Chapter 4: Keeping Your Head Down

The trouble with remembering a life nobody else had was that it would not stay put.

It got out in small ways. He caught himself humming a song that had not been written yet, or anywhere. He reached for light switches on walls that had never had them. Twenty times a day his hand went to his left thigh and patted the empty cloth there, looking for a phone, and each time the absence arrived fresh, a small private bereavement about the size and shape of a bar of chocolate.

The worst was what came out of his mouth.

“It’s like the Central Line in summer,” he said on the fourth morning, at the stove plate. Doss had been complaining that the slats along the upper wall had jammed and the carriage was holding the heat like an oven, and the words were out before the rest of him had been consulted.

Doss looked at him the way you might look at a dog that had just said something.

“The what?”

“Nothing. I meant — it’s hot.”

“I know it’s hot. I just said it was hot.” She took her bowl. “That’s the conversation we’re having.”

She went back behind her barricade. Elliot looked at his porridge.

Across the plate, Mr Fixer was watching him. The grin was not on. His eyes were quick and level and entirely attentive, and Elliot saw him open his mouth, and saw the question arrive in it, and saw him consider it for the length of one breath.

“Pass the malt,” said Mr Fixer.

Elliot passed the malt.

The farm detail was Mr Fixer’s idea. “You need chits,” he had said. “Chits need work. The farm always needs hands. Go, haul, muck, come back smelling terrible, repeat. Honest labour is what people with pending paperwork do, so as not to look like people with no paperwork at all.”

So Elliot went back to the farm, through the long green run of the crop carriages, and found that the goat carriage smelled exactly as he remembered it, which was like the inside of a well-used wellington boot if the boot were the size of a house and had been worn by a goat.

The detail was run by a broad, weather-darkened woman named Greer, in a leather apron, who spoke to the animals with a warmth she did not waste on the workers. This seemed fair. The animals lived here.

Elliot had been in the carriage for about a minute, and had got as far as the feed store, where a narrow young man was thumping something down on each new sack as it came in and humming to himself, when he was struck hard in the back of the thigh by a goat.

He turned round. She was small and brown and white, with a beard and an expression of perfect contentment. She looked at him with her flat, oblong eyes, lowered her head, and did it again.

“That’s Margaret,” said Greer. “She does that.”

“Does she have a grievance? Or is it more of a general philosophy?”

Greer looked at him. “She’s a goat.”

“Right.”

“They don’t have philosophies. They have heads and they use them.”

This struck Elliot, as he picked up a fork, as a fair summary of most of the management styles he had known.

He spent the morning mucking out pens at the far end of the carriage, and Margaret spent it at his heels. Every so often, without rancour and with great devotion, she butted him. By mid-morning the other hands had begun to watch.

“She likes you,” Greer said, on her way past with a bucket.

“How can you tell?”

“She’s stopped doing it to me.”

In the afternoon Greer moved him forward to the crop carriages, carrying compost along the troughs and watching the water.

The water came from tanks at the forward end, through a run of valves and channels and short lengths of hose, along the troughs on either side of the carriages and down to an overflow at the far end, where it gurgled into a measuring bucket and was tipped away. Beside the valves hung a slate with the watering written up in chalk, so that whoever was on shift knew what to do and when: 1st bell — all open. 3rd bell — all shut.

It worked, in the sense that water arrived. But all the valves opened at once, so the near troughs took the pressure and flooded, and the far troughs, starved, got what was left in coughs and spurts, too much and then nothing and then too much. The overflow bucket filled four times while Elliot watched. A whole run of seedlings at the far end of the third carriage had gone yellow at the edges, and somebody had tied a rag to that trough as if to mark a grave.

He saw it all at once, from above, as he had always seen things at work: the whole system as a diagram in his head, and the place where it broke circled in red. Open the far run first. Give it a bell to fill. Open the near ones after. It would cost nothing but a line of chalk.

He was standing at the slate with his mouth open and his hand half raised when the rest of his brain caught up with him.

He shut his mouth. He put his hand down. He picked up the compost.

Saying something would mean explaining how he knew it, and explaining how he knew it would mean being interesting, and he had promised, at length and with a joke, not to be interesting. So the water went on surging and wasting, and the far seedlings went on yellowing, and Elliot carried compost past them all afternoon and felt, every time, as though he were walking past someone who had fallen over.

In Seventy-four that evening, Tullis was sitting at the stove plate when Elliot got back, waiting his turn.

“You’re the new one,” he said kindly. “Pending, same as me. Which stop did you come in at?”

Elliot opened his mouth, and found nothing in it.

Mr Plum, who had been stirring the pan, held it out sideways. “Hold this,” he said to Tullis.

Tullis held it. Mr Plum then asked him whether the laundry had sent any word, and whether it was the hot-press or the mangles they wanted him for, and Tullis, who had been waiting three months for somebody to ask, told him at length. By the time he had finished, the porridge was done and the question had been carried off somewhere and lost.

Elliot looked at Mr Plum. Mr Plum looked at the porridge.

When Elliot went to his bunk, Old Satterly was awake.

He was sitting up in his bottom bunk with his back to the wall and his hands on his knees, arranged as if he had got himself into position some time ago and meant to stay there until the world justified the effort. His eyes were open, pale and clear, and they were on Elliot.

“You’re the new one,” he said. His voice was thin and dry, like paper that had been folded and unfolded many times and was still, somehow, whole. “Fixer’s project.”

“I’m not anyone’s project.”

“Everyone’s someone’s. Fixer collects them. Interesting people. Broken things. He can’t help it.” The pale eyes did not move. “You arrived heavy.”

Round them, the carriage went on with its evening: someone cooking, someone laughing, the dog’s claws on the boards.

“Heavy,” Elliot said.

“Most come in light. Empty hands. Empty heads. They fill up with what’s here, and it doesn’t take long, because there’s nothing in the way.” Old Satterly drew a breath, slowly, as if breath were a thing that had to be fetched from a distance. “Now and then one comes in carrying. Trying to put it down without anyone seeing. The clever ones manage.”

“And the ones who don’t?”

Old Satterly closed his eyes. The conversation was over, or the nap had resumed; with him, the border between the two had never been properly surveyed.

Pip came down the Strand just before the lamps went low, with a folded paper.

“From Birdie,” she said. “From the clerk.” She held it out and then didn’t quite let go of it. “I didn’t read it.”

“I believe you.”

She looked at him for a moment, as if this were not the usual answer.

“Most people check the fold,” she said, and let go, and was gone.

It was in a small, upright hand, in pencil.

Receiving book. Last stamped line: STOCK CARRIAGES — FEED RETURNS (1 crate). Received, checked same day. Crate returned aft by runner the same afternoon. Nothing stamped after it. — I. G.

Elliot read it twice.

He thought about the feed store at the forward end of the goat carriage. He thought about sacks stacked to the roof, each one marked RECEIVED in violet ink. He had walked past it on his first day, cold and lost and smelling of pig, and made a small joke about it to himself, and walked on.

He did not go back that night. It was dark, and the farm carriages were a long walk, and there was another thing he wanted to do there first, and he had not yet decided whether he was going to do it.

Below him, the flowered curtain moved.

“You don’t have to tell him,” said Mr Plum, very softly. “Fixer.”

“I know.”

“Or me.” A pause, long enough for the train to fill it. “You also don’t have to carry it alone.”

The curtain fell back. Just below Elliot, Mr Fixer’s frame creaked once — whether because he was awake and listening, or simply because frames creak, there was no way to tell.

He went at the second bell of the night, when the carriage was as quiet as it got, which was not very.

The crop carriages were dark except for one lamp turned low over the slate, and the pigeons shifted and muttered overhead and did not come down. The night hand was asleep on a sack by the tanks, with his boots off and his mouth open. Elliot stood in front of the slate for a long time.

It was such a small thing. It was a line of chalk. Nobody need ever know who had written it, and the seedlings at the far end would stop dying of thirst at the back of a carriage nobody looked at. It was not being interesting. It was being tidy. That was what he told himself, and he was a good enough project manager to know when someone was managing him, even when it was himself.

He rubbed out 1st bell — all open with his sleeve and wrote, in square capitals that he hoped looked like anybody’s:

1st bell — far run open. 2nd bell — all open. 3rd bell — all shut.

Then he went back to his bunk and lay awake until it was nearly morning, waiting to feel guilty, and was surprised by how long it took.

On the fifth day Greer stood in the third crop carriage holding the overflow tally and looking at it as if it had said something rude.

“Down by a third,” she said.

The night hand, who was going off shift, shrugged. “Board said far run first. I did what it said.”

“Who wrote it?”

He shrugged again, a different shrug, for a different question.

Greer looked at the slate. She looked at the far troughs, already darker and wetter, and at the rag on the yellow run. Then she looked up into the rafters, where the pigeons sat in a long grey row, not landing on anything.

“Pigeons,” she said darkly, out of long habit, and went to see about a canvas cover.

Elliot carried compost and kept his face still and did not look at the slate at all.

At midday, while the hands ate, he asked her about the feed returns.

“Ossie,” said Greer, and jerked her head towards the goat carriage.

Ossie Venn was the narrow young man from the feed store. He had a cheerful face and the look of someone who considered every problem as a goat considers a bucket — certain there was something in it for him and willing to put his head in to find out. A grain sack had just come in from the crop carriages. He tipped it upright, took a brass stamp from a tobacco tin of violet ink, and brought it down on the sacking with a satisfied thump.

RECEIVED.

Elliot looked at the stamp for some time.

“The crate,” he said. “The one the feed returns go forward in. When it came back from the Office, three months ago — what did you do?”

Nobody, it was clear from Ossie’s face, had asked him this before, or indeed anything at all about what he did.

“Unpacked it,” said Ossie. “Returns go in the tin with the warrant.” He pointed to a battered tin on a hook. “Straw goes to the goats. And at the bottom of the straw was this.” He held up the stamp, fondly. “Well, you don’t send a man a stamp by accident, do you? It says RECEIVED. So I thought, right. They want things received.”

“And you’ve been—”

“Every sack in. Every bale. The stock cards.” He nodded at the pens, and Elliot saw now that every pen had a card on a nail, and every card had been stamped, in violet, with the full authority of the Conductor’s Office. “Margaret’s had hers four times. She eats it. I issue her a new one. I receive it.”

“Best-kept goats on the train,” said Greer, who had come up behind them. She said it with something that in a less weathered face might have been pride.

Elliot told them. He told them about the Office, and the one stamp, and the three months, and the couple who had been engaged for three months longer than they had meant to be, as far as the forward carriages were concerned — he kept that short — and about Tullis, four hundred and something, walking forward every third day for most of an hour and back again. He told them about Ivy Gell and her list.

Ossie Venn’s face went through several things.

“I was receiving them,” he said at last, quietly. “Things. I thought it was a new system.”

“It was a very good system,” said Elliot, and meant it.

Ossie turned the stamp over in his hands once more. Then he wiped its face carefully on his shirt-tail, which did not help, and held it out.

“What’ll we use?” he said.

“Chalk?”

“Chalk,” said Ossie, as if he had been offered a stick.

He took it to the tea car that evening, in his pocket, wrapped in a bit of sacking, and the whole way forward it was the heaviest thing he had ever carried, though it weighed almost nothing.

Ivy Gell was at the end of the counter with her cup in both hands. When he put the bundle down in front of her and folded back the sacking she did not say anything for a moment. Then she picked up the stamp in both hands, carefully, as if it might go off.

“The farm,” she said.

“Feed store. It went back in the crate. It’s been receiving goats.”

Ivy laughed, once, a surprised sound, and then put her hand over her mouth as if she had been caught at something.

“You found it, though,” Elliot said. “I mean — you should say you found it. You looked at the book.”

“I’ll say what happened.” Ivy took a small notebook from her jacket and a pencil from her hair. “That’s what the book’s for. Received of—?”

“I’d really rather—”

“It has a column, Elliot.” She waited. “Received of.”

“Elliot Marsh.”

“Carriage?”

“Seventy-four.”

“Ticket?”

He hesitated for half a second too long, and in the brass of the urn Birdie, who had been wiping the same patch of counter for some time, stopped wiping.

“Pending,” said Elliot.

Ivy wrote it down. Then she wrapped the stamp back in its sacking with great care and stood up.

“Two thousand three hundred and forty-one,” she said. “I’ll start tonight.” At the door she turned. “Thank you,” she said, formally, as if it were going in the book as well.

When she had gone, Birdie went on wiping the counter.

“Does Fixer know?” she said.

“No.”

“He will,” said Birdie. “Everybody will. That’s the trouble with doing a thing well on this train, young man. It gets talked about.”

That night he lay on his top bunk with the ceiling a foot from his face and made a list, in his head, of things he could not say.

That he knew what a light switch was, and that the lamps in the crop carriages were a brave copy of something his world did with a switch.

That he had lived in a flat with a door that locked and a window that looked out on the same street every morning, and had found it boring, and would give anything to find it boring again.

That the sky was the wrong colour.

That he had died. That he remembered it. That the last thing he had held was a sandwich he hadn’t paid for, and that some nights the guilt about the sandwich was worse than the grief about everything else, because the grief was too large to hold, but the sandwich was exactly the right size.