Is (24 page)

A boy called Joe led off Is. ‘You’ll be my hurrier,’ he told her. ‘I’m right glad to have one; for two weeks I’ve been doing the cutting and the hurrying both, and it’s slow work. We’re told to fill twenty corves a day and they flog you if it’s less.’

All the time he talked he was hacking away with a slender pick at the rockface in front of him. ‘The coal comes in a layer,’ he said, ‘like the filling in a cake. You can feel it with your fingers. But you have to take out the rest of the rock to get at it. That’s what wastes time.’

They were in a short passage just wide enough to hold them, and the roof was so low that they banged their heads against it unless they knelt. Joe passed the coal back to Is, who dropped it in a basket. Soon her hands were very sore. When the basket was full she emptied it into the corf, which stood farther back.

Most of the time Joe worked in the dark. ‘They do give us a ration of candles,’ he said, ‘but they’re dangerous. If there’s an escape of gas, that can blow your head off. That was what happened to my last hurrier.’

‘Oh,’ said Is, and then, ‘The corf’s full now.’

‘Take it back to the whim-gin, then.’

This proved to be a long way off, twenty minutes’ drag, pulling the heavy corf.

The whim-gin was situated in a vertical shaft which led up to the surface. Four or five hundred feet above, Is could just see a faint point of light. A continuous double rope wound upwards to a pulley on the ground overhead, and the corves were hooked on to it. Two men took her corf from Is, attached it to the rope, and gave her an empty one.

‘
Run
with it, you little nippence!’ shouted one of them, slashing after her with his cane, and she scurried off into the dark, wondering how she would ever find her way back to Joe.

‘Why’s it sich a perishing long way from the coalface to the whim-gin?’ she asked, when she had found him, and begun shifting the heap of coal he had hacked out while she was gone. ‘Why can’t it be closer to here?’

‘Why, you nodcock, because we’re under the sea here. The whim-gin’s on the nearest bit of land – Holdernesse Point, it’s called, one o’ the fellers told me.’

‘How does it work?’

‘There’s a horse walks round and round winding a drum; you couldn’t have that in the middle of the sea.’

‘So that feller wasn’t telling truth when he said there’s only one way out.’

‘Ay, but the whim-gin’s only used for coal. And there’s guards by it always, with whips and pistols. No use thinking you could get out that way. No one gets out of here.’

‘You ever meet a cove called Arn Twite? Or Bobbert?’ Is asked irrelevantly.

Joe gave a half laugh.

‘Oh,
him
! The cat-boy. Yes, it’s true, he gets in and out. No one knows how!’

Is went on with her work, thinking about the sea. There it was, up above. If the rock were to crack – if the roof were to give way – it was propped upon thin wooden supports . . .

This is the worst place I’ve been in yet, she concluded. Grandpa’s house was paradise compared. And she thought wretchedly of Aunt Ishie’s warm kitchen, of Grandpa Twite yanking and thumping his press in the cellar below. Oh, Grandpa! Whatever happened? Did he die, in the end? Or did he wake up? What will Aunt Ishie do if he dies? At least she’s got Doc Lemman to stand by her. One thing about Aunt Ishie; I reckon she’ll make the best of things wherever she settles. She don’t waste time, she’ll be out on her missions again.

Wonder what came to Mrs Macclesfield? thought Is. I’ve a kind of a notion that it was Cousin Arn let her out.

And that’s one comfort; at least I did find Cousin Arn. She was faintly cheered by the memory. He’s a funny one. But I reckon he ain’t as touched in the wits as he makes out; not by a long chalk. Wonder if he’ll tell the old gals in the mill as I got snatched; that is, if they weren’t snatched too . . . What would Gold Kingy ever do to
them
?

Thinking these thoughts, grubbing about in the pitch-black passage to pick up lumps of coal and load them in the basket, Is could not help falling into dreadfully low spirits. If only, she kept thinking. If only Grandpa hadn’t teased Uncle Roy. If only
I
hadn’t been rude to the horrible bully. If only Davie Stuart and Arn Twite hadn’t met in London . . .

But then she thought: if Davie and Arn Twite and I hadn’t come up north, it’s true some trouble and grief would have been saved, but things up here would be just as awful – Gold Kingy telling his lies, his agents gulling silly kids on to the Playland Express – that’s
gotta
be stopped. If I can only somehow send a message to Mr Greenaway I can do summat about that.

Or I suppose – now I’ve found Arn – I could go back south myself and tell his mum he’s still living; if only (heaven knows how) I could get outa here. Only, how
could
I go back to live in our barn on Blackheath Edge knowing what it’s like up here? And Arn still away from his mum?

These questions went round and round. And as they did so, all the hideous cold, damp, dark and horror of the coal-pit seemed to wrap and suffocate and weigh her down, so that she was obliged to sit back on her heels and press her gritty hands together and clench her teeth, in order not to let out a groan of panic and wretchedness.

‘Get a move on, can’t ye?’ said Joe. ‘You bain’t shifting t’coal quick enough.’

‘I – I’m sorry,’ gulped Is. And then she felt the Touch, bright-hot and radiant, like a golden skewer passing into and beyond her, coming from somewhere else, invisible, incomprehensible, but immediately connecting her with all those waiting, hoping others. She was not alone. She remembered Mr Greenaway saying, ‘You were
Sent
. There be a line from here, stretching northwards.’

‘Where are you?’ she called silently to all the others, and they answered together. ‘Why – we are here! Now you are with us! Now you know about the Bottom Layer.’

‘Don’t I
just
!’ said Is. ‘But what do we have to do, what can we do?’

‘Why,’ they said in simple chorus, ‘it’s for you to tell us that!’

And then the connection faded.

After what seemed an endless stretch of time to Is, a bell clanged somewhere in the mine and whistles blew; one lot of workers came off shift, another lot crawled from their bunks and went to take up the nonstop labour. A meal of thin porridge and bread was doled out by the guards, but many were too tired to eat; if lucky, they crept into bunks, if not, they fell asleep on the muddy floor. And, through her dazed and hungry slumber, Is felt the Touch come to her again in the form of a dream.

‘You have to teach us,’ the voices said.

‘But what, for pity’s sake?
I
ain’t learned.
I
ain’t lettered. Never got no schooling.’

‘You know more than we do. And we are scattered, single, lost in the dark. We can’t talk to each other; only to you. You must join us together. That’s for you to do.’

Is considered that. First in her dream and then again when she woke in the dark, three minutes before the bell clanged and the day-shift (as if there
were
any day) must stagger up, cram down a crust of bread, and bolt off to the coalface.

Working through that shift Is learned, partly from Joe, partly from observation, that the Holdernesse pit was shaped on a grid form. ‘It’s called bord and pillar,’ Joe told her. ‘The coal’s spread out in a big, thin patch over several square miles, so they work it in a criss-cross honeycomb pattern, leaving pillars of coal everywhere to support the roof.’

‘Yes, and s’pose the pillars ain’t strong enough? Coal’s crumbly stuff. S’pose they cuts ’em too thin?’

‘Shouldn’t wonder but what that
will
happen one o’ these days,’ Joe said gloomily.

The honeycomb shape of the pit meant that the workers had little contact with each other, for the pairs of colliers and hurriers were all working in separate spots, hundreds of little blind alleys, only meeting by chance if they arrived together at the whim-gin.

Scrabbling in the damp, dark, silence and stink of the bord, Is sent out her thoughts to the Bottom Layer.

‘Listen, you lot! Can you hear me? All I can teach you is what I know myself. Agreed?’

An affirmation came back to her like a buzz of bees.

‘Well – that I’ll tell you and glad to, but one thing you gotta learn, and that’s how to talk to each other. Not just to me. That’s only sense, ain’t it?’

It took them some time to understand what she meant: that if, collectively, they could all be in touch with her, and that if
she
had learned to communicate with
them
, somehow there must be a way of their learning to talk in thought patterns to one another.

‘I dunno how it’s done,’ said Is, ‘but we know it
can
be done, for we’re doing it now. So you gotta try, keep trying. I wonder, is there any of you in the pit that I know?’

She felt somehow that if she could address people by name, it would strengthen their identity, give them more power to express themselves. She thought back to her trip on the Playland Express. ‘Mary-Ann? Is there a girl here called Mary-Ann?’ She remembered the yellow-haired girl in the seat beside her. ‘Mary-Ann from Spitalfields?’

‘Why yes!’ came a surprised answer. ‘That’s me! I’m here! How did you know?’

‘Abel? Tod? Are you there?’

‘I’m here – Tod Carter. Abel got killed when the rock fell in on him.’

‘Tess? Ciss?’

‘Ciss tried to run away and the guards shot her,’ a voice said sadly. ‘I’m Tess.’

‘Coppy? Little Coppy?’

‘Here I am!’ came a furious howl. ‘They put me in the dark and told me to keep opening and shutting a door. I don’t like it here! I hate it! I want my mama! I want my Aunt Susan! I want to go home!’

‘Don’t you fret, Coppy, we’ll get you home somehow. Don’t cry!’ She soothed his wails and said to the others, ‘Now you see. You’ve gotta talk to each other. You’ve gotta get through. You’ve gotta keep trying!’

‘Yes, but tell us something first. Tell us something now. Give us summat to think about.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you about Davie Stuart,’ said Is, and did so. She told how he was the king’s son, how he wanted to see what was happening. ‘Reckon he thought it was his job to find out, and stop it if he could.’ She told how he came north, and what happened to him.

Her story was received in total silence. For a while, she thought the connection must have broken. But then she heard a single voice – the voice of Mary-Ann.

‘Was that a true tale, you – what’s
your
name?’

‘Is.’

‘Was that a true tale, Is?’

‘Yus. I know a lot of people who met Davie Stuart in the foundries. And I know his father, who’s king of this land.’

If the poor old skite hasn’t died, she thought.

‘Can you others hear what Mary-Ann is saying?’ she asked into the silence.

‘Yes!’

‘There’s one that can come through, then. Like I said, you gotta keep trying. Will you think about Davie Stuart. He helped a lot o’ people. And his token’s still helping them. – Now I’m tired, I gotta stop and rest for a bit. But I’ll tell you some more, later.’

Is did find herself staggeringly tired – as if she had been dragging a heavy weight up from some deep, deep well far beneath her. Joe had begun to grumble that he was able to cut out the coal much faster than she could shift it. She hurried to catch up. Moving coal was much easier work than expressing her thoughts to the Bottom Layer. She wondered if Joe had been tuned in to the thought-exchanges that had been going on; if so, he seemed entirely unaffected by them, just went silently and doggedly on with his work. Perhaps not every person in the pit could make this contact. But I’m tain a lot can, thought Is; it feels like hundreds and hundreds of ’em coming through.

Later on, when she had given her mind a rest, she told the Bottom Layer about Aunt Ishie, and got a very strong response.

‘I know! I heard of her! I’ve got a pocket she made – I’ve got one too! And I have!’

‘Who gave you those pockets? How did you get them?’ Is called back.

‘The cat-boy gave it to me. The cat-boy. The catboy . . .’

Aha! thought Is. I wonder how he gets in and out?

She asked, ‘But who gave them to the cat-boy?’

Tess answered, ‘A lady who lost her daughter.’

‘Mrs Macclesfield!’ Then Is had a thought. ‘Anyone here called Helen – Helen Macclesfield?’

A faint, exhausted, thread of reply came through: ‘Yes . . . that’s my name . . .’

‘Helen! It’s your little cousin Coppy who’s just come – Coppy Gower. Can you talk to him?’

‘Coppy?’ came the whispered thought. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes!’ he howled back.

‘Good, Coppy! Just keep your hopes up. Being in the dark isn’t so bad if you can talk.’

But hope for what? wondered Is. Still, she did feel that progress was being made.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m going to tell you some of the tales that my sister Penny used to tell me.’

And she told them the one about the mysterious barricades, and the one about the lost five minutes.

11

At the coalface there was little point in trying to remember about nights or days. Very soon the workers had lost any idea of whether, in the world up above, it might be dark or light; they thought in shifts. On Sundays they received a lump of cheese with their bread and gruel; this was the only change marking the passage of time in the days and weeks of blackness and silence.

After Is had been talking to the Bottom Layer for twenty or thirty shifts, she had told them, many times over, all of Penny’s stories, and one that Dido had told her once about a king who lost his keys; she had even begun to make up some stories of her own. She had recited as many of Grandpa’s riddles as she could recall, and given them a lively description of Grandpa: how he was sensible and a skilled printer when sober, but turned into a dangerous lunatic when drunk.