plum looked up and saw his face, and something in his own face answered it.

“It gets easier,” he said.

“Does it?”

Mr Plum considered this seriously, a man for whom words were not small change.

“No,” he said. “But you get better at it.”

He bent back to the clarinet. After a while Elliot lay down on his bunk and listened to the small tap and click of the work below him, and did not think about receiving books, or about Ivy Gell drinking her tea in one swallow, or about the kick under the counter, and failed at all three.