Chapter Eight — The Approach

The car came at the wrong time of day, which was how she knew it was about the birds.

Nobody who lived in the Pastoorstraat drove. They walked, or they had a moped that smelled of two-stroke, or they had a brother in Genk who came on a Sunday. A car that idled at the kerb on a Tuesday morning with two men in it and didn't switch off was a thing the whole street would have a side window for, and Lieselot, scraping the droppings boards at the bottom of the garden with the loft door propped and the April cold coming off the bricks, heard the engine before she saw anything and felt her own hands go still on the scraper without deciding to.

She had been three days getting the smell of the confession off her, and she had not managed it. I made the clock lie. You read a thing like that in your grandfather's hand and it goes into you the way coal-dust went into Staf — it doesn't wash out, it stays in the body, it greys the inside of you for good. She had read the account of it now, the careful pencil and then the ink where his hand had got bad, the whole of what he did and how — all but the last pages, the ones that started over with her own name at the top, Lieselot, in a smaller hand, which she had folded back and not let herself read, because the account of the fix she could stand, and whatever it was he wanted to say to her about it she could not, not yet. She had not slept properly since, and she had not told anybody, and she had gone on feeding the birds and scraping the boards because that was a thing the hands could do while the rest of her stood off to one side and refused to think.

She came up the garden with the scraper still in her fist.

The car was a clean grey Opel, washed, and the man who got out of the passenger side was the man from the graveside. She knew him before he straightened — the shoes told her, even now, even on a Tuesday: clean shoes, town shoes, a man who kept himself like a thing that mattered in a place that had stopped mattering. He had a flat cap. He took it off when he saw her, which nobody in the street did for her, which they did for Staf, and he held it in both hands in front of him the way you hold a cap at a graveside or in a church, and that was worse than if he'd kept it on.

The other man stayed in the car. The driver. Younger, a heavier face, both hands on the wheel of a car that wasn't going anywhere, looking at the loft over the fence the way a man looks at a thing he's already decided is his.

"Lieselot," the older one said. Not a question. He knew her name. "Maes."

"That's the gate," she said, "if you're coming in."

He didn't smile but something moved at the side of his mouth, a thing that might have been respect and might have been the start of a tiredness he'd been carrying so long it had grooves. He let himself in at the gate and stood on the cracked concrete of the path with his cap in his hands and the car running at his back, and he looked, for a second, at the loft — only a second, but she saw it land on him, the long low brick hok with the wire and the trap and the dark inside, and she saw it cost him something to look at it, the way it would cost you to look at a house somebody had lived in that should have been yours.

"You'll know who I am," he said.

"Bery." It came out of her flat. She had not meant to say it. It had been sitting in her three days, the name in the tin, the column of small sums going back and back in Staf's coded hand, Bery, Bery, Bery, a debt with a man's name on it; and now the man was standing on the path with his cap in his hands and she'd put the two halves together out loud before she could stop herself, and she watched him hear it.

He went still. "He told you."

"He left it to me. There's a difference."

"Aye," Marcel Bery said. "There is." He turned the cap a quarter-turn in his hands. The car idled. Somewhere down the row a curtain would be moving. "Is your father in?"

"He's not."

"Good." He said it plainly, no apology in it. "It's not him I came for."

She did not ask him into the house. She would not have known how, and the house was Bram's, and Bram's house this hour of the morning would have something in it she'd rather a stranger didn't see. So they stood in the cold garden, the two of them, with the loft between them like a thing on a table neither would touch, and the birds inside heard the strange voice and went quiet, then began, low, the unsettled mutter they made when there was a cat on the wire.

"My father," Marcel said, "won the Barcelona in nineteen fifty-eight."

He said it the way you'd say a fact about the weather. He'd had forty years to learn to say it without his voice doing anything, and the practice was in it, the way the practice was in everything about him, the clean shoes and the held cap and the still hands — a man who had drilled himself smooth over a thing that would have made a louder man shout.

"His name was Frans," he said. "You'll not have heard it. There's no reason you'd have heard it. He flew out of the wrong end of the next town, no club weight, no café behind him, nobody to stand him a beer and say his bird was good. We came up from the Borinage when I was small, my grandfather did, for the pit, and a name like ours — they heard it foreign. Bery. They'd say it like it had a smell." He turned the cap. "A man like that doesn't win the Barcelona. A man like that isn't allowed to have the best bird in the province. But he did, and he had, and in fifty-eight he proved it, out of his own loft, with a bird he'd bred from nothing, against every big name in Flanders." He stopped. "And then your grandfather's clock said different."

The birds shifted on their perches. The young cock — Manneke, Staf had been going to call him, she'd seen it pencilled on the breeding card and the name had got into her without permission — put his head out at the wire and looked at the stranger and looked at her.

"I've read it," Lieselot said.

"Read what."

"What he wrote." She heard her own voice and didn't like it, too young, too small in the cold garden. "He wrote it down. What he did. I'm not — you don't have to tell me my grandfather cheated your father, Mr Bery. I know. It's in a tin in my room." She had not meant to say that either. The tin. She'd given him the tin now, the existence of it, a thing the man would carry away and want. Stupid. But it was out, and she watched him take it, and watched something happen behind his face that she had not been ready for, which was not triumph.

It was a kind of grief that had been waiting so long it had stopped looking like grief. He shut his eyes for a second. When he opened them he looked at the loft, not at her.

"He wrote it down," Marcel said. "Forty years and he never said it to a living soul, and he wrote it down for you." There was no kindness in it and no cruelty; it was a man turning over a stone he'd carried his whole life and finding it lighter than he'd thought, and not being grateful for that, because the lightness was its own insult — that it had been so easy, in the end, for the old man to set down, the thing that had broken Frans Bery's life.

"My father knew," Marcel said. "That's the thing you want to understand about him. He knew. The day they read the result out at the club, your grandfather first by — what was it, the margin was nothing, it was a handful of minutes over a thousand kilometres, it was metres a minute, you couldn't see it with your eye — my father stood in that lokaal and heard them give Staf Maes the Barcelona and he knew, the way you know your own child's step on the stair, that his bird had been the better bird and had been put second by a clock."

A wood pigeon went over, fat and clattering, and the loft birds answered it from the dark, a low surf of sound, and Marcel waited it out without seeming to hear it.

"And he had no proof," he said. "He had a pencil line in his own logbook and a certainty in his chest and nothing else, and a name they heard foreign, and a town that wanted its hero." He turned the cap. "So he said nothing. What was he going to say? The legend cheated me? They'd have run him out. They half ran him out anyway, for the look on his face when they gave Staf the cup. A bad loser, they called him. Couldn't take it." His voice did, finally, a small thing, a tightening, gone as soon as it came. "He took it for forty years. That's the taking."

Down the garden the loft was quiet now, the birds settled to the new voice, and the light was coming flat and grey across the green heap and the dead winding-gear, the same light it came every morning, indifferent, and Lieselot stood in it with the scraper still in her hand and the cold going up through her boots and felt the thing she'd been keeping off to one side for three days walk all the way up to her and stand in front of her with a cap in its hands.

"What do you want," she said.

He didn't answer straight away. He looked at the loft a long time, and she understood he was making himself say it slowly because if he said it fast it would come out as the thing it almost was, which was a threat, and he was a man who would rather die than let it be that.

"Money," he said, "I don't want. He sent us money. Forty years of it." He nodded, just once, at the house, at the upstairs window behind which the tin sat. "You'll have seen it in the tin if you read the tin. Little and often, the whole time, addressed in his own daft code like he thought my father didn't know exactly what it was. Guilt with a stamp on it. My mother took it because we were poor and my father couldn't stop her and it shamed him every month of his life. So no. Keep the money. I'd not touch it." He breathed out. "What was taken wasn't money."

"The bird," she said.

"The win," he said. "The name. The thing that says, in the book, in the gold, that the best bird that flew the Barcelona in nineteen fifty-eight came out of Frans Bery's loft. That's what was taken. And you can't give that back, because the man who earned it is in the ground out at the same cemetery as your grandfather, in a cheaper part of it, with no flowers, because he died last winter certain of a thing he could never prove, made small by it his whole life, a bad loser to the day he died." The cap stopped turning. "December, it was. Your grandfather went on living till April. A handful of months. If the old man had set it down one winter sooner my father could have died a winner." He looked at her then, full on, for the first time, and his eyes were dry and very tired. "So you'll understand there's a part of this that can't be put right. He's gone. The win's no use to him now."

"Then—" she started.

"There's the bloodline," Marcel said.

The birds. Of course the birds. She had known it the second the car didn't switch off.

"Your grandfather's bird in fifty-eight — the one that was put first that should have been second — every bird in that hok runs back to it. I've kept the pedigrees, what I could get of them. Forty years I've watched that loft win and breed and sell off the back of a bird whose result was stolen from my father, and prosper, while we — " He stopped himself. Drilled himself smooth again, visibly, a man putting a lid down. "The bloodline's the only thing left that has my father's win in it, because his win is the reason it's worth anything. Take away fifty-eight and that line's just pigeons. So it's mine. By right, if there were any right in this, the line is mine. I want it back."

"It's worth—" Lieselot said, and didn't finish, because she didn't know what it was worth, only that Jules had gone quiet handling the breeding cards and that Bram talked about it the way he talked about things he'd seen in a window and would never have.

"It's worth more than this street," Marcel said. "I know what it's worth. I'm not a fool and I'm not a poor man any more, whatever I was. I could buy it. I'd not have to ask a girl in a garden." He said a girl in a garden without scorn, almost gently, which was worse. "But I'll not buy a stolen thing back off the family that stole it like I was the one in the wrong. That's the last forty years all over again — the Berys, cap in hand, paying the Maeses for what was theirs." The cap, she saw, was in his hands. He saw her see it. He did not put it on. "So. Two ways. You give me the line — the birds, the line of the fifty-eight — and we're square as we can be with a dead man, quiet, between us, nobody the wiser. Or—"

He waited, to be sure she was listening.

"—or it's said out loud. In the lokaal. With the tin open on the table and the clock he kept and the logbook in my father's own hand, and the result of fifty-eight struck out and put right in front of the whole club, the whole town, the federation if it comes to it. My father's name where Staf Maes's is. Said, and written, and never unsaid."

"That'd—" Her mouth was dry. "That'd finish him. Staf. The town's got nothing but him."

"I know what the town's got," Marcel said. "I grew up in the cheap end of it." Something flat and old went across his face. "You think I don't know I'd be taking the one good thing this dead place has left? I'd be the man who killed the legend. They'd hate the Berys then for real, not just in the back of the hand. I'd do it anyway." He looked at the loft. "Forty years I've waited to be able to do it. He's dead. I can do it now."

The car, behind him, gave its low patient idle. The man in it had not moved. Lieselot looked past Marcel at the heavy face over the wheel, at the two hands set on it, and the man looked back at her with no cap in his hands and nothing held still about him at all, and she understood that Marcel had brought him on purpose, brought him to sit in the running car like a thing kept on a chain, so that whatever Marcel said with his cap in his hands and his voice held level, the other one was the part of it that wouldn't stay level, and they both knew it, and she was meant to know it too.

"My brother," Marcel said, without turning round. "Dries. He'd not have come to the gate with his cap off." It was almost an apology. It was a warning dressed as one.

He gave her the deadline at the gate, on his way out, the cap going back on his head only when he'd turned his back to the loft, as if it could see.

"The grote fond," he said. "The Barcelona. The big one, the queen race, July. You'll know it's coming — the whole town'll know, it's the only thing this place still gets a Sunday out of." He set his hand on the gate. "You've till then. Fly your season if you have to fly it to keep them — I know about the old man's will, the club talks, everybody knows you've to race them or lose them. Fine. Race them. But the day they basket for the Barcelona, I want the line in my loft, or I want the truth on the table. One or the other. Not both, not neither. You choose which by July."

"That's the same race," she said. It came out before she'd thought it. "Fifty-eight. That's the same race he did it in."

Marcel Bery looked at her for a moment over the gate, in the flat grey morning, with the dead winding-gear black at the end of the street behind him and the green heap going on quietly turning itself back into a hill.

"Aye," he said. "It is. I'd thought you'd see that." And then, lower, the only time his voice came all the way open the whole hour he stood in her garden: "It's the same clock, an' all. He kept it, the old man. He kept the clock that did it. Forty years he kept the very thing." He shook his head, slow, at a thing too big to be angry at any more. "You tell me what kind of a man keeps the knife."

He got in the car. The heavy-faced brother put it in gear without a word and they pulled away down the Pastoorstraat, the clean grey Opel too wide for the street the company had built narrow for men who'd never own one, and Lieselot stood at the gate with the scraper still in her hand and watched it to the corner and round it and gone.

When the engine was gone she became aware of the loft at her back, the forty of them breathing in the dark behind the wire, the young cock with his head out, watching her. The line of the fifty-eight. Every one of them, all the way down, running back to a bird that had been put first by a lie — bred and sold and won on for forty years, beautiful, worth more than the street, and hers.

She had three days ago thought the worst of it was the dead man lying to a town.

Now there was a man with clean shoes and a cap in his hands who had told her the rest of it, and a brother in a running car who hadn't bothered with the cap, and a date in July with her grandfather's name on one side of it and Frans Bery's on the other and the same clock, the very clock, sitting in a biscuit tin in her room — the very thing, the knife — waiting upstairs in the dark like the birds waited in theirs.

She went and bolted the loft. Then she stood a while in the cold garden, not going in, and looked at the south of the sky, which she had been telling herself for three days she wasn't going to do, and did it anyway.