Chapter One — Late, But Coming

The mine had been shut twelve years and the birds were the only thing in Sint-Amandsheide that still went somewhere and came back. You could measure the town by what it had lost. The winding-gear over the old Sint-Amand stood black against the sky at the end of every street like a thing that had hanged itself and been left up as a warning. The slag heap, the terril, had gone green — birch and broom rooting in it, a few goats some Italian let graze the lower slope — so that the one mountain the town had ever built was now busy turning itself back into a hill, politely, as if embarrassed. The cités, the long brick rows the company had thrown up for the miners in the good years, still stood, and half of them were dark. People said the young had all gone to Genk and Hasselt for the work, which was a way of not saying there was no work, here or there.

What was left was Saturday afternoons, and the sound of them.

Lieselot could hear it from the kitchen with the window shut. The whole back of the street out in their gardens, faces tipped up, an old man somewhere with a stopwatch in his fist and his mouth going like a priest who'd forgotten the words and kept the rhythm. Komeen, komeen. Come on. She had grown up inside that sound the way you grow up inside a smell — the way the loft itself was a smell, corn and lime and the warm dry reek of forty bodies — and she hated it the helpless way you hate anything you didn't get to choose, which was most things, when she thought about it, which she tried not to.

She was fifteen and she had a list. The list was: finish school somewhere with a train that went past the city. Be anyone whose grandfather was not famous for a bird. Get out before the town finished closing over her like water over a dropped thing.

The list did not have a loft on it.

Staf had been dead three days. He was lying up at Vandeput's in the cold room behind the parlour with the curtains the colour of old tea, and tomorrow they would put him in the ground after the eleven o'clock Mass, and the town would come, because the town always came, and stand in the rain that was certainly coming, and say he was the last of something. They had been saying he was the last of something for as long as she could remember. Now they would get to be right.

The birds did not know.

That was the thing she kept coming back to, standing at the kitchen window with a cold cup of coffee she'd made and not drunk. Forty pigeons in the hok at the bottom of the garden, and not one of them knew the old man was three days dead. They had been fed — she'd done it herself, badly, the way he'd shown her a hundred times when she was small and she'd let it run straight through her like water through a grate — and watered, and the droppings boards scraped, because if you didn't they sickened, and she was not going to be the one who let Staf Maes's birds sicken with him not yet in the ground. That was pride, not love. She was clear with herself about that.

At four in the afternoon she went down the garden to lock the loft, and they did the thing.

She was not expecting it. She had her hand on the bolt and the light was doing what April light did at four, going long and thin and gold along the brick, and inside the wire the birds were settling, a low collective mutter, a shifting of feet. And then all at once — not one by one, all at once, the way a field of corn lies down under a gust — they turned. Every bird in the loft swung its small hard head to the same quarter of the sky, the south, out over the roofs and the dead winding-gear and the green heap, out toward France and the long water beyond it, and went still. Forty birds facing south at four in the afternoon as if the old man were out there yet, somewhere over the sea, late, but coming.

She stood with her hand on the bolt and did not move for a while.

It was nothing. It was the hour. He'd fed them at four for forty years and birds are clocks with feathers, that was all, they were waiting for the rattle of corn the way a dog waits at a gate. It was nothing.

She locked the loft and went back up the garden and did not look at the south of the sky, and that was the first lie she told that week, and it was to herself, and it was small.

There was one bird she'd let herself look at, before she shut the wire, because looking at one was not the same as caring about all of them. The blue hen on the third perch down, the one Staf called De Late — the late one — for a habit she had of coming in last off the training tosses and coming in anyway, dropping out of an emptied sky long after he'd given the others corn, so that he'd say daar is ze under his breath, there she is, with a satisfaction Lieselot had never understood and didn't ask about. The hen sat with one foot tucked and watched her with the orange eye, the eye that was, when you got close, not a stupid thing at all but a polished little world, a circle the size of a shirt button with the whole of the sky banked in it, and Lieselot looked at the hen and the hen looked at Lieselot, and neither of them gave anything away. Good, she thought. They understood each other. She was the last of the line of people who could look at a bird and feel nothing, and she meant to keep the line going.

She'd seen Staf hold that hen, once, near the end, when his hands had got bad — seen him take her up out of the basket and run two fingers along the keel of her breast the way you'd test a knife, his eyes going somewhere else while his hands read her, reading the muscle, the warmth, the fat of her, whatever it was old men read off a half-kilo of bird that told them more than a doctor could tell them off a man. He'd held the hen like that for a long minute and then put her back and not said anything, and that had been her grandfather's idea of a conversation, and it had gone on for forty years, between him and a shed full of pigeons, while everyone he could have talked to with words got smaller in his life and then left it. Lieselot had thought, watching him: I will not be a person who talks to birds. She had thought it the way you think a thing to keep it true by saying it, which is the same reason people pray, and works about as well.

Wendy came round on her way down to catch the bus, because Wendy still had places the bus could take her on a Saturday and was not above letting that be seen.

She stood in the doorway in her coat and her good shoes and her face done, fifteen and already finished somehow, already a girl from a town that wasn't this one, and she looked at the kitchen and the cold range and the cup of coffee Lieselot still hadn't drunk, and her own face did a quick kind thing and then put itself away.

"You coming?" Wendy said. "There's the thing at Davy's. In Genk. His brother's driving back after."

"Funeral's tomorrow."

"That's tomorrow." Wendy said it gently. She had a boyfriend in the city and a plan and a way of saying tomorrow like it was a separate country she didn't live in. "You'll go mad sitting in here with—" She stopped before she said him, because Staf was up at Vandeput's and you didn't say that, and instead she tipped her head at the window, at the garden, at the dark shape of the loft down the end of it. "With all that."

"All that," Lieselot said, "is mine now, apparently."

Wendy's eyebrows went up. She didn't know about the will yet; nobody did; it was an hour old. "The birds?"

"The lot."

"What are you going to do with a load of pigeons?"

It was the right question. It was the question Lieselot had been asking herself for three days, would ask herself the rest of the year, the question the whole town would put to her in one form or another with every face it owned. And she heard herself not have the answer she'd planned, which was sell them, obviously, the answer of a sane girl with a list and a bus to catch — heard herself instead say nothing for a beat too long, looking past Wendy at the south of the sky going down to nothing over the green heap.

"You're not coming," Wendy said. It wasn't a question now.

"Tomorrow's the funeral," Lieselot said again, like that was a reason, and watched something close a small distance in Wendy's face — not unkindly, just the way a window closes when the weather turns — and understood, in a way she had no words for and wouldn't have used them if she had, that Wendy was going to get out of this town and she, Lieselot, who had wanted it more and said it louder, was standing in a cold kitchen with a dead man's birds and a tin she hadn't opened, and that the bus was leaving without her, in more ways than the one.

"Right," Wendy said. "I'll ring you." She would, too, for a while. "Sorry about your opa."

"He's not sorry," Lieselot said, which made no sense, and Wendy laughed because she thought it was the dry thing Lieselot did, the armour, and went off down the Pastoorstraat in her good shoes to catch the bus, her heels going on the wet brick, getting smaller, the way the town made everything smaller as it went toward the edge of itself and the road out.

The notary came at six, which was an hour when decent people were eating, and Bram answered the door because Bram was already three pils into the evening and answering doors was a thing he could still do well.

His name was Meneer Coemans and he was from Beringen, a town big enough to have a notary, and he had the soft clean hands of a man who had never been down anything. He sat at the kitchen table with a folder and refused the coffee and the jenever both, which Bram took as an insult and filed away to be hurt about later. Lieselot stood at the counter with her back to the cold range. She had not been told to sit and she would not ask.

"You're the granddaughter," Coemans said. "Lieselot."

"That's me," she said.

"Sit, then, if you like."

"I'm grand."

He looked at her a moment longer than the words needed, the way the teachers looked at her when she answered too quick, and then he opened the folder and began to read the will of Gustaaf Maes in the flat voice they used, and the room got very quiet around the reading, the way it does when money is in a room, even when the money is forty birds and a brick shed.

Bram got the house. The little terraced house in the Pastoorstraat, mortgage-free, which Staf had paid off out of a miner's wage by never once in his life buying anything he didn't need except feed. Bram got his father's watch, and his father's chair, and a sum in the bank that turned out to be smaller than Bram had clearly been hoping, judging by the way his face went, and Lieselot watched it go and felt nothing she'd admit to.

Then Coemans turned a page and said: "The loft, the birds, all stock, breeding records, equipment, and"—he read it out exactly, the way it was written—"'all that is in it and of it,' he leaves to his granddaughter, Lieselot Godelieve Maes."

Nobody said anything.

Then Bram laughed, one short ugly bark of it, no humour in it anywhere. "The birds. He left her the birds."

"He did."

"She doesn't even—" Bram stopped. He had a thing he did with his mouth when he was about to be cruel and then thought better of it, a kind of working, and he did it now and what came out instead was small and almost true. "She doesn't even like them."

"Be that as it may," said Coemans, who clearly said be that as it may a great deal.

Lieselot kept her back against the range and her face shut. She doesn't even like them. It was the most accurate thing her father had said in a year, and she resented him for it, for being right about her, for knowing the one true thing and using it to be wounded rather than to be a father. The birds were worth more than the house. Everyone in the room knew it and nobody would say it, because that was the joke of the town, that a brick shed at the bottom of a miner's garden could hold a fortune in feathers, more than the house, more than the bank, more than a man could earn going down a hole for thirty years — and the town that knew this, that lived by it, that read the southern sky like scripture every Saturday, still couldn't keep a frites shop open past nine.

"There's a condition," Coemans said.

He didn't read this part. He looked up from the folder and said it to her directly, and she understood it was the part Staf had told him to say with his own mouth.

"The loft is left to you, but it's a working loft, and your grandfather has tied it to the club's bylaw and to a stipulation of his own. The birds are to be flown. Raced, under the Maes name, this season. If they're not entered and flown — if the loft sits dead a year — the bloodline reverts to the club, or it's to be sold, and the proceeds—" He glanced at his folder, found it, didn't like saying it. "The proceeds go elsewhere."

"Elsewhere," Bram said.

"It's specified."

"To who?"

Coemans closed the folder a little, not all the way, a man drawing a curtain. "That's a separate instrument. There's also"—and here he reached into his case and brought out a thing and set it on the table between them, and the kitchen got quieter still—"this. He was very particular. It's to go to Lieselot, and she's to open it alone."

It was a tin. An old biscuit tin, the kind that had once had a king and queen on the lid and now had only the ghost of them, the gilt worn to grey, the corners gone soft with handling. It was not large. It was the size of a thing you'd keep buttons in, or a dead woman's rings, and Lieselot looked at it on the scarred table in the bad kitchen light and felt the back of her neck go cold for no reason she could have given.

"Alone," Coemans said again. "He was clear."

"What's in it," said Bram, and his hand was already moving.

"I don't know," said Coemans, which was the first thing he'd said all evening Lieselot believed completely. "I never opened it. He brought it to me sealed in '88 and told me whose hands it was to go into and on what terms, and I've kept it in the office safe six years, and I never opened it." He looked at the tin like it might do something. "He was a stubborn old man, your father," he said to Bram. "But he was honest." And he said it the way you say a thing that costs nothing, a kindness for the bereaved, the standard coin — he was honest — and Lieselot watched the words go out across the table and land, and had no idea yet that they were the cruellest thing said in that kitchen all night.

Bram's hand had reached the tin. He had two fingers on the lid.

"It's hers," Coemans said, not loudly.

Bram took his hand back. There was a silence in which the three of them looked at a biscuit tin, and outside, the last of the Saturday gardens called their last birds home, komeen, komeen, and a single clock somewhere down the row struck the hour off true, a beat behind the church, the way every clock in the world is a beat behind some other clock, and somebody's good bird came in late and was caught and clocked and that was a man's whole week made or unmade in the time it took to strip a rubber ring off a leg.

Later, when Coemans had gone and Bram had gone too — out, to the café, to be a man who'd been passed over, which gave him somewhere to be — she carried the tin up to her room and put it on the bed and sat looking at it.

She did not open it. She had been told to open it alone and she was alone and she did not open it, and she told herself that was because she was tired, and that was the second lie, and it was bigger than the first.

She knew the shape of what was happening to her even if she didn't know the contents. She had spent fifteen years getting ready to leave this town. She had built herself for it the way you build for weather — too cool to want anything, because if you never said you wanted out then the town could never catch you wanting and laugh, the way it laughed at Bram, the way it laughed at everyone who'd had a notion and stayed. And now a dead man had reached up out of three days of being dead and put a brick shed and forty birds and a sealed tin into her hands and tied them to her with a season, like a man tethering a goat so it won't follow the herd over the hill.

All that is in it and of it.

She lay back on the bed without undressing and listened to the house tick and settle, and to the wind getting up out of the south the way it did at night this time of year, coming off the water it had crossed, carrying nothing she could name. Down the garden the loft would be dark and the forty birds asleep on their perches with their heads turned in under their wings, not knowing, still not knowing, that the man who'd lifted her to that window when she was small so she'd be the first to spot the speck that was his bird coming home — there, little one, there, do you see him — was three days dead and going into the ground in the morning, and that the thing he'd left was not love, or not only love, but a weight in a biscuit tin she was afraid to open and could already feel, across the dark room, like a stone laid on her chest.

The tin sat on the bed and did not get lighter for being ignored.

She'd open it tomorrow. After. When the Mass was done and the town had said its piece and gone home to its birds, she'd open the thing and find out what kind of inheritance a man leaves the only person he ever told the truth to, and what it costs to be told.