Chapter Sixteen — The Bolt on the Inside

The grey Opel was Marcel's. The other car she didn't know, and that was how she knew there were two of them now.

It was parked wrong, was the first thing. Down the Pastoorstraat the cars sat half on the kerb the way they'd always sat, nose to the brick, tidy as the men who owned them, because a street with nothing in it still had its manners. This one sat square across the mouth of the alley that ran behind the gardens, where you didn't park, where you'd never park, because the alley was how the night-soil men used to come and now was how nobody came at all except to bring the bins out Tuesday. A red Escort gone the colour of a bad tooth, one wing a different red where it had been mended cheap. It sat across the alley like a thing set down to stop another thing getting out.

She came up from the bus at half four with her schoolbag on one shoulder and saw it and stopped, and the part of her that had spent fifteen years getting ready to leave this town and read every face in it for the small change of contempt — that part stood very still and counted.

The loft was at the bottom of the garden, off the alley. The alley was blocked.

She went in the front, through the house, because the house was the long way round and the long way round was the way you went when a car was sitting where it shouldn't.

Bram was at the kitchen table with a coffee he wasn't drinking and the radio on low, and she knew before he turned that he'd been sitting there a while, that he'd seen something out the back and come in and sat down with the radio for company, which was the most her father did with a thing he didn't want to deal with: he kept it the radio.

"There's a fella," he said. Not turning. "Out the back. By Jules's old shed."

"I saw the car."

"He's been there a bit." Bram turned his cup a quarter, the way Gust turned a glass, the way every man in the town turned a thing he wasn't going to drink. "I'd not go down, if it was me."

"It's not you."

She said it before she'd decided to, the way she said most true things, and watched it land on him and not even bruise, because he agreed with it, that was the trouble, he agreed with it more than she did. He'd been being-not-her his whole life. He looked at her schoolbag and then at the back window and then at his coffee, and the choosing went through him and came out the place it always came out.

"Your opa would've gone down," he said. It was meant to shame somebody. She wasn't sure who.

She put the schoolbag on the chair and went out the back.

The garden in June was the loft and a strip of grass gone to seed and Jules's old leaning shed that wasn't Jules's, only stood where a man named Jules-before-this-Jules had once kept rabbits, and at the end of the strip, between her and the loft door, stood a man she'd never met who she knew on sight the way you know weather coming.

He was younger than Marcel and he wore it badly. Marcel held still; this one couldn't. He stood with his weight going from foot to foot like a man on a platform whose train was late, and his hands were doing a thing in his coat pockets, working, the way Bram's mouth worked before he was cruel, and his face was Marcel's face with forty years less patience laid over the same bone. He'd been looking at the loft. He turned the look on her and it didn't change much.

"You're the girl," he said.

"You're the brother." She set her feet. The wire of the loft was eight steps behind him and she could hear the birds in it, the low Saturday mutter, except it was Tuesday, the mutter they did when a stranger stood too close and breathed wrong. "Dries."

That stopped him a second. That she had the name. He hadn't reckoned on being known; angry men never do; they think the wound is private, theirs, a thing they carry where the light can't get at it, and it knocks them sideways to learn it's been entered in a book.

"He sent you," she said. Marcel. "Or he didn't, and that's worse."

"Nobody sends me." Quick, ugly, true. He took a step and she did not take one back, which cost her, because every animal thing in her wanted the house, and she had learned this off the birds too, off Jules, you don't reach for it and you don't run from it, you stand and you let it read you and you give it nothing, and she stood and gave him nothing, and he came the one step and stopped, because she hadn't moved and a man who's used to people moving doesn't know what to do with a girl who won't.

"Marcel's been very patient," Dries said. The word in his mouth was a thing he hated. "Forty years patient. He came to your loft with his cap in his hands. He gave you to July. You know what my brother is? He's a man who thinks if he's good enough about it, the world'll come round and do right, and he's been thinking that since he was a boy watching our father come second, and the world has never once come round, not one time, and he still thinks it." He was close enough now she could smell him, cigarettes and a cold car and something under it, a sourness, a man who hadn't slept. "I'm not him."

"I noticed."

"Don't." He said it flat. "Don't do the clever thing. The old men let you do the clever thing because you've got his hands, I hear it everywhere, she's got his hands, the whole heath warm as toast for the girl who's got the thief's hands." His voice cracked on thief and he hated that worse than anything, she saw it go through him, the crack, that he couldn't even say his own father's robber out loud without his voice doing the thing a boy's voice does. "My father had hands. You ever hear it? Anybody up here ever say Frans Bery had hands? No. They said he was a bad loser. They said it in the café and they said it at his funeral, the four of us standing in the rain, Frans Bery, ah, the man who never got over Barcelona. That's his hands. That's what's left of his hands."

The birds shifted behind him, all at once, a soft collapse of feet, and she watched his shoulders go up at the sound, this hard man, because a loft full of pigeons turning together is a thing that gets into you whether you love them or not, and she thought: he hates them and he wants them. The same as me. We're the only two people on this heath who hate them and want them and we want them for the exact opposite reason and it's going to be one or the other of us that gets to keep them.

"What do you want," she said. "Marcel wants the truth said out loud. Or the birds. He told me. What do you want."

He looked at her a long moment, and the foot-to-foot stopped, and for one breath he was just a man in a garden, forty-four, sour with no sleep, the boy who'd watched his father come second still living somewhere up behind his eyes.

"I want it to have hurt," he said.

She didn't have anything for that. There wasn't a clever thing to put against it. He saw that he'd landed it and it didn't make him glad; he wasn't a man who got glad off landing things; he was a man who only knew he was alive when the old hurt was moving, and he'd come here to move it, and now it was moving and he looked sick with it.

"My brother wants a name on a record," he said. "A name in a book in a lokaal, in this dump, where nobody'll ever read it, for a man who's dead and can't read it either. That's his justice. A correction. He'd shake your hand if you gave it him. He'd cry, the soft old—" He stopped. "I don't want a correction. You can't correct forty years. You can't put it back. Frans is in the ground at Eisden under a stone we couldn't afford the good lettering on, and your opa's got a town. My brother wants to even a thing that doesn't even." He nodded at the loft, slow. "I want what's in there. The whole line. Den 58, all of it, the blood. I want it out of this garden and into mine and I want the men up here to have to drive to Eisden of a Sunday to buy a Bery bird if they want the good blood, and pay for it, and call it that, Bery, in their mouths, for fifty years. That's not a correction. That's interest."

"And if I say no."

He smiled then, and it was the worst thing his face had done. "You won't be home all the time," he said. "You go to school. You go down the village. The car was in the alley an hour before you came and nobody rang a bell, nobody looked out, your own father sat in there with the radio on. This is a town that minds its own. And a loft's just a shed, girl. A latch and some wire. Things get out of sheds. Things get left out." He let that sit. "I'm not saying I'd do a thing. I'm saying a shed at the end of a garden in a town where nobody looks out the window — it's a worry, isn't it. It'd worry me. I'd be at that window myself, if it was mine. I'd not get a night's sleep."

The cold went up the back of her neck the way it had gone up the night the notary set the tin on the table. Not fear exactly. Fear was a thing that wanted you to run. This was the other thing, the thing that wanted you to stay, to put your back to the wire and not move, the thing she'd felt for forty birds she'd told herself a hundred times she didn't care about.

"Get your car out of my alley," she said.

He held it a second longer. Then he went, sideways, not turning his back to the loft till the last, a man leaving a thing he wasn't done with, and she heard the Escort cough and catch in the alley and back out wrong, the wing scraping the gatepost, and the sound of it die away down toward the Eisden road, and the birds in the loft came down off the stranger slowly, the mutter going back to the ordinary mutter, settling, not knowing they'd been bargained for, not knowing a man had stood eight steps off and called them interest.

She went in to the loft.

She hadn't meant to. She'd meant to go up to the house and ring Jules. But her feet took her to the wire and her hand took the bolt and she went in among them with the door open behind her, and the warm reek of them closed over her, corn and lime and the dry smell of forty bodies, and she stood in it a while and let her heart come down the way you let a bird come down, not reaching for it.

De Late was on the third perch where she always was, one foot tucked, the orange eye on her. The cleanest line in the loft. The bird closest to a stolen Sunday that her grandfather could make before he died, bred toward on purpose across thirty years like a man building a church to the thing he'd done, and worth more than the house, more than the bank, more than anything in a town that couldn't keep a frituur open past nine — and a man had just stood in the garden and said I want what's in there and meant her, meant this hen, this half-kilo of bird with the whole sky banked in its eye.

She put her hand under the hen the way Staf had shown her without meaning to teach her, two fingers along the keel, and felt the heart going under the warm breast, quick and even, the heart of a thing that did not know it was money and did not know it was the centre of a forty-year wound and did not know that two families and a club and a dead town were all of them reaching for it across the years. It only knew the south of the sky and the wire and the hand. She held the hen and the heart went and went, and she understood, standing there, that she could not leave her in the loft.

Not the loft Dries Bery had measured with his eyes. Not behind a latch and some wire in a town that minds its own and never looks out the window. He'd told her how he'd do it without saying he'd do it, which was the same as telling her, and she believed him, not because he was hard but because he was right: a shed at the end of a garden is a latch and some wire, and the only thing keeping forty birds safe in it for forty years had been that nobody in the world had a reason to want them gone.

Now somebody did.

She took De Late up to the house.

She did it in Staf's anorak with the hen held against her under the coat the way you carry a bird against the cold, its head in by her collarbone, and Bram looked up from the radio and looked at the shape under the coat and didn't ask, because asking was a thing he'd stopped doing about her around the time the loft became hers, and she went up the narrow stairs to her room with the hen warm against her and her father not asking, and she stood in the middle of her own room with a champion pigeon under her coat and nowhere on God's earth to put it.

The room was a bed and a wardrobe and the loose board under the bed where the tin was. You couldn't keep a bird in a wardrobe. A bird needed air and light and a perch and to not go mad. She knew that now; she hadn't known it in April; it was one of the hundred things the season had put in her hands without asking.

She thought about Jules. Jules had a loft. Jules had a quiet street and a widower's tidy garden and a man who'd flown against Staf for fifty years and would know exactly what it meant if the Maes legacy hen turned up in his hok overnight. He'd take her. He'd not even ask, the way her father hadn't asked, only for the opposite reason — Bram from not wanting to know, Jules from already knowing. But to give the hen to Jules was to tell the whole heath inside a day that Lieselot Maes was hiding her birds from somebody, and a town that minds its own and never looks out the window would, she knew, look out the window for that, would have it round the bar by Thursday, the girl's hiding the 58 blood, what's she frightened of, who's she frightened of, and the question would walk straight up to the door of the tin.

She stood in the room with the hen against her and worked it the way she'd learned to work a velocity sum, three times, looking for the place the numbers lied.

There wasn't a clean answer. There was never a clean answer; she was beginning to think that was the whole of being grown — not running out of clean answers, she'd never had those, but running out of the belief in them, the kid's faith that one was waiting somewhere if you were only smart enough. Gust wanted her to fly and be loved and keep the lie. Marcel wanted the truth or the blood. The buyer wanted the line whole and her on a train. Her mother wanted her gone. Bram wanted the money. Dries wanted it to have hurt. And every single one of them, every one, was reaching for the warm thing under her coat, the heart that went and went and knew none of them.

The one thing nobody wanted was the one thing only she could do, and she hadn't decided to do it, and she was running out of the place where not-deciding was free.

She made a box.

It was a stupid thing, a thing she'd have laughed at in April — a girl with a list and a bus to catch, on her knees in her bedroom making a pigeon a box out of a crate that had held bananas at the Italian's shop, wiring an old curtain rail across the top for a perch, lining the bottom with the newspaper she should have been reading for school, the racing page up, because there was always the racing page, the town printed nothing else worth keeping. She put the box by the window where the bird could get the morning and see the south of the sky, because a homing bird that can't see the sky it homes to will fret itself thin, Jules had told her that, they need to know which way out is, even when they're not going. She set the hen in it. De Late stood on the curtain rail and turned her head and looked at the window, at the long June light going down the brick the way it went, gold and then not, out over the green heap and the dead winding-gear toward France and the water beyond it.

Lieselot sat on the floor with her back to the bed and watched her watch it.

It would do for a night. It was not a thing you could do for a season. You could not run a loft out of a bedroom; the birds were a loft and a calendar and a club and a sky; you couldn't hide your way to Barcelona; sooner or later every bird she had would have to go down to the wire and into the basket and out across the sea in front of the whole town, and that was the trap inside the trap, the thing Dries had seen and she was only seeing now on her bedroom floor: to fly them she had to expose them, and to keep them safe she couldn't fly them, and to keep them at all she had to fly them, and somewhere in the middle of that arithmetic was the answer she'd been refusing, the one with her own mouth in it.

She got up and went and bolted the loft.

She did it from the outside first, the way you always did, the brass bolt cold under her thumb, and then she stood looking at it in the last of the light and understood the bolt was nothing — it was a latch and some wire, Dries was right, it would stop a fox and it would not stop a man, it had never once in forty years been meant to stop a man because no man had ever wanted in. And she did the thing then that she would do every night for the rest of that summer, the thing that was the first plain sign, if anybody had been looking out their window to see it, that the girl had stopped being a girl who didn't care: she went back into the loft, and she shot the bolt from the inside, and stood there in the dark with the forty birds breathing around her and the one true bird up in a banana box in her bedroom and the tin under the board with the proof in it complete, and she stayed a long minute on the wrong side of the door, the side you couldn't get out of without help, listening to the breathing, deciding nothing, guarding everything, the only one on the whole dead heath who knew which sheds were worth breaking into now, and why.