Chapter Twenty-One — Entries Due

The form for Barcelona was a different colour from the others, and that was the first thing she understood about it: that the club spent money on the colour of it, on a thicker paper, a green like the baize on the results table, so that a man who'd flown nothing all his life but the short races from France would feel, taking it down off the spike by the door, that he was holding something heavier than a Sunday.

There were three of them left on the spike when she came in on the Thursday. The rest of the loft had taken theirs. You could see it in the bar, who'd entered the grote fond — the ones who'd entered carried it the way men carry a thing they're afraid of, lightly, talking too much about wind. Fons Beckers had his folded in his breast pocket and kept touching it. Old Sus Gielen had spread the union map on the long table and was doing what he did, the surveying, the distances, his finger going down the column of lofts and the kilometres beside each, nine hundred and ninety, a thousand and ten, a thousand and forty, the heath at the far long end of it where the figures got biggest, where you flew the most sea for the least chance, and Sus saying the numbers under his breath like a man telling beads.

She took a green form off the spike. She didn't fold it. She held it flat against her hip under the anorak the way she'd carried other paper lately, the logbook page, the business card, and went and stood at the end of the bar where Jules had a tea going cold in front of him and a place kept beside him that nobody else would sit in because it had been Staf's.

"You're entering, then," René said down the bar. He said it kindly. The whole club was kind to her now, which she'd stopped trusting around the time she'd worked out what the kindness was a payment on.

"Haven't decided."

"You've a form in your hand."

"Forms are free."

René laughed, and Mon laughed, and somebody said forms are free, that's a good one, and it went down the bar the way her dry things went, taken for armour and not for the truth, and she let it. She'd learned you could say the truest thing you had in a flat voice and a room would hear a joke, and there was a use in that, a place to keep a thing where it would be looked at and not seen.

What was true was this. She had eleven days.

Eleven days to the basketing, and the basketing was the wall. After the basketing there was no taking anything back; the birds went in the crates and the crates went south and a thing decided was decided. Before the basketing there was eleven days of being a girl with a green form she hadn't filled in, and she had worked out, lying awake with the loft a black shape down the garden, that the eleven days were the only thing she still owned outright. The season had taken everything else off her one piece at a time — the not-knowing, the in-between place, the lie she could half-live in — and given her in exchange a set of doors, all real, all of them costing the whole of what she had. But the eleven days weren't a door. The eleven days were the hallway. You could stand in a hallway. You could keep the form in your hand and your hand on no latch and breathe, and the town would think you were deciding when in fact you were doing the one free thing left, which was not yet to have decided.

Jules turned his cold tea a quarter turn on its saucer, the way the old men turned a drink they weren't going to drink, and didn't look at her.

"What's it want," he said. "The form."

"Ring number. Loft. The hen's, if it's the hen." She knew what it wanted. She'd looked at it on the bus, on her knee, the green of it bright as a wound against her school skirt. "Number of birds entered. The clock you'll constate on."

"You'll constate on Staf's," Jules said. "The good one. The sealed one. There's only the one honest clock in that loft." He said it without weight, the way he said everything that mattered, and let it sit, and she felt the floor of it open under the flat words the way it always did with Jules, the long drop under the plain thing. Only the one honest clock. Because there were two clocks in the Maes loft. There was the working clock, Staf's race clock, the one the club sealed before every race and broke open after, that had told the truth every Sunday for forty years because Staf, having lied with a clock once, never once let a clock lie for him again. And there was the other one. The brass one, in the tin, under the board, the one that had been made to lie one Sunday in 1958 and kept ever after, the knife a man keeps, scratched 58 on the base, sitting in the dark under her bedroom floor not telling any time at all.

"I know which clock," she said.

"I know you know." He drank, finally, a small swallow of the cold tea, grimaced at it, set it down. "I'm only saying it so it's said. A thing said is harder to slide past."

She filled in the loft on the bus home, because the loft was nothing, the loft was Maes, it was already her name and her grandfather's name and the town's name for the same thing, and writing it changed nothing.

She did not fill in the ring number.

She sat with the green form on her knee and the bus going past the dead high street, the boarded butcher's, the frituur that still opened for the men coming off no shift at all, and the phone box she'd stood in to call her mother, and the church, and then the cités starting, the long brick rows, and then the heath proper, the broom and the birch and the terril coming up green-black against a sky going the colour it went in June, a high thin grey with the light somewhere behind it, the colour of a thing that hadn't decided either. And she thought about the ring number.

There was a ring number that would change the meaning of the form.

Any of the cocks she'd flown all season, the hard old widowhood cocks Jules had brought to form, the dark blue one four generations down off De Sint that had clocked fourth off the loft in the halve-fond — any of those she could write on the line and it would be a girl entering a long race, flying her grandfather's birds, doing the thing the will made her do, and the form would mean I am keeping the loft. That was all. That was clean enough. You flew the team you had and you sent the cocks because the cocks were the racers and you took your chance over the sea like everyone at the long end of the union map, and a Maes bird in the grote fond was no crime, it was a season honoured, it was forty years of a man's work going on past him the way work was meant to.

And there was the other ring number.

De Late. The blue hen. 1991. Third perch down, one foot tucked, the orange eye that gave nothing back. The great-great-grandchild of De Sint, the cleanest the old man could breed back toward the bird that came home a strong second forty years ago and was made a liar's first — she's the loft, Jules had said, holding the pedigree card, the longest column, the blood run nearly pure, the thing Staf built the whole shed to be able to make before his hands gave out. Bred toward Barcelona on purpose. Bred to fly the one race, the long one, the sea-and-mountain one, the same one. To write that number on the green line was not to keep the loft. It was to enter 1958 again. The same race, the same bloodline, the same crossing, and at the end of it the same clock — not the brass one in the tin, the brass one would never run again, but a clock, a clock, the working clock sealed under Gust Verhoeven's wax, waiting at the end of a thousand kilometres of sea to be told a time. To fly the hen was to set the whole thing running a second time and find out, this time, what the girl did at the end of it that the man had done wrong.

She did not write the number.

She got off at her stop with the form folded once, against her hip, and walked up the Pastoorstraat with her face to the ground the way she walked, and behind the houses the first of the Saturday-evening men were already out though it was only Thursday, faces up, because the long race made men go out and look at the sky early, to get used to it, to start the wait before there was anything to wait for.

Marcel Bery's Opel was at the kerb when she came up the street.

He wasn't in it. He was standing at her gate the way he stood, the flat cap in his two hands, and Dries was in the car, and that was the new arrangement, she'd learned it over the bad weeks of the early summer — Marcel at the gate with his cap, the man of principle, the courteous wound; and Dries in the car, the engine running or not running, the threat that let Marcel be courteous. They had it worked out between them, the two halves of the same forty years, and she'd stopped being frightened of Marcel and never quite stopped being frightened of the car.

"You've been to the club," Marcel said. Not a question. He'd have known. He knew the calendar of a sport his family had been put out of better than the men still in it.

"Forms are free," she said.

He didn't laugh. He looked at the form against her hip, the green of it showing past the edge of the anorak, and something went over his face, quick, gone — not anger. She'd looked for anger in Marcel for weeks and never found the clean kind, the kind you could lean on. This was the other thing, the worse thing, the thing she'd seen on him at the graveside before she knew his name: the look of a man watching a thing he'd waited his whole life for come down a street toward him, and not being able to tell, yet, whether it was the thing or only another car.

"It's the long one," he said. "Barcelona. The green form." He knew the colour of the form. Of course he knew the colour of the form. His father had taken a green form off a spike forty years ago and filled in a ring number, the blue hen's number, the better bird's, in the small upright hand, and flown her across the sea and won, and woken to a different number said out loud. "You're entering the hen."

"I haven't entered anything."

"But you'll enter the hen."

"I haven't decided what I'll enter."

He turned the cap in his hands, once, the slow turn, and looked past her up the garden at the dark shape of the loft, and she saw him not look at it the way the buyer looked at it, with the price running, but the way a man looks at the one place his father was never let stand. The Maes loft. The shed at the bottom of a hero's garden, full of the blood that beat his own.

"My father took the green form," Marcel said, "in fifty-eight. He'd never flown the long one. A man like him, an incomer, a coal-scuttle loft — you didn't fly Barcelona, that was for the names, for the men with standing, the men who could lose a good bird over the Pyrenees and shrug. He flew it anyway. Put everything he had on the one hen and sent her over the sea on the green form because it was the only race big enough to make the town see him whether it wanted to or not." He stopped. The cap stopped. "And it did. She made the metres no other bird made that day. The town saw it for about twelve hours, the time it took the drums to be read." He put the cap back on, which meant he was done, which meant he was about to say the thing he'd come to say. "I'm not telling you for pity. I'm telling you because you've a green form against your hip and you'll fill in a ring number, and there's only one number on that form that gives my father back his race, and it's not the hen's. It's no bird's. It's the truth's." He looked at her, flat, patient, the awful courtesy of it. "You can enter the hen and fly her and win and be loved. Or you can enter the hen and fly her and lose and be pitied. Either way you'll have flown my father's race on my father's blood and said nothing. The form doesn't ask you to do right, Lieselot. The form only ever asks a ring number. The right's a separate thing, and it's got no line on any paper, and the club spent good money making sure of that."

Behind him, in the car, Dries leaned and looked at her through the glass and didn't say anything, and that was Dries's whole part, to lean and look and let her feel the engine.

"You've till the basketing," Marcel said. "Same as the club gave you. Same as the season. Everybody's giving you till the basketing." A small thing, not a smile. "Funny how they all land on the same Sunday."

He got in the car. The Opel pulled off clean and quiet down the dead street, and she stood at her own gate with the green form against her hip and watched it go small, the way the street made everything go small toward the road out, and behind her the loft murmured its evening murmur, not knowing, never knowing, and down the row a man called his last bird home off the practice toss, komeen, komeen, and somebody's clock struck the hour a beat behind the church.

She went down to the loft to lock it for the night and she took the form with her.

She didn't mean to. It was in her hand and the birds came first, you didn't put a bird down to put a paper down, and so she went in among the perches with the green form still in her fist and the smell came up around her, the corn and the lime and the warm dry reek of forty bodies, the smell she'd hated the helpless way you hate a thing from childhood and had stopped, somewhere in the bad summer, being able to hate, because you cannot go on hating the smell of the one thing you turned out to be good at.

De Late was on the third perch with one foot tucked.

She put her hand under the hen the way Staf had shown her without meaning to teach her, two fingers along the keel, and the hen sat in her hand and did not fight, and Lieselot felt the keel and the worked muscle and the dry silk and the heart going under her fingers, quick, the bird's heart, the small machine of it, going at the speed a bird's heart goes, faster than anything in the town went, faster than the bus or the years or a girl walking fast with her face down, going like a thing that meant to get somewhere and come back. And she held the hen in the going light and the green form was crushed in her other fist against the wire, and she understood that the hen did not know she was a thousand kilometres of risk and a stolen win and a dead man's record and a living man's wound, did not know she had a ring number that could mean two different lives, did not know she was 1958. The hen knew the loft. The hen knew the hour. The hen knew, if she knew anything, that this was the hand that fed her now, the new hand, the one that had come after the old one stopped, and that it was steady, and that it read her keel the right way, and the hen sat in the right hand and gave nothing away with the orange eye, and the two of them understood each other the way they had since the first night — neither of them telling, both of them waiting.

She put the hen back.

She stood in the loft in the last of the light with the crushed form in her fist and she thought: I could not write any number. I could let the form go unwritten and the season run out and the loft go dark and revert to the club, and the secret would die where Gust wanted it to die, and Marcel would get nothing and Frans would stay off every board, and I'd be on a train to Genk before September with the birds sold off the cards to a man up by Antwerp who'd keep the line whole and never know what it was — and that was a door too, the easiest door, the do-nothing door, and she'd stood in front of it on the bus and known she would not walk through it, not because she was brave, she didn't feel brave, she felt like a girl in a cold shed holding a bird and a green paper, but because the do-nothing door was Bram's door, was the town's door, was the door her grandfather had walked through forty years ago and called it carrying — and she had decided, somewhere she couldn't point to, lying awake with the loft a black shape down the garden, that whatever she did she would not do nothing. Doing nothing was the one thing every adult in the heide had already done. She would not give them the company.

She filled it in at the kitchen table, under the bad light, with Staf's pen.

The fat black Pelikan, the gold nib gone soft on the one side, the same pen the confession was written in, the same blue-black ink. She'd thought about that when she got it out of the drawer and uncapped it — that the lie and the form would be in the same ink, in the same hand near enough, a girl's hand schooled by the same dead miner — and she'd thought, good. Let it be the same ink. If you were going to set the thing running a second time, run it in the same ink the first time was written in, and let the second hand be cleaner than the first or let it be the same, you'd find out which over the sea.

She wrote the loft: Maes.

She wrote the clock she'd constate on, and it was the honest one, the working one, the one Staf never let lie, the one Gust Verhoeven would seal with his own wax die over the keyhole the way honesty was sealed, honesty you could feel with your thumb.

She wrote the number of birds entered: one.

And on the green line, in the blue-black ink, in the careful hand a dead man's loft had taught her, she wrote De Late's ring number, the whole long string of it, the country and the year and the figures, the hen's number, the hen's, the great-great-grandchild of De Sint, the bird bred toward this one race, the bloodline, the trap, the thing the Berys wanted, the thing the town wanted her to win on, the thing that was 1958 with feathers on, sitting on the third perch down not knowing she was a ring number on a green form on a Thursday in June.

She entered the hen.

She read it back once, the form filled in, the green paper, the blue-black ink, Maes, the honest clock, one bird, the number — and she saw that she had done a thing and not done a thing, both, in the one act. She had entered the hen, which the will needed, which the season needed, which the wall of the basketing needed; she'd flown into the trap with her eyes open and put 1958 on the spike to run again. And she had not decided, on any line of any paper, how she would fly her. There was no line for that. Marcel was right; the club had spent good money making sure there wasn't. The form asked a ring number and she'd given it one. The form did not ask whether she'd stand up at the basketing and say what the brass clock in her tin had done, whether she'd give a dead man his race back before the crates went south or take his blood and his win and his town's love and say nothing the way the man she got the blood from had said nothing. The form had no line for that and so she'd left it unwritten, the only line that mattered, the line that wasn't on the paper — and she understood, capping the pen, that she had bought herself exactly the thing she'd worked out on the bus she still owned: the days. The hallway. The hen would basket and fly whatever she decided; the deciding she had pushed all the way down the season to its last possible inch, to the basketing itself, to the green baize and the wax and the moment before the seal, where the form ran out and only the girl was left.

She put the form in her schoolbag for the morning, between her geography and a thing she hadn't done for French, the way you carry the one heavy thing among the light ones so your hand learns it's there.

She went up. She lifted the loose board and got out the tin and opened it in the dark and the smell came up, the brass and the old paper and the forty years, and she laid the form down inside, on top of the confession and the logbook page and the drum-tape and the debt-notebook and the brass clock, all of it together now in the one tin under the one floor — the lie and the proof and the wound and the green paper that set it running again — and she did not put the clock to her ear, because the clock told no time, and she did not read the confession's last page again, because she'd read it the night before and once was enough to be a charge for life, and she closed the tin and put it back under the board.

Then she went to the window.

It was full dark over the heath, the winding-gear a blacker black against the grey, the terril a shape you knew was there. Down the garden the loft was a shape you knew was there. The hen was on the third perch with her head turned in under her wing, not knowing she was entered, not knowing the form said her number, not knowing she had eleven days and then the sea. And Lieselot stood at the loft window where the old man had lifted her as a child to be first to spot the speck — there, little one, there, do you see him — and looked south, at the dark, at the long water she couldn't see and the race coming up the calendar at her like a tide, and thought that she had got it as honest as a green form would let her, which was not honest at all, which was only deferred, and that the one true line was the one she'd have to write in the air, out loud, in a room full of men, with her own mouth, on the morning the crates went south — and that until then she had her eleven days, and the hen was entered, and 1958 was on the spike to run again, and at the end of it, this time, the girl would be the one standing at the clock.

She did not yet know what she would do at the clock.

That was the truest thing in the house, truer than the tin, and she stood at the window and let it be true, late, the way the truth ran in this town, eleven days and then the sea, and somewhere out over the dark water the race already coming, late, but coming.