Chapter Nine — The Same Ink

The entry form had to be back to the club by Thursday, and on Wednesday night her father came home early to lose it for her.

She heard him before she saw him. Bram had a way of arriving in a house that announced everything about the evening he'd had — the latch tried twice, the scrape of a shoulder along the hall, a chair pulled out too hard so it barked on the tiles. He'd been at the café since five, which meant since the men got off the dole queue and went to the one place that would still extend them a tab. He came into the kitchen with his coat half off one arm and his face wet from the rain that had finally come, the rain the whole town had been promising at the graveside a week ago and only now delivered, and he stood swaying gently in the doorway and looked at her at the table with the form and Staf's pen and said, "What's that, then."

"Club form."

"For the birds."

He nodded a long time at that, the way drunk men nod, agreeing with something only they could hear. Then he crossed the kitchen and got himself a glass off the rack and didn't fill it, just held it, which she'd learned to read as worse than filling it. A man who poured was going to drink and go quiet. A man who held the empty glass had a speech in him.

"Bery came to see me," Bram said.

She kept her eyes on the form. The form wanted the loft name, Maes, and the season, 1994, and a list of ring numbers she'd have to copy off the rubber of each bird, and the chairman's box for the club to sign, and a line at the bottom for the owner, and the owner was her. She'd been filling it in slow, the way you fill in a thing you don't quite believe you're allowed to.

"Did he," she said.

"At the frituur. Bought me a packet of chips like I was a kid." Bram laughed, no humour anywhere near it. "Marcel Bery, buying me chips. You know what that family is. You know what they were." He waited for her to ask and she didn't, so he told her. "Nothing. They were nothing. The wrong end of the heide, the Berys, came over with the Italians or after them, nobody could ever say, the old man flew his birds out of a coal scuttle nailed to a wall and thought he was somebody." He set the glass down on the counter, careful, the carefulness of a man who knows his hands aren't to be trusted. "And now the son's buying me chips and talking about the line. The line, he says. Your father's line. Like it grew out of his garden."

"What did he offer you."

It came out of her flatter than she meant. Bram heard it anyway, the way drink makes a man hear the thing under the thing, and his wet face did something — surprise, then a kind of low cunning that was the worst face he had, worse than the maudlin one, worse than the angry one.

"Enough," he said. "He offered enough."

The rain went on against the window. Down the garden the loft would be a black shape in it, the boards she'd scraped that morning, the forty bodies dry inside on their perches with their heads turned in, and somewhere on the third perch the blue hen Staf had called De Late with her one foot tucked, not knowing she had a price, not knowing she'd had a price for forty years.

"Enough to clear what I owe," Bram said. "Enough to clear it and have over. You don't know what I owe, Lieselot. You've no idea what your old man let me carry while he was up there being a saint with his pigeons." He'd started moving while he talked, small steps, the orbit of a man circling a thing he wants and is ashamed to reach for. "He paid this house off and let his own son go to the wall, and now he's dead and he's left the one thing worth money to a kid who doesn't even—" The word caught. He'd used it before, the night the notary came; she'd heard it land then too. "Who doesn't even like them," he finished, quieter.

"No," she agreed. "I don't."

"So." He spread his hands, the speech arriving where it had always been going. "So you sign that loft to me. Or you sign it to Bery direct, I don't care which, and we take his money, and I clear my slate, and you—" he looked at her then, and for one second something honest and terrible came up in his face, a father seeing the daughter he'd failed and offering her, in the only currency he understood, an exit— "you go. You take your half and you get on the train you're always going on about and you go to your school in Hasselt or wherever it is and you never have to smell a pigeon again. I'm giving you out, girl. I'm the only one in this town trying to give you out."

And the awful thing was it was true. That was the thing she'd sit with later, in the dark, the way she sat with most things. Every other adult who'd come to this kitchen in the last week had come to tie her tighter to the loft — Staf with his will, the notary with his condition, even Jules, who tied you to it gentle, by teaching you to want it. Her father, drunk and grasping and out for himself, was the only one offering her the door. He'd dressed it in his debts and his grievance and his shame, but under all of it the door was real.

She looked at the form. At Maes, in her own writing. At Staf's pen lying across it, a fat black Pelikan with a gold nib gone soft on one side from forty years of one man's hand, the pen he'd written the loft logs in, the breeding cards, the names of birds and their parents and their parents' parents going back to a dark blue cock that won Barcelona in 1958, the pen — she knew now, she'd known for a week, the tin upstairs under the loose board where she'd put it — that had written the confession too. The 1958 race was not mine. I made the clock lie. Same nib. Same blue-black ink she could still buy at the bookshop in Beringen if she wanted it, the most ordinary ink in the world, the ink half the men of Staf's age signed their lives in.

The lie and the loft, written in the same ink, by the same hand.

If she signed the form, she signed in it too.

"I'll think about it," she said.

It was not what she meant. She didn't know what she meant. She knew only that her father wanted her to fold, and that something in her had learned a long time ago, the way you learn to flinch, to want the opposite of whatever a Maes man wanted her to want.

Gust Verhoeven came the next morning, which was Thursday, which was the day the form was due, and that was not an accident, and she knew it wasn't.

He came on foot in a good coat, a man who'd timed his arrival for after Bram had gone wherever Bram went and before she could have got down to the club, and he stood at the gate and didn't come up the path until she opened the door, which was manners, and which was also a man who wanted you to feel he'd ask before he took. He was chairman of De Verre Thuis and had been for nineteen years, and he had the clean hands of a man who'd kept the books while other men kept the coal, and Lieselot had seen him exactly twice — at the funeral, at the basketing where he'd sealed the clocks under his thumb — and both times he had looked at her the way you look at a problem you're going to be patient with.

"I won't come in," he said. "I see you've things on." He nodded past her at the kitchen, at the form on the table, the pen. He missed nothing, this one. "Your opa's hand," he said, of the pen, and let it sit.

"He left it me."

"He left you a great deal." Gust looked down the garden at the loft and something moved over his face, brief, that she'd have called fondness on anyone else. "I flew against that loft for thirty years. You know that? Me and Jules and your grandfather and a dozen others who're all gone now, every Sunday from April to September, the whole town in their gardens. There's not a man left in De Verre Thuis under sixty, did you know that either? Not one. We bury two a year and christen none." He said it without self-pity, a man stating a measured distance. "When I go, and when Jules goes, it stops. The whole thing stops, and the gardens go quiet, and that's the town finished, that's the last thing it does. You understand what I'm telling you."

"You're telling me to fly them."

"No." He looked at her, surprised and not surprised, the way the notary had looked at her, the way the teachers did. "No, girl, that's the thing. I'm telling you the opposite."

The rain had stopped in the night and the morning had come up grey and washed and cold, and out over the green heap and the black winding-gear the sky had that scoured look it got after weather, and Lieselot stood in her doorway in Staf's anorak — because it was there, she'd have said, if anyone asked, and no one asked — and waited.

"You're fifteen," Gust said. "You don't know the work. No shame in it; nobody knows it at fifteen, it takes a life. You'll lose birds you can't afford to lose because you didn't read the weather, and you'll cook a team's form bringing them too hard, and you'll get to July with the loft half empty and the good ones dead over France, and that's not a maybe, that's a near certainty, and at the end of it the legend goes out not with a song but with a girl who couldn't manage." He said it gently. That was the cruelty of it, the gentleness. "Or."

"Or."

"Or you let the line go to people who can keep it." He didn't say the Berys. He didn't have to; she watched him not say it, watched him walk all the way up to the edge of it and decline, a careful man on the lip of a thing. "You sell, or you give the breeding stock to a loft that'll carry it on, quiet, no fuss, and the bloodline lives, which is what your opa would want, the bloodline carried on, and the town keeps its champion in the pedigrees forever where nobody can take him down. And you go and have whatever life you were going to have." He paused. "Some things are better kept than flown. Some things, you carry them by setting them down. He'd understand that. He understood that better than any of us."

It was very nearly the kindest speech anyone had made her all week, and it was the most frightening, and it took her a moment to find why.

He'd understand that. He understood that better than any of us.

Gust Verhoeven had known Staf fifty years. He'd sealed Staf's clock and read Staf's drum-tape and stood in Staf's garden a thousand Saturday afternoons. And here he was on her doorstep the morning the form was due, having timed his arrival, in his good coat, telling her — gently, reasonably, like a man doing her a great favour — to let the line go quiet and keep the champion safe in the pedigrees where nobody can take him down.

Where nobody can take him down.

She didn't have the whole of it. She wouldn't have the whole of it for weeks. But she had the tin upstairs and the confession in it, and she had a chairman on her step who'd come to make sure the loft went dark, and standing there in the cold washed light she understood one thing all the way down, the way you understand a thing in the body before the head agrees: he knows. Not the contents, maybe. Not the figures, not the clock, not the column of small sums sent to a name from the wrong end of the heide for forty years. But the shape of it. The chairman of De Verre Thuis knew there was a thing to keep down, and he'd come, on the morning the form was due, in his good coat, to keep it.

"Did you ever fly Barcelona?" she asked him.

It came out of nowhere, and she watched it land. Gust's clean hands went still on the gate.

"What?"

"Barcelona. The fond. Did you ever fly it. Against him."

"Once or twice." Careful. So careful now. "It's a hard race. Most lofts never put a bird in it. You don't put a bird across the Pyrenees and the sea unless you've a bird worth losing."

"He won it."

"In '58."

"In '58." And Gust Verhoeven looked at her for a long moment over the gate, and whatever he'd come with — the speech, the kindness, the good coat, the careful walking up to the edge of things and declining — it shifted in him, just slightly, the way a clock you've wound too tight gives a small sound somewhere inside before it stops. "You want to be careful," he said, "what you go digging in a dead man's loft. Old men keep things. Old men keep things they shouldn't, and they don't always mean anything, and a clever girl can make a thing out of nothing and break her own heart with it, and the town's heart, for no good in the world." He straightened his coat. "Sell the stock, Lieselot. Or give it on. I'll find you a good loft for it, men who'll do it right. Don't fly. You'll thank me. The whole town will thank me, though they won't know to."

He nodded to her, the chairman's nod, the one he gave across the green baize of the club table, and he went off down the Pastoorstraat the way he'd come, unhurried, a man who'd said his piece and trusted reason to do the rest, his good shoes going careful on the wet brick, never once looking back at the loft, as if it were already a thing he'd settled.

She stood in the doorway a while after he'd gone.

Three of them now. Her father, who wanted the birds sold so he could clear his slate and call it setting her free. The Berys, who wanted the line back. And the chairman, the whole weight of the town behind him, who wanted the loft to go dark so the champion could stay up on the board where nobody could take him down. Sell. Surrender. Bury. Three doors, and every one of them swung the same way, into the quiet, and every one of them had been opened for her gently, by someone older, in a good coat, who'd already decided to look away from a thing and had come to teach her how.

She went back inside and sat down at the table.

The form lay where she'd left it. Maes. 1994. The list of ring numbers half copied, the chairman's box empty, the owner's line empty, Staf's pen across it where her father had nearly talked her out of using it.

She picked up the pen.

She wasn't doing it for him. She wanted that clear, even to herself, especially to herself. She wasn't doing it because she loved the old man or missed him or owed him; she didn't, on the whole, miss him, which she'd noticed with a kind of cold interest all week and not examined — there was a missing-shaped space where the missing should have been and instead there was just this, this argument with a dead man she couldn't win because he wasn't there to lose it. She wasn't signing for Staf.

She was signing because three grown people in good coats had stood in this kitchen and on its step and told her, gently, to fold, and she could not, she physically could not, be folded. It was the one thing she'd built herself to do. You don't catch a girl wanting and laugh at her if the girl never lets herself be caught wanting anything — and the surest way to never be caught was to want, hard, the thing they were all so reasonably telling her to give up. Spite. It was spite. She knew it for spite and she didn't care; some doors you walk through for the wrong reasons and only find out on the far side what was in the room.

She finished the ring numbers, copying them careful off the breeding cards in Staf's own hand, the loft going from forty bodies in a shed to forty numbers in a column, a team, her team, in the same blue-black ink the cards were written in, the same ink the logs were written in, the same ink — she thought it deliberately now, made herself think it, looked straight at it the way she'd looked the blue hen in the eye — the same ink the confession was written in upstairs. I made the clock lie. You couldn't sign one without signing in the other. There was no clean ink in this house. There was only the one bottle, and one hand to use it now, and it was hers.

She signed her name on the owner's line. Lieselot Maes. The nib gone soft on one side dragged the way it had dragged for him, so her name came out with the same small flaw in it, the same catch on the downstroke, his catch, in her name. She looked at it a long moment. She hadn't decided what she'd do with what she knew. She'd decided only this — not to let it go dark, to be in the room. The rest she'd work out from the inside, with her eyes open and the tin under the floor, which was already more than he'd managed in forty years.

She blew on the ink the way he used to, an old man's habit she'd caught off him without meaning to, the first of many she'd catch this season and pretend she hadn't.

Jules came at four to look at the birds, because four was the hour, and found her in the loft with the form folded in the pocket of Staf's anorak.

He didn't ask. He had a way of not asking that was worth more than any question; he came in and the birds settled at the sight of him the way they didn't quite for her yet, and he ran his slow hands over a young cock without seeming to look at him, reading the keel, the warmth, the fat, and he said, of nothing, "You'll want to toss them short first. Ten kilometres. Build them up. Don't let anyone tell you to send them far early to look brave."

"Verhoeven came," she said. "He wants me to sell."

"I know he does." Jules put the cock back on its perch. He didn't ask what she'd answered. He'd seen the fold of the form in her pocket and the ink not quite dry on her thumb, and that was answer enough for a man who said less than anyone and meant more. "He's not wrong, you know," he said mildly, which surprised her. "You'll make a hash of it. Everybody does, the first year. You'll lose birds." He looked at her with his pale watchful eyes. "Question's only whether you'd rather make the hash yourself, or have it made tidy for you by someone in a good coat."

Out in the garden, on the half-hour the light went, the loft settled toward its evening and the birds began to murmur and shift, and then — she'd half forgotten it, had half stopped expecting it, and there it was — at the turn of four they swung as one to the south of the sky, every small hard head toward the water they'd never crossed yet, toward France and the long sea beyond it, toward nothing, toward the hour. She watched them do it and this time she didn't tell herself it was the corn.

"I'll make my own hash," she said.

Jules nodded, slow, as if she'd answered a question about the weather. "Right," he said. "Then we'd best teach you not to." He picked up the scraper she'd left against the wall and handed it to her, handle first. "Boards," he said. "Every day. That's where it starts. A loft tells the truth in its droppings before it tells it in the sky." And he went out to put the kettle on in her grandfather's kitchen as if it were his own, and left her there in the going light with the scraper in one hand and the signed form heavy in her pocket as a brass clock, the forty birds turned south above her toward the race that was coming, the same race, the long one, the one across the sea — and her in it now, signed and entered, in the same ink as the lie.