Chapter Fifteen — Three Flaked Letters

The board hung in the back room of the lokaal where the light was worst, which Lieselot had decided was on purpose, because a thing you want looked at you put under a window and a thing you want believed you put in the dark.

It was a panel of varnished oak the length of a coffin, and on it in gold leaf were the names. Club champions, season by season, the lettering done in the old way by a man in Beringen who'd been dead before she was born, so that the recent names — the eighties, the nineties — were thinner and meaner than the names from the good years, done in cheaper gilt by cheaper hands, the way everything in the town got thinner as it came toward now. She'd been in this room a dozen times since the funeral and never read the board, the way you don't read a war memorial in your own village; it's furniture, it's the wall. But tonight she'd come early for the results meeting and the others weren't down yet, and there was nothing else in the room but the board and the smell of last night's smoke, so she read it.

Most of the names she didn't know. Dead men, or men so old they were nearly the same thing. Lemmens was up there twice, '71 and '74 — Jules, when his hands were young. Verhoeven once, '69. Verschueren, who she knew now had been the chairman the year of the lie and was forty years dead. And at the top, where the panel started, where the oldest gilt was, the gold leaf laid on thick by the dead man in Beringen back when the town could afford to mean it:

MAES — 1958 — BARCELONA

The varnish over it had gone amber and the gilt had lifted at the edges of the letters, a few flakes of gold gone off into the dark of the back room over forty years, so that the M had lost a corner and the second A was half a letter, a town's whole future in three flaked letters going quietly the colour of nicotine, up there where nobody could take it down.

She was still looking at it when Gust Verhoeven came in behind her and didn't pretend he hadn't seen her looking.

"That'll outlast the lot of us," he said. "They don't lay leaf like that any more. Nobody's got the wrist for it."

He'd timed it again. She knew that the way she knew weather now, in the body before the head — the others not down yet, the café out front gone quiet between the early men and the after-supper men, the one hour in the week the back room was empty. He had a coat for the club and a coat for the street and tonight he had the street one still on, which meant he'd come in special, not stayed down after.

The Maes loft had clocked a bird Sunday. Not won — she wasn't ready to win and Jules wouldn't let her pretend she was — but a halve-fond from Bourges, the team brought to form careful over three weeks, and a yearling hen of the line had come off the front of the drop and clocked a velocity that put the loft fourth in the club and ninth in the union, and René had said it down the bar with the others listening, she's got his hands, that one, and it had gone round the town by Monday the way a good result goes round, faster than any bad news, the one kind of news the town still ran on. Staf Maes's granddaughter, flying. The legend's blood, back in the gardens.

That was the warm thing. She'd felt it land all week, the men nodding different, the warmth coming at her like sun off a wall.

And here was the chairman in his street coat at the one empty hour, and she understood that the warm thing and the man were the same thing, and that the bill for the warmth was about to be read out.

"Sit," he said, and pulled two chairs from the long table where they did the results, and this time she sat, because she wanted to hear it sitting, level, not standing in a doorway like a kid being kept after.

He didn't sit straight away. He went to the board first. He took a handkerchief out of his good coat and he wiped, very gently, along the bottom of the oak, under the names, where the dust gathered, an old man tidying a grave he visited often. Then he sat.

"You've got the logbook," he said.

She kept her face shut. She'd learned that off the birds, that you give nothing in the face, that the keel tells you everything and the eye tells you nothing. "What logbook."

"Bery's." He said the name without weight, the way you'd say a feed brand. "Marcel's been showing it. Down the Borinage clubs first, then up here. A page out of an old union log, his father's hand, a time pencilled in. He's not careful, Marcel. He thinks if enough men see it, it becomes true." Gust folded the handkerchief back into a square. "It doesn't work like that. A thing's true when the club says it's true. That's what a club is. That's the only thing a club is, in the end — the men who get to say what happened."

"And what happened," she said.

"What happened is up on that board."

The radiator ticked. It was June and they still had the heat on low in the back room because the old men felt the cold off the bricks even in summer, and the pipe ticked the way the church clock ticked, a beat behind something, and out the high window the light over the green heap was going the long way down it went this time of year, gold and then not.

"I'll tell you what you've got," Gust said, "and then I'll tell you what I've got, and then you can do what you like with both, because you will anyway, I can see that, you're his to the bone." He said his and let it carry both meanings. "You've got a tin. I don't know what's in it. I've a notion. You've got a girl's certainty and a hard man's logbook and a dead man's pen, and between the three you think you can prove a thing about a Sunday forty years gone." He turned his glass on the table, a quarter turn, the way a man does who isn't going to drink it. "Say you can. Say it's all there, watertight, the clock and the page and his own hand confessing it. Walk me through it. What do you do."

She didn't answer. He didn't want her to.

"You stand up at a basketing," he said, "in front of the men, and you say Staf Maes cheated. You say the win on that board's a theft. And then what. Then it's done — you can't half-say it, there's no taking back the first time it's said out loud in a room. So it's done. And here's what's done with it." He counted it off, not on his fingers, he wasn't a finger-counter, but in his voice, each one set down flat and let lie. "Staf's gone. You don't hurt him; he's past it; the worst you do to Staf is take the one thing he had to show for sixty years down a hole, and he's not here to feel it, so that's nothing, that's hitting a man who's already in the ground. Frans Bery's gone too. December was it, the winter before your opa. So you give the win to a dead man. A man who can't hold it, can't fly on it, can't sit in his garden of a Sunday knowing it's his at last. You give a record to a grave. That's the whole of your justice, girl — you take it off one grave and you put it on another, and in between you stand a town up and tell it the one true thing it had was a lie."

"Maybe the town should know its one true thing was a lie."

"Why." He asked it plain, like a man asking the wind direction. "Tell me why. Not what's clever. Why does it help anyone living for the heath to know that Staf made the clock—" He stopped.

He stopped on it. Made the clock. The two words out before he'd weighed them, and she watched him hear himself, watched the small thing go across his face that she'd seen go across it once before, at the gate, the morning the form was due — the sound a clock makes somewhere inside when it's wound a turn too tight.

She didn't say anything. She'd learned that off Jules. You don't reach for the bird; you let it come down to you.

"Made his result," Gust said, going on, smooth, an old man stepping over a kerb in the dark and not breaking stride. But it was too late and they both knew it was too late, and the back room held it, the radiator ticking, the gold flaking quiet off the board behind him.

"You knew," she said.

He didn't deny it. That was the thing she'd think about after, lying in the dark with the loft a black shape down the garden: that he didn't even reach for it, didn't say knew what, didn't put his clean hands up. He'd carried it forty years and he was tired and a tired man passing a weight to a child doesn't always have the strength to lie about the weight.

"I was thirty," he said. "Younger than your father is now. I wasn't on the master clock that year, Verschueren had it, Verschueren and Door Vandersmissen, and they're both forty years in the ground and I'm not going to stand here and tell you what two dead men did with their hands one Sunday because I wasn't standing at their elbow. I'll tell you what I knew." He turned the glass another quarter. "I knew the time that came off Staf's drum was better than the bird I'd watched come in. I was in my garden. I had a clear sight down the row to Staf's loft, and I saw De Sint drop — everybody saw it, it was the bird of the town, you watched it come the way you'd watch your own — and I saw the time it dropped, in my own head, by my own afternoon, and when they read the drums in the morning the time was better than what I'd seen. By a few minutes. A handful of minutes."

The same words. The same exact words off the confession, a handful of minutes, so that for a second she had the vertigo of it, the dead man's hand and the live man's mouth saying the same small phrase forty years apart, two men who'd loved Staf and lied for him, one in ink and one in a long careful silence.

"And you said nothing."

"And I said nothing." He looked at her, and for the first time there was no chairman in his face, just an old man who'd outlived everyone who could share the thing with him and was sharing it now, badly, with the wrong person, because she was the only person left. "What would you have had me say, at thirty. To who. Bery had no proof and no standing and a name the town heard as foreign and a loft built out of a coal scuttle. Staf had the town. The whole town, Lieselot, the whole pit, forty-four thousand men down those holes in '56 and every one of them needing one Sunday a year when somebody from here beat the world. You think I was going to take that off them? In '58? When there was still coal, when there was still a town, when a man could be proud of where he was from?" He shook his head, slow. "I held my tongue and I told myself the difference was a few minutes and a few minutes is nothing, and you live forty years on that, on a few minutes is nothing, and then one day a girl comes in and reads the board."

Out front a door went and a couple of the early men came in for the meeting, and she heard René's laugh and Mon answering, and the ordinary Tuesday sound of it came down the passage, and Gust glanced at the passage and then back at her, and his voice came lower and faster, the part he'd come to say.

"Here's what I've got," he said. "I've got nineteen years as chairman and fifty in the club and the only living memory of how it all hangs together, and when I go it stops, you know that, you've heard me say it. And I've got this." He didn't touch the board this time. He just looked at it, at the amber top of it, the thick old gilt. "The one win this town has left. The one Sunday it beat the world. And you can take a knife to it, and prove your point, and give a record to a grave, and be the clever girl who told the truth — or."

"Or."

"Or you keep flying like you flew Sunday." He said it and she felt it for what it was, the warm thing, the sun off the wall, pointed straight at her now and turned all the way up. "You've got his hands. I've watched a lot of hands across that table and you've got his, the real thing, it can't be taught, Jules'll tell you the same. You could be the next one up on that board. Not a flake of his coming off — his name and yours, the two of you, the loft of Maes, the only thing this heap of a town has had to be proud of in a hundred years, carried on. I'll back you. The whole club behind you, the doors open, the good advice, the young birds you'll need, the standing. You could be twenty-five and the best loft in the union and they'll say Maes the way they used to say it, and that's a life, girl, that's a real life, here, that nobody can take off you. Or you can have the truth, which is a record on a grave and a town with nothing, and yourself the one who took it. That's the choice. I'd not insult you by dressing it."

He sat back.

"Let it lie," he said. "He loved you. He left you the best of what he had. Let the dead keep their Sunday and you keep the life he meant you to have. There's no one it helps, the truth. Not one living soul. I've had forty years to find the soul it helps and there isn't one."

The men were coming down the passage now, chairs scraping out front, somebody calling did anyone bring the union sheet. Gust stood, and the chairman came back into him, the coat, the dignity, the clean hands; he was the chairman again and she was a girl who'd come early to a results meeting, and the back room was furniture and a wall.

She stood too. She looked past him at the board. At MAES, the corner gone off the M, the second A half a letter, the gold going the colour of an old man's fingers up there in the worst light in the building where you put a thing you want believed.

And she understood, standing there with the radiator ticking a beat behind the church, that she'd had it backward all week. The warm thing wasn't a gift. The fourth in the club, the ninth in the union, René saying she's got his hands — every one of those was a payment, the first instalment of the same wage Staf had drawn for forty years, the town's love paid out against a silence, and the better she flew the more she'd be paid and the more she was paid the more she'd owe. To win, here, in this club, off this board, was to take the deal. To be loved the way Staf was loved was to be a liar the way Staf was a liar. There wasn't a clean version of the warm thing. The warmth and the lie came off the same board, in the same gilt, and you couldn't take one without standing under the other.

She'd thought the choice was the birds or the truth. Sell or surrender or speak. She saw now there was a worse thing in it than that, the thing Gust had come in his street coat at the empty hour to offer her: that she could keep the birds and be loved, fly brilliant and be the legend's blood and have the whole town's warmth pointed at her for the rest of her life — could have everything she'd ever pretended not to want — and the only price was the one Staf had paid, was the price he'd built the whole loft to be able to pay, was a dead man from the wrong end of the heath up on no board anywhere, and a grave going quiet under a December stone, and her own mouth shut.

"I'll think about it," she said, which was what she'd said to her father, and it meant the same nothing, and Gust heard the nothing in it and nodded as if it were a yes, because a man who'd built a life out of letting things lie heard I'll think about it as the sweetest sound there was.

"That's all I ask," he said. "Just think. You've till July. Plenty of time to do the sensible thing." He put a hand on her shoulder, a dry warm chairman's hand, the hand that sealed the clocks. "Fly well Sunday," he said, and went out to the meeting, and she heard them greet him down the passage, Gust, allei, Gust, the room rearranging itself round the man who knew where everything was.

She stayed a moment in the dark with the board.

Sunday she would fly, because the entries were in and the season was a clock you couldn't stop now. But she stood looking up at the three flaked letters and the half a letter and the corner gone off into forty years of dark, and for the first time it wasn't a wall and it wasn't furniture. It was a price list. Every good Sunday she flew from here on, every speck she watched come down out of the south, would put a little more gold on her name up there beside his — and she'd know now, every time, exactly what the gold was, and where the flakes of it had gone, and onto whose unmarked grave they'd come quietly to rest.

She went out to the meeting and took the seat they left for her, the legend's chair, and said nothing, and let them pay her.