Chapter Thirteen — The Outsider

Marcel Bery came back on a Sunday, which was the wrong day to come to a flyer's house, and he knew it, and he came anyway.

She heard the Opel before she saw it, the clean grey sound of it idling at the kerb the way no car in the Pastoorstraat idled, the cars in the Pastoorstraat being the kind that started on the third try or not at all. It was the middle of the morning. She'd been down the loft since seven, separating the cocks back into their boxes after the half-hour she'd let them sit with the hens, doing the thing Jules had taught her with the nest bowls, and her hands smelled of corn and the warm dust of feathers and she did not stop doing what she was doing when the car came. She finished the box. You finished the box. That was a thing she'd learned without anyone teaching it to her, that the birds came before whoever was at the gate, because the birds couldn't wait and people could, and she liked that there was finally one thing in her life she was allowed to put first without being called cold for it.

When she came up the garden he was standing at the gate with his cap in his two hands.

"It's Sunday," she said.

"It is."

"You're not meant to come Sunday. Race Sunday. You'd know that, if you—" She stopped. She'd been about to say if you were one of us, and the Berys were the one family in the heide you did not say that to, and she heard the cruelty of it land in his face before she'd quite chosen it, and was ashamed, and didn't apologise, because apologising would have made it a thing.

"There's no race today," Marcel said. "Not your distance. I checked." He'd checked. He knew the calendar of a sport his family had been put out of forty years ago, and he'd checked it before he came so he wouldn't take her from a wait. That was Marcel all over, she was learning — the awful, deliberate courtesy of a man who held a thing he could break you with and carried it like a hat. "I won't keep you. I've brought you something. To look at." He didn't say to keep. He said to look at, the way you'd hand a man a knife handle first. "And then I'll go, and you can think about it, and that's all I'll ask of you today."

He held it out.

It was a single sheet of paper, foolscap, gone the colour of weak tea, soft along the fold like a thing that had been folded and unfolded a great many times by hands that were careful with it. She didn't take it. She looked at it in his hand and then up at his face, and Marcel Bery looked back at her, and there was nothing in his face she could use, no anger to push against, no pity to refuse, only the flat patient weight of a man who had decided, a long time ago, exactly how much of himself he would let you see.

"It's a page out of a club book," he said. "The old book. De Verre Thuis kept a logbook, those years, every race, every loft, hand-written — your Verhoeven still has the run of them somewhere, the ones that didn't go in a skip when they did the lokaal up. This one didn't go in the safe." A small thing happened at the corner of his mouth, not a smile. "My father kept his own. Same as the club's, race for race, his own hand, because a man with no standing learns to keep his own record of what he did, since the men who keep the official one might not bother to keep him in it." He turned the page a little, toward the grey Sunday light. "This is the Barcelona, fifty-eight. In his hand. The time his hen made it home."

She took it.

She didn't decide to. Her hand went out the way it had gone out for the page and for the form and for the cock's keel the first time, ahead of the part of her that argued, and the paper was very light, lighter than paper should be, light the way old things go light, as if the years took some of the weight out on their way past. Marcel let it go into her hand and then put both his hands back on his cap.

"Look at it inside," he said. "Not out here. It's nobody's business in the street." He put the cap on. "And then you'll know what I know, and you won't be able to not-know it, and that's the only honest thing I can do to you, Lieselot Maes. I can't make you do right. I can only stop you being able to say you didn't know."

He went back to the car. He didn't say goodbye, the Berys not being a goodbye sort of family either, and the Opel pulled away clean and quiet down the dead street, and she stood at the gate with the page in her two hands the way he'd held the cap in his, and the loft behind her went on with its low Sunday murmur as if nothing in the world had changed, which was the loft's whole gift, that it did not know and did not care and went on, and she carried the page inside to the kitchen table and put it down flat and pressed the fold open with the side of her hand and read a dead man's handwriting.

It was nothing to look at. That was the first thing, and it took her by the throat in a way nothing dressed-up could have.

A column down the left of dates. A column of distances in figures. A column of times. A man's small upright hand, schooled the way they'd schooled them then, every letter made the same way every time, the careful hand of a man who'd been told once, as a boy, that his sort had to be twice as neat to be let half as far, and had believed it, and had stayed neat his whole life over a coal scuttle nailed to a wall. No flourish anywhere. No pride in it. Just the work, set down. Saturdays and Sundays through years, Quiévrain, Noyon, Pont, Châteauroux, Limoges, the ladder of the season climbed and climbed again, year on year, the same hand getting no less neat and no more famous, a man flying his birds out of nothing against men with lofts the size of his house, and writing it all down because no one else would.

And then the one line.

BARCELONA. 1.058 km. Zondag. And the time. And then, after the time, in the same small upright hand, with no underlining, no mark, nothing a stranger would see — a second figure. The velocity. The metres in the minute his hen had made across the sea and the mountains and the whole of France, worked out by hand, the long sum done in pencil in the margin and then the answer set down clean in the column where it belonged.

She knew the number.

She knew it the way you know a face in a crowd that has no business being there. She'd worked the sum herself, on the back of a feed bill, the night she read the confession whole — sat in the loft with the brass clock in her lap and the drum-tape unrolled and Staf's own hand telling her De Sint came home a strong second, and she'd done the arithmetic he must have done three times that night forty years ago, distance over time, the metres in the minute, because she'd wanted to feel the size of it, the handful of minutes, wanted to know in figures how small the thing was that a man had stolen a life with. And here was the other number. The winning number. Higher than Staf's by — she didn't even need to do it again, she could feel the gap, the way you feel a step that isn't there in the dark — higher by the smallest margin a margin can be and still be a margin. A few metres a minute. Over a thousand kilometres. The difference between a name in gold leaf at the top of a board where it had hung forty years and a man flying out of a coal scuttle and writing his own true time in his own book because no one else would keep it for him.

It was real. That was the thing the page did that the confession hadn't, quite. The confession was Staf — Staf's hand, Staf's ink, Staf's voice in the room, and you could, if you were a coward, half-hear in it an old man's guilt running away with him at the end, a thing he'd talked himself into in the dark of being dying, a sin grown in the telling. But this was the other side of the sum. This was the man the sin was done to, in his own hand, the day it happened, before he could have known he'd been robbed — because the page was dated Zondag, the Sunday, before the drums were read, before the morning roar, before anyone told Frans Bery what his time had been declared to be. He'd clocked his hen home and stripped her ring and written down the true time of her flight, the honest time, the winning time, in the small neat hand his life had taught him, and gone to bed thinking, surely, that he'd done it at last, the one thing — and woken to a town saying a different number out loud, and never once been able to put his own number next to it where anyone could see, until now, until a grey Sunday morning forty years on, when his son drove a clean car down a dead street and gave the page to a girl who hadn't been born and laid the two numbers side by side on a kitchen table for the first time in the world.

1958. Staf is twenty-four and the outsider's loft is a coal scuttle nailed to a wall, and Staf has gone to look at it because a man came up from the Borinage with a hen that won at Limoges and the whole club is pretending not to be afraid.

It is a Tuesday in the week before Barcelona. The release is Saturday from Spain; the birds basket Thursday. Staf walks out past the Italians' end of the cités where the houses give up being houses and become sheds and then become whatever a man can nail to a wall, and he finds the Bery loft by the smell of it, which is clean — that is the first thing, and Staf does not want it to be the first thing — a clean loft, dry, the boards white, a man's whole poverty turned into care, which is the only thing a man with nothing has to spend.

Frans Bery is up a ladder doing something to the wire. He is not much older than Staf. He has the look of a man the town has agreed about without telling him, a watchfulness in the shoulders, and he comes down the ladder slow when he sees who it is, because everyone knows Staf, everyone knows the young miner with the dark blue cock, the town's coming man, and Frans Bery wipes his hands on a rag and does not put one out to shake.

"Maes," he says.

"Bery."

They stand. The hen is in a box by the wall, set apart, a blue hen, and Staf looks at her and Frans Bery watches him look. After a while Staf says, "Can I," and it is not really a question, and Frans Bery, who could say no, who has every reason in the world built up over years to say no, lifts the hen out of the box and hands her to the man everyone loves, because that is what flyers do, even the ones the town has decided about, they show you the bird, because the bird is the one thing that can't be made small by who owns it.

Staf takes her. He runs two fingers along the keel the way his own grandfather showed him, and the hen sits in his hands and does not fight, and Staf feels the muscle under the down, the worked deflated muscle of a bird brought to the very edge of itself by a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and the warmth, and the dry silk of the feather, and the heart going steady and slow, a fit bird, an unfrightened bird, a bird that had been handled with care every day of its life by hands that loved it without being able to afford to, and Staf knows. He is twenty-four and he is the best young flyer in the heide and he has the best cock in the town and he stands in a coal scuttle nailed to a wall with the outsider's hen in his two hands and he knows, with the whole of the thing in him that reads a bird, that this is the better bird. Not by much. By a few metres a minute, maybe, over a thousand kilometres. By the smallest margin a margin can be.

He hands her back.

"She's all right," Staf says, which is a lie, and Frans Bery puts the hen back in her box and says nothing, because Frans Bery has spent his life learning the exact weight of she's all right in the mouth of a man who knows better, and he has stopped expecting anything else, and the not-expecting is the thing the town did to him, worse than any word.

Staf walks home past the Italians' end with the feel of the hen still in his hands. He does not say to anyone what he felt. He goes down the pit on the Wednesday and cuts coal in the dark with the dust going into the lungs that are already going, and he thinks about the hen, and about his own cock, and about the town up top in the light that has decided he is its coming man, that has pinned to him the one thing it has left, which is the right to be proud of something, and he thinks: a few metres a minute. And he is afraid. Not of losing. He could lose. He could come second to a better bird and shake the man's hand and be the town's second-best and live. He is afraid of a thing he cannot name yet on the Wednesday in the dark, a thing that will have a name by the Sunday night, when the drums are read and a club official's hand has been on the seal and a few minutes that were never really there have made a strong second into the first the whole town wanted, and the outsider stands at the back of the lokaal with his cap in his hands, knowing, with the certainty of a man who has held his own bird and Staf has held it too, unable to put one number next to the other, and goes home, and gets out a book, and writes down the true time anyway, because a man with no standing keeps his own record of what he did.

She didn't know how long she'd sat at the table. The light had moved. The kitchen had gone from grey-bright to the flat low Sunday grey of the afternoon coming on, and she still had the page under her hand, and she'd read it eleven times, twenty times, and it didn't change, the two numbers stayed where they were, the dead man's true time and the gap she could feel like a missing step, and somewhere under the floor of her room the brass clock sat in its tin, the clock that had been made to lie, and she understood, sitting there, that something had changed in her hands that she hadn't agreed to.

Up to today she'd had a secret. A bad one, a heavy one, a thing she carried and argued with a dead man about in the dark. But a secret is a thing you know. It lives in you. It can stay in you and harm no one but you, and a girl could tell herself — she had told herself, all week, lying to herself the way she'd been lying to herself since the first night with the tin — that knowing a thing and saying nothing was a kind of in-between place, not the lie itself, not the truth either, a place a person could live, the place every adult in this town lived, better kept than flown, you'll thank me, leave the dead their secrets. She'd half-meant to live there. She'd signed the form and told herself she hadn't decided anything yet, that she'd fly the season and work it out from the inside, that the not-deciding was itself allowed.

It wasn't, anymore.

Because now it wasn't a thing she knew. Now it was a thing she held. The page on the table and the clock under the floor — put them next to each other and they were not a feeling, not a guilt, not an old man's deathbed story. They were proof. Two halves of a sum that a stranger, anyone, the club, the federation, the town, could lay side by side and see. The drum-tape said when Staf's clock said his bird was home. The page said when the better bird was truly home. And the gap between them, the handful of minutes that were never really there, was no longer a thing only the dead and the dying knew. It was in her kitchen. It was under her hand. She could prove that Staf Maes had not won Barcelona in 1958.

And that meant that not-saying was not nothing, anymore. Not-saying was now a thing you did. Every morning she got up and scraped the boards and fed the birds and let the cocks sit with the hens and did not lay these two pages side by side on the club's green baize, she would be choosing it. Deciding it. Forty years Staf had carried the guilt alone and called it carrying; she'd thought that was weakness, the cowardice of a man who couldn't give a thing back and keep being loved. But Staf had only had the confession, which was his and could die with him. He'd never had the other half. He'd never been able to prove it, not without the page, and the page had been across town in a coal scuttle nailed to a wall, in the careful hand of the man he'd robbed, all those years.

Now both halves were in one house. Hers. And the in-between place she'd meant to live in had a floor that wasn't there, like a step in the dark.

She put the page in the tin.

She went up and lifted the loose board — the wardrobe, she thought, I should keep it in the wardrobe, it was in the wardrobe, and didn't know why the thought came, only that it came, a small wrongness she let go of — and got out the tin and opened it and the smell came up, the smell of the inside of the tin that was the smell of forty years and the brass and old paper, and she laid Frans Bery's page in flat on top of Staf's confession, the robbed man's true time face to face with the robber's account of the lie, two neat hands going dark together in the dark of a biscuit tin under a girl's bedroom floor.

It was the worst thing she'd ever held in her hands and she'd never once, all this time, been able to put it down.

She closed the tin. She didn't put it back under the board. She sat on the edge of the bed with it in her lap, the weight of it, heavier now by one soft sheet of foolscap that weighed nothing, heavier than the clock, heavier than the whole loft, and out the window the afternoon was going down grey over the green heap and the black winding-gear, going toward four, and she knew without looking that down the garden the forty birds were settling toward the hour, and that at four they would turn, all at once, every small hard head to the south of the sky, toward France and the long water beyond it, toward the race that was coming up the calendar at her like a thing already decided — the same race, the long one, Frans Bery's race and Staf's race and now hers, and on the third perch the blue hen with one foot tucked, De Late, the great-great-grandchild of the cock that came home a strong second and was made a liar's first, sitting in the going light not knowing she was a piece of evidence, not knowing she was a stolen win with feathers on, not knowing she had a price or a guilt or a name in two dead men's hands.

Lieselot held the tin and watched the south of the sky.

I can't make you do right, Marcel had said. I can only stop you being able to say you didn't know.

He'd done it, then. Whatever happened now — whatever she did with the season, with the birds, with the deadline coming up out of July like a tide — she would never again be a girl who simply had not known. She'd be a girl who knew, and held the proof, and chose, every single day, what to do with it. The not-deciding was over. Marcel Bery had driven down a dead street on the wrong day and handed her a man's whole life folded soft along one crease, and now the in-between place was gone, and there were only the three doors left, all of them real, all of them costing everything — and the season between her and the one she'd have to walk through, and the birds turning south at four toward the water, late, the way the truth was late, the way the man it was owed to was forty years and one winter too late to ever see it laid down where anyone could read it.

She got up. She put the tin under the board, not the wardrobe, the board, and went down to the loft to lock it for the night, because the birds came first, and stood with her hand on the bolt while every one of them turned to the south at the turn of the hour, and did not tell herself, this time, that it was the corn.