Chapter Seven — A Handful of Minutes

She had read the first lines of the confession five days before and put it back in the tin and shut the lid on it the way you shut a door on a smell, fast, before it could get into your clothes. The 1958 race was not mine. I made the clock lie. She had got that far and no further. You could live a while on the first lines of a thing. She had found that out.

She held out four days. On the fifth it rained from breakfast, a slow grey Limburg rain that came in off the heath and meant to stay, and there was nothing to do at the loft but feed and scrape and stand at the wire watching the birds not fly, and Jules didn't come because Jules's knees didn't come out in rain, and Bram was at the café being a man who'd been passed over, and Wendy was in the city with the boyfriend and the plan, and the whole town had gone in out of the wet and pulled its curtains, so that for once there was no Saturday sound, no faces up, no old men in their gardens, nothing but the rain on the loft roof like a thousand small fingers wanting in.

So she went up and got the tin.

She didn't make a thing of it. She wasn't going to make a thing of it. She sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed and the tin between her knees, the old king and queen worn to grey ghosts on the lid, and she took the lid off and laid it down quietly, the way you'd lay down a card you didn't want anyone to see.

The clock was on top, where it always was, heavier than a thing that size had any right to be. Brass gone the colour of a held coin. She lifted it out and set it on the carpet beside her and didn't look at it. Then the drum-tape, the yellowed roll of paper that meant nothing to her yet, that was just a dead man's rubbish until somebody told her how to read it. Then the column of figures in his cramped hand, the small sums going back and back, dated, every one of them put against a single word she still didn't have the key to — Bery, Bery, Bery, down forty years of a page like a man saying a name in his sleep.

And under all of it, folded twice, soft at the creases from being folded and unfolded and folded again by hands that were dead now, the letter.

She took it out and unfolded it and this time she did not stop at the first lines.

1958.

Staf is twenty-four and the coal is under his nails for good now, in the cracks of his knuckles, in the rims of his eyes, so that the pithead men joke he could shut his lids and still look like he's watching you. He has the early cough already, the one that wakes Mariette in the night and that she has stopped asking about because there is nothing to be done about a thing every man on the street has. He has been married eleven months. He has a loft of fourteen birds at the bottom of a rented yard and a job that takes the daylight from him at both ends, and he has one cock, a dark blue, the kind of blue that's almost black until the sun catches it and then it's the colour of a beetle's back, of oil on water, of a thing too good for where it lives.

He calls the cock De Sint. After the pit. After the town. After the saint nobody can name a single fact about except that the colliery and the parish and the whole heath are his and the town never thinks to wonder who he was.

The cock is the best bird in the town and Staf knows it and tells no one, because a man who tells you his bird is the best is a man whose bird is about to lose. He trains him alone, before his shift and after it, in the blue dark and the brown dark, throwing him from the heath, from the canal bridge, from further and further out toward France, and the cock comes home every time the way a stone comes home to the ground, with no fuss, as if it had only ever been a question of letting go.

Barcelona is the race. Everyone's race that year. The whole town has gone in on it the way a town goes in on a single thing when it has only the one thing to put its weight on. A miner's town a thousand kilometres from a Spanish sun, and the men have scraped the entry money out of wages that don't stretch to it, because a man can stand a great deal of his own life being nothing if there is one Sunday in July when his bird might cross the sea and the mountains and come home and make him, for an hour, more than his shift.

Staf baskets De Sint at the lokaal on the Thursday with his hands steady and his face shut. The chairman seals the clocks. The wax goes down over the keyholes, one loft at a time, and old Door Vandersmissen presses each seal with his thumb and a tired little nod, and Staf watches his own clock sealed and feels nothing he could name, only the cold weight of the thing already, the want of it, the terror under the want.

There is one other man basketing who could win.

He is not from the club, not really. He flies under it because the rules make him, but the men don't drink with him and the bar goes quiet a half-beat when he comes in, and his name has the wrong sound in it for the town, a sound the heath hears as foreign and never forgives. Frans Bery. A loft built out of nothing in a yard at the wrong end, no pedigree behind his birds that anyone here will credit, no café standing, no father's name to lean on. And the best blue hen Staf has ever put a hand on.

Staf knows it the way he knows his own cock. He has handled the hen once, at a club toss, when Bery let him, watching him do it with the flat patient eyes of a man who has nothing to lose by letting another man know the truth. Staf ran two fingers along the keel and felt the muscle and the heart going under it, and put the hen back and said nothing, and walked home the long way that night, because he had felt, in half a kilo of bird, the exact shape of the thing that was going to beat him.

She had to stop there. She put the letter face-down on her knee and looked at the rain on the window for a while.

It was the two fingers along the keel that did it. She knew that. She had watched him do that her whole life, that small testing pull along a bird's breastbone, the eyes going somewhere else while the hands read, and she had thought it was the most him thing there was, the thing only he did, and here he was doing it to another man's bird forty years before she was born and writing it down to her in a dead man's hand so that she would know — she understood now what the letter was for, what it was costing him to write — so that she would know he'd been told the truth in his own hands and gone home and done what he did anyway.

The clock sat on the carpet beside her. She had not meant to touch it. She picked it up.

It was the same clock. She had been to the lokaal now, she had stood through one basketing, she had watched Gust Verhoeven set and seal the lofts' constateurs under his thumb with the same tired nod the letter gave to a dead man called Door, and she knew now what this brass thing in her hands was, what it was for, what it was meant to do, which was the one thing in the whole sport a man could not argue with: keep the time, and keep it true, and not care whose week it made or broke. A thing built to be honest. The only thing in the town that couldn't be talked round.

And he had kept it. That was the part. That was the part that wouldn't sit. He had made it lie, once, in one weak hour, and then he had not destroyed it the way a guilty man destroys the thing — he had kept it, oiled it, wrapped it, carried it across forty years and into a notary's safe and out the other side into her hands, the way you keep a stone in your shoe on purpose to remember a debt.

She turned it over. Her grandfather's hands had held this. She found, without deciding to, that her own had fallen into the same hold, two hands cupped under the weight of it the way he must have cupped it, the brass warming to her the way it had warmed to him, forty years and one grave apart, the same metal, the same cold honest mechanism inside doing the one thing it was made to do and waiting, always waiting, to be made to do otherwise.

She put it down. She picked the letter back up.

1958.

The day of the lossing the men gather at the lokaal and there is nothing to do but wait, which is the whole sport and the whole horror of it. The birds went south in the convoy on Friday. They were freed at Barcelona on the Saturday morning into a clear sky and a sun the colour of a furnace, the starter recording the time to the minute, and now it is Sunday and the men stand in their gardens up and down the heath with their faces tipped and their clocks ready in the kitchen, and the church bell goes for the evening Mass and not one of them moves toward it, because God can keep but a bird won't.

The fast ones could come tonight. Most will come tomorrow, after a night out over France in the dark with nothing under them. Some will not come at all. The sea takes its tithe. The mountains take theirs. A man stands in his garden and watches the south go gold and then grey and then nothing and counts in his head the kilometres and the headwind and the heat the bird flew through and tries not to do the sum that says too long, too long.

De Sint comes Sunday at the very edge of the light.

Staf is at the loft window. He has been there since four. And there is the speck, low out of the south over the green-going slag and the black winding-gear, dropping, and it is him, it is the cock, it is daar is hij, there he is, and Staf has him in his hands and the rubber ring off the leg and into the clock and the crank turned before the bird has stopped trembling, and the clock stamps the time onto the drum with a small hard sound like a single full stop at the end of a sentence, and Staf stands in the loft in the last of the light with the cock against his chest and his own heart going and thinks: that is a winning bird. That is the bird that wins Barcelona.

It is not.

He works it himself, that night, on the back of an envelope, the way every man works it, the kilometres divided by the minutes, the metres-per-minute that is the only god the sport answers to — because the man whose loft is farther out can clock his bird an hour later and still beat you, speed and not the kitchen clock being the whole of it — and Staf does the sum three times and three times it comes out the same.

A strong second. A hero's bird. The best bird the town has flown in living memory.

Second.

Because somewhere at the wrong end of the heath a blue hen has already come home, earlier, to a man with no name and no café and the better bird, and her velocity over her own surveyed distance is better than the cock's by a margin you could measure in a handful of minutes.

A handful of minutes. Over a thousand kilometres of sea and stone and Spanish sun, the difference between the man the town will carry on its shoulders and the man it will forget by Tuesday is a handful of minutes that, Staf knows, sitting at his kitchen table with the cock asleep against the wall and Mariette asleep above him and the whole town asleep certain that tomorrow it will be a town with a champion — those minutes are real. The hen earned them. They are hers.

And Door Vandersmissen, who keeps the master clock, who will read the drums in the morning, who has known Staf since he was a boy and has nothing himself anymore but the keeping of the seals and the small power of it, says to him in the dark of the lokaal yard when Staf walks down to be near other men because he cannot sit still in his own house — says, not even as a question, more as a man holding a door open and letting you decide whether the cold comes in:

"His clock came in early, that Bery. Funny how an outsider's clock always runs a hair fast." A pause. The old man's thumb working at nothing, at the memory of wax. "Drums don't get read till morning, Staf. A clock can run a hair slow, of a Sunday. A seal can have been off and on. Nobody'd ask. Not of you. Not for the town."

And the letter does not say what was said after that. The letter does not give her the how, and she understood, reading it, that this was not him sparing her but him sparing the thing itself, refusing even on the page to teach it; the letter gives her only the morning, the drums read, the chairman's tired nod, and his own bird's time, when it was read out, a handful of minutes better than it had been the night before, and the town's roar going up around him in the lokaal like water closing over his head, and Frans Bery standing at the back of the room with his cap in his two hands, looking at Staf, not saying anything, knowing, knowing in his hands the way Staf had known in his, and unable to prove a thing.

She read the last lines of that part and put the letter down in her lap and sat with the rain.

She did not cry. She wanted to note that, to herself, the way you note a thing in your favour. She didn't cry and she didn't miss him. What she felt was worse than missing him and she didn't have the word for it, and the word she reached for instead was the bird's word, the one he'd used his whole life and she'd never asked about — voel, feel, the thing Jules said too, two fingers along the keel, read what's actually there and not what you want there to be — and what was actually there, when she ran her hands along the cold length of the day, was this: that she had been lifted to that loft window as a small child by a man who'd already done this, who'd stood at that exact window in the last of the light and clocked a bird he knew was second and let a whole town call it first, and that the love in the hands that lifted her had been the same hands.

She got up off the floor.

She put the letter back, and the figures, and the drum-tape. She held the clock a moment longer than the rest before she set it down in its place, because she knew now what it was and she would never not know, and she shut the lid on the king and the queen and carried the tin down the garden in the rain with it held against her chest the way Staf had held the cock in the letter, and she didn't decide to do that and couldn't have said why.

The loft smelled of corn and lime and forty warm bodies and the wet coming off her own coat. The birds shifted on the perches, a low mutter, settling. And there on the third perch down, one foot tucked, the orange eye, was the blue hen. De Late. The late one. Last off every toss and home anyway.

She had thought, that first night, that the hen was nothing. A bird with a habit. She knew better now and didn't want to and the knowing came anyway, cold, complete: that this hen on the third perch was the great-great-grandchild of the dark blue cock in the letter, that the line ran straight as a homing flight from the bird that came home second in 1958 and was clocked into a stolen first, down forty years and four generations to the half-kilo of warm blood watching her now with the whole grey sky banked in a circle the size of a shirt button. The crown of the loft. The bird worth more than the house. The bird she'd have to fly, this season, under the Maes name, to keep any of them.

The best bird in the town. Built on the back of a hen that beat it.

She put her two fingers along the keel of the blue hen the way she'd watched him do it a hundred times, the way the letter had watched him do it to a man's bird forty years before, and felt the heart going under the muscle, quick and hard, a thing trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had — and understood, standing in the dark loft with the rain on the roof and the tin against her chest, that to fly this bird and win was not a thing she could do innocently anymore. That every Sunday from here to July she would be standing in his footprint at the window with his bird in her hands, and the win, if it came, would be the same win, the 1958 win, run again, forty years on, the handful of minutes paid forward into her.

She took her fingers off the keel.

Down at the wrong end of the heath, she thought, there had been a man with no name and the better bird, and somewhere there was a son of his, or two, and a flat cap held in two hands at a graveside, and a debt written Bery, Bery, Bery down forty years of a dead man's page — and the bird that could give her everything the town had to give was the one thing in the world she could not keep clean.

She locked the loft. She did not look at the south of the sky. The rain kept on, wanting in, and she went up the wet garden with the tin against her chest, carrying it now the way you carry a thing you have decided not to put down.