Chapter One — Late, But Coming

The mine had been shut twelve years and the birds were the only thing in Sint-Amandsheide that still went somewhere and came back. You could measure the town by what it had lost. The winding-gear over the old Sint-Amand stood black against the sky at the end of every street like a thing that had hanged itself and been left up as a warning. The slag heap, the terril, had gone green — birch and broom rooting in it, a few goats some Italian let graze the lower slope — so that the one mountain the town had ever built was now busy turning itself back into a hill, politely, as if embarrassed. The cités, the long brick rows the company had thrown up for the miners in the good years, still stood, and half of them were dark. People said the young had all gone to Genk and Hasselt for the work, which was a way of not saying there was no work, here or there.

What was left was Saturday afternoons, and the sound of them.

Lieselot could hear it from the kitchen with the window shut. The whole back of the street out in their gardens, faces tipped up, an old man somewhere with a stopwatch in his fist and his mouth going like a priest who'd forgotten the words and kept the rhythm. Komeen, komeen. Come on. She had grown up inside that sound the way you grow up inside a smell — the way the loft itself was a smell, corn and lime and the warm dry reek of forty bodies — and she hated it the helpless way you hate anything you didn't get to choose, which was most things, when she thought about it, which she tried not to.

She was fifteen and she had a list. The list was: finish school somewhere with a train that went past the city. Be anyone whose grandfather was not famous for a bird. Get out before the town finished closing over her like water over a dropped thing.

The list did not have a loft on it.

Staf had been dead three days. He was lying up at Vandeput's in the cold room behind the parlour with the curtains the colour of old tea, and tomorrow they would put him in the ground after the eleven o'clock Mass, and the town would come, because the town always came, and stand in the rain that was certainly coming, and say he was the last of something. They had been saying he was the last of something for as long as she could remember. Now they would get to be right.

The birds did not know.

That was the thing she kept coming back to, standing at the kitchen window with a cold cup of coffee she'd made and not drunk. Forty pigeons in the hok at the bottom of the garden, and not one of them knew the old man was three days dead. They had been fed — she'd done it herself, badly, the way he'd shown her a hundred times when she was small and she'd let it run straight through her like water through a grate — and watered, and the droppings boards scraped, because if you didn't they sickened, and she was not going to be the one who let Staf Maes's birds sicken with him not yet in the ground. That was pride, not love. She was clear with herself about that.

At four in the afternoon she went down the garden to lock the loft, and they did the thing.

She was not expecting it. She had her hand on the bolt and the light was doing what April light did at four, going long and thin and gold along the brick, and inside the wire the birds were settling, a low collective mutter, a shifting of feet. And then all at once — not one by one, all at once, the way a field of corn lies down under a gust — they turned. Every bird in the loft swung its small hard head to the same quarter of the sky, the south, out over the roofs and the dead winding-gear and the green heap, out toward France and the long water beyond it, and went still. Forty birds facing south at four in the afternoon as if the old man were out there yet, somewhere over the sea, late, but coming.

She stood with her hand on the bolt and did not move for a while.

It was nothing. It was the hour. He'd fed them at four for forty years and birds are clocks with feathers, that was all, they were waiting for the rattle of corn the way a dog waits at a gate. It was nothing.

She locked the loft and went back up the garden and did not look at the south of the sky, and that was the first lie she told that week, and it was to herself, and it was small.

There was one bird she'd let herself look at, before she shut the wire, because looking at one was not the same as caring about all of them. The blue hen on the third perch down, the one Staf called De Late — the late one — for a habit she had of coming in last off the training tosses and coming in anyway, dropping out of an emptied sky long after he'd given the others corn, so that he'd say daar is ze under his breath, there she is, with a satisfaction Lieselot had never understood and didn't ask about. The hen sat with one foot tucked and watched her with the orange eye, the eye that was, when you got close, not a stupid thing at all but a polished little world, a circle the size of a shirt button with the whole of the sky banked in it, and Lieselot looked at the hen and the hen looked at Lieselot, and neither of them gave anything away. Good, she thought. They understood each other. She was the last of the line of people who could look at a bird and feel nothing, and she meant to keep the line going.

She'd seen Staf hold that hen, once, near the end, when his hands had got bad — seen him take her up out of the basket and run two fingers along the keel of her breast the way you'd test a knife, his eyes going somewhere else while his hands read her, reading the muscle, the warmth, the fat of her, whatever it was old men read off a half-kilo of bird that told them more than a doctor could tell them off a man. He'd held the hen like that for a long minute and then put her back and not said anything, and that had been her grandfather's idea of a conversation, and it had gone on for forty years, between him and a shed full of pigeons, while everyone he could have talked to with words got smaller in his life and then left it. Lieselot had thought, watching him: I will not be a person who talks to birds. She had thought it the way you think a thing to keep it true by saying it, which is the same reason people pray, and works about as well.

Wendy came round on her way down to catch the bus, because Wendy still had places the bus could take her on a Saturday and was not above letting that be seen.

She stood in the doorway in her coat and her good shoes and her face done, fifteen and already finished somehow, already a girl from a town that wasn't this one, and she looked at the kitchen and the cold range and the cup of coffee Lieselot still hadn't drunk, and her own face did a quick kind thing and then put itself away.

"You coming?" Wendy said. "There's the thing at Davy's. In Genk. His brother's driving back after."

"Funeral's tomorrow."

"That's tomorrow." Wendy said it gently. She had a boyfriend in the city and a plan and a way of saying tomorrow like it was a separate country she didn't live in. "You'll go mad sitting in here with—" She stopped before she said him, because Staf was up at Vandeput's and you didn't say that, and instead she tipped her head at the window, at the garden, at the dark shape of the loft down the end of it. "With all that."

"All that," Lieselot said, "is mine now, apparently."

Wendy's eyebrows went up. She didn't know about the will yet; nobody did; it was an hour old. "The birds?"

"The lot."

"What are you going to do with a load of pigeons?"

It was the right question. It was the question Lieselot had been asking herself for three days, would ask herself the rest of the year, the question the whole town would put to her in one form or another with every face it owned. And she heard herself not have the answer she'd planned, which was sell them, obviously, the answer of a sane girl with a list and a bus to catch — heard herself instead say nothing for a beat too long, looking past Wendy at the south of the sky going down to nothing over the green heap.

"You're not coming," Wendy said. It wasn't a question now.

"Tomorrow's the funeral," Lieselot said again, like that was a reason, and watched something close a small distance in Wendy's face — not unkindly, just the way a window closes when the weather turns — and understood, in a way she had no words for and wouldn't have used them if she had, that Wendy was going to get out of this town and she, Lieselot, who had wanted it more and said it louder, was standing in a cold kitchen with a dead man's birds and a tin she hadn't opened, and that the bus was leaving without her, in more ways than the one.

"Right," Wendy said. "I'll ring you." She would, too, for a while. "Sorry about your opa."

"He's not sorry," Lieselot said, which made no sense, and Wendy laughed because she thought it was the dry thing Lieselot did, the armour, and went off down the Pastoorstraat in her good shoes to catch the bus, her heels going on the wet brick, getting smaller, the way the town made everything smaller as it went toward the edge of itself and the road out.

The notary came at six, which was an hour when decent people were eating, and Bram answered the door because Bram was already three pils into the evening and answering doors was a thing he could still do well.

His name was Meneer Coemans and he was from Beringen, a town big enough to have a notary, and he had the soft clean hands of a man who had never been down anything. He sat at the kitchen table with a folder and refused the coffee and the jenever both, which Bram took as an insult and filed away to be hurt about later. Lieselot stood at the counter with her back to the cold range. She had not been told to sit and she would not ask.

"You're the granddaughter," Coemans said. "Lieselot."

"That's me," she said.

"Sit, then, if you like."

"I'm grand."

He looked at her a moment longer than the words needed, the way the teachers looked at her when she answered too quick, and then he opened the folder and began to read the will of Gustaaf Maes in the flat voice they used, and the room got very quiet around the reading, the way it does when money is in a room, even when the money is forty birds and a brick shed.

Bram got the house. The little terraced house in the Pastoorstraat, mortgage-free, which Staf had paid off out of a miner's wage by never once in his life buying anything he didn't need except feed. Bram got his father's watch, and his father's chair, and a sum in the bank that turned out to be smaller than Bram had clearly been hoping, judging by the way his face went, and Lieselot watched it go and felt nothing she'd admit to.

Then Coemans turned a page and said: "The loft, the birds, all stock, breeding records, equipment, and"—he read it out exactly, the way it was written—"'all that is in it and of it,' he leaves to his granddaughter, Lieselot Godelieve Maes."

Nobody said anything.

Then Bram laughed, one short ugly bark of it, no humour in it anywhere. "The birds. He left her the birds."

"He did."

"She doesn't even—" Bram stopped. He had a thing he did with his mouth when he was about to be cruel and then thought better of it, a kind of working, and he did it now and what came out instead was small and almost true. "She doesn't even like them."

"Be that as it may," said Coemans, who clearly said be that as it may a great deal.

Lieselot kept her back against the range and her face shut. She doesn't even like them. It was the most accurate thing her father had said in a year, and she resented him for it, for being right about her, for knowing the one true thing and using it to be wounded rather than to be a father. The birds were worth more than the house. Everyone in the room knew it and nobody would say it, because that was the joke of the town, that a brick shed at the bottom of a miner's garden could hold a fortune in feathers, more than the house, more than the bank, more than a man could earn going down a hole for thirty years — and the town that knew this, that lived by it, that read the southern sky like scripture every Saturday, still couldn't keep a frites shop open past nine.

"There's a condition," Coemans said.

He didn't read this part. He looked up from the folder and said it to her directly, and she understood it was the part Staf had told him to say with his own mouth.

"The loft is left to you, but it's a working loft, and your grandfather has tied it to the club's bylaw and to a stipulation of his own. The birds are to be flown. Raced, under the Maes name, this season. If they're not entered and flown — if the loft sits dead a year — the bloodline reverts to the club, or it's to be sold, and the proceeds—" He glanced at his folder, found it, didn't like saying it. "The proceeds go elsewhere."

"Elsewhere," Bram said.

"It's specified."

"To who?"

Coemans closed the folder a little, not all the way, a man drawing a curtain. "That's a separate instrument. There's also"—and here he reached into his case and brought out a thing and set it on the table between them, and the kitchen got quieter still—"this. He was very particular. It's to go to Lieselot, and she's to open it alone."

It was a tin. An old biscuit tin, the kind that had once had a king and queen on the lid and now had only the ghost of them, the gilt worn to grey, the corners gone soft with handling. It was not large. It was the size of a thing you'd keep buttons in, or a dead woman's rings, and Lieselot looked at it on the scarred table in the bad kitchen light and felt the back of her neck go cold for no reason she could have given.

"Alone," Coemans said again. "He was clear."

"What's in it," said Bram, and his hand was already moving.

"I don't know," said Coemans, which was the first thing he'd said all evening Lieselot believed completely. "I never opened it. He brought it to me sealed in '88 and told me whose hands it was to go into and on what terms, and I've kept it in the office safe six years, and I never opened it." He looked at the tin like it might do something. "He was a stubborn old man, your father," he said to Bram. "But he was honest." And he said it the way you say a thing that costs nothing, a kindness for the bereaved, the standard coin — he was honest — and Lieselot watched the words go out across the table and land, and had no idea yet that they were the cruellest thing said in that kitchen all night.

Bram's hand had reached the tin. He had two fingers on the lid.

"It's hers," Coemans said, not loudly.

Bram took his hand back. There was a silence in which the three of them looked at a biscuit tin, and outside, the last of the Saturday gardens called their last birds home, komeen, komeen, and a single clock somewhere down the row struck the hour off true, a beat behind the church, the way every clock in the world is a beat behind some other clock, and somebody's good bird came in late and was caught and clocked and that was a man's whole week made or unmade in the time it took to strip a rubber ring off a leg.

Later, when Coemans had gone and Bram had gone too — out, to the café, to be a man who'd been passed over, which gave him somewhere to be — she carried the tin up to her room and put it on the bed and sat looking at it.

She did not open it. She had been told to open it alone and she was alone and she did not open it, and she told herself that was because she was tired, and that was the second lie, and it was bigger than the first.

She knew the shape of what was happening to her even if she didn't know the contents. She had spent fifteen years getting ready to leave this town. She had built herself for it the way you build for weather — too cool to want anything, because if you never said you wanted out then the town could never catch you wanting and laugh, the way it laughed at Bram, the way it laughed at everyone who'd had a notion and stayed. And now a dead man had reached up out of three days of being dead and put a brick shed and forty birds and a sealed tin into her hands and tied them to her with a season, like a man tethering a goat so it won't follow the herd over the hill.

All that is in it and of it.

She lay back on the bed without undressing and listened to the house tick and settle, and to the wind getting up out of the south the way it did at night this time of year, coming off the water it had crossed, carrying nothing she could name. Down the garden the loft would be dark and the forty birds asleep on their perches with their heads turned in under their wings, not knowing, still not knowing, that the man who'd lifted her to that window when she was small so she'd be the first to spot the speck that was his bird coming home — there, little one, there, do you see him — was three days dead and going into the ground in the morning, and that the thing he'd left was not love, or not only love, but a weight in a biscuit tin she was afraid to open and could already feel, across the dark room, like a stone laid on her chest.

The tin sat on the bed and did not get lighter for being ignored.

She'd open it tomorrow. After. When the Mass was done and the town had said its piece and gone home to its birds, she'd open the thing and find out what kind of inheritance a man leaves the only person he ever told the truth to, and what it costs to be told.

Chapter Two — The Tin

They buried him in the rain that had been certainly coming, and the town came, the way the town always came, and stood in it. The priest said the things. The grave was cut into the clay above the old workings, where the ground was good for nothing now but the dead, and you could see from the lip of it, between two umbrellas, the black winding-gear at the end of the Pastoorstraat standing over the whole business like a foreman who'd stopped pretending to work.

The old men from the club came in their one suit each. They stood in a knot to the side, caps in their hands, water running off their bald heads, and they did not cry, because men of that town did not cry at a grave any more than they'd have cried going down the cage in the morning — they did the other thing, the thing they did at the loft window on a hard Saturday when the sky stayed empty: they waited it out with their faces shut. De Staf, one of them said, just the name, the way you'd say it stepping into the café, and another nodded, and that was the eulogy that counted.

A hard man Lieselot didn't know stood at the back in clean shoes. She noticed the shoes because everyone else's were ruined in the clay and his were not, polished, dark, out of place at the edge of the grave like a man who'd come to a different appointment — a man who'd come to collect, not to grieve. He didn't look at the coffin. He looked at her. When the first clay went down he was already turning to go, and Jules — old Jules Lemmens, who'd flown against Staf for fifty years and was the only one of them who came and stood by her instead of in the knot — Jules put a hand on her arm, light as a bird, and steered her the other way before she could place the face, and said nothing about it, and that was a kindness she'd only understand later.

Bram cried. Bram cried the way he did everything, too much and too late and with an audience, and three pils in already at eleven in the morning, and the town watched him do it and filed it away, the son, the way they'd been filing it away his whole life.

Afterward there was coffee and a plate of things at the parish hall, and the town said its piece — he was the last of them, the last real one, there'll not be another — and shook Lieselot's hand one cold wet hand after another, and asked her what she'd do with the loft now, every one of them, in one form or another, with a look that already knew she'd sell and was already a little disappointed in her for it. She said we'll see forty times. By two o'clock they had gone home to their own birds, because it was a Saturday in April after all, and a man could be buried and the racing still want doing.

She walked home alone. She did not go in the house. She went down the garden in the thinning rain to the loft, because the birds wanted feeding, and feeding them was a thing she could do with her hands while the rest of her stood off to the side.

Inside, the hok was dry and warm and smelt of itself — the corn and the lime and the dusty animal warmth of them — and the rain went on the felt roof, and the forty birds shifted and muttered on their perches and watched her with their orange eyes do the thing the old man had done at four for forty years. She filled the hopper. She changed the water. The blue hen, De Late, came down off the third perch to the floor and walked the wire near her hand, not tame, not wild, just there, watching, and Lieselot did not put her hand to it. She filled the grit pot. She scraped the boards.

When there was nothing left to do with her hands she stood in the middle of the loft a moment in the falling light, and the birds settled around her, and it was the quietest place she'd been all day. Then she went up to the house and got the tin off the bed where it had sat through the Mass not getting lighter, and she brought it back down to the loft, because if she was going to open the thing she would rather do it here, among the only witnesses Staf had ever trusted, than in the kitchen where her father would come back to.

She sat on the upturned feed crate he'd always sat on. She put the tin on her knees.

Alone, the notary had said. He was clear. Well. She was alone, near enough. Forty pairs of eyes didn't count.

The lid had been on so long it had married itself to the tin, and she had to work it, her thumbnail in the seam all the way round, and when it came it came suddenly with a small dry breath of air gone stale years ago, the smell of inside, of paper kept too long and a faint oil-metal underneath it, and she had it open on her knees in the loft with the rain on the roof and she looked down into the thing her grandfather had spent six years in a safe and forty years before that not destroying.

On top, a letter. Folded in three, the paper gone the colour of weak tea at the creases, his hand on the outside of it — she knew his hand, the cramped upright miner's copperplate they'd flogged into him at the parish school in the twenties and that had never once relaxed — one word, her name. Lieselot. Not to Lieselot, not for my granddaughter. Just the name, the way the old men said it at a grave. As if she were a place you addressed a thing to.

She did not open it first. She lifted it out and set it on the crate beside her, careful, the way you'd lift a bird, and looked at what was under it, because she was a coward and she knew it and she'd rather meet the thing sideways.

Under the letter was a clock.

Not a watch. A clock — a constateur, the timing clock, the kind that lived sealed in the wooden box on the high shelf at the club and got brought down twice a Saturday with the reverence of a monstrance. She knew the shape of one without ever having held one. It was brass and it was old, far older than the one at the club now, a heavy round drum of a thing in a battered wooden case the size of two fists, a winding key folded against its side, a slot in the top where the rubber ring went in, a small glass face. It was beautiful in the way tools are beautiful, made to do one thing and do it true. She lifted it out and it was heavier than it looked — heavier than it had any business being, she thought, for a thing that only had to weigh the truth — and she turned it in the loft light and the brass had a deep dull shine where two generations of hands had held it in the one place, and on the base, scratched in, not stamped, a number and a year. 58.

She did not know yet what it was. She knew it was wrong for it to be here. That much the body knew before the head did. A man's race clock belonged to the club, was sealed by the club, was opened by the club; you did not keep one in a tin in a safe for forty years any more than you kept the chalice from the church under your bed. The wrongness of it sat in her hands with the weight of it. A thing built to tell the truth, she thought, not knowing yet why she thought it, kept because it had been made to lie.

She set it down beside the letter, gently, the way you set down a thing you've started to be afraid of.

Under the clock, a paper. A strip of paper, narrow and long, yellowed, rolled and gone flat with the years, the kind that fed through a clock's drum and took the punch of the time on it. There were marks on it she couldn't read — a column of small punched figures, times, a smudge of old ink — the record of one race, kept the way the clock was kept, when both of them should have been broken open in front of officials and read and put away in the club's memory and not in a dead man's tin. She didn't understand it. She understood it was a second wrong thing, twin to the first, and she put it down with the clock and didn't pick it up again.

And under the paper, at the bottom of the tin, a notebook. A cheap school exercise book, the cardboard cover soft as cloth, the kind you bought six for a franc, and she opened it and it was not racing notes, or not the ones she'd expected. It was a column of figures going down the page and over the next page and the next, dozens of them, scores of them, every one dated, the dates marching down the years — '59, '61, '64 — sums of money, small sums, a few hundred francs here, a thousand there, set down in his cramped hand in two columns like a man keeping a tab he was paying off and never finished paying. And at the head of each page, no explanation, no word, only a name. The same name, page after page, year after year, the only word in the book that wasn't a number.

Bery.

She did not know the name. She turned the pages and the name kept coming, the dates kept coming, the small sums kept going out into the dark to a man called Bery for forty years, and she sat in the loft with the rain on the roof and the cold coming up off the floor through the crate and could not make the figures into anything but what they plainly were, which was a debt. A debt her grandfather had carried, quietly, in secret, in a school exercise book at the bottom of a tin, all her life and longer, to a name she'd never heard him say once.

The clean shoes at the grave. The hard man who'd looked at her and not the coffin. She didn't connect them, not yet, not with words — but something in her connected, the way the birds had turned south all at once, all of them, before she'd thought to look.

She put the notebook down with the rest of it.

That left the letter.

She picked it up off the crate. The birds had gone still around her; the loft was nearly dark now, the last grey light coming flat through the wire, and she had to tilt the paper to the window to read it, and she unfolded it, the three soft creases opening like something reluctant, and the first lines were at the top in his hand, the same flogged copperplate, steadier than she'd have thought for the hand of a man whose hands at the end couldn't strip a ring off a bird.

Lieselot, it said. You will have looked at the clock first because you are mine and you go at things sideways. Good. Then you already half know.

And then:

The 1958 race was not mine. I made the clock lie.

She stopped.

She read the line again, and a third time, and the words did not change and did not soften and did not turn into some other thing she'd misread in the bad light. I made the clock lie. The clock that lived on her knee a foot away. The clock with 58 scratched in the base. The 1958 race — the race, the only one, the Barcelona that the whole town pinned its whole self to, the win with his name in gold leaf on the board at the club, the win that was the last and best thing this dead place had ever done, the thing they'd all stood in the rain that morning to bury the last of — the 1958 race was not mine.

She did not read the next line.

She found she had stopped reading the way you stop walking when the ground isn't where your foot expected it, a lurch, a body refusing before the mind has agreed to anything, and her eyes were on the page and going no further, the words after I made the clock lie just shapes now, grey on grey, and she did not read them, she could not, not tonight, not with him a day in the ground and the whole town still wet from telling her he was the last real one, he was honest, there'll not be another.

She folded the letter back along its creases. Three folds. Her hands did it on their own, very carefully, as if the thing might wake.

She sat in the dark loft with the clock and the strip of paper and the book of a forty-year debt and the unread half of her grandfather's confession on her knees, and the birds breathed around her, and the rain eased off the roof to nothing, and out beyond the wire the south of the sky went down past grey to black over the dead winding-gear, and she understood — without words, the way she understood the hour the birds turned — that she was the only living person who knew. That the town that had buried him today as its one true thing had buried a lie, and didn't know, and she knew, and he had made sure of it, he had reached up out of the clay and made certain that of all the people he could have handed it to — the club, the notary, his own son — he handed it to her, fifteen, in a cold shed, alone, because she was the one he'd told the truth to, and that was supposed to be love, and it sat on her chest like the clock in her hands, heavier than a thing that small had any right to be.

He loved me, she thought, and could not finish it, because the other half of the thought was and he lied to all of them, and there was nowhere in her, not yet, where the two would sit down together.

She did not cry. She'd cried for nothing all day and she did not cry now, when there was something. She put the lid back on the tin — the letter, the book, the strip of paper, and last the clock, settling its weight down into the bottom — and she pressed the lid till the old seam took, and the air went out of it in its small stale breath, and the tin was shut.

It was not lighter for being shut. She'd known it wouldn't be.

She came up the garden in the full dark. The kitchen window was lit; Bram was back, then, slumped at the table with the bottle and the radio low, the local station doing the racing results from the day's vitesse in the flat reverent voice they used, and from the loft of, and a name, and a velocity, somebody's good Sunday read out to a town that lived for it. He didn't look up. He'd be hours yet at the bottom of himself.

She did not go in. She stood at the foot of the garden with the tin held against her in both arms like a thing you'd carry out of a fire, and she looked back down at the loft, the dark squat shape of it against the last of the sky, where forty birds slept with their heads turned in under their wings, not knowing — still not knowing, never to know — that the man who'd built them, who'd lifted her to that window when she was small so she'd be the first to spot the speck that was his bird coming home, had not won the race that made them what they were. That the line ran back, every bird of it, to a Sunday in 1958 and a clock made to lie about a handful of minutes, and that the most valuable thing in the dead town, the fortune in feathers at the bottom of a miner's garden, was built on a theft, and was hers now, and she could not give it back and she could not keep it clean and she had not even read to the end of the letter that told her so.

The notary's voice came back to her, flat, kind, standing at the kitchen table the night before with the will in his soft clean hands. He was a stubborn old man, your father. But he was honest. The cruellest thing said in that kitchen all night, and she'd had no idea, and now she had every idea, and there was no one to tell that it was funny, because it was not funny at all.

Down at the end of the Pastoorstraat the winding-gear stood black against the black. Somewhere down the row a last clock struck the hour a beat behind the church, the way every clock in the world is a beat behind some other clock, a beat that in 1958 had been worth a man's whole life and nobody had ever known but two, and now one of those two was in the clay and the other was a name in a book in a tin in her arms, a name she'd say out loud for the first time tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever she found the nerve to read the rest of what a dead man had left the only person he ever told the truth to.

Bery.

She went inside, past her father, up the stairs, and put the tin on the floor of her wardrobe under the man's anorak she'd taken to wearing because it was there, and shut the door on it, and lay down on the bed without undressing, and listened to the wind get up out of the south off the water it had crossed, carrying nothing she could name, and did not sleep for a long time, and did not, in all that time, once miss him.

Chapter Three — The Will's Teeth

It did rain, the way the town had promised itself it would, a fine grey rain that did not so much fall as hang, and the whole of Sint-Amandsheide stood in it at eleven o'clock and watched Staf Maes go into the ground with their collars up and their faces wet and could not have said, any of them, whether the wet was the rain or themselves.

Lieselot stood at the lip of the grave between her father and the priest and looked at the brass on the coffin and thought about feed.

She thought about feed because it was a thing she could do something about, and the rest of it she could not. She had given the birds their morning ration before the cars came, gone down the garden in her good shoes with the bag of the depurative mix Jules had told her to start them on, the light stuff, the cleaning-out stuff, and she had scattered it badly and watched the forty heads go down and had felt, standing there in the loft smell with the rain not yet started, more like a person than she would feel all day. So now, at the grave, with the priest saying the words about resurrection that the town did not believe and would not be told it didn't, she thought about whether she'd given them enough or too much, and whether the young cock, the nervy one Staf had called Manneke, had eaten at all, because he hadn't, he'd stood off in the corner with his shoulders up, and a bird that won't eat is a bird telling you something you don't want to hear.

The priest finished. The town crossed itself. Somewhere off the back of the crowd a man coughed the deep coal cough, the one half of them had, and it was the most honest sound made at the graveside all morning.

They came past her after, one by one, the whole town, and took her hand in their two hands and looked at her with the wet faces and said the thing. He was the last of something. They said it in the words they had — amai, kindje, and a hard one, your opa, a hard one — but it all came to the same, and what it meant, she understood, standing there having her hand pressed by men who smelled of pils and rain and birds, was not we are sorry he is dead. It was we are sorry he is dead because now there is one less of us who remembers when we were a place. They were not burying a grandfather. They were burying a Saturday in 1958 that they had each, every one of them, spent their whole lives standing inside.

She let them. She had her own face for it, the shut one, and she wore it, and they took the shut face for grief and were glad of it, because a town wants its dead wept for and she was the only one with the standing to do the weeping, and she would not give them even that, and they did not know she was withholding it, and that was its own small mercy.

Her father wept. Bram wept the loud unashamed way of a man three drinks past being able to choose, his big hand over his mouth, and the town liked him better for it than it had liked him in years, and he knew it, even drunk he knew it, and Lieselot watched her father be loved for crying at the grave of the man who had passed him over, and understood something about her father that she did not have words for and did not want.

The buyer was there. She didn't know it yet.

He stood off at the edge of things by the chapel wall in a coat too good for the town, a square soft man of maybe sixty with a driver waiting in a clean grey car at the cemetery gate, and he watched the burial the way you watch an auction lot being walked out, with a kind of patient appetite, and at one point he caught Bram's eye across the graves and Bram, drunk, lifted his chin to him, the smallest nod, the nod two men give who have already had a conversation. Lieselot saw it and filed it and did not understand it, then.

She understood it an hour later, back at the house, when the cars had gone and the town had gone to the lokaal to drink to Staf properly, the way it wanted to, and her father came in out of the rain with his black tie pulled loose and sat down heavy at the kitchen table and said, not looking at her, "There's a man wants to see the birds."

"What man."

"A man." Bram turned the salt cellar round on the oilcloth, round and round. "From up by Antwerp. He buys lines. Good lines." He said good lines the way he said most things, like he was quoting someone who'd hurt him. "He came down for the funeral special. That's respect, that is. A man drives down from Antwerp for a funeral, that's a man who knows what your opa was."

"He came down to look at the loft."

"He came," said Bram, "to pay respects." But the salt cellar went round and round.

"How much."

Her father looked up at her then, and for a second there was something in his wet drunk face that she would think about later, something that was almost relief, almost gratitude, the look of a man who has been dreading a fight and finds the other person already knows the shape of it. "Enough," he said. "Lieseke. Enough to clear what I owe and a good bit over. Enough that I never have to—" He stopped. He didn't say be this. He gestured around the kitchen, at the cold range, at the house his father had paid off and left to him because at least a house can't be ruined by the man who has it. "Enough," he said again. "He'll take the lot. The whole loft, the records, the line of the 58, all of it, one price. He'll take it off your hands tomorrow and you can go back to being fifteen."

"It's not yours to sell."

"I'm your father."

"It's not yours to sell," she said again, in the flat voice, and watched the word father sit there between them not doing anything, the way it usually didn't.

"You don't even like them," Bram said, and there it was again, the one true thing, the family's one reliable knife, and he picked it up the way he always did, by the blade, so it cut him too. "You never went near them. Fifteen years and you never once— and now you're going to stand in my kitchen and tell me—" He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he took them away his face had gone soft and pleading and worse than angry. "It's a way out, Lieseke. For both of us. He left you a way out. Whatever he was thinking, leaving them to you and not me— maybe that was him being smart for once. You take the money. You take the money and you go to your schools in the city and you're shot of this whole— this whole graveyard of a town. He'd want that for you. He would."

And the worst of it, she thought, was that her father believed it. That her father had built, in the few hours since the grave closed, an entire little church around the idea that selling the dead man's birds was a thing the dead man would have blessed, and that he, Bram, was doing it out of love. He half was. That was the part she couldn't get her hands round. He half was.

"There's a condition," she said. "On the will. You heard it."

"Coemans's lawyer talk."

"Fly them or lose them. This season. Under the name. If they sit a year they go to the club, or they're sold and the money goes—" She stopped where Coemans had stopped. Elsewhere. She knew now where elsewhere was. She had a tin upstairs with a column of figures in it and a name at the head of the column, and she was not going to say that name in this kitchen to this drunk man. "—the money goes somewhere else. Not to us. So if you sell them, you sell them broken. You sell them out of the season and you've broken the one thing that made them worth what your man from Antwerp wants to pay."

She had not known she knew that until she said it. She'd worked it out somewhere in the back of herself, in the part of her that was good at the thing she'd spent fifteen years refusing to be good at — the part that ran the numbers, the velocities, the angles, the part that was, she was beginning to suspect with a low dread, exactly her grandfather's part. The line of the 58 was worth a fortune because it raced and won. A loft that didn't fly was just forty birds in a shed. Staf had tied the money to the flying on purpose. He'd built a trap out of his own legend, and the jaws of it were: to be worth selling, they had to be flown; to be flown, they had to be hers; and to keep them hers, she had to do the one thing she'd sworn she never would.

Bram stared at her. Slowly, slowly, the drunk fog of him understood that his daughter had just, in two sentences, taken the floor out from under the only plan he had.

"He did that on purpose," Bram said.

"Yes."

"The old—" Bram's mouth worked. He looked, for a moment, like he might laugh, or weep, or put his fist through the cold range. "He did it from the grave. He reached up and—" He shook his head. "You know what he was, your opa. You think you do because he was good to you. But you don't know what he was. None of you know what he was."

It was the closest her father had ever come to the truth, and he didn't know he'd said it, and he said it as a complaint about being passed over, and Lieselot, who had a tin upstairs that knew exactly what Staf Maes was, said nothing, and held her father's drunk eyes, and felt the whole weight of the thing she now carried alone settle a little lower on her, like water finding its level.

She went back to the cemetery in the afternoon. She told herself it was to get out of the house and away from her father, and that was half of it.

The rain had thinned to nearly nothing. The new grave was a wound of dark earth in the grey grass, the flowers already going flat and brown at the edges, the wreaths the town had sent leaned against the temporary cross with their ribbons running ink in the wet. VAN UW VRIENDEN VAN DE VERRE THUIS. From your friends at De Verre Thuis. The club had sent the biggest one, of course. The club always sent the biggest one.

There was a man at the grave.

He had his back to her and a flat cap in his two hands, held down in front of him, and he stood at the foot of the grave not the head, off to the side, the way you stand at a grave you have not come to mourn. He was big through the shoulders and gone still in the way that big men go still, and his shoes — she saw them before she saw anything else about him — his shoes were clean. Good black shoes, polished, the rain beaded on them, not a speck of the cemetery's mud on them anywhere, in a town where every man's shoes carried the place on them like a second skin. A man who had stepped from a clean car to a grave and would step back to a clean car and take none of it with him.

He heard her on the gravel and turned.

He was about her father's age but nothing like her father. Heavy-faced, hard, the face of a man who has held something in for so long that holding it in has become his face. He looked at her the way Coemans had looked at her, a beat too long, except that where Coemans had been measuring her against a document, this man was measuring her against something older, and she could not read it, and it made the back of her neck go cold the way the tin had.

"You're the girl," he said.

"I'm the granddaughter."

Something crossed his face at granddaughter — not quite a flinch, the ghost of one, gone before it landed. He looked back down at the grave, at the dark earth, at the club's enormous wreath, and his jaw worked once, slow, the way Bram's did, except Bram's worked toward saying a cruel thing and stopping, and this man's worked toward saying nothing at all and almost failing.

"He's down there, then," the man said.

"Since this morning."

"Aye." He turned the cap in his hands, once, all the way round. "Forty years he was up there"—he didn't look at her, he tipped his clean-shod chin off toward the town, toward the lokaal where the wreaths came from, toward the honour board she hadn't yet seen with Staf's name in gold leaf at the top of it—"up there in all of it. And now he's down here. Same as everybody. Funny how that works." He said funny like it was the bitterest word he owned. "You wait and you wait for a man to be brought low and then God does it for nothing, does it to everybody, for free, and it doesn't—" He stopped. He'd said more than he'd meant to. She watched him gather himself back behind the still face, the way you'd watch a man button a coat against weather.

"Did you know him," she said. "My grandfather."

The man looked at her then, full on, and there was forty years in the look, and she had no idea yet what was in it, only that it was old and that it was about her grandfather and that it was the opposite of every wet-faced thing the town had pressed into her hand that morning. The town had buried a hero. This man had come to make sure a hero was dead.

"You've got his birds, then," he said.

It wasn't a question. He said it the way you confirm a thing you have driven a long way to confirm. You've got his birds, then. And there was no grief in it and no kindness in it and no condolence in it; there was something underneath it that ran down and down, past the grave, past 1994, down to a Saturday in a year before either of them was born to it, and she felt it without understanding it, felt the floor of the morning drop away under the four flat words, and she thought, with a cold clear certainty that had nothing to do with anything she could prove: Bery. This is the name in the tin.

"Yes," she said. Because she would not give him less than the truth, even the small truth, even before she knew what the truth was. "I've got his birds."

He nodded, once, slow, like a man receiving a debt he had always known was owed. He set the cap on his head. He looked once more at the dark wet earth, and whatever he said to it he said inside himself, his lips not moving, and then he turned to go, his clean shoes on the gravel, and she let him take three steps before the thing in her that ran the numbers made her open her mouth.

"What's your name," she said.

He stopped. He didn't turn all the way back. She saw the side of his hard face, the rain on the brim of the cap.

"He'll have told you," the man said. "If he told you anything at all. If he was honest with you at the end the way he never was with—" He cut it off. "You'll know my name when you've earned it, girl. Or when you've decided what you are. One or the other." And he walked away down the cemetery path to the gate where the clean grey car was waiting, the same car, she realised, the buyer's car, no — not the buyer's, another car, she'd confused them, two clean cars at a poor town's funeral in one day and both of them there for the birds and neither of them there for the man — and a younger man got out of the driver's side and held the door, a hard young face that looked at her across all the graves with no patience in it at all, none of the older man's terrible control, just a flat young anger looking for somewhere to land, and then the doors shut and the car pulled out into the grey and was gone toward the road that went somewhere.

Jules found her still standing there.

She didn't hear him come; old men in this town moved over wet ground like they'd been doing it eighty years, which he had. He came and stood beside her at the grave, not too close, a small tidy old man in a good worn coat, smelling faintly of the loft and of tea, and he didn't say anything for a while, and that was the first restful thing that had happened to her all day, a grown person standing beside her who did not need her to be sad in a particular way.

"That was Bery," she said. Not a question.

Jules looked off at the gate where the car had been. His face did a careful thing, the thing she'd see it do all season, the thing of an old man deciding how much of a dangerous load to set down at one time.

"That was Marcel Bery," he said.

"He came to the funeral to look at me."

"He came," Jules said, "to make sure." He bent, slowly, and straightened the club's wreath where the wind had tipped it, a small unconscious tidiness, the hand that was never wrong with a thing. "There's history there, Lieseke. Between that family and this loft. Old history." He said old history the way the buyer said respect and Bram said good lines — a phrase laid carefully over a hole so you wouldn't see the bottom of it. "It's not for today. You've put your opa in the ground today; that's enough work for one day. The rest of it"—he straightened, brushed the wet off his hands—"the rest of it keeps. It's kept forty years. It can keep a season."

It can keep a season. She heard the false bottom in it even then. She heard a kind old man tell her a kind old lie, the same lie the whole town was built on, the lie that was carved in gold leaf on a board she hadn't seen yet — let it keep, let the dead keep their secrets, let it lie.

And up the hill the loft was waiting with its forty birds and the nervy young cock who wouldn't eat, and in her room the tin was waiting with the name in it she now had a face for, and she understood, standing in the thin rain over the raw grave with the one honest adult in the town telling her gently to let it lie, that everyone older than her had already decided to let it lie, every single one, that they had each made their peace with the same small rot forty years ago and would go on making it forever, and that the only person in Sint-Amandsheide who had not yet decided whether to let it lie was a fifteen-year-old girl with bitten nails who had wanted, more than anything in the world, never to have to decide anything here at all.

"What did he do," she said. "My grandfather. To that man."

Jules was quiet a long moment. The rain came off the brim of his cap in a fine thread.

"Feed your birds," he said at last, gently, which was not an answer and was the truest answer he had. "That young cock's off his food — I saw it this morning. He'll come right or he won't, but you watch him. You watch him tonight." He put his hand on her shoulder, once, light, the only touch all day she didn't want to shrug off, and took it away. "Birds first," he said. "The rest of it'll still be rotten in the morning."

He walked her to the gate. The grey car was long gone down the road that went somewhere, and behind them the new earth darkened in the rain over the man the town had buried as a hero and one man had buried as something else, and Lieselot went home up the dead high street to feed a bird that wouldn't eat, carrying a name she'd been given and refused, carrying the will's two teeth — fly them or lose them — closing on her from both sides at once, and behind her face, where no one could see it, the part of her that ran the numbers had already started, against her every wish, to work.

Chapter Four — Voel

Jules Lemmens came up the garden path on the Tuesday after the funeral with his hat in his hand and a bag of grit under his arm, and Lieselot watched him from the kitchen and thought: here it is, the first one who's going to want something.

She'd had four days of them. They came to the door in their good coats with their faces arranged for it, and they said een groot verlies, a great loss, and they looked past her shoulder into the kitchen the way men look into a shop they're deciding whether to rob. The last of something, they said. The last of the line. And then, every one of them, before they got their hat back on: and the birds, who'll have the birds. Like the birds were the body and the body in the ground was just the wrapping it came in.

She'd told them all the same thing, which was nothing. She'd learned that off Staf without knowing it. Say nothing and they fill the silence with themselves and leave, and you've given nothing away.

But Jules didn't ring. He came round the side and down the path like he'd done it ten thousand times, which he had, and he didn't go to the kitchen door at all. He went to the loft.

She had to go down the garden to him. That was the first thing he did to her and he did it without a word — he made her come to him, in the cold, by going to the birds instead of the house, and by the time she'd got her boots on and crossed the wet grass he was already at the wire with the door open, not touching anything, just looking, his hands behind his back like a man at Mass.

"They've not been let out," he said. He didn't turn round.

"They've been fed."

"That's not what I said." He looked along the perches, the rows of small heads turning to him, the low water-sound of forty birds shifting their weight. "Fed isn't flown. You've kept them alive. That's not the same as kept."

"They're not going to be kept," she said. "They're going to be sold."

Now he turned. He had a wide, slow, brown face, very still, a widower's face, and pale eyes that had spent seventy years reading the southern sky and had got the colour of it. He looked at her the way he'd looked at the birds, taking the measure, not unkind, not kind either, just reading.

"Sold," he said.

"My father's seeing to it." Which was a lie; Bram was seeing to nothing except the inside of the café. "There's a man who'll buy the lot."

"A man." Jules nodded slowly, like she'd said something interesting. "Is there a name on the man?"

There was. It was the name in the tin, the column of dates, the small sums going back forty years — Bery — except she didn't know yet that those two were the same; she only knew that a hard man in clean shoes had stood at the edge of the grave on Monday and looked at her over the hole and said you've got his birds, then, and not one word to the priest or to God, and that Jules himself had taken the man's elbow and steered him off down the cemetery path before she could answer.

So she said, "Bery."

She watched it land in him. It was a small thing — a man who didn't move much, moving even less — but she saw it, the way you see a bird go still on the perch a half-second before it's afraid of anything you can hear. His pale eyes did something to the loft, went around it once, the perches, the breeding boxes, the dark blue hen on the third perch down, as if he were counting what was in there, or saying goodbye to it.

"The Berys," Jules said, "have history with this loft."

"What history."

"Old history." He turned back to the wire. "From before you. From before your father." He let a hand rest on the loft door, just rest there, not opening it further, an old man's hand with the nails gone to horn. "It's not for me to say. It's nothing to do with the birds. Birds don't keep accounts." He said it the way you say a thing to close a door, and Lieselot, who had spent her whole life listening to grown people close doors, heard the door close and filed away that there was a room behind it.

"If you've come to tell me to sell," she said, "you can save your legs."

"I've come," Jules said, "because Staf would haunt me if I let you kill them in a week out of spite, and I'm too old to be haunted. I sleep badly enough." He opened the bag of grit and tipped a measure into the trough along the wire, a small grey rush, and the nearest birds came down to it, businesslike, and began to take it up. "You've not given them grit. Four days. They'll have started eating the lime off the wall."

"They've got food."

"Grain's food. Grit's how they break it." He didn't look at her. "Without it the food sits in them and rots and they get the wet droppings and then they get sick and then you've got a loft full of dead birds and a man in clean shoes saying the granddaughter let Staf's line die in a fortnight. Is that what you want said?"

It was not, as it happened, what she wanted said. She found, standing in the cold with her arms folded, that there was a fairly long list now of things she didn't want said, and that the list had been getting longer since Saturday, and that this was a kind of trap, the having of a list, because once you didn't want a thing said you had to do something to stop it being true.

"No," she said.

"No," Jules agreed. "Right." He straightened up off the trough with a hand on his back. "I'll show you the once. After that you do it or you don't, and if you don't, sell them quick to someone who'll feed them, and don't pretend it's anything but giving up, because the birds can't tell the difference between a girl who hates them and a girl who's just lazy, and either way they're dead."

He showed her the loft.

Not the way the men at the door would have shown her, with the talk, the legend, your grandfather, the great Staf, Barcelona, the gold of it. Jules didn't say Staf's name again after the haunting. He showed her the loft the way you'd show someone how to keep a fire in — the boards under the perches that came out to be scraped, every morning, no exceptions, because the droppings carried the wet and the wet carried the death; the order of the feed, the light corn early in the week to clean them out and the richer stuff toward the weekend, the maize and the peas, the small seeds at the end like sweets; the water changed twice a day and the vessel scoured, because a dirty drinker would kill a loft faster than a hawk. The names on the feed sacks — Versele-Laga, the green and the writing she'd seen in the shed her whole life and never once read.

"Twice a day," he said. "Morning and four. He fed at four." Jules glanced at her, the only time he came near it. "You'll have noticed they wait for it."

She had noticed. She thought of Saturday, the forty heads swinging south at four o'clock as if the old man were out over the water, late, but coming, and she'd told herself it was nothing, it was the corn, birds are clocks with feathers — and here was Jules, telling her the same thing she'd used to make it nothing, they wait for the four, and somehow in his plain mouth it didn't make it nothing. It made it worse. Because the birds didn't know the difference between a man coming with corn and a man not coming at all. They turned south for the corn. They'd have turned south for him. To a bird there was no difference, and Lieselot stood in the loft and understood, with a cold she couldn't blame on the weather, that being faithful and being hungry were the same shape from the inside, and that maybe that was true of more than birds.

"You've gone quiet," Jules said.

"I'm listening."

"You're not. You're thinking something. That's different." He didn't ask what. He moved her along the perches.

The thing she remembered after, the thing that got in and didn't come out, was the boxes.

Down the far end of the loft, partitioned off behind their own wire, was a row of separate compartments, each with a little nest bowl and a perch and a single bird. Cocks. She knew that much — the doffers, fatter in the neck, the iridescence running purple-green on the throat when they turned — sitting each alone in his box, and along the other side, in a section she'd not been let look at properly, the hens, kept apart, the wire between them.

"This is the racing," Jules said. He stood in front of one box, hands behind his back again, and let her look. "Weduwschap. Widowhood." He said the word like it was just a word and watched her not have a meaning for it. "You keep the cock and the hen apart. All season. He lives here, alone, in his box, with the empty bowl. She lives over there. They can hear each other. They can't get to each other." He nodded at the cock in the box, a red chequer with a hard bright eye, who had come to the front of his wire when Jules stopped, and was making a low sound, over and over, a sound she felt more than heard. "And then on the morning you race him, you give him an hour with her. Just an hour. You let him think he's home, he's got her, it's done — and then you take her away and you put him in the basket and you send him three hundred kilometres into France."

Lieselot looked at the cock at the wire. He had not stopped the low sound. His whole small body was pointed at the partition, at the hens he could hear and not reach, and his feet shifted and shifted on the perch, and his eye, when it came round to her, was not stupid and not soft; it was the eye of a thing that wanted one thing in all the world and had been engineered to be denied it.

"Why," she said.

"Why what."

"Why does it work."

Jules looked at the cock and not at her. "Because he flies home faster than anything alive to get back to her," he said. "Three hundred kilometres, into a headwind, over the towns, and the only thing in his head the whole way is the hen behind that wire. That's the engine. That's the whole sport. You take the thing he loves and you put it just out of reach and you point him at it across a country and you let go." He paused. "And when he comes home you give her to him for a quarter of an hour and then you take her away again. And you do it next week. And the week after."

The cock kept up his sound. The hens, somewhere on the other side, answered, a thin distinct call, and the cock went frantic at the wire for a second, beating once, settling, the feathers on his throat blown out, and Lieselot found she had to look away from it, and was angry at herself for having to.

"That's cruel," she said. She heard how childish it sounded and said it anyway.

"It's racing." Jules turned. "Is it crueller than him sitting in a field somewhere being shot for a Sunday dinner? He's the best-kept thing in this town. He's worth more than the house you slept in last night. He eats better than your father." He said your father with no heat at all, which was worse than heat. "And he's a champion because he wants something he can't have, badly enough to cross a sea for it. There's worse ways to be made." He looked at the cock with something she couldn't name, that pale-sky look, level and old. "I've kept birds sixty years, girl. Some days I think they're the only ones in this town who never settled for less."

It was while he was showing her how to read a bird that the morning turned, though she didn't know it was turning.

He reached into the nearest box and took up the red chequer cock, fast and certain, both hands closing over the wings so the bird couldn't beat, and the thing went from frantic to perfectly still in his hands, the way they do, surrendered, and Jules turned it breast-up and ran two fingers down the centre of it, the keel, and his face went somewhere else while his hands read, exactly the way Staf's used to, the eyes gone soft and unfocused and the whole man poured down into his fingertips.

"Here," he said. "Give me your hand."

"I don't want to hold it."

"I didn't ask what you wanted." He had her wrist before she could decide, dry old fingers, and he turned her hand over and laid the cock in it, breast up, and closed her fingers around the wings the way his had been, and put his own two fingers over hers and pressed them down the keel of the bird.

"There," he said. "Feel that. The bone down the middle. The muscle either side of it. Full. Round. That's a bird that hasn't raced — see how it fills the hand? Like a loaf that's risen." He moved her fingers. "After a hard race you'll feel that gone down. Worked off. Hollow either side of the keel, the muscle eaten into, and you'll know he's given everything, you'll feel it in your hand before you see it on the clock." He took his fingers off hers but left the bird in her grip. "Now you. Don't look at it. Shut your eyes if you have to. Feel it. Voel."

She nearly gave it back. She had her mouth open to say something dry, the armour, the thing she did, I'm not shutting my eyes in a shed, Jules, and she didn't say it, because the bird in her two hands had stopped being frantic and gone still against her palms, and under the warmth of it, under the dry slip of the feathers, she could feel it. The heart. Going. Quick and hard and small, faster than she'd have believed a thing could run a heart and not burn, a tiny machine of want going go go go go go against her fingers, the whole of him reduced to that, to the wanting, to the engine Jules had built out of love and a length of wire, and she stood in the cold loft with her grandfather four days in the ground and a tin upstairs with a lie in it that she'd read the first line of and slammed shut, and she held a bird's running heart in her hand and felt, against everything on her list, against fifteen years of building herself so that nothing could be taken because nothing was wanted — she felt it want.

She felt it want so hard it would cross a sea.

And — this was the thing, this was the part she'd be furious about later, lying in the dark — she did not give it back. She held it a beat too long, the way she'd looked too long at the south of the sky, the way she'd not answered Wendy's question, and Jules, who missed nothing, said nothing, which was how she knew he'd seen it.

"Right," she said, too loud, and put the cock back in its box, and the cock went straight to the wire again and started up the low sound at the hens it couldn't reach, faithful and hungry, the same shape from the inside, and Lieselot wiped her hand on her grandfather's anorak as if she could wipe the feeling off it.

Jules left the way he'd come, round the side, no hat-business at the door.

At the path he stopped. "Tomorrow morning," he said. "Seven. You scrape the boards, you do the grit, you do the water, and I'll come and stand over you and tell you everything you've done wrong, and you'll hate me, and in a month you'll do it without me." He looked at her over the green of the garden, the loft dark behind her, the dead winding-gear black at the end of the street. "You've got his hands," he said. "I felt it when I put the bird in them. You'll wish you didn't. It's a curse in a town like this, to be born to the one thing that's leaving." He pulled his hat on. "Don't sell them this week. Sell them this week and you'll never know what you had in your hand. Sell them in September if you've a mind to, when the season's done, when you know. Not in a week, out of spite, to a man in clean shoes whose father your grandfather—" He stopped. The door behind his eyes shut again, neat as a latch. "Seven o'clock," he said, and went.

She watched him to the end of the path. Then she went back down to the loft, against every item on her list, and stood at the wire in the last of the light, and the cock came to the front of his box for her because she was where the corn came from, and made his low sound, pointed at a thing he couldn't reach, the engine running, and she stood and let herself watch it for a while, the only honest hungry thing in the town, before she locked the door.

She would not sell them this week. She told herself it was spite — that every grown person who'd come to the door wanted her to fold, the men in their coats, her father, the man in clean shoes, and she would not be folded, she would keep them out of pure contrariness, to make the lot of them wait. That was a reason she could live with. It had nothing to do with a heart going go go go against her fingers, nothing to do with hands she hadn't asked for. Spite. She was good at spite. Spite was on the list.

What Jules had nearly said at the path stayed with her, though, up the garden and into the house, a man in clean shoes whose father your grandfather—. Whose father your grandfather what. She thought of the tin upstairs, the column of dates and small sums, Bery, and the man at the grave, you've got his birds, then, and the door Jules had shut twice in one morning, and she stood in the dark kitchen and understood that two things she'd been keeping in separate rooms — the rotten thing in the tin and the hard man in the clean shoes — had a wall between them that was getting thin, and that one of these days, probably soon, she was going to have to put her hand on it and feel through to whatever was breathing on the other side.

She did not open the tin that night either.

But she set an alarm for half six, for the first time in her life, to be in the loft at seven, and she told herself it was so she wouldn't have to hear Jules say she was late.

That was the third lie. It was the biggest one yet, and it was the first one that was going to save her.

Chapter Five — Honesty You Could Feel With Your Thumb

The basketing was on the Friday, and Jules came for her at half six in the van that smelled of corn and the dog he no longer had, and said nothing about it being her first time, which was how she knew he knew what it was.

She had the basket in her lap. Six birds in it, the six Jules had picked off the perch with his hands going over each one in a second the way a blind man reads a face, putting back the two she'd chosen because she liked the look of them, which was the wrong reason and he'd let her find that out by not arguing. Not that one. He's carrying water. Feel him. And she'd felt him, and felt nothing, and put him back anyway because Jules's certainty was a thing you didn't fight twice in a morning. The six in the basket now were cocks. They sat low and tight and did not coo. They had spent the week wanting their hens through a wire and the wanting had hollowed them out and lit them up at once, and you could feel it through the wicker against her knees, a kind of hum, six small motors idling toward home before they'd even been taken from it.

Weduwschap, Jules had called it. Widowhood. You took the hen away and the cock went half mad with it, and the half-madness was the engine, and the whole brutal art of it was to make the bird love something it couldn't have so it would tear the sky apart to get back. She'd thought it was the ugliest thing she'd ever heard when he first laid it out for her in the hok, flat, like feed instructions, and she'd said so, and Jules had looked at her with his pale wet eyes and said, Ge moogt het lelijk vinden. The birds don't. You're allowed to find it ugly. And gone back to the perches.

"You've the rings?" he said now, not looking from the road.

She had the rings. The numbered rubber rings the club would put on at the door, that was the club's job, but Jules meant Staf's loft stamp and the entry papers, and she had those, in Staf's old leather folder gone soft as a glove, with his name on every line in his own hand and a space at the bottom where her name had to go instead and didn't fit.

"I've them," she said.

"You'll let me do the talking and then you'll do it next time," Jules said. "That's the deal. I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it once in front of you."

"You said that about the feeding."

"And now you do the feeding." He took the turn into the Stationsstraat, past the frituur with its blind down and the church with its one cracked bell that the town still rang at the wrong half-minute, a beat behind God, the way her grandfather's clock down the row had always struck a beat behind the church. "Same with this. Watch the once. Then it's yours."

She looked out the smeared window at the town going by in the grey, the cités with their dark halves, a man in a doorway with a dog and a cigarette and nowhere to be at half six on a Friday, the dead winding-gear standing up over all of it at the end of the long street like the last black tooth in a jaw. Twelve years shut. The thing that had pulled the whole town up out of the ground every morning and let it back down every night, that had been the only thing in Sint-Amandsheide that went somewhere and came back, until it stopped, and then the only thing left that went somewhere and came back was in a basket on her lap, idling, wanting a hen.

The club was a low brick building behind the café, joined to it by a corridor that smelled of both at once — old beer and pigeon. Het lokaal. She had never been inside it in her life. She had stood outside it as a child holding Staf's hand while he went in for ten minutes and came out smelling of smoke, and she had understood even then that it was a place for men and birds and not for her, a church with its own door, and she'd hated it the easy way you hate a place that won't have you.

It would have her now. That was the joke. She walked in behind Jules with the basket and the soft folder and the whole low warm room turned to look — fifteen, twenty old men, flat caps and good coats over working bodies, and a long table down the middle covered in green baize the colour of a billiard cloth, and on the table the clocks.

She had not been ready for the clocks.

She'd thought, a clock, and pictured something like Staf's brass thing in the tin, the one she had not been able to look at for more than a second before shutting the lid on it. But there were twenty of them, heavy wooden boxes the size of a small dog, dark with age and oil and handling, brass-cornered, each with its little glass window and its key and its crank, sitting in a row on the green baize like a congregation that had got there before her. Each man's clock. Each man's truth-machine, brought in to be made honest together. The whole sacrament of the thing was laid out on a billiard cloth in a back room behind a café in a dead town, and the men stood around it the way men stand around a thing they have done every Friday of their lives and would do until they died.

Jules put his hand flat on her shoulder blade, just for a second, just to move her forward, and then took it off.

"Maes," he said to the room. "Staf's loft. The girl's flying it this year."

Nobody said anything for a moment that was a beat too long, the way the kitchen had gone when Coemans read the will, the silence a room makes around a thing it isn't going to argue with and isn't going to welcome either. Then an old man near the table — small, with a face like a walnut and a cardigan buttoned to the throat — said, "Staf's girl," not to her, to the others, placing her, and a low murmur went round that she couldn't read, that had her grandfather's name in it and something else under it she couldn't catch.

"Granddaughter," said Jules.

"Granddaughter," the walnut man agreed, as if it were the same thing, and waved a hand at the table. "Bring her up, then. Let her see how it's done, since she's doing it."

The man with the seal was the chairman, and the chairman was Gust Verhoeven, and she knew that before anyone said it because of how the room arranged itself around him without seeming to move.

He was a big man gone soft in the way big men go, with a clean heavy face and hands that had clearly once done something and now mostly held things — held the master clock now, the club's own, the one all the others were set against, a brass-and-mahogany thing on its own stand at the head of the table with a dignity the others didn't have. He looked at Lieselot for a moment with eyes that were not unkind and were not warm, the way you look at a debt that's come due in an unexpected currency, and then he looked back down at his work.

"You set them all to the master," Jules said to her, low, under the room's noise. "Wind them, set the time off this one"—a nod at the chairman's clock—"then they're sealed. Every clock in the race carries the same time so nobody's lying about when his bird came. You follow?"

She followed. She watched a man bring his clock up and watched Gust take it in those soft heavy hands and turn the key and bring the hands round, his lips moving, comparing, the whole room hushing a half-step around each one. Wind, set, check. And then the thing she would remember, the thing that put a cold finger on the back of her neck the way the tin had: the sealing.

When a clock was set, Gust took a stub of red wax and a little brass die on a wooden handle, and he warmed the wax at a candle stub kept burning on a saucer for the purpose, and he let a drop of it fall over the keyhole of the clock — over the slot where the crank went in, the only place a man could ever get inside the works — and pressed the die into it while it was soft. And when he lifted the die there was a small round seal of red wax over the keyhole with the club's mark stamped into it, a crest worn nearly smooth, and you could not open the clock now, could not turn the key, could not touch the works inside, without breaking that seal where every man in the room could see it broken.

She understood it in her body before she understood it in her head. The seal was the thing. The seal was the whole sport. A bird could fly its heart out over four hundred kilometres of France and it meant nothing — nothing — unless the time it came home was a time no man had been able to reach in and change. Everything rested on a drop of wax the size of a thumbnail. Honesty you could press your thumb against and feel.

She thought of the brass clock in the tin at the bottom of her wardrobe, the one Staf had kept that should never have been kept, and she thought: that one has no seal on it now. Somebody broke it. Somebody broke the seal on that clock and got inside the works and made it say a thing that wasn't true, and then kept it for forty years instead of giving it back to be sealed clean, kept it under a king and a queen worn to grey, and left it to her.

"Maes," Gust said.

She brought the clock up. Staf's working clock, the loft clock, not the tin one — Jules had taken it down off the shelf in the hok that morning and shown her how to wind it and she had wound it badly and he had taken her hands off it and wound it right. It was an honest clock. It had nothing wrong with it. But she carried it up the green baize to Gust Verhoeven feeling as though she were carrying the other one, the guilty one, feeling the room watch Staf's granddaughter bring Staf's clock to be made honest, and she set it down in the chairman's soft hands and could not meet his eye.

He wound it. He set it to the master. His lips moved. And then he warmed the wax and let it fall over the keyhole and pressed the die in, and it took him three seconds, and when he lifted the die there was the little red seal, the club's worn crest, honesty you could feel with your thumb, sitting over the slot of her grandfather's clock as though such a thing had never once in the history of the town been broken.

"There," said Gust Verhoeven, and pushed the clock back across the baize to her, and looked at her at last, and there was something in his clean heavy face she would only understand later, that she filed away the way you file the thing you can't read. "Welcome to it," he said.

It did not sound like welcome.

1958.

The drum-tape from the tin is yellow as an old tooth and it carries, in faded violet ink, the punch-marks of a race forty years gone — and folded inside it, in Staf's young hand, a half-page that is not a confession yet, only a setting-down, the way a man writes a thing to keep from saying it.

Staf is twenty-four and the coal is under his nails for good now and his chest takes the stairs of the lokaal like a man twice his age. He carries his clock up the green baize. It is the same room. It is even some of the same men, only younger, only with their faces still full. The chairman then is old Verschueren, dead these thirty years, and beside him at the master clock stands a club official whose hand is on the seal, whose name Staf does not write down, will never write down, will carry to the ground unwritten — a hand that will, in the days after the race, do a small thing to a drop of wax that no one will ever look at twice.

But that is not yet. Tonight the seal goes on honest. Tonight Verschueren warms the wax and lets it fall over the keyhole of Staf's clock and presses the die, and Staf watches the little red crest take, and feels nothing but the ordinary Friday fear of a man who has the best young cock he's ever bred in a basket and a race across the water on Sunday and a town that has nothing and a wife at home and a cough he hasn't told her the worst of.

He does not know yet that he will break this seal. He does not know yet that there is anything in him that could. He is a man who has just had his clock made honest, standing in a warm room that smells of beer and birds, and the only thing he knows for certain, the thing he would have sworn his life on, is that the seal means what it says.

That is the thing the tape gives back. Not the lie. The honesty that came before it — the proof that the man who broke the seal had once stood in that exact spot and believed in it. You don't write I made the clock lie unless you first knew, in your body, against your thumb, what an honest clock was.

She did not read the tape that night. She would read it later, after, when she could.

But she carried the meaning of it home from the lokaal without knowing she was carrying it — sat in Jules's van with the sealed clock on her knees and the basket gone, handed over, her six cocks crated now into the dark of the convoy with two hundred other birds bound for the release point in the morning, and felt the weight of the clock against her legs, an honest clock with a fresh red seal on it, and could not stop her mind going to the other one.

"You're quiet," Jules said.

"It's a lot of clocks," she said.

He almost smiled. "It's the same clock twenty times." He pulled out into the dead Stationsstraat. "It's the one thing in the whole carry-on that has to be true. The bird can be slow. The weather can be filth. A man can lie about his loft, his feed, his luck, his money, what he paid for a bird, whether he's any good — and they all do, every Friday, it's half the pleasure. But the clock." He shook his head once. "You don't touch the clock. There's nothing else holding it up. Take the clock away and it's just men telling each other their birds are fast."

She looked at the seal on the clock on her knees, the little round wound of red wax, the worn crest. You don't touch the clock.

"Has anyone ever," she said, and stopped, because she heard where the sentence was going and didn't know how to land it without giving herself away.

Jules drove for a moment.

"Ever what."

"Touched it. The clock. Got inside it."

He was quiet long enough that the church bell came and went, a beat behind God. The winding-gear slid past the window, black on grey.

"Not here," Jules said. "Not in this club." And then, after the frituur, after the turn, in a voice that had gone careful the way it went careful whenever she got near the thing without knowing she was near it: "There's stories. Every club's got stories. A man's clock that ran a hair slow one famous Sunday and made him a champion. You hear them at funerals." He glanced at her, once, and away. "You don't repeat them at funerals. The dead can't answer."

The dead can't answer. She kept her face shut, the way she'd kept it shut in the kitchen, in the church, at the table when Coemans said he was honest and didn't know it was the cruellest thing in the room. The dead can't answer, and the seal she'd watched go on her grandfather's clock tonight was honest, and the one in the tin at the bottom of her wardrobe was broken and gone and kept, and somewhere in the dark of a convoy truck rolling south toward France her six birds were idling toward a home they'd tear the sky to reach, and on Sunday she would stand at the loft window and wait for them to come back, and clock them on a clock with a true seal on it, and it would be the most honest thing anyone named Maes had done in this town in forty years, and she was the only person alive who knew that was something to say.

Jules pulled up outside the house. The light was on in the front room, which meant Bram was home, which meant Bram was drinking, which was its own kind of clock you could set the evening by.

"Sunday you watch the south of the sky," Jules said. "First one to drop, you don't grab him. You let him come in to the water, you let him settle, then you take him, then you strip the ring, then you clock. In that order. You grab a frightened bird at the wire you'll have him flaring off again and your race is on the roof while the clock runs. Patience. You hear me. The whole thing's waiting."

"The whole thing's waiting," she said.

"That's the craft." He put both hands on the wheel and looked through the windscreen at the black gear over the town. "Everybody thinks it's the flying. It's the waiting. Any fool can love a bird that's home." He reached over and lifted the sealed clock off her knees, gently, and set it on the seat between them to carry in for her, because her hands were full of the folder and the basket-smell and the night. "Go on. I'll bring this."

She got out into the cold. The clock went under his arm with its little red seal, the truth of the thing, the one thing that had to be true. And she stood a second on the wet brick and looked up, the way the whole town had taught her to look up without ever teaching her on purpose, south, over the roofs and the dead winding-gear toward France and the long water past it, where her six birds were rolling away in the dark toward Sunday, and where, forty years gone, her grandfather had stood in that same warm room believing in a seal, before he learned what was in him, before he put his thumb to the wax and pressed.

Chapter Six — The Wait

The race went up out of a town in France called Quiévrain at half past seven in the morning, and Jules knew this because Jules knew everything that could be known about a thing that was happening two hundred kilometres away where he could not see it.

He'd come at seven with a flask of tea and a fold-up stool, the kind men took to football, and set the stool in the wet grass at the bottom of the garden with the loft at his back and his face to the south, and he'd said good morning to her the way you'd say it to another man on a shift, which was no way at all, a tip of the head and a noise in the throat. Then he'd sat down to wait. Lieselot stood beside him with Staf's anorak zipped to the chin and her hands shoved up the sleeves and told herself she was only out here because the kitchen was cold and Bram was asleep in the chair with his mouth open and she'd rather watch an old man stare at the sky than listen to her father not breathe right.

That was four lies before eight in the morning. She was getting good at them. They came easy now, like a skill.

"They're up," Jules said, at half seven exactly, looking at his watch and not the sky. "Lovely morning for it. Bit of west in the wind." He licked a finger and held it up the way she'd thought only people in films did, and frowned at what it told him. "Bit much west, maybe. They'll get pushed off the line a touch, coming up. Cost them. Not the good ones."

"How do you know they're up."

"Radio." He nodded at the little transistor on the grass by his foot, turned down so low it was just a man's voice underwater. "Lossing's announced. Half seven, clean release, the lot away together." He poured tea into the cup of the flask and didn't offer her any, which she understood was a courtesy — out here, you did your own waiting. "Now we sit. Now's the bad part."

"This is the bad part. Sitting in a field."

"This is the bad part," Jules agreed, and drank his tea, and went on looking at the south of the sky as if it owed him money.

She'd basketed nine birds. She'd done it herself, two evenings ago, at the lokaal, with the old men watching her hands and saying nothing and Gust Verhoeven sealing the clock under his thumb with the wax and the little brass die so that the keyhole wore a red blister of honesty you could feel if you ran your finger over it, which she had, on the walk home, in her pocket, the cooled wax, over and over, the way you worry a scab.

Nine birds in a basket, and the basket on a convoy truck, and the truck to France in the dark, and the dark to morning, and the morning to up, they're up, and now the nine of them somewhere over Belgium coming home to a brick shed at the bottom of a dead miner's garden because forty years of a man's hands had made these particular birds believe this particular shed was the only safe place in a turning world. She had not built that belief. She had inherited it, the way she'd inherited the shed and the lie and the tin she still hadn't read past the first line. She was just the shape standing where Staf used to stand, holding the corn.

The corn was the thing. Jules had taught her the corn the night before, in his lonely tidy kitchen over tea, drawing it on the back of an envelope. You don't feed them in the morning. You let them come home to it. The bird crosses two hundred kilometres on an empty crop with one idea in its head, which is the food and the perch and the place, and you do not give that idea away cheap by feeding it before it's earned. You keep the hens shut up where the cocks can't get at them all week — weduwschap, widowhood, she had the word now and used it in her head like a coin she was getting used to spending — so that the cock comes home not just for corn but for the hen, comes home half mad for her, drops out of the sky like a stone because the only thing in the world is in there. Love and hunger, Jules had said, and not looked up from the envelope. That's all it is. You make them want two things they can only have at home, and then you throw them across a country, and you wait.

"It's cruel," she'd said, to be saying something.

"It's true," Jules had said, which was not an answer and was.

By nine they had nothing.

This was normal. Jules said it three times, this is normal, in the flat way that meant he was saying it to her and to himself both. Quiévrain was two hundred and some kilometres and even a good bird on a clean wind wasn't dropping into Limburg before half nine, ten, and with the west in it pushing them wide they'd be later, working back across the line, costing themselves the minutes that were, when you got down to it, the whole of the sport. The whole of it. Distance over time. Metres a minute. A bird that flew the same distance as another bird but did it five minutes faster won, and a bird that lived three streets further from the release and clocked later could still beat the one that clocked first, because it was further, because it was speed and not arrival, because a man with a slow clock and a fast bird could—

She stopped that thought where it started. She was getting good at stopping it. It came at her sideways now, several times a day, the arithmetic of it, the soft little arithmetic of a few minutes, and every time she got a look at where it was going she shut the door on it the way you shut a door on a smell.

Wendy's text came at twenty past nine. Lieselot felt the phone go off against her hip and took it out under cover of the anorak so Jules wouldn't see, though Jules wouldn't have known what it was if he had.

bus at 11. davy + them going to the pool in genk. coming?? say yes

She looked at it. The south of the sky sat over the green heap, milk-coloured, empty, the wind moving the broom on the slope so the whole terril shrugged, slowly, the one mountain the town had built turning itself politely back into a hill. Eleven o'clock. The pool in Genk, the chlorine and the boys and Wendy in her good swimsuit being a girl from a town that wasn't this one, the bus going past the city, the train past that, the whole map of out she'd been building herself toward for fifteen years, all of it leaving at eleven, with a seat in it for her.

cant. sorry, she typed. Then she looked at the sorry and didn't know who it was for, and deleted it, and sent just cant, and that was somehow worse, and she put the phone away under the anorak and looked up at the empty sky and hated herself with a clean cold completeness that was, she thought, at least honest. At least she wasn't lying to Wendy. She was just lying to the bus.

"Expecting someone?" Jules said, not turning.

"No."

"Right," Jules said, and that was the end of it, and she could have kissed his slow ugly hands for not asking, for being the one person in the whole town who would let a thing be exactly as small as it was.

The first one came at twenty to ten.

She didn't see it. She was looking at the sky the way you look at a sky, all of it, none of it, and Jules's hand came up off his knee — just lifted, two inches, the fingers spreading — and he said, very quietly, the way you'd speak in a church, "Daar."

There.

She followed his eyes and there was nothing and then there was a speck. That was all. A speck where a half-second ago there'd been air, low over the roofs to the south, a mote, a fault in the eye, and she'd have called it a fault in the eye except that Jules had said daar before it was anything at all, had pulled it out of the empty sky by knowing where to look, and now the speck did the thing that turned her stomach over without permission — it resolved. It got an edge. It got the rumour of wings. It came on, low and fast and dead straight, no bird in a film, no soaring, just a small hard committed body burning a line through the air toward one point on the earth and that point was here, was the shed at her back, was home, and it came down over the dead winding-gear and the green heap and the wet brick rows with the whole weight of two hundred kilometres behind it and it did not slow until the last second and then it threw its wings forward and dropped onto the loft board with a sound like a slap and was a pigeon. Just a pigeon. A blue cock with his beak open, panting, his eye gone bright and wild, standing on the board where ten seconds ago there'd been nothing and the sky.

Lieselot found she had her hand pressed flat against her own breastbone and did not remember putting it there.

"Don't run at it," Jules said, already up off his stool, moving slow and sideways, no hurry in him, his whole body gone soft and unthreatening. "Never run. He drops, you let him settle, he goes in for the corn, you take him in the trap. You run, you spook him, he sits on the roof to get his breath and that's your minutes gone." The cock dipped its head into the loft, into the dark and the corn, and Jules's slow hand was there and then the bird was in his two hands, and he stripped the rubber ring off the red leg with a thumb, one move, forty years in it, and dropped the ring into the slot of the clock and turned the key and the clock made a sound — a small dense mechanical chunk, a thing being bitten down on and kept — and Jules looked at his watch and said a time out loud, nine forty-one, and the clock had it now, had it stamped on the paper drum inside its sealed dark, an honest minute punched down and held, and that, she understood, watching, was the whole religion. That sound. The clock taking a true time and keeping it where no one's thumb could reach.

"You do the next one," Jules said, and handed her the cock to hold while he reset, and the bird in her two hands was the warmest thing she'd ever held, blazing, the small heart going against her fingers so fast and so hard it didn't seem like a thing a body could keep doing, a heart trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had, and she stood there holding two hundred kilometres of want in her hands and her face did something she was glad Jules had his back to.

They came after that the way Jules said they would, in ones and twos, the long quiet stretches and then daar and the speck and the slap of the board, and she clocked them, fumbling the first, smooth by the third, the thumb on the ring, the ring in the slot, the key, the chunk, the time. By half ten she had seven of the nine home. She knew the seven without counting them because she'd started, without deciding to, to know the birds — the blue cock with the white feather in his shield, the dark hen with the cross temper who bit, the small neat cock Staf had called nothing because he was nothing, a middling bird, a club bird, here he was home anyway, panting on the board, and she put two fingers on his keel before she sent him in, the way she'd seen Staf do, and felt the breast gone hard and deflated and hot, the muscle worked down to nothing, and knew — knew, in her hand, before her head agreed to it — that this nothing-bird had flown hard, had flown his guts out across a country and come home empty and meant it. Good, she told him, under her breath, before she could stop the word. Good lad.

Then there were two not home, and then there was one.

The light kept up. The wind kept its west in it. The other gardens down the row went quiet one by one as the men got their birds and went in to their dinners satisfied or unsatisfied, and the Saturday faces-up thinned out, and by noon it was just the two of them in the wet grass, her and Jules, and one bird that wasn't a speck yet.

It was the young cock. She didn't say it. She knew which one it was the way she now knew all of them, which was the trouble, which was the whole trouble with the last two days — that she'd gone and learned them, learned the nine, and one of the nine was a young cock of the line, a yearling, dark, with a way of sitting square on the perch like he'd been built for it, and Jules had said he's the best young thing in this loft, this one, mark me, this is a bird, said it two evenings ago handling him in the lamplight with a thing in his voice she hadn't heard before, and now the young cock was a hole in the sky to the south where seven birds had come out of and he had not.

"He'll come," Jules said.

"You don't know that."

"No," Jules agreed. He didn't dress it up. "I don't. He's young. Young ones break off, chase another flock, sit on a barn for an hour because a hawk put the wind up them. He could be sat on a roof in Diepenbeek getting his nerve back this minute. He could come in at four o'clock and you'd think nothing of it next week." He poured the last of the tea and it came out cold. "Or the west pushed him over the water somewhere he shouldn't have been, and a peregrine had him, or he flew into a wire, or he's sat in a strange loft eating a stranger's corn and forgetting us." He drank the cold tea. "You wait. That's the answer to all of it. You wait, and the sky tells you, and it tells you in its own time and not yours, and there's nothing you can do to it but stand here and let it."

Lieselot stood there and let it.

The afternoon went the way afternoons in that town went, the light getting long and thin and gold along the brick the way it had the day she'd watched the birds turn south for a man who wasn't coming, and she stood with her face to that same quarter of the sky and waited for a bird, and somewhere in the standing the thing she'd been guarding against for two days got past her without her noticing the moment it happened, the way the worst things do.

She wanted him to come.

Not for the loft. Not for the season or the will or to spite her father or because every adult wanted her to fold and she wouldn't be folded. She wanted the young dark cock to drop out of that emptied sky and slap the board and be a bird in her hands, wanted it with a plain hot stupid want that had no list in it and no plan and no train past the city, wanted it the way she'd spent fifteen years training herself not to want anything where the town could see, and the town wasn't even here, only Jules, and Jules was looking at the sky and not at her, and so she let herself want it, in the privacy of an empty garden, with her grandfather three weeks in the ground and a tin upstairs she still hadn't read.

The bus to Genk had gone at eleven. She'd heard it, faintly, the diesel cough of it pulling off from the square, taking Wendy and the pool and the boys and the map of out, and she hadn't moved, and the not-moving had been, she understood now, standing in the gold light, a kind of choosing, though she'd have died before calling it that.

At four o'clock the light did its trick. Jules said "daar" and her heart went up like a thrown bird, and she followed his hand, and there was a speck low over the green heap, resolving, getting an edge, getting the rumour of wings, coming on hard and straight—

—and it broke left at the last and dropped two gardens down, into Mon's loft, Mon's bird, the wrong shape, the wrong colour, a stranger come home to a stranger, and the slap of a board that wasn't hers, and Mon's voice raised in the satisfied way of a man whose week had just been made.

Jules let his hand back down to his knee.

The place at the wire where the young cock should have been stayed empty. She found she'd been looking at it without meaning to, the gap on the loft board, the foot of clean grit-board where a dark square yearling ought to be standing with his beak open and his heart trying to get out of him, and there was nothing there, just the board and the dark behind it and the seven home birds gone quiet on their perches, and the eighth a roof somewhere in Diepenbeek if she was lucky and a smear of feathers under a wire if she wasn't, and the south of the sky going down slowly toward the colour of nothing over the one green mountain the town had built and was busy losing.

"Light goes at half eight, this time of year," Jules said, getting up off his stool, folding it, his knees cracking like wet wood. He didn't tell her to come in. He didn't tell her he wouldn't. "A young bird that's not home by dark mostly comes at first light. Mostly." He looked at her, and at the anorak that was Staf's, and at her face, and didn't say anything about any of it. "I'll be back at six tomorrow. You want to be out here at first light, you be out here at first light. He'll either be on that board or he won't, and you standing here all night won't move him one wingbeat closer." He put a hand on her shoulder, the slow ugly hand, just for a second, the weight of it. "But you'll stand here anyway," he said. "I know. I always did too."

And he went up the garden and out the side gate, and Lieselot stood at the loft with her hand on the cold bolt and her face to the south, where the light was going, where the young cock wasn't, and waited — for a bird, for the dark, for the first thing in her life she'd been caught wanting and couldn't make herself stop — late, but, she told the empty sky, the way you tell a thing to keep it true, coming.

Chapter Seven — A Handful of Minutes

She had read the first lines of the confession five days before and put it back in the tin and shut the lid on it the way you shut a door on a smell, fast, before it could get into your clothes. The 1958 race was not mine. I made the clock lie. She had got that far and no further. You could live a while on the first lines of a thing. She had found that out.

She held out four days. On the fifth it rained from breakfast, a slow grey Limburg rain that came in off the heath and meant to stay, and there was nothing to do at the loft but feed and scrape and stand at the wire watching the birds not fly, and Jules didn't come because Jules's knees didn't come out in rain, and Bram was at the café being a man who'd been passed over, and Wendy was in the city with the boyfriend and the plan, and the whole town had gone in out of the wet and pulled its curtains, so that for once there was no Saturday sound, no faces up, no old men in their gardens, nothing but the rain on the loft roof like a thousand small fingers wanting in.

So she went up and got the tin.

She didn't make a thing of it. She wasn't going to make a thing of it. She sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed and the tin between her knees, the old king and queen worn to grey ghosts on the lid, and she took the lid off and laid it down quietly, the way you'd lay down a card you didn't want anyone to see.

The clock was on top, where it always was, heavier than a thing that size had any right to be. Brass gone the colour of a held coin. She lifted it out and set it on the carpet beside her and didn't look at it. Then the drum-tape, the yellowed roll of paper that meant nothing to her yet, that was just a dead man's rubbish until somebody told her how to read it. Then the column of figures in his cramped hand, the small sums going back and back, dated, every one of them put against a single word she still didn't have the key to — Bery, Bery, Bery, down forty years of a page like a man saying a name in his sleep.

And under all of it, folded twice, soft at the creases from being folded and unfolded and folded again by hands that were dead now, the letter.

She took it out and unfolded it and this time she did not stop at the first lines.

1958.

Staf is twenty-four and the coal is under his nails for good now, in the cracks of his knuckles, in the rims of his eyes, so that the pithead men joke he could shut his lids and still look like he's watching you. He has the early cough already, the one that wakes Mariette in the night and that she has stopped asking about because there is nothing to be done about a thing every man on the street has. He has been married eleven months. He has a loft of fourteen birds at the bottom of a rented yard and a job that takes the daylight from him at both ends, and he has one cock, a dark blue, the kind of blue that's almost black until the sun catches it and then it's the colour of a beetle's back, of oil on water, of a thing too good for where it lives.

He calls the cock De Sint. After the pit. After the town. After the saint nobody can name a single fact about except that the colliery and the parish and the whole heath are his and the town never thinks to wonder who he was.

The cock is the best bird in the town and Staf knows it and tells no one, because a man who tells you his bird is the best is a man whose bird is about to lose. He trains him alone, before his shift and after it, in the blue dark and the brown dark, throwing him from the heath, from the canal bridge, from further and further out toward France, and the cock comes home every time the way a stone comes home to the ground, with no fuss, as if it had only ever been a question of letting go.

Barcelona is the race. Everyone's race that year. The whole town has gone in on it the way a town goes in on a single thing when it has only the one thing to put its weight on. A miner's town a thousand kilometres from a Spanish sun, and the men have scraped the entry money out of wages that don't stretch to it, because a man can stand a great deal of his own life being nothing if there is one Sunday in July when his bird might cross the sea and the mountains and come home and make him, for an hour, more than his shift.

Staf baskets De Sint at the lokaal on the Thursday with his hands steady and his face shut. The chairman seals the clocks. The wax goes down over the keyholes, one loft at a time, and old Door Vandersmissen presses each seal with his thumb and a tired little nod, and Staf watches his own clock sealed and feels nothing he could name, only the cold weight of the thing already, the want of it, the terror under the want.

There is one other man basketing who could win.

He is not from the club, not really. He flies under it because the rules make him, but the men don't drink with him and the bar goes quiet a half-beat when he comes in, and his name has the wrong sound in it for the town, a sound the heath hears as foreign and never forgives. Frans Bery. A loft built out of nothing in a yard at the wrong end, no pedigree behind his birds that anyone here will credit, no café standing, no father's name to lean on. And the best blue hen Staf has ever put a hand on.

Staf knows it the way he knows his own cock. He has handled the hen once, at a club toss, when Bery let him, watching him do it with the flat patient eyes of a man who has nothing to lose by letting another man know the truth. Staf ran two fingers along the keel and felt the muscle and the heart going under it, and put the hen back and said nothing, and walked home the long way that night, because he had felt, in half a kilo of bird, the exact shape of the thing that was going to beat him.

She had to stop there. She put the letter face-down on her knee and looked at the rain on the window for a while.

It was the two fingers along the keel that did it. She knew that. She had watched him do that her whole life, that small testing pull along a bird's breastbone, the eyes going somewhere else while the hands read, and she had thought it was the most him thing there was, the thing only he did, and here he was doing it to another man's bird forty years before she was born and writing it down to her in a dead man's hand so that she would know — she understood now what the letter was for, what it was costing him to write — so that she would know he'd been told the truth in his own hands and gone home and done what he did anyway.

The clock sat on the carpet beside her. She had not meant to touch it. She picked it up.

It was the same clock. She had been to the lokaal now, she had stood through one basketing, she had watched Gust Verhoeven set and seal the lofts' constateurs under his thumb with the same tired nod the letter gave to a dead man called Door, and she knew now what this brass thing in her hands was, what it was for, what it was meant to do, which was the one thing in the whole sport a man could not argue with: keep the time, and keep it true, and not care whose week it made or broke. A thing built to be honest. The only thing in the town that couldn't be talked round.

And he had kept it. That was the part. That was the part that wouldn't sit. He had made it lie, once, in one weak hour, and then he had not destroyed it the way a guilty man destroys the thing — he had kept it, oiled it, wrapped it, carried it across forty years and into a notary's safe and out the other side into her hands, the way you keep a stone in your shoe on purpose to remember a debt.

She turned it over. Her grandfather's hands had held this. She found, without deciding to, that her own had fallen into the same hold, two hands cupped under the weight of it the way he must have cupped it, the brass warming to her the way it had warmed to him, forty years and one grave apart, the same metal, the same cold honest mechanism inside doing the one thing it was made to do and waiting, always waiting, to be made to do otherwise.

She put it down. She picked the letter back up.

1958.

The day of the lossing the men gather at the lokaal and there is nothing to do but wait, which is the whole sport and the whole horror of it. The birds went south in the convoy on Friday. They were freed at Barcelona on the Saturday morning into a clear sky and a sun the colour of a furnace, the starter recording the time to the minute, and now it is Sunday and the men stand in their gardens up and down the heath with their faces tipped and their clocks ready in the kitchen, and the church bell goes for the evening Mass and not one of them moves toward it, because God can keep but a bird won't.

The fast ones could come tonight. Most will come tomorrow, after a night out over France in the dark with nothing under them. Some will not come at all. The sea takes its tithe. The mountains take theirs. A man stands in his garden and watches the south go gold and then grey and then nothing and counts in his head the kilometres and the headwind and the heat the bird flew through and tries not to do the sum that says too long, too long.

De Sint comes Sunday at the very edge of the light.

Staf is at the loft window. He has been there since four. And there is the speck, low out of the south over the green-going slag and the black winding-gear, dropping, and it is him, it is the cock, it is daar is hij, there he is, and Staf has him in his hands and the rubber ring off the leg and into the clock and the crank turned before the bird has stopped trembling, and the clock stamps the time onto the drum with a small hard sound like a single full stop at the end of a sentence, and Staf stands in the loft in the last of the light with the cock against his chest and his own heart going and thinks: that is a winning bird. That is the bird that wins Barcelona.

It is not.

He works it himself, that night, on the back of an envelope, the way every man works it, the kilometres divided by the minutes, the metres-per-minute that is the only god the sport answers to — because the man whose loft is farther out can clock his bird an hour later and still beat you, speed and not the kitchen clock being the whole of it — and Staf does the sum three times and three times it comes out the same.

A strong second. A hero's bird. The best bird the town has flown in living memory.

Second.

Because somewhere at the wrong end of the heath a blue hen has already come home, earlier, to a man with no name and no café and the better bird, and her velocity over her own surveyed distance is better than the cock's by a margin you could measure in a handful of minutes.

A handful of minutes. Over a thousand kilometres of sea and stone and Spanish sun, the difference between the man the town will carry on its shoulders and the man it will forget by Tuesday is a handful of minutes that, Staf knows, sitting at his kitchen table with the cock asleep against the wall and Mariette asleep above him and the whole town asleep certain that tomorrow it will be a town with a champion — those minutes are real. The hen earned them. They are hers.

And Door Vandersmissen, who keeps the master clock, who will read the drums in the morning, who has known Staf since he was a boy and has nothing himself anymore but the keeping of the seals and the small power of it, says to him in the dark of the lokaal yard when Staf walks down to be near other men because he cannot sit still in his own house — says, not even as a question, more as a man holding a door open and letting you decide whether the cold comes in:

"His clock came in early, that Bery. Funny how an outsider's clock always runs a hair fast." A pause. The old man's thumb working at nothing, at the memory of wax. "Drums don't get read till morning, Staf. A clock can run a hair slow, of a Sunday. A seal can have been off and on. Nobody'd ask. Not of you. Not for the town."

And the letter does not say what was said after that. The letter does not give her the how, and she understood, reading it, that this was not him sparing her but him sparing the thing itself, refusing even on the page to teach it; the letter gives her only the morning, the drums read, the chairman's tired nod, and his own bird's time, when it was read out, a handful of minutes better than it had been the night before, and the town's roar going up around him in the lokaal like water closing over his head, and Frans Bery standing at the back of the room with his cap in his two hands, looking at Staf, not saying anything, knowing, knowing in his hands the way Staf had known in his, and unable to prove a thing.

She read the last lines of that part and put the letter down in her lap and sat with the rain.

She did not cry. She wanted to note that, to herself, the way you note a thing in your favour. She didn't cry and she didn't miss him. What she felt was worse than missing him and she didn't have the word for it, and the word she reached for instead was the bird's word, the one he'd used his whole life and she'd never asked about — voel, feel, the thing Jules said too, two fingers along the keel, read what's actually there and not what you want there to be — and what was actually there, when she ran her hands along the cold length of the day, was this: that she had been lifted to that loft window as a small child by a man who'd already done this, who'd stood at that exact window in the last of the light and clocked a bird he knew was second and let a whole town call it first, and that the love in the hands that lifted her had been the same hands.

She got up off the floor.

She put the letter back, and the figures, and the drum-tape. She held the clock a moment longer than the rest before she set it down in its place, because she knew now what it was and she would never not know, and she shut the lid on the king and the queen and carried the tin down the garden in the rain with it held against her chest the way Staf had held the cock in the letter, and she didn't decide to do that and couldn't have said why.

The loft smelled of corn and lime and forty warm bodies and the wet coming off her own coat. The birds shifted on the perches, a low mutter, settling. And there on the third perch down, one foot tucked, the orange eye, was the blue hen. De Late. The late one. Last off every toss and home anyway.

She had thought, that first night, that the hen was nothing. A bird with a habit. She knew better now and didn't want to and the knowing came anyway, cold, complete: that this hen on the third perch was the great-great-grandchild of the dark blue cock in the letter, that the line ran straight as a homing flight from the bird that came home second in 1958 and was clocked into a stolen first, down forty years and four generations to the half-kilo of warm blood watching her now with the whole grey sky banked in a circle the size of a shirt button. The crown of the loft. The bird worth more than the house. The bird she'd have to fly, this season, under the Maes name, to keep any of them.

The best bird in the town. Built on the back of a hen that beat it.

She put her two fingers along the keel of the blue hen the way she'd watched him do it a hundred times, the way the letter had watched him do it to a man's bird forty years before, and felt the heart going under the muscle, quick and hard, a thing trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had — and understood, standing in the dark loft with the rain on the roof and the tin against her chest, that to fly this bird and win was not a thing she could do innocently anymore. That every Sunday from here to July she would be standing in his footprint at the window with his bird in her hands, and the win, if it came, would be the same win, the 1958 win, run again, forty years on, the handful of minutes paid forward into her.

She took her fingers off the keel.

Down at the wrong end of the heath, she thought, there had been a man with no name and the better bird, and somewhere there was a son of his, or two, and a flat cap held in two hands at a graveside, and a debt written Bery, Bery, Bery down forty years of a dead man's page — and the bird that could give her everything the town had to give was the one thing in the world she could not keep clean.

She locked the loft. She did not look at the south of the sky. The rain kept on, wanting in, and she went up the wet garden with the tin against her chest, carrying it now the way you carry a thing you have decided not to put down.

Chapter Eight — The Approach

The car came at the wrong time of day, which was how she knew it was about the birds.

Nobody who lived in the Pastoorstraat drove. They walked, or they had a moped that smelled of two-stroke, or they had a brother in Genk who came on a Sunday. A car that idled at the kerb on a Tuesday morning with two men in it and didn't switch off was a thing the whole street would have a side window for, and Lieselot, scraping the droppings boards at the bottom of the garden with the loft door propped and the April cold coming off the bricks, heard the engine before she saw anything and felt her own hands go still on the scraper without deciding to.

She had been three days getting the smell of the confession off her, and she had not managed it. I made the clock lie. You read a thing like that in your grandfather's hand and it goes into you the way coal-dust went into Staf — it doesn't wash out, it stays in the body, it greys the inside of you for good. She had read the account of it now, the careful pencil and then the ink where his hand had got bad, the whole of what he did and how — all but the last pages, the ones that started over with her own name at the top, Lieselot, in a smaller hand, which she had folded back and not let herself read, because the account of the fix she could stand, and whatever it was he wanted to say to her about it she could not, not yet. She had not slept properly since, and she had not told anybody, and she had gone on feeding the birds and scraping the boards because that was a thing the hands could do while the rest of her stood off to one side and refused to think.

She came up the garden with the scraper still in her fist.

The car was a clean grey Opel, washed, and the man who got out of the passenger side was the man from the graveside. She knew him before he straightened — the shoes told her, even now, even on a Tuesday: clean shoes, town shoes, a man who kept himself like a thing that mattered in a place that had stopped mattering. He had a flat cap. He took it off when he saw her, which nobody in the street did for her, which they did for Staf, and he held it in both hands in front of him the way you hold a cap at a graveside or in a church, and that was worse than if he'd kept it on.

The other man stayed in the car. The driver. Younger, a heavier face, both hands on the wheel of a car that wasn't going anywhere, looking at the loft over the fence the way a man looks at a thing he's already decided is his.

"Lieselot," the older one said. Not a question. He knew her name. "Maes."

"That's the gate," she said, "if you're coming in."

He didn't smile but something moved at the side of his mouth, a thing that might have been respect and might have been the start of a tiredness he'd been carrying so long it had grooves. He let himself in at the gate and stood on the cracked concrete of the path with his cap in his hands and the car running at his back, and he looked, for a second, at the loft — only a second, but she saw it land on him, the long low brick hok with the wire and the trap and the dark inside, and she saw it cost him something to look at it, the way it would cost you to look at a house somebody had lived in that should have been yours.

"You'll know who I am," he said.

"Bery." It came out of her flat. She had not meant to say it. It had been sitting in her three days, the name in the tin, the column of small sums going back and back in Staf's coded hand, Bery, Bery, Bery, a debt with a man's name on it; and now the man was standing on the path with his cap in his hands and she'd put the two halves together out loud before she could stop herself, and she watched him hear it.

He went still. "He told you."

"He left it to me. There's a difference."

"Aye," Marcel Bery said. "There is." He turned the cap a quarter-turn in his hands. The car idled. Somewhere down the row a curtain would be moving. "Is your father in?"

"He's not."

"Good." He said it plainly, no apology in it. "It's not him I came for."

She did not ask him into the house. She would not have known how, and the house was Bram's, and Bram's house this hour of the morning would have something in it she'd rather a stranger didn't see. So they stood in the cold garden, the two of them, with the loft between them like a thing on a table neither would touch, and the birds inside heard the strange voice and went quiet, then began, low, the unsettled mutter they made when there was a cat on the wire.

"My father," Marcel said, "won the Barcelona in nineteen fifty-eight."

He said it the way you'd say a fact about the weather. He'd had forty years to learn to say it without his voice doing anything, and the practice was in it, the way the practice was in everything about him, the clean shoes and the held cap and the still hands — a man who had drilled himself smooth over a thing that would have made a louder man shout.

"His name was Frans," he said. "You'll not have heard it. There's no reason you'd have heard it. He flew out of the wrong end of the next town, no club weight, no café behind him, nobody to stand him a beer and say his bird was good. We came up from the Borinage when I was small, my grandfather did, for the pit, and a name like ours — they heard it foreign. Bery. They'd say it like it had a smell." He turned the cap. "A man like that doesn't win the Barcelona. A man like that isn't allowed to have the best bird in the province. But he did, and he had, and in fifty-eight he proved it, out of his own loft, with a bird he'd bred from nothing, against every big name in Flanders." He stopped. "And then your grandfather's clock said different."

The birds shifted on their perches. The young cock — Manneke, Staf had been going to call him, she'd seen it pencilled on the breeding card and the name had got into her without permission — put his head out at the wire and looked at the stranger and looked at her.

"I've read it," Lieselot said.

"Read what."

"What he wrote." She heard her own voice and didn't like it, too young, too small in the cold garden. "He wrote it down. What he did. I'm not — you don't have to tell me my grandfather cheated your father, Mr Bery. I know. It's in a tin in my room." She had not meant to say that either. The tin. She'd given him the tin now, the existence of it, a thing the man would carry away and want. Stupid. But it was out, and she watched him take it, and watched something happen behind his face that she had not been ready for, which was not triumph.

It was a kind of grief that had been waiting so long it had stopped looking like grief. He shut his eyes for a second. When he opened them he looked at the loft, not at her.

"He wrote it down," Marcel said. "Forty years and he never said it to a living soul, and he wrote it down for you." There was no kindness in it and no cruelty; it was a man turning over a stone he'd carried his whole life and finding it lighter than he'd thought, and not being grateful for that, because the lightness was its own insult — that it had been so easy, in the end, for the old man to set down, the thing that had broken Frans Bery's life.

"My father knew," Marcel said. "That's the thing you want to understand about him. He knew. The day they read the result out at the club, your grandfather first by — what was it, the margin was nothing, it was a handful of minutes over a thousand kilometres, it was metres a minute, you couldn't see it with your eye — my father stood in that lokaal and heard them give Staf Maes the Barcelona and he knew, the way you know your own child's step on the stair, that his bird had been the better bird and had been put second by a clock."

A wood pigeon went over, fat and clattering, and the loft birds answered it from the dark, a low surf of sound, and Marcel waited it out without seeming to hear it.

"And he had no proof," he said. "He had a pencil line in his own logbook and a certainty in his chest and nothing else, and a name they heard foreign, and a town that wanted its hero." He turned the cap. "So he said nothing. What was he going to say? The legend cheated me? They'd have run him out. They half ran him out anyway, for the look on his face when they gave Staf the cup. A bad loser, they called him. Couldn't take it." His voice did, finally, a small thing, a tightening, gone as soon as it came. "He took it for forty years. That's the taking."

Down the garden the loft was quiet now, the birds settled to the new voice, and the light was coming flat and grey across the green heap and the dead winding-gear, the same light it came every morning, indifferent, and Lieselot stood in it with the scraper still in her hand and the cold going up through her boots and felt the thing she'd been keeping off to one side for three days walk all the way up to her and stand in front of her with a cap in its hands.

"What do you want," she said.

He didn't answer straight away. He looked at the loft a long time, and she understood he was making himself say it slowly because if he said it fast it would come out as the thing it almost was, which was a threat, and he was a man who would rather die than let it be that.

"Money," he said, "I don't want. He sent us money. Forty years of it." He nodded, just once, at the house, at the upstairs window behind which the tin sat. "You'll have seen it in the tin if you read the tin. Little and often, the whole time, addressed in his own daft code like he thought my father didn't know exactly what it was. Guilt with a stamp on it. My mother took it because we were poor and my father couldn't stop her and it shamed him every month of his life. So no. Keep the money. I'd not touch it." He breathed out. "What was taken wasn't money."

"The bird," she said.

"The win," he said. "The name. The thing that says, in the book, in the gold, that the best bird that flew the Barcelona in nineteen fifty-eight came out of Frans Bery's loft. That's what was taken. And you can't give that back, because the man who earned it is in the ground out at the same cemetery as your grandfather, in a cheaper part of it, with no flowers, because he died last winter certain of a thing he could never prove, made small by it his whole life, a bad loser to the day he died." The cap stopped turning. "December, it was. Your grandfather went on living till April. A handful of months. If the old man had set it down one winter sooner my father could have died a winner." He looked at her then, full on, for the first time, and his eyes were dry and very tired. "So you'll understand there's a part of this that can't be put right. He's gone. The win's no use to him now."

"Then—" she started.

"There's the bloodline," Marcel said.

The birds. Of course the birds. She had known it the second the car didn't switch off.

"Your grandfather's bird in fifty-eight — the one that was put first that should have been second — every bird in that hok runs back to it. I've kept the pedigrees, what I could get of them. Forty years I've watched that loft win and breed and sell off the back of a bird whose result was stolen from my father, and prosper, while we — " He stopped himself. Drilled himself smooth again, visibly, a man putting a lid down. "The bloodline's the only thing left that has my father's win in it, because his win is the reason it's worth anything. Take away fifty-eight and that line's just pigeons. So it's mine. By right, if there were any right in this, the line is mine. I want it back."

"It's worth—" Lieselot said, and didn't finish, because she didn't know what it was worth, only that Jules had gone quiet handling the breeding cards and that Bram talked about it the way he talked about things he'd seen in a window and would never have.

"It's worth more than this street," Marcel said. "I know what it's worth. I'm not a fool and I'm not a poor man any more, whatever I was. I could buy it. I'd not have to ask a girl in a garden." He said a girl in a garden without scorn, almost gently, which was worse. "But I'll not buy a stolen thing back off the family that stole it like I was the one in the wrong. That's the last forty years all over again — the Berys, cap in hand, paying the Maeses for what was theirs." The cap, she saw, was in his hands. He saw her see it. He did not put it on. "So. Two ways. You give me the line — the birds, the line of the fifty-eight — and we're square as we can be with a dead man, quiet, between us, nobody the wiser. Or—"

He waited, to be sure she was listening.

"—or it's said out loud. In the lokaal. With the tin open on the table and the clock he kept and the logbook in my father's own hand, and the result of fifty-eight struck out and put right in front of the whole club, the whole town, the federation if it comes to it. My father's name where Staf Maes's is. Said, and written, and never unsaid."

"That'd—" Her mouth was dry. "That'd finish him. Staf. The town's got nothing but him."

"I know what the town's got," Marcel said. "I grew up in the cheap end of it." Something flat and old went across his face. "You think I don't know I'd be taking the one good thing this dead place has left? I'd be the man who killed the legend. They'd hate the Berys then for real, not just in the back of the hand. I'd do it anyway." He looked at the loft. "Forty years I've waited to be able to do it. He's dead. I can do it now."

The car, behind him, gave its low patient idle. The man in it had not moved. Lieselot looked past Marcel at the heavy face over the wheel, at the two hands set on it, and the man looked back at her with no cap in his hands and nothing held still about him at all, and she understood that Marcel had brought him on purpose, brought him to sit in the running car like a thing kept on a chain, so that whatever Marcel said with his cap in his hands and his voice held level, the other one was the part of it that wouldn't stay level, and they both knew it, and she was meant to know it too.

"My brother," Marcel said, without turning round. "Dries. He'd not have come to the gate with his cap off." It was almost an apology. It was a warning dressed as one.

He gave her the deadline at the gate, on his way out, the cap going back on his head only when he'd turned his back to the loft, as if it could see.

"The grote fond," he said. "The Barcelona. The big one, the queen race, July. You'll know it's coming — the whole town'll know, it's the only thing this place still gets a Sunday out of." He set his hand on the gate. "You've till then. Fly your season if you have to fly it to keep them — I know about the old man's will, the club talks, everybody knows you've to race them or lose them. Fine. Race them. But the day they basket for the Barcelona, I want the line in my loft, or I want the truth on the table. One or the other. Not both, not neither. You choose which by July."

"That's the same race," she said. It came out before she'd thought it. "Fifty-eight. That's the same race he did it in."

Marcel Bery looked at her for a moment over the gate, in the flat grey morning, with the dead winding-gear black at the end of the street behind him and the green heap going on quietly turning itself back into a hill.

"Aye," he said. "It is. I'd thought you'd see that." And then, lower, the only time his voice came all the way open the whole hour he stood in her garden: "It's the same clock, an' all. He kept it, the old man. He kept the clock that did it. Forty years he kept the very thing." He shook his head, slow, at a thing too big to be angry at any more. "You tell me what kind of a man keeps the knife."

He got in the car. The heavy-faced brother put it in gear without a word and they pulled away down the Pastoorstraat, the clean grey Opel too wide for the street the company had built narrow for men who'd never own one, and Lieselot stood at the gate with the scraper still in her hand and watched it to the corner and round it and gone.

When the engine was gone she became aware of the loft at her back, the forty of them breathing in the dark behind the wire, the young cock with his head out, watching her. The line of the fifty-eight. Every one of them, all the way down, running back to a bird that had been put first by a lie — bred and sold and won on for forty years, beautiful, worth more than the street, and hers.

She had three days ago thought the worst of it was the dead man lying to a town.

Now there was a man with clean shoes and a cap in his hands who had told her the rest of it, and a brother in a running car who hadn't bothered with the cap, and a date in July with her grandfather's name on one side of it and Frans Bery's on the other and the same clock, the very clock, sitting in a biscuit tin in her room — the very thing, the knife — waiting upstairs in the dark like the birds waited in theirs.

She went and bolted the loft. Then she stood a while in the cold garden, not going in, and looked at the south of the sky, which she had been telling herself for three days she wasn't going to do, and did it anyway.

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."

"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."

"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.

Chapter Ten — Widowhood

The young cock came back on the fourth morning, and she did not see it happen, which was the part she'd be ashamed of for a long time.

She'd gone in to do the boards at seven the way Jules had taught her, the scraper cold in her hand and the loft still half-dark, the birds a low mutter in the rafters, and she was three perches along the cocks' side before she understood that the count was wrong in the good direction. She stood with the scraper held out from her body like a thing she'd forgotten the use of and counted again, slower, and there he was, the young red cock from the line, Manneke, the one that had gone out to Quiévrain a week ago and not come back, the one she'd stood at the window for past the point where Wendy's bus had gone and the light had gone and Jules had said, gently, that you learned this part too, that some of them the sea kept and some of them the hawk kept and some of them just decided, out there, not to be yours any more. He was on the end perch with his feathers wrecked and one wing held a hair low and a string of something dried down the front of him, and he watched her with an eye that had been somewhere she would never go, and he did not look like a homecoming. He looked like a thing that had crawled.

She did not touch him. She'd learned that much. You don't haul a bird about that's come in off a hard one; you let him sit, you put water near, you let the loft do the work the loft does. She filled the drinker and set it close and went on with the boards with her back to him and her face doing something she was glad nobody was there to see, and after a while she heard him go down off the perch and heard the small ordinary sound of a bird drinking, and she scraped the same square of board four times so as to have a reason to stay.

That was the thing she couldn't have explained to Wendy if she'd tried, which she wouldn't. That a half-kilo of bird she'd told a dead man she felt nothing for could come in off the sea four days late and wreck her morning by living.

Jules came at eight with bread and a thing he didn't make a speech about, which was tea.

He looked at Manneke for a long time without going near him, hands in his coat, reading the bird from across the loft the way he read everything, and then he said, "He's no good to you this year," which she'd worked out for herself and which still landed somewhere under the ribs.

"He came home."

"He came home." Jules drank his tea. "And he'll moult out wrong from a knock like that, and his form's gone, and you'll not put him across France again before September, and if you've sense you'll not put him across it ever. He's a breeder now, that one. He'll sit in the box and make you better ones." He said it flat, a man doing sums, and then he did the thing that undid her a little, which was to add, looking at the wrecked young bird and not at her, "But he came home. That's the bird telling you the loft's right. A bird won't kill himself to come home to a loft that's wrong. Remember that, when you're losing them and thinking it's you."

"I scraped the boards," she said, which was not an answer to anything, and Jules said, "I know you did," which was.

He set the tea down on the sill and rolled his sleeves, an old man getting ready for work, and said the thing he'd come to say.

"Right. Now we do it properly. Now we do weduwschap."

She'd had the shape of it off him already, in the first week — cocks one side, hens the other, the wire down the middle of the loft like a thing that kept a marriage from happening so it could be spent. But the shape of a thing wasn't the thing, and what Jules did over the next hour was the thing.

He took her down the hen side first, where the hens sat in their own boxes and their own light, and he put his slow hand into a box and brought out the hen that belonged, he said, to the slate-blue cock on the far end of the other side, the one Staf had flown two seasons before he died and never raced again, kept for breeding, kept for exactly this. He held the hen so Lieselot could see her and not so the cock could.

"You keep them apart," he said. "All season. He doesn't see her, he doesn't hear her if you can help it, he forgets what she smells like until he half forgets she's real. He sits in his box alone and the box is the only thing in the world that's his, and he keeps it like a miser, and he hates every other cock that comes near the wire of it. That's not nothing, that hate. You're going to use that. And then—" Jules carried the hen across, slow, and Lieselot followed, and on the far side the slate cock had got up off his perch and gone to the wire of his box and was making a sound she'd heard a hundred times in her childhood and never once heard, "—then, the night you basket him, the night before the long one, you give her back. Ten minutes. Twenty. You let him have her in the box, let him drive her, let him think the season's over and he's won, and then you take her away again and you shut him in the basket still wanting her, and you put him on the lorry, and you send him eight hundred kilometres into Spain wanting her, and he comes home across the Pyrenees and the sea and France with that in him like a stone in a sling."

He let the hen back into her own box. The slate cock at the wire went on for a moment and then stopped, abrupt, the way they do, gone back to standing on one foot as if nothing.

"That's the engine," Jules said. "That's the whole secret of the thing. It's not feed and it's not training, those just give you a bird that can. This is what makes a bird that wants. You take the one thing he loves and you keep it from him and you make his whole body into a thing that has to get home, and then you let him out a thousand kilometres away and you trust that what you did to him is stronger than the sea."

Lieselot stood with her back to the wire and watched the slate cock stand on one foot, robbed and not knowing it, and said, before she could not say it, "That's a horrible thing to do to a bird."

Jules looked at her. There was something in his pale eyes she couldn't read, that might have been approval and might have been its opposite, and he said, "It is. Best flyers in the world worked it out, the Belgians, in lofts like this, and the whole world copies us, and it's a horrible thing to do to a bird, and it brings them home." He picked his tea back up. "You'll do it anyway. Everyone who's any good does it. You take the love the bird's got and you point it where it does you good, and you tell yourself the bird's happy enough, sitting in his box being a king. And mostly he is. That's the part nobody likes to say out loud, jong." He said the jong the way the old men said it, the way you'd say it to a boy you respected. "He's happy enough. It still comes home to you wanting something it'll only get if it nearly kills itself getting back. That's weduwschap. That's the trade."

She thought about the wire down the middle of the loft, and about a clock built to tell the truth and kept because it had been made to lie, and about a man who'd taken the one thing a town loved — its hunger to be proud of something — and pointed it where it did him good, and told himself the town was happy enough. She didn't say any of that. She'd got good, that week, at not saying things in the loft. The loft was where she kept the not-saying.

"Show me," she said. "Which ones. For the season."

And that was the morning she stopped pretending she was learning this to spite Gust Verhoeven.

It took the rest of the week, and she was good at it, and she hated how much she didn't hate it.

That was the only way she could think about it: as a thing she'd failed to hate. She'd set out fifteen years to be a person who could stand in a loft and feel a polished little world of bird-eye looking back at her and give nothing, and somewhere in that week the giving started without her permission. It came in through the hands. Jules would put a cock in her two hands and stand back and say nothing, voel, feel, and she'd run two fingers along the keel the way she'd watched Staf do it near the end, and after a while she stopped doing it the way you copy a thing and started doing it the way you read a thing, and the bird went from a half-kilo of warm trouble to a sentence she could half make out — too much fat here, this one's flat, this one's coming up, this one's ready and being wasted on a Tuesday. She'd hand the bird back and say what she'd felt and watch Jules's face for whether she was wrong, and more and more she wasn't wrong, and the not-being-wrong was a thing that filled her up in a place she hadn't known was empty, and she despised it and went back the next morning at seven for more.

She learned the boxes. Which cock owned which box and would fight to keep it, which hen went with which cock, the pairings written in Staf's hand on cards gone soft with handling — the same hand, the same blue-black ink, that wrote I made the clock lie, so that every card she read was a small reminder she'd stopped being able to feel cleanly about any object in that loft. She learned the feed cycle properly, the light corn early in the week to clean them out and the maize and peas and the little oiled seeds toward the weekend to build the fire back up, the Versele-Laga sacks stacked where Staf had stacked them, and she learned not to leave feed down, to give them what they'd eat and lift the rest, because a bird that grazes all day is a bird that's never hungry enough to be anything.

She learned to read the sky, a little, off Jules, who read it like a man reading a face he'd known fifty years. Which way the wind sat and what it would do to a release out of the south. What a sky scoured clean meant and what a soft grey one meant and what you didn't send your good birds into for love nor money.

And the cocks came up. That was the thing she couldn't get over and wouldn't say. Under her hands and the wire and the horrible clean trade of the widowhood, the cocks came up into form like something rising, the muscle hardening, the feather going tight and silky, the eye getting that wet bright look that Jules said you couldn't put there, you could only let it come — and one morning toward the end of the week she threw a cock to the sky off the back of the garden, a short toss, ten kilometres out and back the way Jules said, build them up, don't be brave, and she watched him go up hard and circle once high over the dead winding-gear and the green heap and then snap home, drop out of the morning straight to the loft like a held breath let go, and she heard herself make a sound. Not a word. A small sound. And then she caught herself making it and looked round quick to see if Jules had heard, and he had, and he had the grace to be looking at the sky and not at her.

"There," he said, to the sky. "Now you've a problem."

"What problem."

"Now you'll want to be good at it." He picked up the empty basket. "That's the problem. There's no coming back from that one."

Wendy came on the Saturday, on her way to the bus, in her coat and her good shoes, and stood in the garden in her finished way and looked at Lieselot in Staf's anorak with a feather stuck to the sleeve and pigeon on her hands and something on her face that Wendy clearly hadn't planned to say and said anyway.

"You stink," Wendy said. "You actually stink of them now."

"Corn and lime," Lieselot said. "It's nice if you grew up in it."

"You hated it." Wendy said it almost gently, almost like a thing she was sorry to have to bring up. "You used to hate it. You used to do the thing where you wouldn't even say pigeon, you'd call it 'the shed,' like if you said it normal you'd catch it." She looked down the garden at the loft, at the wire, at the birds settling in the back of it. "There's a bus at half eleven. Davy's got people coming back to his after. His brother'll run us. You haven't come to a single thing since—" She stopped, the way she always stopped before the dead man, and changed it. "You haven't come to anything. You're fifteen, Lies. You're going to be the girl who didn't come to anything."

"I've got a race Sunday."

She heard it come out of her mouth. She heard exactly how it sounded. Wendy heard it too, and something happened in Wendy's face, not unkind, just final, the way a window closes when the weather turns — the same thing that had happened in the kitchen the day of the will, only further along now, a window most of the way shut.

"A race," Wendy said.

"It's the halve-fond. Five hundred kilometres. I'm basketing my own team for the first time, Jules says I can pick three of my own on top of his." She knew she should stop. She watched Wendy watching her not stop. "They go off from down in France somewhere and you don't know if they'll—" She heard the want in her own voice, the actual want, naked, and she did the only thing she had left, which was to make it a joke, flat, armour. "It's very exciting, Wendy. It's basically a rave."

Wendy didn't laugh. That was how Lieselot knew it had gone too far to be saved with the dry thing.

"You're turning into one of them," Wendy said.

She didn't say it cruel. That was the worst of it. She said it like a diagnosis, like a thing she was almost frightened of on Lieselot's behalf — the old men in the gardens, faces up, the whole closing-over of the town that they had spent their childhoods swearing to each other they'd get out of before it set around them like the green heap setting around the slag. One of them. The ones who stayed. The ones who'd had a notion and let the town keep them, who flew birds out of the back of a dead town because it was the one thing it still did, faces up to a southern sky every Saturday, waiting.

And the thing Lieselot couldn't say — couldn't have said to Wendy, couldn't have said to herself standing there with the feather on her sleeve — was that one of them had stopped being only the worst thing in the world. That it had got a second meaning in under a fortnight, a meaning that was a cock snapping home like a held breath, a meaning that was a wrecked red bird coming in off the sea four days late to live, a meaning that was her own two hands reading a sentence off a half-kilo of warm trouble and getting it right. She'd hated them her whole life for staying. She had not, until this week, understood that there might be something there worth staying for, and the understanding was the most dangerous thing that had happened to her since the tin, because the tin she could hide under the loose board, and this she could not hide anywhere, it was in her hands.

"Maybe," she said.

Wendy looked at her a second longer. Then she did the kind thing, the last kind thing, which was to not say any of the rest of it. "Right," she said. "I'll ring you." She would, twice more, and then it would thin out the way these things thin, not a fight, just a frequency that fell off, a girl getting on a bus and the town making her smaller as she went toward the edge of it. "Good luck with your—" Wendy tipped her head at the loft. "Whatever it is. Your rave."

And she went off down the Pastoorstraat in her good shoes, her heels going on the brick, getting smaller, going somewhere that wasn't this, the way Lieselot had spent her whole life planning to go and was now, with pigeon on her hands and a race in the morning, watching someone else do.

Jules came at four, because four was the hour, and found her on the hen side with a card in her hand.

She hadn't heard him come in. She was standing at the wire looking at the slate hen in her box, the one that went with the cock she'd send Sunday, and she was thinking — she made herself think it, looked straight at it the way she made herself look at things now — that on Saturday night she'd take this hen across the loft and give her to the cock for twenty minutes and let him think he'd won, and then she'd take the hen away and shut the cock in the basket wanting her and send him into France, and she'd do it because it worked, because the Belgians worked it out in lofts like this and the whole world copied them, because it was a horrible thing to do to a bird and it brought them home. And she was thinking about Staf, who knew a thing about taking the one thing a creature loved and pointing it where it did you good. She was thinking about whether everyone in this whole sport was, underneath, doing a version of the thing he'd done, and whether the only difference was the size of it and who paid — and whether that was a true thought or just the thought she reached for so she could go on standing in his loft loving his birds and not have to hate him cleanly.

"You'll want to leave that pair an hour, not twenty minutes," Jules said, behind her, of the card. He'd read it off her over her shoulder, the way he read everything. "First long one of the year, you give the cock a bit more. Let him really think it's his. Cruel to be kind." He took the card and looked at it and put it back in its slot. "You all right?"

"Verhoeven wants me to give the line to a good loft," she said. It came out sideways, the way the true things came out of her now, attached to something else. "Said the bloodline would live, the champion'd stay safe in the pedigrees. Said some things are better kept than flown."

"He did."

"You think that too? That some things are better kept than flown."

Jules was quiet a moment. Out in the garden the light was doing the long gold thing it did at four, going thin along the brick, and somewhere down the row a clock struck the hour off true, a beat behind the church, and an old man's voice rose up calling a last bird home, komeen, komeen, and the whole town did the one thing it still did together.

"I think," Jules said slowly, "that men who say a thing's better kept than flown have usually got their own reasons for wanting it kept." He looked at her, the pale eyes steady. "And I think your opa didn't leave you forty birds and a brick shed so they could go and sit safe in some clever man's pedigree where nobody'd ever fly them across the sea again. A bird that's not flown isn't kept, jong. It's just a thing in a box, slowly forgetting it could ever have got home." He picked up the scraper she'd left against the wall and handed it to her, handle first, the way he did, the way it was starting. "Boards," he said. "Then we pick your three. You've a race tomorrow."

And as he said it, on the turn of four, the birds did the thing they did — swung all at once to the south of the sky, every small hard head toward the water they'd be crossing before the summer was out, toward France and the long sea beyond it, toward the race that was coming and the one underneath it that was older and worse, the same race, the one Staf had won on a clock made to lie and that she'd been entered in now, signed in his ink, her three birds going in on top of Jules's, her hands the ones that would basket them, the only honest thing she had to send.

She took the scraper. She did not tell herself it was the corn.

She thought, instead, watching the slate cock stand robbed and kingly on one foot at the wire of the box that was the only thing in the world that was his: I'm going to be good at this. God help me. I'm going to be good at the worst-loved thing in the world, and somewhere under the loose board is the reason I shouldn't want it, and I want it anyway, and tomorrow I send them into France and find out what kind of flyer a liar's hands can make.

Chapter Eleven — His Hands

The halve-fond came up off the calendar like the next rung of a ladder you can't see the top of, and the difference she felt in her own body, basketing for it, was that this time nobody had picked the team for her.

Jules had stood back. That was the thing. The first race he'd put six cocks in her hands one at a time and named each as he went, and she'd carried them to the club like a girl carrying eggs she didn't believe were hers. This time he came at seven on the Wednesday morning and sat on the upturned crate by the loft door with his tea and said nothing while she went down the perches, and saying nothing was the whole lesson. She'd worked out by now that Jules taught the way the loft taught — by withholding, by letting you put your hand wrong and feel it be wrong — and so she went bird to bird in the cold dim of the hok with the smell of corn and lime in her throat and read them the way he'd shown her, two fingers along the keel, the breast muscle full or worked, the warmth, the way a bird sat in the cup of her palm either trusting her or wanting out.

She turned down the red-chequer cock that had flown well at Quiévrain, because under her fingers he was still soft from it, still recovering, the muscle gone slack the way a thing goes that's spent itself. She'd not have known that a month ago. A month ago a bird was a bird. Now there was a whole language in the keel of one, and she had it without having decided to learn it, the way you find you've learned the words to a song you hated.

She picked seven. Old cocks, the hard ones, the ones whose hens she'd shut away on the far side of the loft so that the cocks had spent the week at the wire making the small grieving sound that was, Jules said, the engine of the whole sport — desire, racked up and held, a love made into a distance. Weduwschap. Widowhood. She'd thought it cruel the first time he explained it and she still thought it cruel and she did it anyway, because it worked, and because she was learning that a great deal that worked was cruel, in this loft and out of it.

"That one," Jules said, the only word he spoke the whole time. She had her hand on a dark blue cock low on the line, the one off the old hen that traced back, on the breeding card in Staf's writing, to a name she now read with her stomach going cold every time: De Sint, 1958. The blue cock was four generations down off that bird and you could see it in him, the near-black of him, the breadth across the back.

"He's not in form," she said. "He's carrying too much. Feel him." She held the cock out and Jules took him, ran his slow hands over him without looking, the way he did everything, his eyes on the middle distance like a man listening for something a long way off.

"He's carrying," Jules agreed. "But he wants it. Form you can build. Want you can't." He gave the cock back. "Your opa flew the heavy ones that wanted it over the clever ones that didn't. Lost some that way. Won the ones worth winning." He drank his tea. "Your call. It's your loft."

It was the first time anyone had said it to her plainly, it's your loft, and she stood holding the heavy blue cock in the cold and felt the thing she'd been refusing to feel since the form went in — that it was, that they were hers, forty bodies in a brick shed worth more than the house, and that she was good at this, that her hands knew a thing her head had spent fifteen years declining to want to know.

She put the blue cock in the basket.

She conditioned them herself that week, off the feeding cards, and got it nearly right, which Jules let her find out by watching her not be wrong rather than telling her she wasn't. The light mix early to clean them out, the corn and barley, the bird's body kept lean and emptied; then the richer days building, the maize and the peas, the little oily seeds and the linseed the last evenings before basketing so the cocks went into the basket with fat on them to burn over France and a hunger to get back to the hens she'd kept from them all week. She measured it into the troughs in the half-light at half-six every morning and again at four, and the four o'clock feed was the one she'd stopped pretending was just a feed. At four the birds turned south whether she fed them or not. She'd learned to be down there for it, at the wire, watching the forty small hard heads swing as one to the quarter of the sky over the green heap and the black winding-gear, toward the water they hadn't crossed and the race that was coming for them, and she'd stopped telling herself it was the corn and started, without admitting it, to feel it as a kind of company.

She basketed on the Thursday at the club, alone this time. Jules drove her down in his old Opel and stayed in the car.

"You don't need me holding your hand at the table," he said. "Go on. They'll be civil. They're always civil." He looked through the windscreen at het lokaal, the low building behind the café with its one lit window, the men's bicycles ranked against the wall. "Civil's free," he said, which she'd learn was Jules's whole opinion of the club, in two words.

Inside, the long table, the green baize gone shiny down the middle from fifty years of elbows, the master clock on its shelf like a relic in a side-chapel. Fons Beckers had the crates open and the basketing book spread, and the old men were there as they were always there, René and Mon at the bar end with their pils, the smoke standing in the light in flat blue sheets. They turned when she came in with her basket and they did the thing they always did, which was to be civil — a nod, a daar is ze, there she is — and go back to their glasses, and she'd learned to read that too: not warmth, not yet, but the wary courtesy you give a thing that might turn out to matter.

She put her seven on the table and gave the cards to Fons and he read the ring numbers and she stripped each cock and held him while Fons fitted the rubber, the gummiring, the numbered band that was the bird's anonymous name for the race, and entered it in the book against the seal-number, the whole quiet liturgy of it, the way you handed your week's hope across a table to a man with a ledger and trusted the ledger. She did it right. She knew she did it right because nobody corrected her, and at this table not being corrected was the only praise on offer.

Gust Verhoeven came through from the back room with the wax and the brass die while she was on her last cock, and he stopped when he saw her, and something went over his clean face that she'd not seen there before — not the patience he'd worn at her gate, the patience for a problem. Something warmer, and warier with it, the two together, like a man pleased to see his money and counting it at the same time.

"Maes," he said. "You're basketing."

"That's what it's for."

"How many?"

"Seven."

He looked at the seven cocks in the crate, the dark blue one among them, and she watched him see the blue one, watched him see the breadth across the back of him and know exactly what he was, four generations down off the bird on the board, and his face did the warm-and-wary thing again, harder this time.

"You're flying the line," he said.

"I'm flying my birds."

"Mm." He set the wax to soften by the little spirit lamp the way he did, the small priest-work of it, and he didn't say anything for a moment, and then he said, not to her, to the table, to the room, in the voice a chairman uses when he wants a thing on the record: "Staf Maes's granddaughter, flying the line of the fifty-eight in the halve-fond. There's something." And René down the bar end lifted his glass an inch, and Mon said amai, and the room warmed by a degree, and Lieselot stood there with the last cock in her two hands and understood, the way you understand a draught before you find the open door, that she'd just been useful to something.

Gust sealed the clocks. He went down the table to each loft's constateur in turn, wound and set against the master, and pressed the red wax over the keyhole and stamped the brass die into it, the club crest, and Lieselot watched him do it to Staf's old honest loft clock — her clock now — and felt the cold come up the back of her neck that came every time, because she knew now, the way she hadn't a month ago, exactly what the seal was for and exactly what it had been made to fail to do, once, forty years ago, under another man's thumb at this same table.

Honesty you could feel with your thumb.

She'd felt it the first time and not understood it. She understood it now. The seal was the sport's whole faith, the one promise that held the rest up — that the clock had not lied — and her grandfather had broken it, here, in this room, with the help of a man whose name she carried in her stomach now like a stone, and these men, these civil men, were the church of it, and the chairman setting the wax with such care over her keyhole was the keeper of the seal and also, she was beginning to think, the keeper of the thing the seal was supposed to prevent.

"There," Gust said, lifting the die. The crest sat clean in the cooling wax. "Sealed. Bring her home, then." And he gave her the nod, the chairman's nod, the one he gave across the green baize, and it was warmer than it had ever been, and she trusted it less than she ever had.

> 1958.

> The drum-tape, when Lieselot lays it flat under the kitchen lamp that night and reads it the way Jules taught her to read a result — distance over time, metres a minute, the only arithmetic the sport believes in — gives back more than a time. It gives back a hand.

> Staf is twenty-four and his clock is sealed and on the shelf with all the others and he believes in the seal the way he believes in the pit holding up over his head, which is to say without thinking about it, the way you believe in the ground. He has carried his bird to the table and stripped him and watched the wax go on. The man pressing the die is the club's man at the master clock, Door Vandersmissen, who has done it for the club for thirty years, whose hand the whole town's honesty passes through every Sunday and has passed through for thirty years without a soul giving it a thought, because that is what a club is — a town agreeing, year on year, to trust the same hands.

> The tape does not show a crime. That is the thing the tape gives back that turns Lieselot cold at her own table: it shows nothing wrong at all. It shows a punched time, clean, in the proper column, sealed and witnessed, exactly as a hundred honest tapes show. The minutes that were never there are not on the tape. They are in the gap between the tape and the truth, and the only hand that could close that gap was the hand at the master clock, the club's own hand, the seal's own keeper — and that hand is the club's, not Staf's. Staf could not have made the clock lie alone. No man could. The seal was built to make sure of that. It took the keeper of the seal.

> It took the club.

> The tape ends and Lieselot sits with it under the lamp and the new thing settles into her, cold and exact: it was never one weak old man at his kitchen table. It was the town's own machinery, the hand everyone trusted, turned for one Sunday to a use no one would ever check — because who checks the keeper of the seal? You'd have to suspect the club of itself. And forty years on, the keeper is dead and cannot be asked, and the seal is still pressed every Thursday, warm wax under a brass die, by the next man to hold the chairman's office and the master clock and the records and the honor board with the gold name on it — by a man who sealed her clock tonight and called her flying the line something, and meant it, and was counting it.

She didn't go to the window for the result on the Saturday. She told Jules she had a thing at school, which was a lie, and she walked up past the church and the dead high street and the boarded frituur that wasn't Bram's frituur but was every frituur, and she stood on the bridge over the canal that didn't go anywhere anymore and watched the brown water not move, because she did not want to want it the way she'd wanted Manneke home three weeks before — the young cock standing now recovered on his perch as if he'd never been three hours late off France, as if the wanting hadn't happened — and she'd decided, on the bridge, in the cold, that she would not stand at the wire and let the town catch her wanting a result.

She caved at two and went home and stood at the wire.

The dark blue cock came in fourth off the loft, dropping out of an emptied southern sky onto the boards with the loose, falling-apart drop of a bird that's emptied itself over distance, and she had him and the ring off his leg and into the slot and the key turned, chunk, before she'd let herself think the word come on, and the time stamped clean on the honest drum, and she stood there in the four o'clock light holding the spent cock against her chest, his heart going under her hand like a thing trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had, and she did not name what she felt and there was no one to name it to and that was, she found, the best way to have it.

He placed. Down the list, not high — the loft was a long way from the release and the velocity was good but not the day's best — but he placed, in the printed result that came round the club on the Tuesday, a Maes bird in the halve-fond reckoning for the first time in the years since Staf's hands had got too bad to fly.

And the town did the thing the town did with a result.

It came to her sideways, the way everything in the town came, in half-sentences over counters and through doorways. The woman in the bakery held her bread a beat too long and said her opa would be proud, de duifkes, the little pigeons, with a softness Lieselot had never had off her before. A man she didn't know nodded to her on the Pastoorstraat as if they were acquainted. And down the club bar, where she went on the Tuesday for the result sheet with Jules, René leaned to Mon and said it, not quietly, meaning to be heard, the thing she'd hear all season now in one mouth or another:

"She's got his hands."

She's got his hands.

It landed on her like a coat held out behind her that she'd backed into without meaning to, that someone was settling onto her shoulders, heavy and warm and not hers, the dead man's coat, the legend's coat, and the trouble was it fit. That was the trouble. It fit her the way Staf's anorak had turned out to fit her, because it was there, and she stood in the smoke with the result sheet in her hand and felt the whole machine of the town turn one notch toward her — the bakery, the nod, the warm wary chairman, the murmur down the bar — felt it begin to do to her the thing it had done to Staf for forty years, which was love him, and which was the surest way she could think of to make sure no one ever told the truth.

Because she saw it now, sharp, standing there with the line of his hands praised in her own. They didn't want her to fail, the way she'd thought after the funeral, the way it had felt when they nodded at her like a chair Staf had left behind and waited for her to drop the birds. That had been the first read and it was wrong. They wanted her to win. They'd worked it out, the club, the town, faster than she had — that a Maes flying the line, a granddaughter with his hands, a legend renewed, was worth more to them alive than the legend was worth dead and safe in the pedigrees. Gust had stood at her gate a fortnight ago and told her to let the loft go dark, keep him safe where nobody can take him down, and now a Maes bird had placed and the chairman had said there's something into the record, and the wind had changed in the whole town, because a live legend was a better fortress for the secret than a buried one. Let her fly. Let her win. Let the town love her the way it loved him. Build the wall higher. Who'd dig under a wall the whole town was standing on?

She'd thought the temptation, when it came, would come from the Berys, or from her father, or from her own fear. She hadn't thought it would come dressed as kindness, as a coat held out, as she's got his hands, the one thing she'd spent her whole life wanting and pretending she didn't — the town's love, finally pointed at her — and she hadn't thought she'd want it. But she'd had the heart of the spent cock going under her palm at four o'clock and she'd had René's words land on her like a coat that fit, and she stood in the smoke of the club her grandfather had cheated, with the result sheet in her hand and his hands praised in her own, and she wanted it, she wanted all of it, and she understood for the first time, fully and in her own body, exactly how a good man at twenty-four could shave a handful of minutes off a clock and live inside the love it bought him for forty years and never once, in all that time, give it back.

Jules took the result sheet out of her hand and read it and folded it and put it in his coat without a word, and looked at her with his pale watchful eyes, and she could not tell if he'd seen the whole of what had just gone through her or only the look it left on her face.

"Good bird, the blue one," he said. "You read him right." And then, mild, into his pils, not looking at her, in the voice he used for the things that weren't about the weather: "They're warm to you now. They weren't, before." He drank. "You'll want to watch which way warm runs in this town, jong. It mostly runs downhill, toward the thing nobody wants disturbed." He set the glass down. "Your opa was the warmest thing this town ever had. Ask yourself what it kept dry."

She didn't answer. Out past the smeared club window the afternoon was going, the light dropping toward the green heap, and somewhere down the row a man's birds were coming home and a clock somewhere was striking the hour off true, a beat behind the church, the way every clock was a beat behind some other clock — except for one, once, that had been made to run a beat ahead, by a hand the whole town trusted, in a room exactly like this one, and been loved for it ever since.

She put the heel of her hand flat on the green baize where the wax had cooled under the die two days before, and felt nothing there now but the old shine of fifty years of elbows, and thought: it wasn't him. Or it wasn't only him. It was this table, this seal, these hands, this warmth that runs downhill toward the thing nobody wants disturbed — and they're holding it out to me now like a coat, and it fits, and that's how they'll get me, if they get me. Not with the money. Not with the Berys. With the loving.

She'd have to be careful, she thought, what she let the town do to her hands.

She didn't yet know that being careful wasn't going to be enough — that you can't accept a coat by halves, and that the warmer they got, the more it would cost her, by July, to take it off in front of all of them and show them what the lining was made of.

But she knew the warm was a trap now. That was the new thing she carried out of the club that Tuesday, heavier than the result was light: that the danger had stopped being the men who wanted to take the birds, and started being the town that wanted to love her for them.

She went home and fed the loft at four, and the forty turned south as one, and she stood at the wire and let herself, for once, not look away.

Chapter Twelve — A Circle the Size of a Shirt Button

The breeding cards were in a tin tea-caddy on the shelf above the loft kitchen, and Jules took them down on a wet morning in May the way a man takes down something he's afraid to drop.

He'd not meant to, she thought. He'd come to help her sort the young birds for ringing, the jonge duiven hatched in March that had to carry the year's federation rings before they could ever be raced, and they'd done that, and then he'd stood in the loft kitchen with his cap still on and his tea going cold and looked at the caddy the way you look at a clock you don't want to wind. Then he'd taken it down. He'd done it the way he did most things, without announcing it, so that she only understood it was happening once it had started.

"You should know what you've got," he said. "If you're going to fly it. You should know what it is."

The cards were not what she'd expected. She'd expected a ledger, the loft logs she knew, Staf's blue-black hand listing dates and distances. These were smaller. Each bird had its own card, stiff yellowed pasteboard the size of a postcard, and on each one a column of names went up the card like a family climbing out of a hole — the bird at the bottom, then its sire and dam above it, then their sires and dams above them, and on up, the ring numbers shrinking into the old federation styles, the years getting older as the card got higher, until at the top there was always, on the good cards, the same name, the same number, the same three letters and two digits that Staf had written so many times the pen had worn a groove in the word.

De Sint. '58.

"There," Jules said, and put his slow finger on it, near the top of a card, not touching the ink. "And there. And there." He moved through a small stack of them and the name was at the top of every one, the dark blue cock that had won Barcelona the year before Lieselot's father was born, the founder, the well everything else was drawn from. "Half the loft comes down off him one way or another. The good half. The other half's hens Staf bought in over the years to cross out, keep the blood from doubling on itself, but the spine of it"—he tapped the column—"the spine of it's the one bird. Forty years. He bred down from the one Sunday for forty years."

She looked at the cards spread on the loft-kitchen table, the rain going on the little window, and she understood what she was looking at, slowly, the way you understand a thing you'd rather not.

"They're all his," she said. "The whole loft."

"The blood's all his. The birds are yours." Jules said it carefully, separating the two with his voice the way you separate a yolk. "That's the thing about it. A loft like this isn't forty birds. It's one bird, gone on forty years, kept alive by being made into more of itself. You don't own pigeons here, meiske. You own a line. A line's a thing that's older than any of the birds in it and means to be younger than them too, after they're dead." He looked at her to see if she had it. "That's why a good line's worth what it's worth. You're not buying a bird. You're buying everything it'll ever throw, and everything that'll ever throw."

"And what's it worth," she said. "This one."

She'd meant it flat, the way she said most things, and it came out flat, but Jules heard the real question under it, the way he heard everything, and he didn't answer for a moment. He squared the cards together against the table, a small fussing motion, an old man buying himself a breath.

"More than the house," he said.

She waited.

"More than the house, and the man who told you that," he said, "would be lying low, so as not to scare you off."

There was one card he hadn't put on the table, and she saw him not put it down, and that was how she knew which one it was.

He held it back in the stack while he gathered the others, and when she reached over and took it out of his hand he let her, but slow, the way you let a child take a knife you've decided they're old enough for. It was older than the rest. The pasteboard had gone the colour of a smoker's wall. The column up the card was longer than any of the others, longer because it was nearer the source, fewer years between the bird at the bottom and the name at the top, and at the bottom of the column, in Staf's hand, gone soft on the downstroke the way his pen went soft, was a name she knew.

De Late. Blauw duivin. 1991.

The blue hen. The one on the third perch down with her foot tucked. The one Staf had run two fingers along the keel of, near the end, when his hands had got bad, holding her a long minute and saying nothing because that was his idea of a conversation. The one who came in last off the tosses and came in anyway, dropping out of an emptied sky long after the corn was given, daar is ze, there she is.

She read the card up. De Late, then her sire and dam, then up, the numbers thinning, the years climbing, four generations, and at the top, where on the others it was near the top, on this one it was the top, the well itself with nothing above it but the federation's old style and the word in the worn groove of the pen.

De Sint. '58.

"She's straight off him," Lieselot said.

"Straight off him. Cleanest line in the loft to the old cock. Great-great-grandchild, no crosses to speak of, the blood near pure as he could keep it." Jules said it the way you'd report a fact about weather, but his eyes were on the card and not on her, and there was something in his stillness she didn't have a name for. "Staf bred her on purpose. Bred toward her for years, tightening it, to get the bird closest to '58 he could make before he died. And he got her." A small movement of the mouth that wasn't a smile. "She's the bird he'd have flown the fond on, if his lungs had given him another year. She's the loft. Everything else is just keeping her company."

Lieselot looked at the card, and then down the loft past the wire to the third perch, where the hen sat in the grey light with her foot up, not knowing she had a column going up over her head taller than herself, not knowing she was the loft, not knowing she was 1958 with feathers on it.

She'd known it already. She'd known it since the rainy day she read the confession through, when the same arithmetic had landed — De Late off De Sint, the prize off the lie, to win on the hen was to win '58 again — she'd known it in her head, a clean cold fact filed where she filed things. But there was a difference, she was learning, between a fact in the head and the same fact handed to you on a yellowed card in a man's worn writing, the hen breathing twelve feet away. The head fact was something you could hold at arm's length. This one had a body. It sat on a perch and put its foot up and watched you with an orange eye, and it was worth more than the house, and it was the best thing in a town that had nothing, and to fly it was to steal a dead man's life all over again.

"Can I hold her," she said.

She hadn't planned to ask. It came out the way the real things came out of her, sideways, before the part of her that guarded the door could get there.

Jules looked at her a moment. Then he set the cards down and went and took the hen off the perch himself, the way you take down a thing you don't want to drop, and brought her back cupped against his coat, and put her into Lieselot's two hands.

She'd handled birds for a month now. She'd learned the basics of it from Jules — the warmth, the way a bird in form sat light and tense and up in the hand, the way you ran two fingers along the keel to read the muscle, deflated and worked after a race, full and round when it hadn't flown. She had Staf's hands, Jules said, his and the notary's and the teachers' all agreed she had something, and she'd stopped arguing about it because arguing about it was a way of admitting it mattered.

But she had never held this one.

The hen was light. That was the first thing, and it was the wrong thing, it didn't go with the card — the card was heavy, the card weighed more than the house, and the bird in her hands weighed nothing, weighed less than the empty cup of coffee she still some mornings forgot to drink, a warm half-kilo of breath and hollow bone that her two hands closed around like water. The keel was a clean blade under the feathers. The heart went against her fingers, fast, far faster than a thing that size had any right to run, going and going like something that meant to be out of the loft and over the roofs and over the green heap and over France and the long water before her slow human pulse had counted to two. The eye, close to, was the eye she'd looked into the first night, the polished orange world, the circle the size of a shirt button, and there was nothing stupid in it. There was a town in it. There was a Saturday street with the faces tipped up and an old man with a stopwatch and a name in gold leaf on a board in a club behind a café, and a dark blue cock coming home at the edge of the light in 1958, and a man at the wrong end of the heide who'd had it taken off him and gone smaller every year, and a tin under a loose board with a confession in it in the same ink as the breeding cards — the whole story, banked and shining in a circle the size of a shirt button, looking up at her without giving anything away.

She held the hen and felt the pull of it come up through her hands like current up a wire.

Not the bird's pull. The pull of the thing the bird was. She could fly her. She had the hands; everyone said so; she could learn the rest off Jules in a season, and she could bring this hen to the edge of her form for July and put her in the basket for Barcelona, the same race, the same crossing, the great-great-grandchild of the bird that won it on a stolen handful of minutes, and the hen would come home off the sea the way they came home, and the town would lift its faces, and the name on the board would have a granddaughter under it now, a girl, a story, the line carried on, and they would love her. Not the cold-eye looking-away kind of love the town had for Bram. The other kind. The kind it had had for Staf for forty years. The kind she had spent fifteen years building herself never to want so it could never be taken off her.

It was right there in her two hands, the weight of it, light as a lie.

She put the hen back on the perch before her hands could decide anything her head hadn't, and she wiped them on Staf's anorak though there was nothing on them, and she said, in the flat voice, "She's not much, for the loft."

"No," Jules agreed, watching her. "She's not much."

The buyer came on the Saturday, which she should have expected, because Saturday was the day the town did its watching and a man who wanted a loft would come on the day the loft was at its work.

She knew him before he spoke. He was the square soft man from the funeral, the one in the coat too good for the heide, the one with the clean grey car and the driver, the one Bram had already talked to before Staf was cold. He came up the Pastoorstraat on foot this time, leaving the car at the corner, the way Gust had come on foot — they all came on foot for the last stretch, she was learning, the ones who wanted something off you, as though arriving in a car would have given the game away — and he stood at the gate in his good coat and said her grandfather's name like a password, Maes, and waited to be let up the path.

She let him up because not letting him up would have told him she was afraid of him, and she wasn't going to tell him that.

"You'll be the granddaughter." He had a soft careful voice to go with the soft careful hands, a man from up by Antwerp who bought lines, Bram had said, who knew what a thing was worth and never once said so out loud, which is how you can tell the dangerous ones. He looked down the garden at the loft, at the wire, at the birds, and his face did nothing, which was a thing she'd learned to read off Marcel: the flat face is the tell, the flat face is a man holding a number behind his teeth so hard it costs him. "Lovely morning for them," he said. "After the wet."

"It's grand."

"I knew your opa. To buy off, here and there, over the years. A bird now and then. He'd never sell me the line, the old devil." A small soft laugh. "Said it'd go to the boy. We know how that turned out." He let his eyes come back up the garden to her, mild as milk. "I was sorry. He was a great flyer. The greatest this corner of the country ever made, and that's not flattery, you can ask anyone, you can read the board at the club."

"I've read it."

"Then you know what you're sitting on." And there it was, gentle, the soft glove with the number in the fist of it. He did not look at the loft when he said it. He looked at her, and his voice went lower and kinder, the voice you'd use on a frightened animal or a frightened child. "I'll be plain with you, because you're young and you've enough men in good coats not being plain with you, I'd say. You can't fly that loft. I mean no offence by it; nobody could, at fifteen, no more than I could go down a pit. You'll lose them over France this summer, the good ones first, because the good ones are the ones you basket for the hard races, and the hard races are where they go down. By autumn you'll have a half-empty hok and a dead man's name in the ground twice over. Or."

"Or."

"Or you let it go to someone who'll keep it whole. The whole line, kept, bred on, raced by hands that know how — your grandfather's blood flying for another forty years instead of dying in a wet summer with a girl who couldn't have known better." He named no figure. He never would; that wasn't how it was done. He let the shape of it sit in the air, a sum with the edges left soft. "It'd clear your father. It'd clear him and leave you both standing. It'd put you on whatever train you've a mind to get on. And the line lives." He spread the soft hands, the same gesture Bram made, the same gesture Gust made, the town's one gesture, the spreading of the hands that meant be reasonable, there's no other way, everyone agrees. "Everybody wins, meiske. That's the rare thing. Everybody wins."

She thought of the card. The column climbing out of the hole to the worn name at the top. You're not buying a bird. You're buying everything it'll ever throw. She thought of the soft man's hands closing around De Late the way her own had, the heart going against his fingers, the circle the size of a shirt button with the whole town banked in it, and she thought about what the buyer didn't know, would never be told, was being asked to pay a fortune to own — that he wanted the line of De Sint, and the line of De Sint was the line of a stolen Sunday, and the price he was naming with his soft mouth was, to the franc, the price of a man at the wrong end of the heide going smaller every year for forty years, sold on, bred on, raced for another forty under whatever loft name had the money to take it.

Everybody wins.

"It's not for sale," she said.

The soft face stayed soft. That was the worst of it, that it cost him nothing, that he'd been told no by old men a hundred times and had got everything he'd ever got by being the man who came back. "It's a working loft," he said, mild. "It has to fly this season or it goes to the club or it's sold. That's the will; I've had it read to me; your father saw to that." He smiled, small and kind and terrible. "You'll fly it badly and lose half of it, or you'll come to me in August when the good ones are dead and the rest is worth half. Either way." He touched his cap, a man who'd said his piece and trusted reason to do the rest, the way they all trusted reason. "I'm patient. Lines are worth waiting for. Your opa taught me that." And he went off down the Pastoorstraat to where the grey car waited at the corner, unhurried, getting smaller the way the town made everything smaller as it went toward its edge.

Bram was in the kitchen when she came in. He had not gone to the café yet; it was early for him, not yet noon, and he was at the table with his hands flat on the wood and a look on him she didn't see often, a look almost like waiting. He'd seen the grey car at the corner. He'd seen the soft man come up the street.

"What did he offer," Bram said.

"Nothing. He never offers. That's the point of him."

"But you know the shape of it."

"I know the shape of it."

He nodded, slow, his hands flat on the table, and she saw that he'd worked it out too, the same arithmetic, the only arithmetic he was ever any good at — what the line was worth, what it would clear, what would be left over, the train, the slate wiped, the standing-up-straight. She saw him want it the way a thirsty man wants a glass that's a foot too far. And then she saw him do a thing he almost never did, which was hold the wanting and not reach.

"It'd clear me," he said. Not asking. Saying it out loud to hear how it sounded, the way you say a number to know if you can afford it. "You know that. It'd clear everything."

"I know."

"And it's worth more than the both of us," he said. "It's the most money this family will ever have its hands on, that shed full of birds, more than your opa earned in his whole life going down the hole, more than the house, more than—" He stopped. His hands were flat on the table and they were not steady. "And he left it to you. Knowing what it's worth. Knowing what I owe. He left the fortune to the kid who doesn't even—" The word, again, the one that landed every time. He didn't finish it. "Why," he said instead, and for once it wasn't grievance. It was a man asking a thing he genuinely didn't understand, his father's son, passed over, looking at his daughter across a scarred table. "Why you. Why not the money in the bank and the line gone to someone who could—" He spread his hands, the gesture, the town's one gesture. "Why hang it on you?"

And she could have told him. The tin was upstairs under the loose board, the confession in the same ink as the cards she'd held that morning, the answer to why you sitting in a biscuit tin with a king and queen worn to grey on the lid. Because he couldn't give it back and keep me loving him. Because I'm the one he told. Because the line is poisoned at the root and he handed me the only thing he ever loved knowing it was the thing he'd ruined a man for, and he didn't leave it to you because he knew you'd sell it, and he didn't leave it to the club because he knew they'd bury it, and he left it to me because—

Because what.

She didn't know yet. That was the truth she sat in, watching her father's unsteady hands flat on the wood. She knew the what of it now — the lie, the clock, the Bery debt, De Late off De Sint, the whole shape of it assembled. She didn't yet know the why-her, the reason the old man had reached up out of three days dead and hung all of it round her neck instead of taking it into the ground clean. There was a last thing she hadn't read. The confession had pages she'd held out on, the way she'd held out four days on the first line; she'd read the fix and stopped before the end, because the fix was a thing you could hold at arm's length and the end, she suspected, was not.

"I don't know why me," she said, which was true, and not the whole of it.

Bram looked at her a while. Then he took his hands off the table, the wanting put away somewhere, and reached for his coat, going to the café at last, going to be a man who'd been passed over, which gave him somewhere to be.

At the door he stopped. He didn't turn round.

"If you're going to sell," he said, to the door, "sell before August. He's right about that, the soft one. After August it's worth half." And then, lower, the closest he could come, his back to her, to the door, to the daughter he'd failed: "And if you're not going to sell, then don't lose them, Lies. Whatever you do with that shed. Don't be the one that loses them." And he went out into the wet, and she stood in the kitchen with the card still in her head, the column climbing to the worn name, the hen on the third perch worth more than the house, and the one page in the tin she hadn't yet had the nerve to read.

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.

Chapter Fourteen — The Number

The card had been in the kitchen drawer under the spare keys and the dead batteries and the rubber bands gone hard with age for as long as Lieselot could remember, and she had not once taken it out to look at it, which was its own kind of looking, the way you can know to the centimetre where a sore tooth is by the path your tongue takes around it.

It was a business card, which was the strange thing. Not a letter, not a photograph. A card for a hairdresser's in Genk — Salon Christiane, Coiffure Dames — with a phone number printed on it in curled gold letters, and on the back, in a hand Lieselot would have known anywhere because it was half her own, three lines in blue biro: the salon was where she worked Tuesday to Saturday; the home number was the other one, ring after six; and underneath, the thing that had sat in the drawer for four years going soft at the edges like the funeral tin, Bel maar. Wanneer ge wilt. Call. Whenever you want.

Whenever. As if want were a tap you could turn.

She'd carried it down the Pastoorstraat in the pocket of the anorak with the logbook page folded flat in the other pocket against her hip, because she had not been able to make herself leave the logbook in the house with Bram in it, and because she had not been able to make herself put it in the loft either, where the tin already was, under the board, as if the two halves of the thing oughtn't to be kept too close together in case they finished saying what they meant. So she'd carried both. The proof of one robbery against one hip and the proof of another against the other, and walked down to the phone box at the end of the dead high street, where the call could be a thing that happened away from the house, in glass, where she could leave it when she left.

The box stood on the corner by the shuttered frituur and the bank that had become a place that sold curtains and then become nothing, just a window with the gold lettering of the bank ghosting through the whitewash, the way the king and queen ghosted through the lid of the tin, the way everything in this town was a thing with an older truer thing showing through it if you stood at the right angle. The box had its panes, most of them. One was starred where someone had put a fist or a head through it years ago and never finished. The light inside came on when she pulled the door to, a buzzing yellow light that made the glass go to mirror so that the street disappeared and there was only her, narrow and grey, with the receiver in her hand.

She had a fistful of francs, the old ones, Baudouin still on them, the dead king. She fed two into the slot and they went down with a sound like a clock taking a tooth, and she dialled the home number off the back of the card, ring after six, and it was twenty past, and she stood in the box in the buzzing yellow with the south of the sky going down behind her in the smeared glass and listened to it ring in a town she'd never seen.

It rang four times. Then it stopped, and there was the small particular hiss of a line opened a long way off, and a voice said, "Ja, hallo?"

And Lieselot found she had nothing ready. She had thought she'd had a thing ready. She'd had it ready the whole walk down. But the voice was a real voice, warm and a little tired, a woman who'd just come in from somewhere and was standing in a hall in her coat, maybe, the way Wendy stood in doorways, half gone already, and the voice was hers, half hers, the half that wasn't Maes, and Lieselot stood in the glass and said nothing for a beat too long, the way she'd said nothing too long at Wendy, the way the receiver in 1958 — no. There was no 1958 in this. This was hers.

"Hallo?" the voice said again, and then, careful, the way you are with a silent line, "Wie is dat?"

"It's me," Lieselot said.

The hiss changed. You could hear a thing happen in it, a held breath let down a wire.

"Lieselot," her mother said. Not a question. She'd known on it's me. That was the part Lieselot hadn't braced for, that a woman four years gone would know her on two words, would have kept the shape of her voice all this time the way Lieselot had kept the path around the tooth. "Lieselot. Amai." A small wet laugh, gone as soon as it came. "I'd nearly — I thought it might be. I don't know why. I had a feeling, this week."

"Opa died," Lieselot said.

A silence. Coins counting down in the slot, that small steady eating.

"I know," her mother said. "I heard. Someone — I heard." She didn't say who. There was a whole town behind that someone, a whole net of who-tells-who that ran out past the edge of the map and found a woman in a hall in Genk and told her the old man was in the ground, and hadn't told her in time, or she'd not have come, or she'd not been asked, and none of that got said. "I wanted to ring you. I had the — I sat with the phone. I didn't know if you'd want." A pause. "I'm glad you rang."

"He left me the birds," Lieselot said.

She hadn't meant to lead with it. She'd meant to say nothing about the birds. But it came out of her like the held breath off the wire, because it was the true centre of everything now and she had no one to say the true centre to, not Wendy, not Bram, not Jules even, who knew the craft of it but not the rot, and here was a voice four years gone that owed her nothing and would carry it nowhere, a voice in glass at the end of the dead street.

"The birds," her mother said, and there was the old thing in it at once, quick, before she could put it away — a flinch, a curled lip you could hear down a wire. "He left you his birds. Not — " She stopped. "Not the house?"

"The house went to Bram."

"Of course it did." A breath. "And the birds went to you. Tuurlijk." And then, lower, almost to herself, "He never gave that man one thing that mattered in his whole life and he gave the girl a shed full of pigeons. That's — " She caught it. "Sorry. Sorry, schat. I shouldn't. I'm glad he — he loved you. He did love you. He'd lift you up to that window, you won't remember—"

"I remember."

"—to the window, so you'd see his bird come in. You were tiny. You'd shout when you saw it. Daar, daar. He'd have walked into the sea for you." She said it the way you say a thing you've decided to be at peace with and aren't. "He couldn't say a kind word to a grown person to save his life and he'd have walked into the sea for you. That's the Maes of it. They love down and they don't love sideways. There's no room in them for sideways."

The coins ate. Lieselot fed another in without looking, her eyes on the smeared glass, on the last of the light going behind the curtain-shop window, behind the ghost of the bank.

"Come here," her mother said.

It came so quietly Lieselot almost missed it under the line-hiss.

"What?"

"Come here. To me. I've a flat, it's small, but there's — you could have the back room, it's small but it's yours, it gets the morning. There's a school, a good one, a real school with a — they do the languages, the sciences, the lot, not like the — there's a future in it, Lieselot. You could finish there. You're clever, you were always the clever one, everybody said. You don't have to be — " She stopped on the edge of saying what. "You don't have to stay there. You don't have to be the one that stayed. Sell the birds. Whatever they're worth — and they're worth something, I know what they're worth, I lived with it long enough — sell them and come, and you'd never have to look at a pigeon or a slag heap or that café full of dead men again in your life."

And there it was. Laid out clean on the wire. The list, her own list, the one she'd built herself for fifteen years: a train that went past the city, a school with the sciences, a room that got the morning, out — the whole of it, offered, free, by the one person in the world who'd done it, who'd got out, who was proof you could. Lieselot stood in the glass box and looked at her own grey narrow face hung in the mirror the light made, and waited to feel the thing she'd spent fifteen years sure she'd feel if this door ever opened.

She felt the logbook against her hip.

That was the thing she felt. Not the offer. The folded paper at her hip with Frans Bery's neat dead pencil-hand on it, the time of a win that never got written down anywhere it counted, and the tin under the board with the other half of it, the clock that lied and the book of money sent forty years to a man who knew and couldn't prove and got smaller every year. Sell the birds. You could. You could sell the birds and the bloodline went south to some loft up by Antwerp or east into Holland and the line of the 58 flew on under a stranger's name and nobody ever had to say whose win it was built on, and the town kept its legend, and Frans Bery stayed second in the only book the world keeps, forever, and Lieselot got the back room that got the morning. You could buy your way out with it. The price was just leaving the lie exactly where it was.

Her mother had done that. Not the lie — her mother didn't know the lie, her mother had walked out years before the tin ever told Lieselot anything. But she'd done the other thing. She'd looked at the whole of it, the dead town and the dead king and the men who loved down and never sideways, and she'd weighed it, and she'd left it exactly where it was and walked, and got the flat that got the morning, and was, four years on, standing in a hall in her coat ringing nobody, waited on by no one, known to one girl who hadn't called in four years and called now only because there was a thing she couldn't carry and needed a voice that would take it nowhere.

She'd got out. She just hadn't got free. You could hear it down the wire, under the warmth, the thin place in it — the sound of a person who'd left the weight where it was and found out the hard way that leaving a weight is not the same as not carrying it; that some weights you carry by the very act of leaving them, that they go where you go, lighter only in the way a stone is lighter when you throw it, for exactly as long as it's in the air.

"You hear me?" her mother said. "Lieselot? Say something."

"I'm here," she said.

"Will you come? You don't have to say now. But will you think — "

"I can't sell them," Lieselot said.

It came out flat, the way the true things came out of her, no weight on it, and her mother heard the no in it and was quiet a moment.

"Why not," she said. Not unkind. Tired. A woman who'd thought she was holding a door and felt it not swing.

And Lieselot stood in the glass and looked for the answer and found she didn't have it in words, not the real one, not the one with the tin in it and the logbook and the handful of minutes and a dead man's neat pencil hand. She had only the shape of it. She had the thing she'd felt at her hip instead of in her chest. So she gave the small true wrong thing, the armour, the way she always did, because the real one wouldn't come.

"There's a season on them," she said. "In the will. They have to be flown or they go to the club. There's a — it's complicated."

"That's him," her mother said at once, and the flinch was back, sharp. "That's him to the bone. Reaching up out of the ground to put a leash on you. He couldn't just give you a thing, could he, he had to tie it to you, he had to — God, even dead. Even dead he's got his hand on the back of your neck steering you down the garden." A breath. "Don't let him. Lieselot. That's what I'm — that's the whole of what I'm saying to you. Don't let a dead man's birds be the thing that — I let this town put its hand on the back of my neck for years and the only thing I ever did right was take its hand off. You take its hand off. You're fifteen. You take the hand off now and you never have to learn how heavy it gets."

And it was good advice. That was the worst of it, standing in the box with the coins eating down: it was good, clean, true advice, the advice Lieselot would have given herself a month ago, the advice that matched her list line for line. Take the hand off now. And a month ago she'd have taken it. A month ago there was no logbook at her hip and no tin under the board and no Frans Bery in the back of any room, knowing, and no morning at the loft window with a cock snapping home out of an emptied sky like a held breath let go, and no Jules saying voel with two fingers along a keel, none of it; a month ago the birds were just the smell from childhood she meant to leave behind, and the hand on the back of her neck was just the town, and you could take a town's hand off and walk.

But it wasn't the town's hand now. That was the thing she couldn't say down a wire to a woman in a hall in Genk. It wasn't the town that had its hand on her. It was the truth. The truth had its hand on the back of her neck, steering her down the garden, and you couldn't take the truth's hand off and call it freedom. You could only walk out from under it and call the walking freedom and find out, four years on, in a flat that got the morning, that you'd carried it the whole way after all, lighter only while you were in the air.

"I have to go," Lieselot said. "The coins are nearly — "

"Wait. Wacht. Lieselot. Have you got a pen, write the home number again, the salon's on the — "

"I've got the card."

"You've got — " Her mother stopped. Lieselot heard her understand that the card had been in the house four years, in the drawer, under the keys, and that her daughter had known to the centimetre where it was the whole time and not touched it, and that this was the first call and might be the last for a while, and that she could not make it be otherwise from a hall in Genk with her coat still on. "You've got the card," she said, quieter. "Right. Then you've got the number. You ring it. Whenever you — you ring it, Lieselot. The room's there. It's a small room but it gets the morning, and it's yours, and the offer doesn't have a season on it, you hear me? There's no season on my door. You come whenever. There's no clock on it."

There's no clock on it. Lieselot stood in the glass with the receiver gone warm against her ear and the last francs counting down and looked at her own face in the mirror the light made, and thought, with a flat clear cold she'd carry out of that box and down the dead street and not be able to put down: that's the difference, then. That's the whole of it. Her mother's door had no clock on it because nothing was riding on it. You could walk through a door with no clock any day of your life and it would change nothing, ever, because the thing on the other side of it asked nothing of you and was owed nothing by you and would be there the same whether you came at fifteen or fifty or never. A door with no clock was just a way out. And the loft — the tin, the logbook, the season counting down to a race across the sea, the choice with a date on it — the loft had a clock on it the way honest things have clocks on them, because something was riding on it, because it would matter forever exactly when and how she walked through, because it was owed and owing both, and you could not get a thing like that for free, and you could not leave a thing like that and be free of it, you could only choose it or carry it, and either way it had its hand on the back of your neck.

She had wanted out her whole life. She had built herself for the door with no clock.

She stood in the glass and understood she wasn't going to walk through it, and could not have said why in any words her mother would not have heard as the town's hand on her neck, the dead man's leash, the very thing her mother had spent her one brave act getting free of — and so she said none of it, and that was the loneliest part of the call, lonelier than the hiss, lonelier than the dead king on the coins: that she had finally understood the difference between getting out and getting free, and there was no one on the wire who could be told it, because the one person who'd know it in her bones was the one person it would sound, to, exactly like a fifteen-year-old being steered down a garden by a dead man's hand.

"I have to go," she said. "Dag, mama."

"Lieselot — "

The last coin went down with the small sound of a clock taking a tooth, and the line gave a tone, flat and even, the sound of a thing finished, and Lieselot stood with the dead receiver warm against her ear a moment longer than she needed to before she hung it on the hook.

The light buzzed. Her grey face hung in the mirror the light made. She pushed the door and the box let her go and the light went out behind her and the glass gave the street back — the shuttered frituur, the ghost of the bank, the curtain-shop, the winding-gear black at the end of it all against a sky gone the colour of the inside of a shell. The receiver, she found when she put her hand back to the door to steady it, the receiver behind the glass was still warm where she'd had it, holding the heat of the call after the call was dead, the way a thing holds the shape of what's left it for a little while before it lets go, and then lets go.

She walked back up the dead high street with the logbook against one hip and the card against the other and the south of the sky going out behind her, and she did not look back at the box, and she did not feel free, and she understood now that she never would, not the way her mother had meant it, not the door-with-no-clock way; that the only freedom on offer to her now was the other kind, the kind with a clock on it and a price and a date, and that she had just, standing in a glass box on a dead corner, declined the only version of out she'd ever wanted in her life, and not for the birds, and not for Staf, and not even for the truth exactly — but because she had finally seen what was on the far side of the door with no clock, a woman in a hall in her coat, four years out and not one ounce lighter, and known it for what it was.

Not a way out. Just a way to be gone.

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.

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.

Chapter Seventeen — The Open Latch

She bolted the loft from the inside now, since Dries, and slept with the half-six alarm set the way you set a thing to make the dark shorter. So she knew the latch had been thrown. She knew it the way she knew the corn was low or a bird was off its water, in the hand before the head, because she'd done it herself the night before with her own two fingers and felt the cold bolt seat home in its keep, and there is a difference, in the body, between a thing you did and a thing you find done.

The latch was up.

It was not forced. That was the first thing, in the grey before the sun, with her breath going out of her in the cold and the dew not yet off the broom on the heap: nobody had put a bar to the door or a boot to it. The wood was sound. The keep was sound. The bolt had simply been drawn, neat, from the outside, by a hand that knew where it sat — and a hand only knows where a loft bolt sits if it has stood at that door before, on the right side of it, welcome.

She stood with her hand flat on the cold planks and did not open it for a moment. Inside, the birds were waking. She could hear the small dry shuffle of them, the click of a beak on a perch, the soft churr a cock makes turning over in the half-dark, the ordinary morning sound of forty bodies that did not know. She listened for the thing she was afraid of, which was silence, a loft gone quiet the way a house goes quiet, and it wasn't there. They were alive in there. They were only alive in there.

Then she opened the door, and the grey light went in ahead of her along the droppings boards, and she counted.

You learn to count a loft without counting. You learn the loft the way you learn a row of faces, so that what you read first is not a number but a wrongness, a gap where a gap shouldn't be, the same way she'd read the empty place at the wire the day the young cock didn't come off Quiévrain. She had Jules's eye now, four months of it, and her eye went down the perches the way it went, the breeders along the bottom, the cocks in their widowhood boxes, the hens shut off in the far compartment behind the wire, and it caught on the third box from the end before her head had done any arithmetic at all.

The box was open. Not the door — the nest-front, the little wire flap they kept down all season so the cock couldn't get at the hen, the whole engine of the method, weduwschap, the desire to get home to her wound up tight all season by never letting him have her. The flap was up. And the box was empty.

It was the old red cock. The hard one, the eight-year-old, the one Jules had pointed her at the second week and said that's a racer, that's a man, the one she'd basketed for the halve-fond and watched come home like a thing fired out of a gun. Gone. And the hen that was his, the little dark widow they kept him pining for, she was gone too, out of the far compartment, the wire there standing open the same neat way.

She stood in the middle of her grandfather's loft with the cold coming up through the concrete and understood, slowly, the way you understand a thing you'd rather not, that nobody had stolen the red cock.

Somebody had let him out with his hen.

She knew what it meant before she let herself know it. A widowhood cock is a coiled spring; the whole season is the not-having; you keep them apart for months so that when you basket him and show him the hen for an hour and then take her away again and put him in a basket pointed at a hundred kilometres of sky, he flies home through weather that kills birds because the only thing in the world is getting back to her. Give him the hen. Just give him the hen, one night, unwatched, in his own box, and you uncoil the spring. You spend the season in a night. He'd mate, and after that he'd be a soft thing, a contented thing, a bird with nothing left to fly home for, and there was no winding him back inside a fortnight; there was no winding him back at all this side of next year.

The race was Sunday. The fond. The first one long enough that you sent them and didn't see them till morning, the first one across real water.

She let the hen go back where she belonged and she shut the wire and she stood there. The red cock came down off the box to her hand looking for corn, fat and easy and ruined, rubbing his head along her wrist the way they did, pleased with himself, pleased with the world, the best bird in the loft and finished for the year, and she held him and felt the heart going slow and content under her two fingers, no edge to it, no spring, just a warm fed animal that had got, for once, the thing it wanted, and she had to put him down quick because her hands had started to shake and she didn't want to shake him.

She did not cry. She wanted to be clear about that, later, telling Jules. She had not cried. She'd stood in the loft with the ruined cock and shaken, and that was the body, the body did what it did, but she had not cried, because crying was for things that happened to you and this had not happened to her. This had been done to her, by a hand that knew the bolt, and you do not cry at a thing somebody chose.

Jules came up the garden in his good cap because she'd phoned the café and said only can you come, and he stood in the door of the loft and looked at the open box and the red cock down on the floor sunning himself in his own contentment and Jules did not ask what happened. He knew what happened. He'd kept widowhood cocks for sixty years.

"When," he said.

"In the night. The bolt was drawn this morning. Drawn, not broke."

He took that in. He went and crouched at the latch, his knees going off like the building, and looked at it close, the way she'd looked, and ran a thumb along the keep, and didn't say anything for a while. Then he stood and went to the red cock and picked him up and felt him, the keel, the warmth, lifted a wing, set him down again, and his face when he set the bird down was the worst thing she'd seen on it. Not anger. She'd have known what to do with anger. It was a kind of tiredness, the look of a man who has seen the same wrong come round again on a long enough wheel that he recognises it.

"This wasn't Dries," he said.

"It wasn't forced."

"No. That's what I'm telling you." He wiped his hands down his trousers though they weren't dirty. "Dries Bery'd put a boot through that door and not care who heard. Dries'd take a bird, the bird, the one bird, and leave you the door swinging so you'd know it was him — that's a Bery, that's a wound walking, they want you to see it." He shook his head, slow. "This is quiet. This is somebody who didn't want it found till it couldn't be put back. Somebody who knew which box and which hen and where the bolt sits." He looked at her. "Somebody from the club's been in your loft on a friendly Sunday and watched your grandfather do his birds and watched you do yours, and last night he came back and undid you with the door shut behind him so the neighbours slept."

She sat down on the upturned feed bucket because her legs wanted it.

"Who," she said.

Jules didn't answer that straight. He was an old man and he did things in order. He went out into the garden where the light was coming up over the green heap and he stood with his back to her looking at the south of the sky the way they all did without meaning to, and when he spoke it was to the sky.

"You know what the worst of this town is," he said. "It isn't that it's poor. We were always poor, poor's nothing, poor you can stand up in. It's that there's nothing left in it to want except one thing, and so everything you can want, somebody can buy you with. There's no work, so a man'll do a job for the price of a job and never mind whose. There's no future, so a man'll sell next year for this week, because what's next year. There's nothing left but the birds and the talk of the birds, and so a man'll trade his own grandfather to be the one telling the talk." He turned round. "I'm not making a speech. I'm telling you why you'll not find it written on anybody's face. They didn't do it out of badness. That's what'll break your heart if you let it. They did it out of nothing. Out of a town that pays in nothing and so its men cost nothing."

"René," she said.

She watched it land on him, and he didn't deny it, the way Gust hadn't denied it, and she thought she could measure her whole summer by the men who, when she said a true thing, did not bother to put a hand up.

"He's been short," Jules said, after a while, like that was an answer, and it was. "His Annick's wee one's bad and the gas was cut in March, I heard it, everybody heard it. And he was down the loft with your opa a hundred Sundays, René, he knows this hok like his own. He knows the bolt." He stopped. "Somebody put money in front of a man who's been short, and told him a job that didn't even look like a job. Open a box. Let a bird have his hen. Where's the harm — they're only pigeons, sure, they'll have a grand night of it." Jules's mouth went thin. "And that's the genius of it, you see. He didn't kill anything. He didn't take anything. There's nothing to bring to a guard. A man let two birds love each other one night. Find me the crime in it."

"Dries," she said. "He paid René."

"Or Marcel paid him without knowing what Dries does with the money. Or nobody paid him for this — Dries gave him forty francs to do a small ugly thing and never said which one, and René picked the box himself because René knows which box hurts." Jules shrugged, and there was a whole grief in the shrug. "You'll not get to the bottom of it, Lieselot. That's the other thing about this place. Nothing's ever the whole way one man's fault. It's always a town's worth of small nothings, each one too small to hang anybody, adding up to a ruined bird. That's how it cheated Frans Bery and that's how it's cheating you, the same machine, forty years on, and there's nobody at the middle of it to hit."

She heard him say the same machine and she felt the floor of the morning go.

Because it was. She'd been reading the tin for months like it was history, like it was a thing that had happened once, to her grandfather, in a year before she was born, a sealed thing in a sealed box. And here it was again, out in the open, in her own loft, in the cold of an ordinary Tuesday — a result corrupted not by a villain but by a town that paid a short man in nothing and bought his hands. A man who'd been welcome at the door. A bolt that knew the hand that drew it. Staf had been the welcome hand once. Staf had been the man bought with the one thing the town had to offer, which was being the one they told the story about, and he'd opened a thing he shouldn't and undone a man in the quiet so the neighbours slept, and called it nothing, a handful of minutes, where's the harm. René had just done to her the smaller, cleaner version of the exact thing her grandfather had done to Frans Bery, and neither of them had thought of himself as a thief, and that was the horror of it, that the town didn't even need a villain. It only needed men with nothing, and one box that mattered, and the dark.

"I'll go to Gust," she said, and heard how young it sounded the second it was out.

Jules looked at her almost kindly. "And say what. That a bird got out of his box. That a latch was open in the morning. You've no boot-print, no broken door, no witness, and a club full of men who'll tell you a wire works loose, a hen squeezes through, it happens, the girl's overwrought, her opa not cold." He shook his head. "And Gust — Gust'd be sorry. He would. He's not a hard man, Gust, that's what makes him dangerous. He'd be sorry and he'd say let's not make a thing of it, no need to drag the club through it, no proof, and he'd mean every word, and at the end of it your bird's still ruined and now you're the one who made trouble in the lokaal over a pigeon. You'd hand him the thing he wants, which is you, loud and wrong and easy to wave away." He came and stood over her. "No. You say nothing. You let them think you don't know, or you don't care, or you're too green to read your own box. You let René look at you across the bar and not know what you know. And you fly Sunday with one less than you meant to, and you fly the rest of them so hard it's an answer."

"That's not justice."

"No," Jules said. "It's pigeons. Justice you do at the end, the once, in front of everybody, and you'd better be right and you'd better be ready, because you only get to do it the one time. The rest of the time you keep the birds. You hear me? Whatever else, whoever's in your loft in the night, whatever this town costs you — you keep the birds, and you keep them honest, and that's the whole of what you can do till July." He put his old hand on her shoulder the way Gust had, the same gesture exactly, and it was a different thing entirely, and she felt the difference go through her like warmth off a wall that was actually warm. "You've still got her," he said quiet. "They didn't touch her. Whoever it was knew the box that'd hurt the most and they still left her be — too clever, maybe, or too feared, or they only had the one job in them. But she's down the back behind the wire and she never knew a thing went on. Go and look."

She went down the back. De Late was on the third perch in the half-dark with one foot tucked, the orange eye banking the grey light of the door, and she watched Lieselot come the way she watched everything, giving nothing, the whole sky in a circle the size of a shirt button and the night's small ruin gone clean past her, and Lieselot put two fingers under the keel and felt the heart going quick and high and clean and wanting, the spring still wound, still all there, and she stood in the cold and held the one bird they hadn't found, the one they'd built to win 1958 again, and understood that the only thing in the loft worth most was the only thing worth most to ruin, and that whoever knew the bolt knew that too, and had, this time, for whatever reason a bought man has, walked past her.

This time.

She bolted the loft. She drew the cold bolt home and stood and listened to it seat in the keep, and then she did a thing she had not planned, which was take the loft key off the nail by the back door where it had hung since before she was born, where every man who'd ever been welcome down the garden knew it hung, and put it in her pocket. A small thing. A thing that said, more than anything she could have said to Gust or René or any of them: no more friendly hands. The door her grandfather had left open to the town for forty years, the open door that was the same as the open clock, the welcome that was the road in — she shut it, and kept the key on her body, and felt the weight of it against her hip the way she'd felt the logbook page there, the small hard freight of a thing you've decided to carry alone.

Down the row a clock struck, a beat behind the church, and somewhere a man with nothing in his hands and a sick child and a cut gas line was getting up in the cold to do whatever the town would pay him for that Tuesday, and she did not hate him, which frightened her more than hating him would have. She went up the garden with the key in her pocket and the south of the sky going pale over the green heap, and she thought: there is nobody in this town clean enough to stand beside me when I do it, except an old man who can barely get up off his knees.

And then she thought, going in to make the coffee she would not drink: then it'll have to be me. Alone if it has to be. With the door shut and the key on my hip and one less bird than I meant, in front of all of them, the once.

She'd been telling them I'll think about it since June. She did not know, standing in the cold kitchen with the key warming in her pocket, the morning she would stop saying it. But she knew now, the way she'd known the latch was up before she opened the door, that she had already, somewhere under the floor of herself, begun to set the time.

Chapter Eighteen — The Colour of a Healed Bruise

The weather came up wrong on the Thursday and was worse by the Saturday, and every old man in the town knew it before the radio did.

You could feel it on the bricks. The wind had gone round into the south and west and then it had stopped going round at all, which was the thing Jules didn't like — a wind that picks a corner and sits in it is a wind with a mind made up — and there was a softness in the air off the church, a wet warmth that wasn't summer, the kind of warmth that comes ahead of a sky full of water. By Saturday afternoon the heap had its head in cloud. You couldn't see the top of the terril from the garden, the green of it gone grey, going up into nothing, and Lieselot stood scraping the boards with the door open and watched the cloud sit down on the one mountain the town had ever built like something settling in to stay.

The race was a fond from Limoges. Six hundred kilometres and a bit, the longest she'd flown a team into, the last hard one before the grote fond — Jules called it the dress rehearsal and then was sorry he'd called it that, because a dress rehearsal is a thing you can do twice and a bird you put on the wing over six hundred kilometres of bad July you might only get to do once.

She'd basketed seven. Six of Jules's choosing and one of her own, and the one of her own was the bird called Sus.

She hadn't named him. Staf had. It was on his breeding card in the dead man's pencil — Sus, blauwe doffer, 1992 — a slate-blue cock two years old, broad in the hand and quiet in the basket, a son of the slate breeder off a hen that went four ways back to De Sint without ever getting close enough to it to be worth money. Not the line's crown. Not anything anyone but her would have looked at twice. Jules had run his thumb down the keel of him a fortnight ago and said he's honest, which was the highest thing Jules said about a bird that wasn't going to win you anything, and Lieselot had heard it and put the cock in her own three on the strength of it, and then quietly taken two of her three out again so it was only Sus, because she'd noticed, the way you notice you've started doing a thing only after you've done it a while, that she went to his box first in the morning. Before the good ones. Before De Late even, in her clean section, kept apart and fed careful and never on the wing this side of Barcelona. She went to Sus first and he came up the wire to her hand without being made to, and she'd thought, don't, the way Staf must once have thought don't, and had done it anyway.

She didn't tell Jules that part. She told Jules he was honest and good for the distance and she wanted to see what he'd do, which was true and was also the kind of true you say instead of the other one.

They basketed at the lokaal on the Friday evening with the rain holding off and everyone pretending it would keep holding.

Gust sealed her clock with the red wax and the brass die, the crest over the keyhole, his dry warm hand on the box, and said fly well the way he said it now, every time, the same two words, and she took them the way she'd learned to take them since the night with the board — as the first coin of a wage she hadn't agreed to draw. The clock that had been Staf's working clock, the honest one, the one with nothing wrong in it, went into the basket of clocks under the seal of a man who'd known for forty years, and Lieselot watched the wax go on and thought of the other clock, the one at home under the loose board, the brass one with the 58 scratched in the base and no seal on it at all, broken open once and kept, and how the only difference between the two clocks in the whole world was that somebody, one Sunday, had decided the difference between them didn't matter.

Fons Beckers loaded the convoy. The men stood about in the yard while he did it, hands in pockets, faces up at the cloud, saying the things they said.

"He'll have it on the nose all the way."

"Headwind from Limoges he'll have it three days."

"Not three days. Don't say three days."

"I'm saying what the wind's saying."

"The wind doesn't know about my electric bill," said René, and a couple of them laughed, the dry short laugh, and Mon said the thing about a fond race being a tax you pay the sky for the good years, and they all knew which good years he meant, and nobody looked at the back of the lokaal where the board was. They never did, out here. The board was for the dark room. Out here in the yard there was only the convoy filling up, basket by basket, a thousand birds from a dozen dead towns going south in a truck to be thrown at the weather in the dark of Sunday morning, and the men watching them go the way men watch a thing they've sent for them so they don't have to feel it for themselves.

Lieselot put Sus's basket up to Fons last. The cock sat low and easy, his eye gone to a black bead in the bad light, and she had her two fingers along his keel one more time without deciding to, reading the warm worked muscle of him, the silk of the feather, the heart going its fast small going under her hand like a thing trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had. Then Fons took the basket and slid it home and shut the door on it.

"Bring him back, Fons," she said, which you weren't supposed to say. It was bad luck and worse manners; the convoyer brings them to the start, the sky brings them home, and a duivenmelker who can't carry that between the two is a duivenmelker who's going to have a hard life. Fons looked at her, an old man with a clipboard, and didn't tell her off.

"I bring them to Limoges," he said. "That's all that's mine."

It rained Saturday night the way it had been threatening to since Thursday, a real rain, the gutters going and the bricks black and the church bell coming muffled through it as if even God's clock had got the cold. Lieselot lay awake and listened to it and thought about a truck on a motorway somewhere south of here full of birds in the dark, and about the sky over the Pyrenees they hadn't even got to yet, and about Sus low in his basket with his eye gone to a bead, and she got up twice and stood at her window looking at the rain coming down past the streetlight and told herself it would clear by morning where the birds were, that it always cleared somewhere, that the weather here wasn't the weather there.

It did not clear by morning where the birds were. Fons rang the lokaal at six and the lokaal rang round, and the word came up the street the slow way bad word comes, mouth to mouth: held. The lossing held over. Too thick to throw them into. They'd sit another day in the baskets in the south, fed and watered and going stale, and the men in the gardens looked at the sky that had cleared, here, gone a clean rinsed blue, here, where there were no birds, and said nothing, because there is nothing to say to a clear sky over an empty garden.

They let them up Monday morning. Eight o'clock, late, the weather only half cleared down there, a headwind out of the north sitting against them the whole long way home. A thousand birds thrown at six hundred kilometres of wind in one roar, and then the wait.

Jules came round Monday afternoon with his flask and his stool and his radio that got the union frequency, and they set up at the loft window the way they always did, and Lieselot understood without being told that this was a wait that was going to be different from the others, because Jules had brought two flasks.

"They'll not have it today," he said, settling the stool. "Not into that. The good lofts down south might steal one in tonight if the wind drops, the ones near the coast. Us, we're a long way back. We're a morning bird at best, this one. More like two mornings."

"Two."

"Or three." He said it the way you say a number you don't like but won't lie about. "It's a hard one, Lieselot. I told you. You don't put them on the wing into a wind like that and get to choose when they're back. The wind chooses." He poured the tea. "You watch the sky, you don't watch the clock. The clock's a liar on a day like this. It'll tell you four hours is a long time and it isn't. It'll tell you they should be here and they shouldn't. You watch the sky and you let the clock alone."

So she watched the sky.

The first afternoon, nothing. Of course nothing — six hundred kilometres into a headwind, no bird in Belgium was home that nobody, that evening the radio said a loft on the coast had clocked one at half seven, one bird, and the whole union went quiet down the airwaves the way a church goes quiet, because if the coast was only just getting them at half seven then everybody inland was a long, long way off, and Lieselot heard the men's silence come down the radio and understood it was the silence of a thousand gardens all doing the same arithmetic at once and not liking the answer.

She slept three hours and was at the window before light.

Tuesday they came.

Not all at once. They came the way fond birds come off a bad race, in ones, hours apart, beaten — you could see it before they dropped, the way they came in low and heavy and crooked over the roofs, not the clean fast snap of a vitesse bird coming home fresh but a thing that had been three days getting here and had used itself up doing it. The first of hers came at twenty past nine, a yellow cock of Jules's pick, and he hit the board hard and went straight in to the water and stood in it to his hocks and drank like he'd flown over a desert, which in a way he had, the desert being the air, six hundred kilometres of it pushing back. Jules clocked him. The chunk of the key, the time onto the drum, the honest sound.

"One," Jules said. "Good lad. There's one."

They came through the morning. By noon she had four of the seven. By two she had five. Each one the same — low, heavy, crooked, then the water, then the corn it was too tired to eat — and each one she caught and stripped the gummiring off and Jules clocked, and each one that dropped she felt the thing in her chest that she'd spent fifteen years building herself not to feel, the lift of it, there, there's one, and then the going-down after, because a bird home is a bird home but a bird home means the sky behind it is emptier by one and there are two still in it.

The fifth was the slate cock's brother, and Jules looked at the two missing and looked at the sky and didn't say anything for a while.

By the afternoon the radio had gone past the union's good lofts and was reading the back-of-the-field times, the slow ones, the ones nobody won anything on, and Lieselot understood that the race was decided now, that somewhere a man on the coast had a velocity that would put his name in a paper, and that what she was waiting on now was nothing to do with the race at all. The race was over. This was the other thing. This was just whether they came back.

The sixth came at half four. A hen. Crooked over the heap and in.

"Six," Jules said. "Six of seven, Lieselot. That's a good day's work in that weather. That's better than half the club'll do."

"There's seven."

"There's always one more than there is," Jules said, which was an old man's thing to say, and was true, and she hated it. "You count what's on the board. You don't count what's in the sky. There's nothing in the sky belongs to you. There never was. You feed them and you fly them and you watch, and the sky gives back what it gives back, and a man who counts what's in the sky is a man who's going to be poor his whole life over a thing he never had."

She knew which one was missing. She'd known since the fourth one came and it wasn't him.

1958.

Staf is twenty-four and the rain has come up out of the south the same way and the bird he is waiting on is not De Sint.

De Sint is home. De Sint came Sunday at the edge of the light, the bird of the town, the strong one, the one everyone watched — came home a second, a strong second, the best metres-per-minute in the heath and the second-best in the race, which is to say nothing, which is to say a man who is nearly the best in the world is a man nobody will remember, and Staf has done his sum three times at the kitchen table and the sum keeps saying second and second is nothing.

But there is another bird. A yellow hen of his own breeding, not the crown, not the one the town watched, a small honest hen he put in on his own account for the distance because he wanted to see what she'd do — and she has not come. Sunday, no. Monday, no. He stands at the loft window with the coal under his nails for good now and the cough he hides going in his chest, and he watches the south of the sky go down the way it goes down in July, and the yellow hen is not in it.

The town is at his gate by Monday evening. The town has heard about the second. The town does not want a second. The town has had nothing but seconds since the pit opened, a town full of men who went down a hole and came up second to the men who owned the hole, and they have come to Staf's gate to be told, this once, that one of them was first at something, and Staf stands at his own window with a clock on the table that says second and a yellow hen that says nothing and a town at his gate that wants a first, and the rain comes on again out of the south.

That is the night Door Vandersmissen comes round. Not the night of the offer. A night before it, a small night nobody will ever write down, the night the yellow hen doesn't come — and Door stands in the kitchen with his cap in his hand and looks at the clock that says second and says, low, a town like this, Staf, it can stand a lot. It stood the firedamp and it stood the foreigners and it stood the prices. The one thing it can't stand is to come second in front of the world when it had a chance to come first. You'd be doing them a mercy. And Staf says nothing, because the yellow hen is not in the sky, and a man standing at a window with one bird gone already does not have a great deal of faith left over to spend on the bird that's home.

The yellow hen never comes. Not Tuesday. Not ever. Six hundred kilometres of weather and she is somewhere under it, in a hedge, in a field, on a wire in the rain, a small honest bird nobody will remember either, and the only thing Staf has to show for the whole of that July is a clock that says second and a town at his gate, and the fear that comes up in him that night is not a fear of being caught, it has nothing to do with being caught, it is the fear of being nothing — of standing at a window his whole life waiting on birds that don't come, in a town that came second, having been, for one Sunday, that close to first and let it go.

He does it for the town, he tells himself. He will tell himself that for forty years.

He does it because the sky took the one bird and he could not stand to let it take the other.

Lieselot read it off the tape and the confession both, after, in the dark, the parts she'd read and re-read until she knew them the way you know a prayer you've stopped believing — but she didn't need the tape that Tuesday at the window. She had it without the tape. She had it in her own chest, watching the south of the sky go down over the green heap, the empty place at the wire where Sus should be and wasn't.

The sky went the long way down it goes in July. It went gold and then it went the colour she would not have a word for if she'd had a hundred years to find one — not red, not grey, a low bruised colour over the heap, the colour a bruise goes four days on when it's nearly better and you press it anyway just to feel that it still hurts, that colour, the whole western sky the colour of a healed bruise pressed, and into it no bird came.

Jules stayed till it was full dark and there was no use in either of them being at a window you couldn't see out of.

"Leave the trap open and a light on it," he said, getting up, his knees going. "Sometimes they come in the dark on the long ones. Worse than this have come in the dark." He folded the stool. He didn't say he'll come. He'd never once lied to her about a bird and he didn't start now, at the end of a hard one, when it would have cost him nothing and meant nothing and she'd have known. "Six of seven into that wind," he said instead. "You did right by them, Lieselot. The ones that came, they came to a loft kept right. That's all that's ever yours — that they had a home worth flying to. The rest is the sky."

He went up the garden in the dark, an old man who'd lost more birds to the south of the sky than she'd ever own, and she stood at the window with the trap open and the bulb on it throwing its yellow square out into the wet, and she did not tell herself it was the corn, and she did not tell herself he'd come, and she stayed.

She understood the thing she had not understood before, standing there.

She'd had it the easy way until now. Staf cheated, and cheating was a thing a bad man did or a weak man did, and she'd been able to hold him at the length of how could you, which is a length you can hold a man at and still feel clean yourself, still feel you'd have done the other thing, the hard right thing, in his shoes — because you've never stood in his shoes, you've only stood near them and felt superior. She'd been angry at him that clean way. She'd argued with him in the dark that clean way, the dead man and the live girl, you loved me and you lied to everyone, and the you lied had always had a clean floor under it, the floor of I never would.

The floor was gone now. Standing at the window with the bruise-coloured sky gone black and the empty wire and Sus not coming and the want in her chest she'd built herself a whole life not to feel, the want for one slate-blue ordinary cock that wasn't worth money and wouldn't win her anything and went up the wire to her hand in the mornings — standing there she felt, for the first time, all the way down, what it would be to have a clock on the table that said second and a town at your gate and a sky that had just taken the one thing you loved out of it, and a man in your kitchen with his cap in his hand saying you'd be doing them a mercy. She felt how a person could do it. Not a bad person. Not a weak one. A person standing at this exact window with this exact hole in the sky, terrified of being nothing, offered a way to make the loss mean something instead of nothing — offered, for a handful of minutes that were never really there, a first instead of a second, a something instead of the long bruised nothing of a sky that doesn't give your birds back.

She'd thought knowing the inside of it would make her softer on him. It made her afraid of herself instead. Because she was the kind who went to one ordinary bird's box first in the morning and didn't tell anyone, the kind who'd just said bring him back, Fons, against all the manners of the sport, because she couldn't carry the wait clean either. His to the bone, Gust had said, and meant the gift, the hands, the eye. It ran deeper than the hands. She had the hole in the sky too.

She left the trap open all night and the bulb burning, and stood at the window long past any use, watching the black square of the south where no bird came. Sus was somewhere under the weather, in a hedge, on a wire in the rain, a small honest bird nobody would remember — taken the way the yellow hen was taken forty years ago, the same sky, the same race almost, the same window. And the question that came up in her then was not whether she could forgive Staf. It was whether, when her own clock came to lie to her — and the season was built to put exactly that offer in her hands — she'd have anything in her stronger than the want and the fear and the empty bruise-coloured wire to make her set it down.

She turned the bulb off near morning. Left the trap. Went up the garden in the grey light to get an hour's sleep before she had to want him home all over again.

He didn't come Tuesday.

Chapter Nineteen — Faces Up

The fond from Cahors came home into a good wind on the last Sunday of June, and the town turned up its face to her birds the way it had once turned it up to Staf's, and she stood in the garden under all those faces and learned what the wanting felt like, finally, from the inside, and it was the worst thing that had happened to her since the tin.

She had not slept. You didn't, the night before a fond came back; Jules had told her that the first week and she'd thought it was an old man making the sport bigger than it was, and now she knew it for the plain fact it was. Six hundred and forty kilometres of France between the loft and where they'd thrown the birds up at dawn in a field outside Cahors, and a night in the crates before that, and a hard week of weather over the middle of it — and you lay in the dark doing the only arithmetic the sport ran on, distance over time, the metres a minute a bird would have to make to be worth anything, and you couldn't make the bird fly any faster by lying awake but you lay awake anyway, the way the town prayed at funerals to a God it didn't believe could do anything either. It was the same muscle. Useless and you used it.

She'd lost one to Cahors. Not De Late — De Late was a hen, kept apart, not even basketed for the long ones yet; you didn't throw the loft's whole future at six hundred kilometres in June to find out what June weather did to it. The one she lost was a three-year-old cock called Wit, a good honest bird with a white flight feather that gave him his name, nothing special on paper, the kind of bird a loft has six of and notices the absence of like a tooth. He'd gone over with the team a fortnight before on the fond from Brive and come back hard, late, off the front of nothing, and she'd brought him on and basketed him for Cahors because Jules said he had it in him and Jules was right about birds the way the church was right about Sundays.

He didn't come.

She'd stood at the wire through the whole of Saturday evening with the seven that did come settling and crooning behind her and the one place on the landing-board staying empty, and she'd done the thing you weren't supposed to do, which was keep the corn down past dark in case, which only fed rats and told the loft you'd lost your nerve. And she'd thought about Wit out over the dark of France somewhere with the white feather no use to him in the night, down in a hedge or a field or worse, and she had not cried, because she didn't, but she'd stood there past the point of any sense in standing there, and that was its own kind of crying, the duivenmelker kind, the kind that wore a coat and watched an empty board and said nothing.

So she'd come to Sunday already hollowed out, already paid, and she'd thought the worst of the week was behind her.

She'd had that exactly backward.

They started coming an hour before she'd let herself believe it.

Jules was there by half-seven with his flask and his stool, because Jules came for a fond the way he came for nothing else, and he set the stool against the back wall where he always set it, in the shade, out of her eyeline, so she'd watch the sky and not the old man, and he poured a coffee and didn't offer her one because she'd learned to bring her own. The morning was bright and high with a wind out of the south-west, a homing wind, a wind that pushed a bird the last hundred kilometres like a hand in the small of the back, and she knew now to feel it on her face and read it before she read the sky, and she felt it and her stomach did the thing.

"Good wind," she said.

"Mm," Jules said, which from Jules was a speech.

The first one came in low off the heap so fast she didn't see it as a bird at all, only a hardness in the air over the green slope of the terril, a thing flung, and then it was over the gardens and it threw its wings up and dropped and she had it — one of the old widowhood cocks, Den Donker, the dark one, four years and hard as a hod — and her hands were on him before the rest of her caught up, stripping the rubber ring off the leg, the small warm leg, and into the slot of Staf's honest clock and the key over and the chunk of the drum biting the time, eight forty-one, and the cock gone in past her to his box and his hen and the whole of it done in less time than it took to think it.

"Velocity on that," Jules said, not getting up.

She didn't answer. She was already back at the wire.

They came then the way they come when a wind is right and a loft is on form, not in a string but in a clutch, two and three out of the same quarter of the sky so you had to clock one with the next already dropping, and her hands learned a speed she didn't know they had, ring and slot and key and chunk, ring and slot and key and chunk, and somewhere in the middle of it she stopped thinking the numbers and just did the thing, the way Jules said you had to, the way Staf must have done it for fifty years in this same garden under this same sky, the hands gone ahead of the head, the head no use anyway, and a kind of joy came up in her so clean and so total that she had it for whole seconds before she remembered to be ashamed of it.

Seven home by nine. The two she'd half-given up on by half past. And then the wire empty and the board quiet and the wind still pushing south-west, and Jules sitting against the wall with his cold coffee saying nothing, and her standing in the wreck of corn-feathers and droppings and her own thudding heart, and she knew before he said it.

"That was a race," Jules said.

The result came up the town the way a good result always did, faster than the bad news the town actually ran on, and by noon the gardens knew, and by two the club knew, and by the time she walked down for milk in the afternoon she was someone different than she'd been at breakfast.

It was Den Donker had done it — the dark cock, four years, off the front of the whole region. When Sus Gielen worked the distances and the velocities that evening and the union sheet came through on the club fax that the lokaal was so proud of, Den Donker had made the best metres a minute of any bird in the union that flew Cahors, and a velocity that put the Maes loft not fourth, not ninth, but first. First in the club and first in the union and somewhere down the printed national list a number with the name Maes against it that men in towns she'd never been to would read on Tuesday and say, who's that, and be told.

First.

She stood in the shop with the milk going warm in her hand while Mevrouw Daniëls who'd known Staf sixty years came round the counter to take both her hands in both of hers, the way you do at a wedding or a grave, and said, amai, Lieselot, your opa, with her eyes wet, and meant it as the highest thing the town had, which it was. And out on the Pastoorstraat men who'd nodded at her since April the way you nod at a chair a dead man left behind now stopped and turned the whole of their bodies toward her, René from the bar and old Cyriel who never spoke and a man whose name she didn't even know, and lifted their caps, actually lifted them, the way she'd only ever seen done to a hearse and to the host going by, and one of them said De Maes, hé, the Maes, with the de on it, the way you said a thing that was an institution and not a girl.

The town turned up its face to her.

That was the thing she'd think about after, walking home with the warm milk: that it was the same face. The exact same face the whole back of the street tipped up to the southern sky every Saturday, the face Staf had lifted her to the loft window to make, the face she'd grown up inside and hated like a childhood smell — and now it was turned at her. At her birds. At the speck of a dark cock she'd brought to form herself with her own two hands over three weeks of half-six mornings, that she'd thrown to a French dawn and called home faster than any man in the union. Every face in town tipped up, and her at the centre of where they were looking, the way Staf had been at the centre of it for forty years, the one warm place in a cold town, the one thing it was proud of.

She wanted it.

That was the whole of it, walking up the Pastoorstraat with the milk. She'd spent fifteen years building herself so the town could never catch her wanting anything, because the thing the town did to the people it caught wanting — to her father, to anyone who'd had a notion and stayed — was laugh. And here was the town not laughing. Here was the town with its cap in its hand. And the want came up in her so hard and so fast it frightened her worse than Dries Bery had frightened her bolting the loft door from the inside in the dark, frightened her worse than the empty place on the board where Wit didn't come, because those were things done to her from outside and this was a thing that had been hiding inside her the whole time, wearing her own face, and it had only been waiting for the town to turn around.

She wanted to be loved like that. She wanted it for the rest of her life. She wanted to be twenty-five and the best loft in the union and have old women take her hands at the grave-and-wedding angle and mean your opa as the highest thing, and have men lift their caps, and be De Maes, the institution, the one warm place, forever.

And she knew exactly what it cost.

She didn't go in. She stood in the garden with the milk and the seven home cocks crooning fat and finished behind the wire, and the dark cock somewhere in there among them not knowing what he'd done, and the place on the board still empty where Wit wasn't, and she did the arithmetic that wasn't distance over time.

Gust had laid the price out for her on the green baize weeks ago — the warmth and the lie off the same board — and she'd understood it then the way you understand a sum on paper. Now it had a velocity on it. Now she'd stood in the shop and felt the want come up through the soles of her feet, and she understood the thing Gust hadn't said, the thing under his confession: that she wasn't being seduced by Gust, nor by the town's caps. She was being seduced by the work. By her own hands. By the fact — and this was the part that went down into her like cold water — that she was good at it, that she had the real thing that couldn't be taught, and that the better she got the deeper in she went, because the gift and the lie were the same inheritance, handed over together, in the same tin, written in the same ink.

Staf had stood in this garden, twenty-four years old, with the town's face about to turn up to him for the first and forever time, and a clock on the table that could be made to lie about a handful of minutes, and a hunger in him to be something in a town where a man was only ever his shift. She'd thought, reading the confession, that she could never understand the weak hour. Just bear the nearly, she'd thought at him in the dark, arguing with a dead man. Your bird was that good. Bear it.

She stood in his garden now with the town's cap in its hand and she understood the weak hour all the way down, and the understanding didn't make her forgive him. It made her afraid of herself.

Jules came down for the cocks in the evening to help her settle the team for the week and to do the thing he did after a big one, which was handle every bird that had flown and read what the race had taken out of it, two fingers along the keel, the muscle gone deflated and worked, the warmth, what he called the bird's honest tiredness, so you knew what you had left to fly with.

He handled Den Donker last, the dark cock, the one that had turned the town's face. He took him up out of the box and ran the two fingers down the keel and held him a long moment with his eyes gone somewhere else, the way Staf used to, the old men's silence with a bird, and then he put him back and looked at her across the loft in the bad light.

"You know what you've got there," Jules said.

"A tired bird."

"A loft." He wiped his hands on his trousers. "You've got a loft, Lieselot. Not a few good birds you got lucky with. A loft. That cock'll breed you ten more like him off the line and De Late's better than him and there's two yearlings in there'll be better than her, and you brought them to that today, you, with your hands, off Staf's blood — and there's not a man in this union, nor in the next, who'll be able to say in five years that the Maes loft was Staf's loft flown by a girl. It'll be yours. They'll say Maes and mean you."

He said it plain, no warmth in it, the way Jules said things, and it was the kindest thing anyone had said to her since the tin and it was also, she understood, the most dangerous, because Jules of all of them wasn't trying to buy her. Jules didn't want the secret kept. Jules half-knew the secret and his arc, if a man like Jules had an arc, bent slowly toward the truth. He was telling her she was good because she was good. He was holding the gift up to the light with no lie wrapped round it at all.

And it was the gift, clean, with no lie on it, that she wanted most of anything in the world right now standing in the loft her grandfather built. That was the trap shutting. Not Gust's warmth. Not the town's caps. This. A true old man saying they'll say Maes and mean you, and meaning it clean, and her wanting it so badly it was hard to breathe, and knowing that to keep it she had only to do nothing, to say nothing, to let the dead keep their Sunday and fly her brilliant honest-feeling birds all the way to the top of a board built on a stolen handful of minutes.

"Wit didn't come," she said, because she had to say something that wasn't the want.

Jules looked at the empty box.

"No," he said. "He didn't." He latched the box anyway, the way you did, the loft made ready as if every bird were coming. "You fly the fond, you lose birds over the sea and the mountains and the dark, and you do it again the next week. That's the whole of it. There's no version where they all come home." He picked up his stool and his cold flask. "You did right by him. You basketed him because he had it in him, and he did, and the weather took him, not you. Don't carry it as yours. The sky's the sky."

He went up the garden in the last of the light, slow, an old man who'd buried a wife and a friend and fifty years of good birds and still came out for a fond, and at the loft window she watched him go, the way Staf had stood her at that window to watch the south, and she didn't watch the south. She watched the man. The one clean adult in the whole of it, going home to a tidy lonely kitchen, who'd told her she had it because she had it, and had no idea — or every idea, and was too gentle to say it — that the truest thing he could have said was the worst thing she could have heard.

The wind held south-west into the dark. She locked the loft and the seven home cocks shifted on their perches and went quiet, and the place where Wit wasn't stayed a place where Wit wasn't, and somewhere past the dead winding-gear and the green heap the south of the sky went down to nothing the way it did, over France, over the long water beyond it, where the birds went and some didn't come back.

She'd thought, in April, that the choice was a hard one because it was three ways and all of them cost. Sell the birds. Give them to the men her grandfather robbed. Or stand up in a room full of men and take the town's one true thing away from it.

She knew now it wasn't hard because it was three ways.

It was hard because there was a fourth thing, and the fourth thing wasn't a choice at all, it was a slope, and she was already on it, and it went down so smooth and so warm — fly, win, be loved, be Maes, be the one warm place in the cold town, and never once have to do anything but the work she'd turned out to love — that you could go all the way to the bottom of it without ever deciding to, the way her grandfather had, the way the whole town had, forty years of good men standing in their gardens with their faces turned up, choosing nothing, letting it lie, and calling the slope a life.

She stood at the loft window in the dark and felt the want of it still, the warm pull of the town's turned-up face, undiminished, not going anywhere, hers now to carry the rest of the season — and underneath it, the first thing she'd let herself feel all day that wasn't the wanting, came up small and cold and entirely her own: that the only way to stop the slope was to do the one thing on it that nobody, not Staf, not Gust, not the whole town for forty years, had ever once had the nerve to do.

She thought: I'm going to win Barcelona. The thought came up out of the want, sweet and certain, De Late the cleanest bird off the line at the very peak of her, the legacy hen, 1958 with feathers on, hers to throw to the Spanish sky and call home and put up on the board beside his name in new gold the town could afford to mean again.

And right behind it, in the dark, in the cold, in her own voice and no one else's, the answer she'd been refusing since the night she opened the tin:

And if I do, I'll have to tell them first.

Chapter Twenty — The Hour

She'd been carrying the last pages around in her chest for two months without reading them, the way you carry a tooth you won't let the dentist look at, working the tongue at it, knowing.

She'd read the fix. She'd read it in April, the whole shape of it, De Sint came home a strong second and Door's hand on the seal and a handful of minutes that were never really there, read it until she could have said it in her sleep and probably had. And then there were three more pages, folded under, and she'd held out on them. She'd told herself it was because she knew already, that a man who'd confessed the crime had nothing left to confess, that the rest was just an old man going on the way old men went on, and another thing, and she didn't need it. That was the lie she'd kept the longest, the one she told best, because it sounded like contempt and contempt was the one thing nobody in the heide ever doubted in her.

The truth was she was afraid of his voice in those pages. The fix she could read like a feed bill, numbers, a thing done. The rest of it would be him talking to her, and she was not ready, all spring, to be talked to by a dead man.

But she'd won Cahors — first in the club and first in the union, Den Donker off the front of the whole region — and the town had turned its face up to her in the street and lifted its caps, and she'd come home and not been able to sleep, because the warmth was still on her like a sunburn you only feel after dark — the men nodding different, René saying it down the bar, she's got his hands, old Mevrouw Daniëls taking both her hands at the grave-and-wedding angle — and she'd lain in the cold room over the kitchen wanting it, wanting all of it, the board and the gold and the town saying Maes the way they used to say it, wanting it the way she'd spent fifteen years training herself to want nothing. And it had frightened her worse than the fix ever had, the wanting. So at one in the morning she got up and lifted the loose board.

The tin came up cold. She opened it on the bed. The logbook page was on top — she'd put it back the day after the phone box, slid it home flat where it belonged, two neat hands going dark together — and under it the drum-tape, and under that the brass clock with the 58 scratched in the base, and the cheap exercise book with the column of small sums, and right at the bottom, refolded along its old creases, the confession. She took it out. She put the rest back. She did not light the big light; she had the little reading lamp her opa had bought her in a year she couldn't place, and she turned past the pages she knew, past the fix, to the place where she'd stopped, and the fold there was sharp and unhandled, white at the crease where the other folds had gone grey, the only part of the letter no one's thumb had ever softened, and she pressed it open and read the rest of it, two months late, the way the late one came home.

1958. Staf is twenty-four, and it is the Saturday night of the race, and his bird is not yet home.

The release was that morning from Spain. They'd had the word down the lokaal by noon — gelost, let up, into a clear sky over the sea — and the men had gone to their gardens to wait, and the waiting was the long kind, the marathon kind, the kind where you don't expect a bird till the edge of the light if you expect one at all, and a man could go mad in it or go quiet, and Staf went quiet. He has the gift of going quiet. The town has always mistaken it for depth.

He waits in his own garden with the cough he hides and the dust already in him for good and a clock in the house that the club sealed on the Thursday, sealed honest, Verschueren's wax over the keyhole and Door Vandersmissen's brass die pressed into it, the same as every clock in the heide, the whole sport's honesty you could feel with your thumb. He believes in the seal. He has believed in it his whole life. A man came up from the pit and he had nothing but his shift and his lungs and the one cock, and the one place in the world where a miner with nothing got an honest count was the seal on the clock, because the clock did not care what name was on the loft. The clock was the one fair thing the town had. He knows this the way he knows weather.

The bird comes at the very edge of the light.

He sees the speck off the south before anyone, because he is the best young flyer in the heide and his eye is already what Lieselot's will be, and the speck becomes the cock, becomes De Sint, dark blue going to black against a sky the colour of the inside of a shell, and the cock comes down the row like he was poured down it, tired, two and a half days on the wing across the mountains and the sea and the whole of France, and he drops onto the board and Staf has him in his two hands before he's folded his wings, and strips the gummiring, and clocks him — the ring into the slot, the key, the chunk, the time stamped honest onto the drum inside the honest sealed clock — and stands in his garden in the going dark with his heart going like the bird's, because he knows what he's seen.

He's seen a strong second.

He does the sum that night at the kitchen table while Mariette sleeps, eleven months married, the sum three times on the back of an envelope, distance over time, the metres in the minute, and three times it comes out the same, and three times it is not enough. It is wonderful. It is a hero's flight, a young miner's cock home from Barcelona at the edge of the second day, a result a man could live on. But it is not the result, because somewhere up the union, in a loft built out of a coal scuttle nailed to a wall, an outsider's blue hen came down earlier off a longer flight, and her metres in the minute are better than De Sint's by the smallest margin a margin can be, and Staf knows it, because he held that hen on the Tuesday and ran two fingers along her keel and knew then, in the dark of his own want, that she was the better bird.

He sits with the envelope. The cough comes and he holds it down so as not to wake her. And the thing he is afraid of, the thing he could not name on the Wednesday in the dark of the pit, comes up out of him now in the lamplight and has a name, and the name is not losing.

He could lose. He is twenty-four and there are forty years of Barcelonas in front of him, or he thinks there are; he doesn't yet know what the dust is doing. He could come second to a better bird and shake the outsider's hand on the Sunday and be the town's coming man still, the man who nearly. Nearly is a fine thing at twenty-four.

But the town does not have forty years. That is the thing he understands at the kitchen table that the boy in him didn't. The pit is at its height — forty-four thousand men down the holes that year, the heide black and roaring and full — and a town at its height is a town that has begun, in some place under its own floor, to be afraid of the going-down, and a town that is afraid wants, more than anything, more than coal, one Sunday a year when somebody from here beat the world. Not nearly beat it. Beat it. And he is the one they've pinned it to. He is the cock the whole town is watching come down the row. Nearly would not be his to keep. It would be the town's, and the town would not want it.

She had to stop there. She put the page face down on the quilt and sat with her hands flat on her own knees, because the worst of it was that she understood. She, who'd come home an hour ago wanting it. She understood the kitchen table and the envelope and the sum that came out nearly three times, understood it from the inside, the way you understand a step that isn't there only after you've put your foot through it. She'd done the same sum on a feed bill in April to feel the size of the thing he'd stolen, and tonight she'd come up from the lokaal having done a different sum entirely, the one Gust laid out for her — be loved or be the one who took it, the warmth or the truth — and she'd wanted the warmth so badly her teeth had ached with it.

A few metres a minute. She'd thought, all spring, that the smallness of the cheat was the horror. It was. But it was also, she saw now, the seduction — that it was so small. That a man could tell himself it was nothing. A few minutes is nothing. Gust had lived forty years on that sentence and so had Staf, and tonight, for one hour in a cold room, so had she. She picked the page back up.

1958. It is later in the night, and Door Vandersmissen comes to the gate.

He does not knock. He stands at the gate in the dark and Staf, who is still up, who cannot sleep, goes out to him, and they stand by the wire of the loft where De Sint is asleep with his head under his wing, home, second, a hero. Door is the club's man at the master clock and has been for thirty years and will be for ten more, and he is not a bad man, the letter is careful about that, he is a man who loves the town the way a sexton loves a church, by keeping its small machinery oiled and saying nothing. He has seen the union times come in over the wire from the other clubs. He knows about the hen in the coal scuttle. He has done the same sum Staf has done.

He does not say much. The letter is careful here too — there is no speech in it, no devil at the gate. He says a clock can run a hair slow, of a Sunday. He says seals have been off and on before now and no one the wiser, that the master clock is his own to keep and his to read, that the difference is a handful of minutes and a handful of minutes over a thousand kilometres is the kind of thing that lives in the rounding, in the survey of the loft, in the cold of the night affecting the spring of a clock — that no one would ever ask, not of the master clock, not of Staf, not for the town. He says it the way you'd offer a man a coat in the rain. Nobody'd ask. And then he says the thing that is not about Staf at all, the thing that does the work, the thing the letter sets down in Staf's own hand forty years on without one word of defence around it, plain as a stone:

He said, think what it gives them.

And Staf stands at the wire in the dark with the second-best bird in the world asleep an arm's length away, and thinks what it gives them. The pit and the cités and the Italians' end and the whole black roaring town that has pinned to a young miner the one thing it has left, the right to be proud of something. He thinks of his father, who is dead, who went down at fourteen and never once in his life had a Sunday that beat the world. He thinks of Mariette asleep, and the lungs he can already hear going at night, and the forty Barcelonas he tells himself are coming and is, somewhere, already not sure of. He thinks: it is a handful of minutes that are nearly there. The bird nearly did it. The bird is good enough that it should have done it, would have done it on a better day, against a lesser hen, on a year the outsider's loft hadn't come up; the win is so nearly true that making it true is hardly a lie at all, only a correction, only the world set the way it ought to have gone.

That is the hour. The letter does not dress it. I told myself I was only making it the way it should have been.

He does not say yes at the gate. The letter is honest about this, more honest than it had to be, the one mercy he allows the man he was: he does not say yes. He says he'll think. And Door goes off into the dark, and Staf goes in, and lies down beside his wife, and does not sleep, and in the morning he does not go to Door and say no.

That is all. That is the whole of it. He never says yes. He only fails to say no, by morning, when the drums are to be read, and the not-saying is the saying, the way Lieselot's own not-saying had become a thing she did every day she scraped the boards and held her tongue. Forty years, the letter says, and the worst of it is I never decided. A man would want to have decided. I let the morning decide. I let Door decide. I let the town decide, that wanted it so. And then it was done, and there was nobody to take it back from, because I had not done it, the morning had done it, and that is the coward's way and I took it, and I have flown thirty thousand birds since and not one of them was as fast as the lie I told by being asleep.

The lamp buzzed. Outside the window the heide was dead quiet the way it only got after one, no cars, the church clock a street away striking the half a beat behind the truth as it always did, and down the garden the loft was a black shape full of breathing birds, forty of them, every good card in it coming down off De Sint, the whole loft a fortune in feathers bred straight out of an hour at a gate.

She thought she'd reach the end of it angry. She'd been angry all spring — not the clean anger you could spend, but the other kind, the kind that had nowhere to go because the man was in the ground and couldn't be shouted at, the kind that turned to vertigo, he loved me and he lied to everyone, how do I hold both of these, the two of them in her hands at once like the clock and the page, neither one of them lighter for the other being true. She'd argued with him in the dark for two months. She'd called him a coward at the kitchen table with nobody there. She'd hated the loft for not knowing, and hated the birds for being innocent, and hated him most for leaving it to her, for reaching up out of three days dead and tying a dead man's shame to a girl who'd only wanted out.

And then she read the last page, the one with the unsoftened crease, and the anger went somewhere she hadn't expected it to go.

Lieselot, it said. Just her name, where the rest had been I. The hand had got worse by this page — the spring of it gone, the letters leaning, an old man's hand with the lungs nearly finished and the pen heavy — but it was steady enough, he'd taken his time.

You'll have read the rest or you won't. It doesn't matter much which. You're the only one I ever told the truth to, and I'm telling it the cowards' way again, in ink, where I'm dead before you read it, because I could not say it to your face and keep your face looking at me the way it does. That's the size of me. Forty years a hero and I couldn't bear one minute of my own granddaughter knowing.

I thought a long time about who to leave the loft to. Not your father — I love him and the town broke him and I'd not hand him a thing built on a lie, he's carried enough of mine. Not the club; they'd keep it the way they kept the other thing, in the dark with the seal on. I left it to you because you are the only one of us with no need to be loved by this town. You've spent your whole life getting ready to leave it. I used to think that was a hardness in you and grieve it. I see now it's the thing I never had. You don't need their Sunday. You could put the whole thing down and walk to the bus.

So here is what I'm asking, and it is the only honest thing I have ever done, and I am only able to do it because I'll be dead and it'll cost me nothing, which is the coward in me staying coward to the last, I know it, I'm not pretending.

I couldn't give it back and keep you loving me. That's the truth of why I sat on it forty years — not the town, not Frans, not Door. You. By the time you were old enough to be told I was old enough to not be able to bear it. So I'm not asking you to keep me. You don't have to keep me, Lieselot. Let them say what they like about the old man; I'll be where it can't reach me. Keep the birds. The birds were never the lie — De Sint flew that race, he flew it true, it was only the count I poisoned, not the blood. The blood's clean. The birds are clean. You keep them.

Keep the birds honest.

That's the whole of it. That's all your old grandfather has to leave you that's worth the weight of the tin. Whatever you do with the rest — the clock, the page, his name and mine — do it. I'll not be in your way. But fly the birds clean, and you'll have given me the one thing I couldn't give myself, which is a Maes who flew Barcelona and didn't lie about it. That's worth more than the board. I only found that out too late to use it, the way a man finds out everything that matters too late to use it.

Daar is ze, it ended, on a line by itself, the old joke, the thing he said under his breath when the late one came in last out of an emptied sky. There she is. And then nothing. No name signed. He hadn't signed it. He'd put her name at the top and the bird's joke at the bottom and left the middle for the one true thing, and where his own name should have gone there was just the white page and the buzz of the lamp and the church clock striking somewhere off the truth.

She sat with it a long time. The cold came up through the floor the way it did in that room over the unheated kitchen, and she didn't move to get a blanket, because moving would have ended the thing that was happening to her and she didn't want it ended yet, she wanted to feel the whole size of it the way you stand in a doorway in the cold to watch a bird you've half given up on resolve out of the south.

She had been carrying the tin for three months like a stone laid on her chest. A curse, a leash, a dead man's shame tied to her with a season. She'd signed the form to spite three grown men and told herself it didn't mean anything, and read the proof and told herself not-saying was a place she could live, and flown fourth and let them call her the legend's blood, and the whole time the tin had sat under the board getting no lighter, because it was a curse and a curse does not get lighter, it only gets heavier the better you fly.

But it wasn't a curse. She saw that now, at two in the morning, with the unsoftened crease open on her knee. He hadn't trapped her. He'd had every reason to trap her — to leave her the birds and the lie tangled so tight she'd have to keep both or lose both, the way the town kept them, the way Gust kept them, the warmth and the silence off the same board. He could have left her nothing but the silence, the way he'd lived in it. Instead he'd left her the silence and the key to it — the clock, the page, the proof, the confession with the method left out and the why left in — and a letter that said, in the plainest words he had, you don't have to keep me. He'd handed her the loaded thing and then, with the last of a coward's strength, untied her hands.

It was the bravest thing he'd ever done and he'd only managed it dead. She could hold that. She found, sitting there, that she could finally hold both of the things at once and not fall — the man who lied to a whole town for forty years and the man who, at the very end, did the one thing none of the rest of them would do, which was hand the truth to the one person he knew would be braver than he was, and tell her she didn't owe him her bravery. He hadn't asked her to clear his name. He'd asked her to leave it dirty if she had to, and keep the birds clean.

The tin stopped being a stone. She felt the exact moment it went, the way you feel a clock stop, the wrong silence of it — the weight didn't leave, it was just no longer lying on her, it was in her hands now, where she could pick it up or set it down, where it was hers to carry on purpose or not at all. A charge, not a curse. A thing he'd asked, not a thing he'd done to her.

And that changed the morning's sum. That was the thing she understood last, with the cold all the way into her now and the lamp buzzing and the birds breathing down the garden in the dark.

Gust had laid it out so cleanly in the back room: be loved like Staf, or be the one who took it. Two doors, and the whole town's weight on the warm one. And she'd come home tonight wanting the warm one, and frightened of the wanting, because she'd thought the choice was between love and truth, and who chooses truth over love at fifteen, who chooses to be the one who took the town's one Sunday, who chooses a record on a grave over the gold going up beside her grandfather's name.

But that wasn't the choice. The letter had moved the doors while she was reading it. Because Staf hadn't asked to be loved. He'd told her, in the last words he'd ever set down, that she didn't have to keep him, didn't have to defend him, didn't owe the dead man one ounce of the warmth Gust was selling her against. The warmth had a price and the price was a silence and the silence wasn't even for Staf — Staf had let her off it, in ink, two months ago, and she'd been too afraid of his voice to read it. The silence was for the town, and the club, and Gust, and the board, and her own want. Not for the man she'd thought she was protecting. He'd never asked to be protected. He'd asked the opposite. He'd asked her to fly clean and let his name take what it took.

She'd been guarding a door the dead man had already opened.

She folded the letter back along its creases, the old soft ones and the new sharp one, and put it in the tin on top of the rest, and held the tin in her lap and did not put it under the board.

Out the window the south of the sky was black, no speck in it, nothing coming, the loft asleep and the town asleep and the church clock a street away striking three a beat behind the truth. In July the same race would be run that Staf flew in '58, the same long crossing, the sea and the mountains, and she'd send the birds of his line up into it, and the choice she'd thought was love or truth was nothing of the kind. It was only ever this: keep the warm thing she'd let herself want for one hour tonight, the gold and the chair and the town saying Maes — or do the thing a dead coward had asked her to do because he couldn't, and tell the truth she'd been guarding for nobody, and fly the clean birds clean.

He'd untied her hands. She sat in the cold with the tin in her lap, no longer a stone, and felt them free, and was, for the first time since the notary set the thing on the kitchen table, more afraid of what she might do with them than of what had been done to her.

Daar is ze, she thought, and didn't know if she meant the truth, or the bird, or herself.

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.

Chapter Twenty-Two — Light as a Lie

There was a thing Jules did with his thumb that she had been watching all season and had not been able to learn, and on the Monday with nine days left he finally let her catch him at it.

He had De Late out of the banana-crate box, which he had not liked, the box, had said nothing about and not liked, a hen of that blood roosting on a curtain-rail by a girl's window like a budgie — and he held her on his open hand in the loft, in the early grey, and ran the thumb down the keel and then did the other thing, the thing, laid the bird belly-up across his palm and pressed two fingers into the soft below the breastbone, in under the worked muscle, and held them there a moment with his eyes gone the place they went, looking at nothing in the corner of the loft, and then turned her right way up and set her on the perch and said, "She's not there yet."

"Where's there."

"You'll feel it." He wiped his hand down his trouser, an old habit, the bird hadn't soiled him. "Not full. Full's no good, full's a fat hen on a perch, she'll fly to France and sit down in a field and think she's done a thing. And not gone, not hollow, you don't want hollow, hollow's a bird with nothing left to spend. You want her on the edge. Hard and light and hungry and not knowing it. A bird that thinks she could fly forever because she's never been allowed to find the end of it." He looked at the hen, who looked at the wall. "Three days off, maybe four. You bring her up to it and you hold her there and you don't go past it, because there's no holding her at the top — she comes up to the edge of form and she sits on it for a day, two days, and then she starts coming down whether you like it or not, and the trick of the whole sport, the only trick, is to have her sitting on the top of it on the morning the crates go south. Miss it by two days either way and you've a good hen flying a great race in the wrong week."

"And how do you know which week's the top of her."

"You don't." He said it the way he said the things that mattered, flat, and let the floor open under it. "You guess. You guess off forty years of guessing and you're wrong as often as you're right and the ones who say they're not wrong are lying, the way men lie, to be loved." He picked up the feed scoop. "Your grandfather guessed better than any man I ever stood beside. That's all the gift is. Guessing closer to the truth of a bird than the next man, and never being able to prove you did it, only the result on a Sunday says so, and the result's a liar too, half the time, because the result's the weather as much as the bird." He poured. The corn went into the trough and the loft came off the perches in one soft fall, the noise of forty bodies dropping to feed, and she stood in it and thought: the result's a liar too, and did not say what she was thinking, which was that in this loft, the one time it mattered most, the result had been a liar on purpose, and the man who made it lie had taught the man beside her how to guess.

The feeding had changed and she'd let it change without quite deciding to, which was how the craft got into you, she'd noticed, not as decisions but as a thing your hands did before you'd ruled on it.

For the short races you fed them down — the light corn, the barley, the depurative, a bird emptied out and clean, a sprinter's body. For Barcelona you fed them up, but slowly, and not the way a fool feeds them up, not just more, but the oils now, the small dark seeds, the linseed Jules measured into her palm and made her smell, that's energy a bird can carry over water, that's three days on the wing in a handful of seed, and the fats laid down on the bird the way a man lays in coal before a winter he can see coming. You were building a body for a distance the body could not imagine. A bird that had never flown more than five hundred kilometres in its life, you were stoking it for a thousand and forty, over the mountains it had never seen and the sea it did not know was sea, and the cruelty and the beauty of it both was that the bird did not know. The bird ate the oiled seed off the trough and grew the engine for its own ordeal and thought, if it thought anything, only that the feed had got better, that the new hand was generous, that the loft was a good place to be.

She filled the trough at half six before school and again at four, the old hour, the four-o'clock hour, and on the Tuesday at four she came down the garden with the scoop and they did the thing they did, turned at once to the south, the whole loft swinging its small heads toward the water they couldn't see, and she stood in it the way she'd stood in it the first afternoon, the week he died, when she'd told herself it was nothing, the hour, birds are clocks with feathers. She knew more now. She knew it was the hour and that knowing it was the hour did not make it nothing. They were facing the place the corn came from for forty years and the place she was going to throw them in nine days, the same place, France and beyond France and the long grey under-edge of the world, and they faced it the way the men down the row faced it on the practice evenings, getting used to the size of it before there was anything in it to wait for.

The widowhood was the engine and she had it running now, hard, in the dark before the race.

She'd separated them the way you separated them, the cocks one end and the hens the other, all season, so that the wanting built. But for Barcelona Jules made her sharpen it past anything she'd done. The cock she'd basket — for she'd basket cocks too, four of them, Jules's hard old widowhood men, on top of the hen, because the long race was a lottery and you didn't put your one good number on a single ticket — the cock she'd basket she now showed his hen for an hour the night before, not the ten minutes of the short races, an hour, let him at the box, let him drive her round it and tread her and crow himself raw and believe, the poor mad machine, that he'd won her back for good — and then took her away in front of him, lifted the hen clean out and shut the wire, so the last thing in his head going into the crate was the thing taken away. That was the speed. That was the whole science of it, dressed up in feed charts and forty years: you took the one thing the bird loved and you put it on the far side of the sea, and you let the love do what fear and feed and breeding could not, which was carry a half-kilo of muscle a thousand kilometres home over open water with no map but the missing.

She'd thought it cruel, in the beginning, in the cold spring, watching a cock pine at the wire for a hen lifted away. She didn't think it cruel now and she'd noticed that, too, the way she'd stopped being able to think it cruel, and was not sure whether that was the craft teaching her the truth of the thing or only teaching her to stop seeing it, which was a different lesson and the one the whole town had passed.

De Late was a hen and you flew the hens on widowhood too, the good fanciers, on the same engine reversed — kept from her cock, shown him, robbed of him. But Jules said no. Jules said leave the hen apart and quiet and let her fly for the loft itself, for the perch and the box and the south window and the new steady hand, because that was a hen, he said, that was the kind of hen she was, off that blood, a hen that came home not for a cock but because home was the thing she did, the way some birds were, the way De Sint had been, the old man's blue-black cock that dropped out of the empty Sunday sky in '58 long after the others because coming home was simply what he was for and he was going to do it whether it won or not.

"That's the danger in her," Jules said. "She'll come for nothing. She'll come for the loft. You can't motivate a bird like that, you can only not ruin her. Feed her right and leave her be and she'll fly her heart out across that water for the plain reason that she's a homing bird and home is south of here, and ask you for nothing, and that's the bird your grandfather spent twenty years breeding back toward, a bird that does the right thing for no reward — and I'll let you sit a while," he said, getting up off the stool, his knees going, "with why a man who could breed that bird needed to make a clock lie."

He left her that. He had a way of leaving her things, on the stool, on his way out, the door shutting on the half of the sentence that mattered. A man who could breed a bird that does the right thing for no reward. She sat in the loft with the hen on the third perch, one foot tucked, the orange eye giving nothing back, and held the two of them in her head, the man and the bird he made, and could not make them fit, and understood that the not-fitting was the thing itself, was the whole tin, was what she'd been handed: that the same hands could breed honesty into a bird and lie with a clock in the same year and love a girl across forty years of it and leave her the choice he didn't have the nerve to make. The hen did not help. The hen was good at the thing he couldn't do and didn't know it, sat on her perch being the answer to a question she'd never been asked, and Lieselot looked at her and thought, not for the first time, that the cleanest thing in the whole rotten inheritance was the one that couldn't talk.

On the Thursday she took the hen up on a toss alone, the long one, the last real one before the basketing, Jules driving her out in the van with the wicker hamper rocking on the back seat and the heath going by, the broom and the birch and the bone-grey afternoon, out past Eisden where the Berys had their dead under a stone they couldn't afford the lettering on, and on, forty kilometres, fifty, to a field with a wire fence and a far line of pylons, and there he stopped the van and they got out into the wind off nowhere and he made her be the one to do it.

"Your bird," he said. "Your hand throws her."

She took the hen out of the hamper. The wind had north in it, a clean cold north, the right wind, a wind that would set a bird's head the moment she was loose. She held the hen the way she held her now, two fingers along the keel without thinking, felt the heart going its quick small going, felt the fat laid in and the muscle hard under it, felt, she thought, for one second, the edge — the thing Jules's thumb found, the not-full, not-hollow, the hard light hungry middle of a bird at the top of itself — felt it the way you feel a thing once and aren't sure you felt it, and then she opened her hands.

The hen dropped, fell a body's length the way they always fell, and then took the air, took it the way they took it, the wingbeat finding itself in three strokes, and went up off the flat field in a tilting climb, banking, taking a bearing off something Lieselot would never see, the slope of the light or the lean of the world or the pull of a perch fifty kilometres north of here, and set her head, and went. North. Home. Toward the dead town and the green heap and the bedroom window, a blue speck shrinking up the cold sky, smaller, gone into the grey, gone before the fence and the pylons had stopped meaning anything, gone the way a thing goes that knows where it's going better than you know where you live.

"There she goes," Jules said. He was looking at the empty sky where the speck had been. "That's the wrong direction to be standing in. We want to be the place she's flying to." He turned and got in the van. "Come on. She'll beat us home, that one, and I want to see her drop."

She got in. The van went north up the heath road behind the bird she couldn't see, and she sat with her hands in her lap, the hands that had thrown her, and looked at the grey ahead where the hen had gone, and thought about the throwing. About how easy it was, in the end, the great thing. You held the bird and you opened your hands and the bird did the rest, the thing it was for, the going and the coming back, the thousand kilometres of sea and mountain folded up small in a body the weight of a letter, and all you had to do, the whole of your part, the human part, was let go at the right time in the right place with your face pointed the way you wanted her to learn — and then stand in a field a long way south of home and watch her leave you, and drive, and wait.

That was the sport. That was the whole sport. You spent the year on the body and the bird spent itself on the sky and at the end you had no part to play at all but the waiting. She thought she had not understood that, in the spring, when she'd hated the smell of the loft and meant to sell. She'd thought the sport was the keeping. It wasn't the keeping. The keeping was just the year you served so you'd have something to throw. The sport was the letting go and the waiting, and the whole town had built its life around the one thing it was worst at, which was bearing the not-knowing, and that was either the bravest thing she'd ever seen a row of broken men do or the saddest, and she could not, driving north through the heath behind a bird she'd thrown into a thousand kilometres of risk she hadn't yet decided the meaning of, tell the two of them apart.

The hen had beaten them home. Of course she had.

When they came up the Pastoorstraat the blue shape was already in the bedroom window, on the curtain-rail in the banana crate, head turned in, settled, as if she'd been there an hour, as if she'd never gone, as if a field fifty kilometres south and a wind with north in it and the whole tilting grey crossing of it had been nothing, a thing she did between perchings, beneath remark. Jules looked up at the window from the gate and made the sound he made, a low breath through the nose, the nearest he came to wonder, and said, "Daar is ze," there she is, the thing Staf used to say of this blood, the late one home, and then caught himself saying a dead liar's words about a bird and went quiet, and put his cap on, which meant he was leaving.

"Nine days," he said at the gate. "Eight, really. You bring her up the way I showed you, the oils Thursday, the hen shown Saturday night, an hour, and you basket Sunday." He looked at her, and she felt the other thing come up under the feed-talk, the thing that had been under everything all season. "She's as good a bird as this loft ever made. She's as good as the one that won the thing nobody can take down off that board." He let it sit. "What you fly her for is yours. I'll not say a word to you about it and I'll not say a word for you either, in there, on the morning, unless you ask me, and if you ask me I'll stand where you tell me to stand." He opened the gate. "But I'll tell you the one thing about that hen and then I'm away to my tea. She'll fly the same race whatever you decide. She doesn't know the difference between an honest loft and a lying one. She'll cross that water exactly as hard for a liar as for a saint, and come home exactly as late, and ask you for nothing either way." He stepped through and shut it behind him. "So she's no help to you, the bird. Don't go looking to her for the answer. She is the answer to a different question and you've not been asked that one. You'll have to find your own, in your own mouth, in there, on the green baize." And he went, up the dark row, getting small the way the street made everything small toward the road out, the only honest man she knew, going home to a cold house to wait, like the rest of them, for a Sunday that hadn't a thing in it yet but sky.

She went up to her room. The hen was on the rail in the window, against the last of the grey, the south of the sky going down behind her to nothing over the green heap and the dead winding-gear. Lieselot put her hand under her, two fingers along the keel, and held her in the going light, and felt the heart and the worked muscle and the fat laid in for the sea, and felt, again, almost, the edge — three days off, four — the bird coming up toward the top of herself on a schedule older than the town, indifferent to the girl, indifferent to the tin under the loose board four feet away, indifferent to 1958 and the clock and the name in flaking gold and the green form with her number on it down in the dark of the box. Light as a lie and heavier than the town, the whole of it, the loft and the legend and the debt and the choice, folded up in a body the weight of a letter and growing strong for the crossing whether the girl who fed her had the nerve to fly her clean or not.

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

She set the hen back on the rail and stood at the window with her, the two of them facing south, and let it be true, the not-knowing, the way she'd let it be true at the window the night she entered her, and over the heath the light went and the men down the row called their last birds off the last toss of the evening, komeen, komeen, getting used to the size of the waiting before there was anything in it to wait for, and somewhere out past France and the mountains and the under-edge of the world the great water lay in the dark, the thing she'd throw her into in eight days, the unknowable middle of it, and the bird sat on the rail and faced it and was not afraid, because the bird did not know it was sea — and the girl beside her knew exactly what it was, and was, and faced it anyway, and that, she thought, watching the dark come up out of the south, was the only difference between them that mattered, and it was the whole difference in the world.

Chapter Twenty-Three — The Private Door

The grey Opel came up the alley at half six on the Saturday evening, the eve of the basketing, the one evening she'd wanted clear, and she heard it before she saw it the way you learned to hear a thing that didn't belong — the engine running too clean for the row, a town engine, an Antwerp engine, a man who could afford to keep a car the way the men here couldn't and parked it where you'd see he could.

She was down the garden with the hen in her hands.

She'd been bringing De Late in for the night, the last night before the crates, and she had her cupped against her chest with two fingers along the keel, feeling the thing she'd half-felt on the heath, the edge, the hard light not-full of a bird come up to the top of itself, and the car stopped at the end of the alley and the engine died and she stood in the loft door with the hen and did not go out to them. She'd learned that off the season too. You made them come to the door. You did not go down the garden to the gate to be met. The gate was theirs out there in the alley dark; the door was hers; and she stood in the one and made them walk the few feet of garden that was the difference, the way the old men made you walk the lokaal to the table, the small geographies of who owed who.

Marcel came up the path alone. The red Escort was behind the Opel — she could see the one wing in a different red, mended cheap, sitting back in the alley dark with its lights off and a shape in it not getting out — and that was the arrangement, the one they'd settled into over the season the way water settles into a channel: Marcel at the gate with his cap in his two hands, the man of principle, and Dries in the car, the thing that would happen if the principle didn't take. She'd stopped being frightened of the shape in the car the way you stop being frightened of a dog that's barked at you forty times and not bitten, which she knew was exactly how you got bitten, and she kept the hen against her chest and watched the shape not move and the man come up the path.

"You've her in your hands," Marcel said. He'd stopped a few feet off. He always stopped a few feet off; it was a courtesy and it was a measuring both. "That the one."

"This is the one."

"My father held a hen like that," he said, "the week of his race. I was small. He'd not let me touch her. He held her like that—" he nodded at her hands, at the two fingers along the keel "—and his face went the way yours is now, gone off somewhere, reading her. I thought he was praying." He turned the cap once in his hands. "He wasn't a praying man."

She didn't answer that. The hen shifted against her, one foot, the orange eye taking in the man and giving nothing back, and Lieselot held her and let the not-answering be a thing in the air the way Jules let it.

"You basket tomorrow," Marcel said.

"Tomorrow night."

"And the form's in." Not a question. He knew it was in; the whole town knew by now that the Maes loft had entered Barcelona, one bird, the hen, the line of the 58, that the dead man's last bird was going back to the race that made him — the town had got a great deal of pleasure out of saying it, she'd heard them, the warm pleasure of a story closing the way a story should, the granddaughter flying the legend's blood into the legend's race forty years on. They had no idea they were saying anything but a nice thing. "The form's in," Marcel said again, "and the deadline I gave you's tomorrow, and I've come for the answer, and I've come"—he stopped, turned the cap—"I've come to give you a door I've not given you before. Will you hear it."

"I'm holding a bird."

"Put her up, then. I'll wait." He said it without heat. "I've waited forty years for the front of a thing. I can wait while a girl puts a bird on a perch."

She put the hen up. She went back into the loft, into the warm dry dark of it, the corn-and-lime reek, the soft mutter of the forty bodies settling, and she set De Late on the third perch where she went, and stood a second with her hand on the wire in the dark and did not want to go back out to the door, and went back out to the door.

He'd come up onto the step while she was in. He stood just below it, so she was the higher of the two by the height of a brick step, which she understood he'd done on purpose, given her the high ground the way you give a thing to someone you've come to take a bigger thing from, and she stood in the loft door above him with the dark birds behind her and let him talk.

"Here's the door," Marcel said. "I'll say it plain because there's no other way I know to say it and we're neither of us built for the long way round." He turned the cap. "Give me the line."

"You've said that before."

"I've said I want the bloodline. I've not said it like this. Listen." He stepped his weight onto the lower step, came up the half-height so they were nearer of an eye, and his voice dropped into the register she'd learned was the one that cost him, the flat one, the one Jules used too, the men of this place going quiet exactly where another sort of man would get loud. "Give me the line. Quiet. The hen and the breeders, the cards, Den 58, all of it, into my brother's hands or my hands, it doesn't matter whose, tonight or after Barcelona, your choosing. And in return"—he held the cap still now, both hands, the turning stopped—"nobody ever knows."

She didn't follow it for a second. She'd been braced for the demand and the demand had come and now there was a second half coming and she stood and let it come.

"Nobody knows," Marcel said. "Not the club. Not the town. Not a soul. You give me back what's mine — the blood, the only thing that's the right size of the thing your grandfather took, the only restitution that's a restitution and not a stamp on an envelope — and I take it home to Eisden and I fly it and it wins under a Bery loft or it doesn't, that's the sky's business, but it's home, it's where it should have been these forty years, and in return I never open my mouth. The tin stays in your floor. The clock stays a thing nobody's seen. Your grandfather's name stays up on that board in its gold. The town keeps its race. You keep your hands clean — cleaner than clean, because you'll have done the right thing and you'll never have had to pay the cost of it, never had to stand up in that room tomorrow night and take the one win this dead town has left and hand it to a grave. You do right and it costs you nothing but the birds, and the birds were never yours, girl, they were never anybody's, they were Frans Bery's, every feather. Give me the line and I'll bury the rest with my own two hands and you'll never be the one who broke the town."

The garden had gone all the way to dark while he talked. Down the row a clock somewhere was being wound for the morning, the small ratcheting of it carrying on the still air, and a man's voice called a last bird off a last toss, komeen, komeen, and out past the roofs and the dead winding-gear the south of the sky had gone down to the colour of nothing, the colour it went, the colour she'd thrown the hen into on the heath and would throw the whole loft into in a day and a night.

She stood in the door and understood that he had just offered her the worst thing yet.

Because it was right. That was the thing of it, the thing that came up in her standing there with the dark birds at her back, the worst of it, the thing she could not get past: he was right. It was the right thing he was offering. The birds were Frans Bery's. The blood was stolen blood — the count was poisoned, Staf had written, not the blood, but the blood had been built on the count, bred up for forty years off a bird that won on a lie, and every good card in that loft had De Sint at the top of it and De Sint had flown a true race and been told a false time, and the whole beautiful line, the thing that was worth more than the house, the thing that was saving her, the thing her hands had learned to love — was a thing grown in stolen ground. Give it back. Of course give it back. There was no version of doing right that didn't have give it back in it somewhere. Marcel Bery had come up her garden in the dark and offered to let her do the right thing in private, with no cost, no town turned against her, no gold name pulled down, no eleven-o'clock-Mass-going people learning that the one thing they'd been proud of was a thing to be ashamed of — and her grandfather's grave left whole, left a hero's grave, left exactly the lie he'd asked her, in the end, in his own hand, to not keep.

That was where it caught.

She stood in the door and felt it catch, the place it didn't fit, and made herself stand in it and feel it the way Jules had taught her to stand in a thing and feel it before she moved her hands. Keep the birds honest. He hadn't written keep the birds. He'd written honest. And he hadn't written give Frans his blood back, though he could have, the man knew where the Berys were, he'd been sending them money in code for forty years, he could have left the birds to Frans Bery in the will and never told a living soul and the town would have its hero still and the Berys would have their blood and the whole rotten count would have stayed buried in a tin in a notary's safe forever. He could have done exactly what Marcel was offering her to do. He'd had the same door. He'd stood at the same door for forty years with the same private handle on it — give it back quiet, keep the name — and he had not opened it, and instead he had done the one strange thing, the thing she hadn't understood until she'd read the last page at one in the morning: he had left it to her, with the proof in the floor, the clock and the tape and the logbook and the confession, all of it, every hard scrap that could only be wanted by someone meaning to do the thing in the open — because the blood given back in the dark gave the Berys a bird and gave Frans nothing.

That was it. That was the whole of it, come up clear in the dark garden the way a speck comes clear out of an empty sky.

Frans Bery hadn't wanted a bird.

She'd thought he had. The whole season she'd thought it — Marcel saying the bloodline, the only restitution the right size — and she'd believed it because it was easier to believe a man wanted a thing you could hand him than to believe he wanted a thing you could only say. But Frans Bery was dead. Frans Bery had been dead since December, in the ground at Eisden under a stone they couldn't afford the lettering on, and you could not give a bird to a man in the ground. The only thing you could give a man in the ground was his name, said out loud, in the room where it had been taken from him, in front of the people who'd taken it — and that you could not do in private, because a name was not a private thing, a name was the town's thing, a name lived in the town's mouth or it didn't live at all. Marcel could fly Den 58 at Eisden for the next forty years and win the whole national programme with it and his father would still be, in Sint-Amandsheide, in the lokaal, on the board, in the mouth of every man who lifted a cap on a Saturday, the bad loser, the incomer with the coal-scuttle loft who'd cried robbery and never proved it. The blood went to Marcel. The name stayed stolen. And Marcel — Marcel knew that. Marcel knew it better than she did. He had just offered her, knowing it, the door his own grief could fit through, the bird, the thing he could hold; and let his father's name go on lying in the gold on the board, because forty years had taught Marcel Bery, the way they'd taught Staf, the way they'd taught the whole town, that you take the small true thing you can hold and you let the large true thing you can't go on being a lie, because the large true thing costs more than anyone has.

"You're not saying anything," Marcel said.

"You've not asked me anything I can say in a word."

"It's a simple door, girl."

"It's not a simple door," she said. "It's the easiest door I've ever been shown and that's a different thing." She heard her own voice come out flat, the lokaal flat, the flat she'd caught off Jules and the men without meaning to, and was surprised by it the way she kept being surprised by the things the season had put in her. "You're offering to let me do the right thing for nothing."

"For the birds."

"For the birds." She let it sit. "And nothing else. Not the name, not the board, not the morning anybody in this town has to wake up knowing a thing about the dead man they were proud of. I give you the blood in the dark and your father stays a bad loser in every mouth in this town forever, and I keep my opa a hero, and you get a bird." She looked down the half-step at him, at the cap turning again now, slow, the only thing in him that ever moved when the rest of him went still. "That's not restitution, Meneer Bery. That's a sale. It's the same sale the man from Antwerp came up this garden to make me, only the price isn't francs, it's me getting to feel I did right. And I'd take it." The honesty of that surprised her too, coming out. "I'd take it in a heartbeat. It's the best deal anybody's offered me all year. Do right, lose nothing, keep everything, hand you a shed full of birds I never asked for and a clear conscience into the bargain." She shook her head, once. "It's almost worth it just for how clean it'd let me feel."

The shape in the car at the end of the alley had got out. She saw it without looking at it — the door of the red Escort opening, the dome light coming on a second and going off, a man standing up out of the car into the alley dark and not coming up the garden, just standing, leaned on the roof of his cheap car with his weight going wrong the way a man's weight goes when he's done waiting, Dries, forty-four and sour with no sleep, his father's lettering still owing on a stone. He didn't come up the garden. The arrangement held even now; Marcel at the gate, the principle; Dries by the car, the cost. But he'd got out. That was a thing he hadn't done before.

"My brother," Marcel said, low, not turning to look, "thinks I'm a fool to offer you a door at all. He'd take what's owed and never mind whose hand it came out of. He thinks the line should be at Eisden by now whether you'll give it or no, and he's not wrong about what's owed, he's only wrong about how. He's wanted the cruel way the whole time and I've held him off it the whole time because I'm my father's son and my father did it the right way his whole life and look where the right way got him." The cap went still again. "I'm tired, girl. That's the truth under the door I'm offering you. I'm tired the way a thing gets tired holding a weight it's held too long. I want it down. I don't much care anymore whether it goes down clean or quiet, I want it down off me before I'm in the ground at Eisden beside him still holding it, and the quiet way's the only way that doesn't break a town to do it, and I never wanted to break the town, the town's not the one that robbed us, the town just believed the wrong man, the town's only guilty of being glad." He looked up at her on the step. "So I'm offering you the kind door. Take the kind door. Give me the line and let the rest lie and we'll both of us have done a hard right thing the easy way, which is more than most get."

And she nearly did. She wanted it down too. She'd wanted it down since April, the weight he was talking about, the stone-on-the-chest of the tin, and here was a man offering to take it off her and ask nothing but the one thing the loft had spent the season teaching her she could bear to lose because it was never hers — and it would be over, tonight, in the dark, no room, no green baize, no morning of being the girl who broke the town, no Gust Verhoeven's face going to slate, no eleven-o'clock people learning the shape of a thing it'd be kinder never to know. Down. Off her. Done.

She thought of the heath, of opening her hands.

That was the thing that came, standing in the door wanting to say yes: the heath, the cold north wind, the hen dropping a body's length and taking the air and setting her head and going, the whole thousand kilometres of it folded up small and aimed home, and the human part of it, the whole of the human part, being only this — to let go at the right time in the right place with your face pointed the way you wanted her to learn. And she understood, the way the season kept making her understand things in her hands before her head had ruled on them, that what Marcel was offering her was the wrong direction to be standing in. The kind door, the quiet door, the door that let her hand back the blood and keep the name a lie — it pointed her south, away from home, away from the place the truth had to land to be true. It let her do the easy right thing in the dark and call it home. And the truth, the real one, the one with Frans Bery's name in it, was north, was up in the lit window of the lokaal tomorrow night with the whole town's faces turned the wrong way, in the open, in the worst place, where it cost everything — and that was where it had to be loosed, because a name said in the dark to one tired man went nowhere, sat down in a field somewhere south of home and thought it had done a thing, and a name said in the lit room flew.

"No," she said.

The word went out and the garden didn't change and that was the strangeness of it, the way the biggest things she'd said all year had gone out small into rooms that didn't change. The clock down the row finished its winding. A bird shifted somewhere behind her on a perch.

"No," she said again, because once wasn't enough for a thing that size and she made herself say it the second time the way you make yourself do the thing your hands know. "I'll not take the door. I'll not give you the line in the dark."

Something went out of Marcel's face. Not anger — she'd half-braced for anger and it wasn't anger, it was the other thing, the worse thing, the thing she'd seen on Bram's face the night the will was read, a tiredness going one notch further down into itself. "Then you'll keep the blood and keep the name and keep the whole rotten lot," he said, flat, "and you'll be exactly your grandfather, girl, you'll be him to the feather, a Maes in that loft sitting on what was stole and calling it an inheritance, and I'll have come up this garden in the dark to give a child the kind way out and the child'll have shut the door in my face for the loft, for the birds, for the same forty pieces of feather your opa shut it for—"

"I'm not keeping them quiet," she said.

He stopped.

She heard it land. She watched it land in him the way she watched a bird land, the small full-body settling of a thing arriving, and she made herself say the rest of it standing on the step above him with the dark birds at her back, in the flat voice, the lokaal voice, the voice the season had grown in her.

"I'll not give you the line in the dark," she said, "because the dark's where my opa kept it, and the dark's where your father's name's been rotting forty years, and a bird handed over in the dark gives you something to fly and gives him nothing. He's dead. You can't give a dead man a pigeon. The only thing you can give a dead man is his name said out loud in the room it was took from him, and that's not a thing I can do in this garden tonight with the lights off, it's a thing I can only do tomorrow, in there, in front of all of them, with the clocks on the table and the wax in Gust Verhoeven's hand and the whole town watching, and it'll take the win off the board and it'll take the hero out of my grandfather and it'll break the town the way you said and I'd give a year of my life not to be the one to do it." She drew a breath. "And I'm going to do it. Tomorrow night. Before a single bird's in a crate. I'm going to stand up in that room and read what he wrote and say your father's name and give him back his race in front of every mouth that ever called him a bad loser, and then I'm going to fly these birds clean, not to win him anything, not to win me anything, just because it's the only honest way left to love a thing that was grown in a lie." The cap had stopped turning altogether in his hands. "That's not the kind door, Meneer Bery. It's the cruel one. It's crueller to me and to my opa and to this whole town than yours by a mile, and your father gets nothing he can hold out of it, just a name said too late to a man in the ground at Eisden — but it's the only door that gives him the thing he actually wanted, which wasn't a bird. You knew it wasn't a bird. You came up here at half six to offer me the bird door because the name door costs everybody too much and you're tired. I understand it. I nearly took it." She looked down at him. "But it's the wrong direction. So. No."

For a long moment Marcel Bery did not move at all, and the shape of his brother by the car did not move, and the only thing in the garden that moved was the dark coming the last of the way up out of the south, and a single late clock down the row striking the half off true, a beat behind the church, the way every clock in the world was a beat behind some other clock, the way one clock, once, in 1958, had been made to run a hair ahead of the true and put a name in gold that should have been somebody else's.

"You'll do it in the open," Marcel said. Not a question. Testing the weight of it.

"In the open. Tomorrow. You should come. You and your brother both. It's your father's name, it should be a Bery in the room when it's said." She put her hand back on the loft door, on the latch, the way she did when a thing was finished and she wanted her hand on the bird-warm dark of her own. "Whatever I lose tomorrow night," she said, "I'll have lost it to your father's face and not behind his back. That's the most I've got to offer you, and it's worse than what you came for, and it's the only thing in this that's true."

She went in and shut the loft door behind her, the latch dropping the small honest sound it dropped, and stood in the warm dark with the forty bodies and the one hen on the third perch with her foot tucked and the orange eye giving nothing back, and through the wire and the brick she heard, after a while, two car doors, the good clean one and the cheap one, and the two engines start, the town one and the broken one, and pull off down the alley and away, the sound of them getting small the way the town made every sound get small as it went toward the road out — and she stood in the dark a long time after they'd gone, with her hand on the keel of the bird she'd entered into 1958 again, and did not feel, the way you'd think a person would feel after saying a thing that size out loud at last, that the weight had come down off her chest.

She felt it move. That was all. She felt the great stone she'd carried since April lift off the floor of her and shift up into her two hands, into the actual world, into a thing she was now going to have to carry the few feet that mattered, up the garden and into the lit room and out of her own mouth in front of all of them — and she understood, holding the hen, that she had not put the weight down tonight. She'd picked it up. The dark man had offered to take it and she'd told him no, and now it was hers to carry into the light, and it was heavier in her two hands than it had ever been on the floor of her, the whole of it, the loft and the legend and the debt and the dead man's name and her own — light as a lie and heavier than the town, and growing no lighter at all for being, at last, after a whole long season of the dark, about to be said.

Chapter Twenty-Four — The Sealing

She carried the tin into the lokaal under her arm wrapped in the green anorak, the way you'd carry a bird to a vet, a thing you didn't want the street to read off you, and the street read it anyway. The Pastoorstraat on a basketing night was the one street in town that still filled. Crates stacked three high outside the door of the club, the wicker ones and the new plastic ones, smelling of straw and ammonia and the rubber smell of forty lofts' worth of birds gone over twice with a damp hand; men in their good caps standing about in the wet with their entry envelopes; the low Saturday-night sound of it, men who had nothing to say to each other any other night of the week saying it now, in the half-sentences, the weather, the wind, Barcelona, this is the big one, this is the queen. She came up through them with the tin under her arm and they made the small room for her they'd made all season, the chair-Staf-left room, nodding her past, and not one of them knew she had the whole forty years of the town under her arm in a biscuit tin, light as a lie and heavier than the road out.

Jules was at the door.

He looked at the shape under the anorak and looked at her face and did not ask. He'd known since the Sunday morning she'd told him, sat at his kitchen table with the rain coming sideways off the heath, and he'd done the thing she'd half-hoped he wouldn't, which was not talk her out of it. He'd gone quiet a long time over his cup and then he'd said, you'll want it on the table, not in your hand, so they can't say you waved a thing about, and that had been the whole of his blessing, a man telling her how to lay the proof down so it would carry — and now he stood at the club door with his cap on and stepped in beside her without being asked, on the loft side, the bird side, and went in with her, and that was the most anybody had done for her all year.

Inside it was hot the way the lokaal got hot, forty men and the gas heater and the old bulb over the green baize, and the trophies on the high shelf catching the light, and the board.

The board was on the long wall where it had always been. Honor board, the club called it, gold names on dark wood going back to before the war, the men who'd won the big ones, and near the top, in the lettering some sign-writer in Hasselt had done in 1958 and nobody had touched since, brighter than the rest because Staf had kept it cleaned: MAES, G. — BARCELONA 1958. She'd grown up under it. She'd been lifted to see it. It was the first reading lesson she could remember, her own surname in gold, the proof that a Maes had once made the whole sky come home to this street.

She set the tin down on the side table by the door, still wrapped, and waited for the clocks.

The clocks came out at nine.

That was the part of the night with the most church in it, and the men went quiet for it the way they didn't for anything else. Gust Verhoeven brought the master clock out from the back room himself, the big constateur, and set it on the green baize under the bulb, and the men brought their own clocks up one at a time and laid them in a row, the brass drums, the little glass faces, some of them sixty years old and worth a wage and wound like watches all week to be ready — and Gust took each one and set it to the master and checked the drum and the printing and then sealed it, dripped the red wax from the little burner and pressed the club die into it while it was soft, the same die, the lead seal going on so that no man could open his own clock between the sealing and the breaking after the race without the broken wax telling on him. The seal was the whole sport. The seal was the reason a man's word about his own bird could be believed by men who'd lie to him about everything else. Gust did it the way he'd done it forty years, the wax and the die, his big slow hands steady, his mouth a little moving the way the old men's mouths moved over the rhythm of a sacred thing, a priest who'd forgotten the words and kept them.

Lieselot watched the wax go on the clocks and thought: that's it. That's the whole of what he broke. Not a bird. Not a race. He broke the seal of the thing that lets these men believe each other, and they put his name in gold for it.

She had brought her own clock up like the others, Staf's clock, the working one, the honest one, and Gust set it and sealed it and slid it back to her without quite looking at her, and she took it, and that was the moment she'd marked for herself, the clock honest in her hand and the wax still warm, because after the sealing the basketing started, and once a bird was in a crate the night was a freight train and you did not stop it.

"Before the crates," she said.

She didn't say it loud. She'd thought all week about saying it loud and Jules had said, don't, the lokaal flat carries further than a shout in here, and he was right, she said it the flat way and it cut the room more than a shout because nobody said before the crates on a basketing night, the crates were the night, and the men's faces came round to her one and two at a time, Gust last, the wax-burner still going in his hand.

"Sit down, girl," Gust said. Not unkind. Tired. "We've forty lofts to basket and a convoyer in Battel at eleven."

"It'll take five minutes."

"Then take it after."

"It can't be after." She had the tin off the side table now and she was unwinding the anorak from it with her two hands while she talked, slow, the way you undid a thing you wanted them to watch you undo. "It can't be after because after the crates are closed there's a bird of mine in one of them, and a bird of mine in one of them with this not said is the same lie as 1958, only it'd be mine." She got the lid up. She did not look down into it; she knew it by heart, the dark of it, the brass, the yellow paper. "And I'll not put a bird of mine in 1958's crate the way my grandfather did. So it's before the crates or it's not a true thing, and I came here to do a true thing."

The room had gone the particular quiet of a room that doesn't yet know what kind of trouble it's in.

She set them on the green baize one at a time, in among the sealed clocks, where the men could see them with the bulb on them, and she named them the flat way as she set them, because Jules had said name each thing as you lay it, make them watch your hands, a thing on a table with no name is just a thing.

"This is my grandfather's clock from 1958," she said, and set the brass one down. It was an older make than the ones on the baize, a heavier drum, and on the underside, if a man turned it, the year was scratched into the brass in a hand none of them would know, 58, and two or three of the older men leaned without meaning to, the way men lean at a thing that's the same as their own thing and wrong. "Not this season's. The one he clocked his bird into at Barcelona in 1958. He kept it. He was meant to give it back to the club after and he kept it forty years."

"Lieselot." Gust had put the wax-burner down.

"This is the drum-tape out of it." The yellowed strip, brittle, the punch-marks in it gone brown, and she laid it flat beside the clock and weighted one end with the clock so it wouldn't curl. "The times printed off the night of the race. And this"—the logbook page, the one Marcel had given her on a wet step in May, a man handing over the one thing that proved his own father right—"this is Frans Bery's own record. In his own pencil. His bird's true home time. The man who flew out of the coal-scuttle loft at Eisden that none of you ever let in the front room of this club."

Somebody said the name low. Bery. Like a thing pulled up out of a long way down.

"And this"—last, and she stopped and made herself slow, because this was the one that was Staf's own hand, the one with his thumb-grease on it and his lung-cough in the slant of the letters, the one she'd read at one in the morning in April and not slept after—"is what he wrote. In his hand. He left it to me with the rest, in a tin, sealed, six years in a notary's safe, to open alone. I've opened it. I've read it a hundred times." She set the confession down on the green baize among the sealed clocks, under the gold board with his name on it, and stood up straight, and the room had got so quiet she could hear the gas heater and a bird somewhere out in the crates shift and resettle in the straw. "And I'm going to read you the middle of it. The part that matters. And then you can do what you want."

Gust came round the table. Not fast. A big old man in his good cap coming round a table the slow honest way, putting his hand flat on the baize beside the brass clock, not over it, beside it, a man not yet sure whether he was stopping a thing or steadying himself against it.

"You don't know what's in that," he said, quiet, for her, almost only for her. "A man writes things, sick, at the end. It's not—"

"You were thirty," Lieselot said.

The hand on the baize went still.

"You were thirty in 1958. You were a measurer. You told me yourself, on the heath in May, you saw his bird drop into the loft that afternoon and you saw the time go up on the board that night and you knew the one didn't fit the other and you said nothing, because a thing's true when the club says it's true, that's what you told me." She held his eye and it cost her and she did it. "So you do know what's in it, Meneer Verhoeven. You're the one man in this room who's known for forty years. I'm only the one reading it out."

He didn't deny it. She'd been ready for the denial, she'd built herself for it all week, the chairman saying the girl's overwrought, her grandfather's dead, look at the state of her — and it didn't come, and the not-coming was worse and better than the denial, because it landed in the room without her having to win it. Gust Verhoeven stood with his hand on the green baize beside the clock and his mouth a little open and forty years came up into his face all at once and made him, for a second, an old man instead of a chairman, and he didn't say it wasn't true. He said:

"It'll take the board off the wall."

"I know."

"It'll take him off it. Forty years. The only one this town ever—" His voice did a thing she'd not heard it do. "You'll take the one thing off the wall this whole street comes in here to stand under. You know what's under that name? Nothing. The mine's shut. The young's gone. Forty years that name's been the one thing in this town that says we were somewhere, we were on the map, a man off this street stood at the top of the whole world one Saturday — and you're going to read a sick man's bit of paper and take it down, and what'll you put up instead, girl? What goes up where the gold comes off?"

"The truth," she said. "Late."

She read it.

She'd thought she'd shake and she didn't, much; her hands had got steady off a season of holding birds you couldn't drop, and she held the page in the bulb-light and read Staf's middle paragraph in the flat voice, the lokaal voice, the one the season had grown in her, and it came out into the hot room plainly, a dead man's words in a dead man's grammar, the way he'd talked, the words a miner used and no more.

She read that his bird, the cock he'd called De Sint, had come home that afternoon in 1958 a strong second on the day, a hero's result, a bird he could have been proud of all his life. She read that Frans Bery's blue hen had beaten him true by a margin so small it was nothing, a handful of metres a minute over a thousand kilometres, the smallest true thing in the world. She read that Door Vandersmissen, who'd had the seal that year and was forty years in the ground at Sint-Amand, had come to Staf in the dark with a way to close that handful of minutes, and that Staf had let him. She read the sentence she'd read a hundred times, the one with his cough in it: I made the clock say my bird was home before he was. I did not race a better bird. I made a clock lie about a few minutes and let a man with no standing carry the loss of it, and I let this town love me for it forty years, and that is the worst thing, that I let them love me for it. She read his last line of that part, which was not an excuse and she was glad of that, which was the only thing in the whole page that wasn't flat: Lieselot, I could not give it back while I lived because I had not the nerve, and a thing given back in the dark is not given back. Do it where it can be heard or do not do it. I leave you the doing because it is the only thing I have left that is true to leave.

She put the page down on the green baize.

"Frans Bery won Barcelona in 1958," she said into the quiet. "Not Maes. Bery. His name should be on that board and my grandfather's shouldn't, and the man it was took from is dead now, in the ground at Eisden under a stone his sons can't afford the lettering on, so it's too late to give him anything he can hold." She looked round at them, the caps, the clocks, Gust's slate face, the gold name over all their heads. "But it's not too late to say it. That's the whole of why I had to say it before the crates and not after, in here and not in a garden in the dark, with all of you and not just one — because a name's not a private thing, a name lives in the town's mouth or it doesn't live at all, and his has been rotting in your mouths forty years as the bad loser, the incomer who cried robbery. So. I'm giving it back where it was took." She put two fingers on the brass clock, the way Staf had put two fingers on a keel, reading a thing. "Here's the clock that lied. It's the club's now, not ours. Do with it what you should've done with it in '58."

There was a long time then when nobody did anything, and that was the part she hadn't been able to picture all week, the after, the no-one-moving, and it turned out the after was just men in a hot room with their caps in their hands and the gas heater going and a thing on the table none of them wanted to be the first to touch.

Marcel Bery was at the back by the door. He'd come, the way she'd asked, in his good cap, with Dries a half-step behind him with his weight going wrong the way it went, and the two of them stood in the door-cold and did not come forward, and when she'd finished and the room had gone quiet Marcel did not say a word. She looked at him over all their heads and he looked back at her and there was nothing on his face she could read as winning, nothing she could read at all except the thing she'd put there, his father's name said out loud in this room at last, in front of every mouth that had made it small — and it was not enough, she could see that, it would never be enough, you could not make forty years come right with four pieces of paper on a Saturday night, and his face said that too, said too late, said he's in the ground, said the thing the whole book of it had been turning toward, late, but. He gave her, after a while, one small movement of the head. Not a thank you. Lower than that and higher than that. A man acknowledging a debt got paid in the one coin that was left, which was worth everything and bought nothing.

Then she did the second thing, the thing the town would understand least and that mattered most, and she said it to Gust because Gust was the one who'd have to allow it.

"I'm still flying her," she said.

Gust came up out of wherever he'd gone. "What?"

"De Late. The hen. She's entered, the form's in, the clock's sealed — your wax." She nodded at the row of sealed clocks, Staf's honest one among them with the red die-mark still soft-bright. "I'm basketing her tonight with the rest. Clean."

"You just—" Gust looked from her to the board to the brass clock on the baize and back, a man whose whole night had come apart in his hands. "You just stood there and took the win off your own grandfather and you're going to fly his bird at the same race—"

"Not to win it back." And this was the thing she'd had to get clear in herself on the heath, opening her hands into the cold, the thing she couldn't have said in April and could say now. "I'm not flying her to win 1958 again. That's what flying her for the gold would be — re-winning the lie, putting the name back up by the back way. I'm flying her because she's a good hen and she's bred to cross that water and a bird like that wants flying, and not flying her to punish a dead man's name would be its own kind of lie, a softer one. The blood's clean. Whatever the count did, the bird flew it true — De Sint flew a real race in '58, it was only the clock that lied about him. So I'll fly his daughter's daughter's daughter honest, on an honest clock, in front of all of you, and she'll come or she won't, and either way it'll be the first true thing flown out of the Maes loft in forty years. That's not winning. That's just flying a bird the way you're meant to. It's the only honest way I've got left to love her."

She picked the brass clock up off the baize — the club's now, but hers to move this once — and she set it down at the foot of the honor board, under the gold name, where they'd all have to step round it, and left it there.

"You can take the name down or leave it up," she said. "That's the club's, not mine. But the clock stays where everyone can see it till you decide, so whatever you decide, you'll have decided it looking at the thing, and not in the dark."

They basketed her last.

That was the convoyer's doing, or Gust's, or just the way the night had gone strange — the forty lofts called up one at a time to the table with their birds, the rubber countermark rings slipped on, the leg-band numbers read out and written down, the birds passed into the long crates for the lorry to Battel and the lorry from Battel to the convoy and the convoy over the mountains to the start, and the Maes loft called last, when the room had thinned and the cold come in off the street through the propped door and most of the caps gone home to talk about what they'd seen and not yet decided how to tell it.

She brought the hen up in her two hands.

She'd done it a hundred times now but she did it slow this once, the two fingers along the keel out of habit and not habit, the hard light not-full of a bird at the top of herself, the heart going under her fingers like something that meant to get out of the town faster than she ever had. The orange eye took in the bulb and the men and the gold name on the wall and gave nothing back, the polished button of it with the whole sky banked in it, the same eye that had looked at her in a cold kitchen the week Staf died, when she was a girl who could look at a bird and feel nothing and meant to keep the line going. She hadn't kept the line. She was the end of that line and the start of another and she knew it, holding the hen up to the table under her grandfather's gold name with the clock that lied set at the foot of it, and she slipped the numbered rubber ring onto the bird's leg the honest way, the small ring that would come off her leg in three days' time, God willing, on a different clock, in a garden, and tell the true time at last.

The convoyer wrote the number down. "Maes loft. One bird. De Late." He looked up at her, an outside man from Battel who didn't know any of it, who'd just driven through a town's whole forty years without feeling a bump. "She a good one, then?"

"She comes home," Lieselot said. "Late. But she comes."

She put the hen into the crate herself, into the dark and the straw with the strangers' birds, all of them about to be carried south in the night toward the water none of them had crossed, and she did the thing she'd watched Staf do at this table when she was small and hadn't understood, the thing she understood now: she kept her hand on the crate-wire a second after the bird was in, in the dark, the way you keep a hand on a thing you're sending where you can't follow.

Then she took it off the wire and let go.

Outside, the lorry started up in the wet, and the crates went up into it three high, and the men who were left stood about in the door-light watching forty lofts' worth of birds be carried off toward the south of the sky, faces up out of long habit though there was nothing yet to see, only the black winding-gear at the end of the street and the dark over the heap and the road out that the lorry took, getting small, the way the town made every sound get small as it went toward the edge of itself. Lieselot stood among them with the empty anorak over her arm and her grandfather's honest clock sealed and warm against her side, and behind her in the lit room the brass clock that lied stood at the foot of the board under the gold that might come down or might not, and she had done the thing, she had loosed the name into the open where it could be heard, and there was no bird in the sky yet to tell her whether the doing was rewarded or punished, and she understood, standing in the wet with the lorry's lights going round the bend, that there never would be — that the doing was done, complete, true whether the hen came home in three days or never came at all, a thing she'd let go of at the right time in the right place with her face pointed the way she meant it, and the rest of it now, the whole thousand kilometres of it, was the sky's business and the sea's, and out of her hands.

Chapter Twenty-Five — A Plain Biro

The lorry had been gone six hours and the town had had all of Sunday to decide how to hold it, and it held it the way the town held everything, which was by not saying.

She knew it before she got to the corner of the Pastoorstraat. There was a thing the street did when it had her in its mouth — a small lull, a half-beat of held breath behind the net curtains, the dropped-stitch in the ordinary noise of a Sunday morning that told you you were the subject of the kitchen you were passing. She'd grown up reading it off the street the way you read weather off the birds. They'd done it to Bram for years, that lull, every time he came up the road with the wrong walk on him. Now it was hers. She came up the Pastoorstraat in the thin June light with her face shut and the loft key heavy in her coat against her hip where she'd kept it since the open latch, and the lull went ahead of her down the row like a thing she was pushing, house to house, a wave of being looked at and not greeted, and she thought: so that's the price of it, then. That's the first instalment. They'll let me walk up my own street like my father.

At the bakery the bell went over the door and the talk stopped.

It had not stopped for her in weeks. For weeks it had been the other thing — she's got his hands, did you hear, fourth off the loft, a Maes bird in the union list again — the warm wash of it, René's mother sliding her an extra koffiekoek across the glass for nothing, the old men touching their caps. She had hated how much she'd liked it, and had told herself she didn't like it, and that was the last lie she'd let herself tell, she'd thought, the night she opened the tin all the way. Now the warmth was off it like heat off a stone after dark. The two women at the counter went back to their bread with their backs got somehow rounder, and the girl behind the glass — not René's mother today, the younger one, the niece — served her the loaf without the small free thing and without the eyes, took her francs and gave her the change counted exact into her palm so their hands needn't meet, and that was the whole of it, that was the town turning, in the weight of a coin laid down instead of pressed into a hand.

"Thanks," Lieselot said.

The girl said nothing. Not unkind. Just a girl who'd been told at her own kitchen table last night what the Maes one had done at the club, and didn't have the years yet to know what to do with her own face about it, and so did the safe thing, which was the town thing, which was nothing.

Lieselot took her loaf out into the street and stood a second under the dead sign of the frituur that hadn't opened past nine in two years, and looked down the Pastoorstraat at the black winding-gear at the end of it standing over the whole row like always, and understood, with the loaf warm against her ribs, that she had taken a thing off this street that the winding-gear had not been able to keep. The pit had gone and they'd survived it. The young had gone and they'd survived that. The one thing the town had carried out of all of it — the one gold thing, the Saturday-afternoon thing, the a man off this street stood at the top of the whole world thing — she'd carried into the lokaal in a biscuit tin and set down on the green baize and broken in front of them, and there was nothing the winding-gear could do about that either, and nobody up the row this morning was going to thank her for it, today or maybe ever, and she'd known that going in and done it anyway, and the knowing didn't make the cold off the bakery counter any warmer on the back of her neck.

That was the deal. She'd shook on it in the dark on the heath. Now she was paying it in koffiekoeken.

Bram was up when she got in, which on a Sunday was its own news.

He was at the kitchen table with no drink in front of him, which was newer news than that. There was coffee instead, his own making, too strong by the smell, and the radio off, and he was sitting in his shirtsleeves with his big ruined hands flat on the oilcloth either side of the cup like a man waiting for a verdict, or like a man who'd been to a thing he didn't have words for and had come home to sit in the room it had happened to.

He'd been there. She'd not known if he would be and she'd not asked him to come and he'd come, in his good cap, and stood at the back by the door near the Berys the whole of it, and she'd been too far inside the thing to watch his face. She watched it now. It was doing something she hadn't a name for. Bram had two faces she knew — the drink coming up in it and the drink going out of it — and this was neither, this was a third one, older, like a photograph of him she'd never been shown.

"You heard about the street," he said.

"I felt it."

"Aye." He turned the cup a quarter-turn on the oilcloth and didn't drink it. "Verhoeven's not coming round, if that's what you're braced for. Talked to him last night, after. He'll not. He's gone quiet on it. That's worse, with Gust. The quiet."

"I know what the quiet means."

"Do you." He looked up at her then, and there was the strange thing in it, the third face. "They came at me last night. Couple of them. Down the café." He said café the way another man would say church, the place he was a regular in his ruin. "Bert Cleynen and that. Wanting me to say you were — overwrought. The girl's overwrought, her grandfather's dead, you can see the state of her, it's grief, it's a sick man's bit of paper, sign here it's all a mistake and we'll have it down off the green baize before morning and never spoke of." He turned the cup the other quarter. "They had it half-written. The thing for me to sign. Father of the girl, head of the house, says the family withdraws it. They'd thought it through. They'd been thinking it through since the lorry left, while we were all still standing in the wet."

The kitchen was very quiet. Out the back, down the garden, the loft was empty of its racers and full of its hens and its young and its breeders, and one of them, low and far, made the round wet sound a pigeon makes to no one.

"And," Lieselot said.

She'd meant it to come out flat and it came out smaller than she'd meant. She'd built herself all season for the club and the Berys and the cold street, and she had not built herself for her father at a kitchen table with no drink in front of him and a thing in his hand he could sign that would take the whole of it back, undo it, fold the gold name back up onto the wall and the truth back down into the dark, and let his daughter be overwrought instead of the one who took it — and she understood, in the held breath of the kitchen, that he could do it. That he was the one with the standing to do it. Father of the girl. Head of the house. They'd been right to go to him. He was the one loose latch in the whole of what she'd done.

Bram looked at the cup a long time.

"I had the pen off Cleynen," he said. "He's got Staf's old Pelikan habit, carries the fat black one, you know the kind. He put it in my hand." He turned his own hand over on the oilcloth, palm up, the ruined miner's palm, and looked at it like the pen might still be there. "And I'm sitting there with their bit of paper and their pen, and Cleynen's saying it kind, he's saying you do right by her, Bram, you don't let a kid throw the loft and the legend both away over a notion, he's saying think of your father, and I'm thinking—" He stopped. He had a thing he did with his mouth before he was cruel, the working, and she watched for it, and it wasn't that. It was something else trying to get up his face that the face had no practice at. "I'm thinking, forty years they let him be the legend. Forty years they let me be his son, the drinker, the one didn't inherit, didn't measure up, the one the old man wouldn't even leave the birds to. And I'm sat there with the pen and they want me to be the one signs it back into the dark, the family man, the responsible one, the first responsible thing they've ever in their lives let me be — and it's to make my own daughter a liar so they can keep loving a dead man for a thing he never did."

He put the cup down very carefully, like it might break, which it wouldn't, it was the thick green café-saucer kind.

"I gave Cleynen his pen back," Bram said.

She didn't say anything.

"I didn't make a speech of it. You don't, with Cleynen, he'd only have it round the town you'd lost your reason an' all. I just give it back and stood up and said she's not overwrought, she's right, my father did the thing she said and you all know it, and I'm not signing it, and you can put that round whoever you like. And I come home." He looked at his hands again. "First time in my life I've stood up out of that café for a reason and not just because it was closing."

The wet sound came again from the loft, far and low.

She wanted to say something and there was nothing in the house's grammar to say it with. They were not a family that said the thing. They were a family that did the small movement of the head, like Marcel in the doorway, the coin that was worth everything and bought nothing. So she went and filled the kettle she didn't want, because that was a thing the hands could do, and put it on the cold range and lit it, and the gas caught with its little blue thud, and she stood with her back to him at the range the way she'd stood the night Coemans read the will, and said, to the kettle:

"He'd not have signed it either. Verhoeven thinks. Staf. He'd have wanted it down."

"He wanted it down forty years and hadn't the nerve," Bram said. "He left you to have the nerve for him. That's a hell of a thing to leave a kid." He said it without heat. Then, after a while, quieter, the third face full on it: "But he picked right, the old bastard. He'd not have left it to me. He knew I'd sign anything for the price of a quiet life." A breath. "He knew you wouldn't. That's the one true thing he ever thought about either of us, and he kept it forty years and only said it with a will."

It was the closest her father had ever come to being her father, and they both knew it, and neither of them was going to say that either, and the kettle began its first thin note on the range, and that was the conversation, that was the whole of it, a man giving a pen back and a girl boiling water she didn't want, and somewhere in it the one true thing got passed between them with no words on it at all.

She went up to the lokaal in the afternoon because she had to, because the brass clock that lied was still standing at the foot of the board where she'd left it, the club's now, not hers, and she'd said you'll have decided it looking at the thing and not in the dark, and that meant the thing had to be lookable-at, and a thing left in a locked room with the light off was no kind of looking. The lokaal was open Sundays for the men to come and read the union results off the fax and drink one and go home. She had a key to the back room because Staf's key had everything on it. She let herself in.

Three of them were in the front, at the long table, with the union sheet and their pils. They went quiet when she came through. Gust was not among them. The quiet followed her to the door of the back room and stopped at it like a dog at a step.

In the back room the brass clock stood where she'd set it, at the foot of the honor board, under the gold.

She'd half-thought they'd have moved it. Hidden it. She'd half-thought she'd come up and find it gone into a cupboard, the green baize wiped, the night put away. They hadn't. Maybe none of them had the nerve to be the one whose hand it was that hid it; maybe that was the same gutlessness that had kept the name up forty years, only now it cut her way for once. The clock stood at the foot of the board in the grey light off the high window, the heavy old drum of it, the keyhole that would never take a seal again, and above it on the varnished oak the names went up in their gold-leaf seasons, Lemmens '71 and '74, Verhoeven '69, the dead chairman Verschueren, and at the top in the thickest oldest gilt, amber under forty years of varnish, the gold lifting at the corners so the M had lost its corner and the second A was half a letter:

MAES — 1958 — BARCELONA.

Still up. They'd not taken it down.

She stood and looked at it the way she'd told them to and felt the thing she'd been braced against all day, which was not the cold street and not the bakery and not even her father with the pen — it was this, the name still up, the gold not gone, because she'd done the loud terrible thing and said it in front of every mouth in the town and the wall didn't know. The wall hadn't heard. The name sat up there in its gilt exactly as bright and exactly as false as it had been on Saturday at noon, and would tomorrow, and the truth she'd torn herself open to say had not so much as scratched the varnish. That's what a town does, she thought. You break the thing and the wall keeps it. You say it out loud and the gold doesn't even flake. They put it up in 1958 and it'll be up when I'm Bram's age unless somebody with a chisel and the union's leave takes it down, and nobody will, because to take it down is to admit it was up wrong, and this town will let a thing be true forever before it'll admit it was ever wrong.

She'd thought the truth was a thing you said and then it was said.

It wasn't. The truth was the clock at the foot of the board. It just stood there, lower than the gold, and waited for someone to be brave enough to put it where the gold was, and there was no guarantee in the wood or the gilt or the whole grey room that anyone ever would.

Then she saw the card.

It was on the green baize below the board, propped against the brass clock — a thing that hadn't been there when she'd left on Saturday night, a thing somebody had come in and put there since, on a Sunday, in the cold, with the men gone home and the light off. A bit of white card, the kind off the back of a feed bill or out of a cigarette packet, torn not cut, the edge soft. And on it, in plain blue biro, in a hand that pressed hard and slanted and was nobody's careful Sunday hand, two words.

Frans Bery.

That was all. No date, no race, no winner, no flourish. Just the name, in biro, pressed hard enough to dent the card, propped against the clock that had stolen it, below the gold name that had taken its place — MAES — 1958 — BARCELONA in forty years of varnished gold leaf, and Frans Bery in ninety seconds of someone's biro, on a torn bit of card, at the foot of the wall where the gold had never gone.

She stood looking at it a long time.

She didn't know whose hand it was. It wasn't Gust's; she'd seen Gust's careful old fountain-pen hand on forty entry forms. It might have been Jules. It might have been one of the three out front who'd gone quiet when she came in and would never say. It might — and this was the thought that got in under the day's whole cold and sat in her chest — it might have been one of the ones who'd turned from her on the street this morning, one of the rounded backs at the bakery, someone who'd been told at his kitchen table what the Maes girl did and was hard against her for it in the daylight and had come up here in the grey of the afternoon alone, on the quiet, where nobody would see his hand do it, and torn a bit of card and pressed the dead man's name into it hard with a biro and propped it against the clock. Both things at once. Cold to her in the street and brave in the dark of the back room. The town in one man. That's how it'll come, she thought. Not in gold. Not all at once. Not where they have to be seen doing it. It'll come in biro, on torn card, by hands that won't put their own name to it — but it'll come.

She did not move the card. It wasn't hers to move, no more than the gold was hers to take down. She'd said the club would decide and the club would decide, in its own gutless brave slow way, in fountain pen or in biro, this year or in ten. But she crouched down on her heels in front of the board, the way Staf used to crouch to read a bird low in the basket, and she looked at the two words on the torn card a while longer, the hard-pressed biro of them, lower than the gold and realer than the gold, and she found she had her two fingers out, not touching it, just held near it, the way you hold two fingers near a keel without yet putting the weight on, reading a thing before you trust it.

Late, she thought. Forty years late. Said in biro by a man too feared to sign it.

But there it was. On the wall. Where the gold had never gone. Frans Bery, coming up out of the dark of the room the way a bird comes up out of the dark of the south — a speck of it, the first faint wrong-shaped dot that might be nothing and might be the thing — and her crouched in front of it with two fingers held near and not yet daring to believe, the way she'd been lifted to the loft window when she was small to be the first to spot it.

Out the front the fax machine woke and chattered out another loft's result onto the floor, and one of the three men said something low, and the radiator ticked, and the grey light moved a half-inch up the oak. She stayed down on her heels in front of the torn card and the clock that lied and the gold that hadn't flaked, and she didn't pray, she wasn't the praying kind, she was the last of the line of people who could look at a thing and feel nothing — except she wasn't, she'd given that up, she'd given it up the night she set the tin on the green baize, and so she crouched there and felt the whole of it, the cold street and the warm loaf and her father's given-back pen and the biro pressed hard on the torn card, all of it at once, the town turning in the dark by the one hand at a time it could spare.

The hen was over the mountains by now. Somewhere south, in the wires, in the lorry's dark, on her way to the Spanish dawn and the long water past it. The choice was made and the card was up and the gold was still up too, and none of it was decided, and all of it was coming.

She got up off her heels. Her knees had gone stiff with the season's crouching, an old man's knees in a fifteen-year-old, Staf's knees, and she let that be true too. She left the card where it was, against the clock, below the gold, and she went out through the front where the three men didn't look at her, and out into the Pastoorstraat where the winding-gear stood black over the dead street, and she turned south at the corner out of long habit, her face up to the empty afternoon sky where there was nothing yet to see, nothing for three days, only the road the lorry had taken getting small at the edge of the town — and she stood there in the cold with her face up anyway, waiting, on purpose, the way the honest things wait, with a clock on them, for a thing that goes out across the water and is late, but coming.

Chapter Twenty-Six — The Lossing

The radio in the loft kitchen had a habit of finding France before it found anything closer, and on the Wednesday morning of the release it was a French voice it gave her first, a man somewhere south reading farm prices into the dark, and Lieselot sat on the upturned bucket in the cold with the volume low and the dial nudged a hair off the French, waiting for the Flemish to come up under it.

It was a quarter to five. She had not slept much and had stopped pretending she would. Down the garden the loft was a black box against a sky going from black to the no-colour that came before grey, and the breeders and the hens were asleep in it with their heads in under their wings, all but the perch that was empty, the third perch down, where the hen had sat her whole short life and where there was nothing now but the white smear on the droppings-board and the worn place on the wood her feet had made. De Late was a thousand kilometres south in a crate with the lights of Spain coming up grey over the convoy yard, and there was nothing Lieselot could do for her from a bucket in the dark, and she sat there anyway, because the sitting was the only thing the night had left to do.

The convoy had its own number you could ring, a man at a desk in Halle who took the lossing time off the wire and read it out, and Jules had given her the number on the back of a feed bill in his slow careful hand, bel pas voor zessen, don't ring before six, they won't know before six. The radio would have it sooner. The radio always had it sooner, off the federation feed, the lossings read out one after another like Mass intentions — Bordeaux gelost, Cahors gelost, the morning's birds going up all over the south of France — and last, because it was the longest and the cruellest and the one the whole country waited on, Barcelona.

She turned the dial the hair back toward the Flemish and the farm prices went under and a different voice came up, nearer, flatter, a Hasselt voice reading the weather over the Pyrenees, and she stopped with two fingers on the dial and listened to a man she would never meet tell her what the sky was doing over the mountains her hen had to cross.

Jules came at half five, in the dark, with his bicycle lamp still on though it was nearly light enough to see by, and he leaned the bike on the wall by the kitchen door the way he'd done all season and came in stamping the cold off his boots and did not say anything cheerful, which was how she knew he took it seriously.

"Anything," he said.

"Weather's the thing they keep saying. Over the mountains."

"Aye." He took the other bucket and turned it and sat, an old man folding down onto it joint by joint, and put his hands toward the little gas ring she'd lit for the warmth as much as the coffee. "There's a wind up there this week. Out of the north-west, high up, over the Pyrenees. They'll have weighed it. They'll not loss into a wall, they're not fools, they've thirty thousand birds and the whole of Belgium watching, they'll hold them sooner than throw them at a thing they can't get over." He said it the way he said most things, to settle her and to settle himself, the two of them the same animal this morning. "But a Barcelona's a Barcelona. There's always the mountains and there's always the water, and they have to be crossed if you want the race, and the race is the point. You don't get a clean queen. You get a hard one or you get none."

"And the hen."

Jules was quiet a moment. He had a thing he did when she asked him the bird straight out, a small slowing, because he would not lie to her about a bird and he would not frighten her either, and the truth lived in the gap. "She's bred for it," he said. "She's bred for exactly it. Your grandfather bred toward this race for twenty years — not the club race, not the Sunday race, this one, the long water. She's the nearest thing to De Sint he could make, and De Sint flew it real in '58, whatever the clock did after. The blood crosses water. That's what the blood is." He turned his hands over toward the gas. "But the blood's in a crate with twenty-nine thousand other birds and a wind on the mountains, and bred-for-it isn't the same as home. You know that now. You learned it this season the hard way, off the young cock that didn't come and the old red one they ruined. Bred for it gets her to the start. After that it's her and the sky, and the sky doesn't read pedigrees."

"That's a comfort."

"It's not meant to be a comfort. You're past wanting comfort. You want the truth of the thing, you've spent the whole year getting where you can stand the truth of the thing — don't start wanting it sweetened now, the morning of the lossing, it'd be a waste of the year." He almost smiled, the dry crack of it. "Pour the coffee, jong. They'll not throw them before six and we'll have got cold for nothing."

The lossing came at twenty past six.

The radio said the others first, the way it always did, the shorter races going up into a better morning further north, gelost, gelost, a man's voice that had read it ten thousand times and kept none of it, and then it came down the list to the bottom where the long one lived, and the voice changed by not changing, which was the thing about it, it said the great cruel word in exactly the flat tone it had said all the small ones:

Barcelona International. Gelost om zes uur twintig. Wind noordwest.

Released at twenty past six. Wind north-west.

Jules sat very still on his bucket with his cup in both hands and did not drink. North-west was the wind they'd been afraid of all morning, the wind that would be a headwind over the mountains, the wind that would hold the birds low and make them climb into it and cost them more than the distance ever could, the wind that turned a thousand kilometres into something longer than a thousand kilometres in the only measure that mattered, which was what it took out of a bird's body to get across it. He did not say any of that. He said:

"They threw them. So the mountains were crossable, or they judged so. That's something. They don't throw if it's a wall."

"North-west," Lieselot said.

"North-west," Jules agreed, and that was all either of them said about it, because there was nothing in the world to be done about a wind, and the saying of it twice was the whole conversation, an old man and a girl in a cold kitchen agreeing that the thing was hard and would not be helped.

She got up off the bucket and went to the kitchen window and looked down the garden at the loft and past it at the south of the sky, which was grey now and getting light and had nothing in it, would have nothing in it for two days at the soonest, three more like, and she stood there and made herself do the arithmetic she'd been not-doing since four, the arithmetic Jules had taught her at this window in April, the thing that turned a wait from a sickness into a craft. Released six-twenty. A thousand kilometres, near enough. A good Barcelona bird flies the daylight and roosts the dark and flies again — they don't fly the night, mostly, not the first night, they're not owls, they put down somewhere over France and wait for the sun. So the soonest she could be here is tomorrow's last light, and that's the freak, that's the once-in-a-decade bird, that's not a hen with a headwind to climb. Realistic is the day after. The third day. And the third day's last light is not late. The third day's last light is on time, for a bird that crossed that water against that wind. The thing to be afraid of is the fourth day. The fourth day you stop doing arithmetic and start doing the other thing.

She did not say the other thing's name even to herself.

The page in the tin gave the lossing morning its own paragraph, two lines of careful pencil before the ink went bad — the wind was wrong that year too, and I stood on the step and did not yet know — and she had read it so many times it ran in her now without the page, ran the way memory runs, as if she had stood on the step herself.

1958. The wind is in the north-west on the morning they throw them, and Staf stands in his garden at twenty past six with the radio brought out onto the step on its long flex, and the whole street is out the same way, men on their steps with their cups, miners on a Sunday off, and the word goes down the row house to house the second it comes off the wire — gelost, Barcelona gelost — and a man two doors down, old Cornelis who is dead these thirty years, lifts his cap and holds it a second like he's at the graveside of something, because the throwing of the birds at Barcelona is the nearest thing this Catholic street has to a thing it believes in without being told to.

Staf does not lift his cap. Staf has a hen in that field — no, a cock, De Sint, the dark blue cock that is almost black, the best bird this street has bred in fifty years — and Staf is twenty-four and the coal is under his nails for good and he has not slept and he stands on his step with his cup going cold in his fist and his young wife Mariette in the doorway behind him with her arms folded against the morning, and he does the arithmetic too, the same arithmetic, released six-twenty, a thousand kilometres, the daylight and the dark and the daylight, the soonest and the realistic and the thing to be afraid of, the exact same sum his granddaughter will do at the exact same window thirty-six years on, in a town that by then will have buried the mine that is at this moment, this 1958 morning, the loudest healthiest thing for thirty kilometres, the winding-gear turning, the pit in full cry under their feet, forty-four thousand men down the hole and the whole of Limburg black and rich and certain it will last forever.

The wind is in the north-west. Staf weighs it the way Jules will teach Lieselot to weigh it, and he knows what it costs a bird, and he wants this race the way a poor man wants one thing in his life, the one Saturday that lifts him out of being one more pair of hands in the dark — and somewhere south, in the same field, thrown into the same north-west wind at the same twenty past six, is a blue hen out of a coal-scuttle loft at Eisden that he has held in his own two hands and knows, knows the way you know a knife is sharper than your own, is the better bird.

He does not know yet that he will cheat. That is the thing the page in the tin will never quite explain to her, and the thing this morning on the step holds and will not say: that the man standing on the step at twenty past six in 1958, doing the sum, wanting the race, is not yet a liar. The lie is three days off, in the dark, with Door Vandersmissen's hand on his arm and the town's hunger in his ears. This morning he is only a young man with a good bird and a hard wind, the same as every other man on the row, the same as his granddaughter will be — clean, still, on the near side of the thing, with the whole sky out in front of him not yet decided.

The radio on the step says it again for the ones who missed it. Barcelona gelost. The street turns south as one, faces up, cups going cold, into a sky that will hold its birds for three days and tell no one anything. It is the last morning Staf Maes stands in that crowd as one of them and nothing more.

By nine the town was at its windows.

She knew it without going up the street, the way she'd known the street had her in its mouth the Sunday after the basketing — you could feel the town doing a thing in concert even through brick, even with the curtains shut. Barcelona morning did not care about the board or the gold or what the Maes girl had stood up and said in the lokaal. Barcelona morning was older than the feud and bigger than it. Every loft in Sint-Amandsheide that had thrown a bird into that field — and there were a dozen, the dozen old men who still played the grote fond, half of them cold to her now and one or two who'd not have her name in their mouths — every one of them was at a window or in a garden this morning with his face to the south, and they were all, the kind and the cold alike, waiting on the same sky, doing the same arithmetic, holding the same fear, and there was nothing she'd said in the club that could touch that, because the wait was the one thing the town still did together, the last thing, older than the mine and likely to outlast the grudge.

Bram was up. He came down in his vest and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the radio, then at her at the window, and didn't ask, because by now he'd learned the shape of it off her, when there was news and when there was only weather.

"Threw them at twenty past six," she said, to spare him the asking. "North-west wind."

"That bad?"

"It's not good. It's a Barcelona. It's never good." She heard Jules in her own mouth and let it stand, because it was true, and because it was a thing to say to a father that wasn't the other thing. "Two days at the soonest. Three more like."

Bram nodded slowly. He filled the kettle he didn't need, the way she'd filled it for him the Sunday before, and they stood in the kitchen with the gas going and neither of them said the thing, which was that there was a Maes bird out over the water again, the same water, the same race, and that this time when it came home — if it came home — the clock it dropped its time onto would be honest, and the name it flew under was a name the town was angry at, and whether it placed first or last or didn't place at all, nobody would be putting any Maes in gold on any wall over it, not now, not ever again. They didn't say it. Bram made the coffee nobody wanted and they drank it standing up, and out the window the south of the sky stayed grey and empty, and somewhere under it, a thousand kilometres off and closing at the rate a tired bird closes into a wind, the hen was flying.

She went down to the loft in the afternoon, not because there was anything to do but because the body wanted to be near the empty perch the way the body wants to be near a thing it's lost, and she scraped the boards that didn't need scraping and topped the grit that didn't need topping and stood in the warm reek of the breeders, the corn-and-lime-and-bodies smell that had been the smell of the whole year, and looked at the third perch down with nothing on it.

The breeders watched her with their orange eyes, the polished buttons of them, the whole grey sky banked in each one, and gave nothing back, the way the birds always gave nothing back, the way she'd once meant to give nothing back herself. She put her hand flat on the perch where the hen's feet had worn it and felt the small smoothness the years had put in the wood and thought, not in words exactly but in the shape under words, that the thing was done now and out of her hands and had been since the lorry took the bend. She'd loosed the name in the lokaal where it could be heard. She'd basketed the hen clean, on an honest clock, under the gold that lied. She'd put the brass clock at the foot of the board where they'd have to step round it. There was nothing left to do that was hers to do. The doing was finished. What was happening now, out over the mountains and the water, was not the doing — it was only the world deciding what it would hand back, and the world's handing-back was not the same thing as whether she'd been right, and she knew that, she'd got herself where she could stand to know it: the rightness was already complete, sealed three days ago with the wax still warm, and the hen could come home in the last of tomorrow's light or could go down in the Gulf in the dark and never be seen by anyone again, and it would not make the thing in the lokaal one degree more right or more wrong than it already, finally, was.

She knew it. She could stand it. And she stood at the loft window all the same, the way Staf had lifted her to stand at it when she was small to be the first to spot the speck, the way she'd stood at the corner of the Pastoorstraat the Sunday before with her face up at nothing — and she found her hand on the latch and not turning it, just resting there, the cold brass of it under her fingers, the loft window facing south, the south of the sky going long and gold the way April light had gone the day she'd first watched the forty birds turn to it, and nothing in it, nothing for two days, and her there anyway, on purpose, with a clock on her, waiting the way the honest things wait — for a thing that had gone out across the unknowable water that morning into a wind out of the north-west, and was somewhere over France now in the last of the light, putting down to roost in a strange tree in a strange country, a thousand kilometres still to come and the worst of it crossed, late already, and coming.

Chapter Twenty-Seven — The First Day

The hen did not come on the first day, and Lieselot knew she would not, and stood at the window most of it anyway.

She had slept four hours in the chair by the loft kitchen and woke before light with the print of the chair-back across her cheek and the gas ring cold and the radio still on, hissing the dead air between the night programmes and the farm prices, and she put it off and went down the garden in the half-dark to feed the breeders that were left, the old cocks and the moulting hens and the two late-bred youngsters that knew nothing of any of it, and she did the feeding the way Jules had drilled into her, level scoop, no waste, water changed even though it didn't need it, because the discipline was the thing on a morning like this, the discipline was the only door left between her and the other thing. She scraped the boards. She filled the grit. She did not look at the third perch down, and then she looked at it, the way you press a bruise to make sure it's still yours, and it was still empty, and she went back up to the house and put the kettle on for nobody.

Out the kitchen window the south of the sky came up grey and stayed grey, a flat North Sea grey with the green heap black against it and the dead winding-gear black against it and nothing moving in it but a magpie on the wire and, once, far off and high, a buzzard that her whole body lurched at before her head knew better, because a buzzard at that range was the wrong shape and the wrong beat and was hunting, not homing, and the lurch went out of her slow and left her hand on the cold tap and her heart going like a bird's.

That was the first day. The lurch, and the climb-down off the lurch, over and over, all the long grey hours.

Jules did not come till the afternoon, and when he came he did not come the way he had on the morning of the lossing, fast and grim with his bicycle lamp burning. He came slow, on foot, with his stick, the way an old man comes when there is nothing to be early for. He had a paper bag in his coat pocket and he put it on the table without ceremony — a half-loaf and a wedge of the hard cheese from the shop on the Stationsstraat that still opened three mornings a week — and he said, "You'll have eaten nothing," which was a statement and not a question, and she had eaten nothing, and he cut the bread on the board with Staf's old knife and they ate standing up at the counter the way the house ate everything now, and that was the first kindness, the bread, and like all his kindnesses it came in the shape of a chore done correctly and was not spoken of.

"Anything on the wire," he said.

"Nothing for here. The shorter ones are clocking. The Bordeaux birds came last night, some of them. There was a man on at six off the federation feed, reading velocities." She had listened to it the way you listen to other people's good news at a funeral. "Nothing south of Bordeaux. Nothing from Barcelona. There won't be. Not the first day."

"No." He chewed. "Not the first day. You've got the sum of it. Soonest is tomorrow's last light, and that's the freak. Realistic is the third. You said it yourself the morning they threw them. Don't go unsaying it now to torment yourself. The arithmetic's the arithmetic whether you like the answer or not."

"I'm not tormenting myself."

He looked at her over the bread, the pale old eyes in the wreck of his face, and didn't say anything, which was him agreeing she wasn't, mostly, and reserving the rest. He had a way of granting you a thing while keeping the change.

"Sit at the window if you're going to sit," he said. "You'll wear a groove in the floor doing it standing. The bird doesn't fly faster for you stood up." He lowered himself onto the second chair by the window with the small grunt that came out of him now at every joint, and arranged his stick against the sill, and set his cup on the ledge, and turned his own face south as a matter of course, an old reflex older than the grudge, older than the girl beside him, and the two of them sat and watched the empty grey the way you watch a kettle that has agreed to take its time.

People came to the window all that day, in a way, without coming to the door.

She felt it the way she'd felt the town doing its concert through brick the Sunday after the basketing, only this was the other concert, the older one, the one that didn't care what she'd stood up and said in the lokaal. All down the Pastoorstraat and across the back of the Mijnwerkerslaan and out along the cités the gardens had their men in them, the dozen old fondspelers who still played the long water, each at his own loft or his own kitchen window with his own face to the same southern grey, and she knew without seeing them that they were doing exactly what she was doing, the lurch and the climb-down, the sum and the re-sum, and that it bound her to them this afternoon in a way nothing else could, not the gold on the board nor the brass clock she'd set at the foot of it, because the wait was the one thing the town still did all together and it did not take attendance and it did not check your name against a list.

She knew which of them were cold to her now. She could have walked the street and named them — the ones who'd not had her name in their mouths since the Sunday, who'd turned their faces from her at the bakery, who'd let it be understood that the Maes girl had done a cruel and ungrateful thing, had thrown her own dead grandfather to the dogs and the town with him, had taken the one win Sint-Amandsheide had left and handed it to nobody, to a dead Eisden man and his sour sons. She knew them. And she knew they were at their windows this very hour with their faces to the very sky she was facing, waiting on their own birds out of the very field hers had gone up in, and that whatever they thought of her this afternoon they were not thinking of her, they were thinking of a speck out of the south, the way she was, and the sky did not know the difference between a flyer it loved and a flyer it had turned from, and threw the birds back, when it threw them, on no schedule of anyone's deserving.

She found she could stand that. She found it was almost the thing she could best stand, that afternoon — that the wait was bigger than the feud, and indifferent to it, and would outlast it. The grudge was a thing the town had made and could unmake. The sky was not.

Wendy rang at four.

The phone went in the cold hall and Lieselot let it go three rings before she answered it, because her whole body had gone to the window at the sound of it, stupidly, as if a bird could ring a telephone, and she had to climb down off that too before she could pick it up.

"It's me," Wendy said. The line had the hollow of a phone box in it, coins, the city behind her, a bus somewhere. "I heard. About — the race. Davy's mam said. She said you put your birds in anyway. After all that. After what you said."

"I did."

"Is it back? The one. The famous one."

"It's a Barcelona, Wendy. They don't come the first day. Nothing comes the first day."

"Right." A silence, coins going down, the city humming. Wendy had got out, near enough; Wendy had the boyfriend and the room in Genk and the course at the school that had a train past the city, the whole list Lieselot had built herself for and was now standing in a cold hall not living. "I just — my mam said the whole street's gone funny about you. About what you did with the old man's race. She said people are saying things." A pause, and then the kind thing came out of her sideways, the way kindness came out of everyone in this town, in the shape of something else. "You all right out there? On your own with it?"

"Jules is here."

"That's not what I asked."

And it wasn't, and Lieselot stood in the cold hall with the receiver warm against her ear and the south of the sky out the smeared little hall window, the same grey, nothing in it, and found she didn't have the dry thing ready, the armour, the line that turned the question off. She had spent fifteen years building a self that could answer that question with a shrug and a joke and get off the phone clean. And the self answered, before she could stop it, in a voice that came out smaller and truer than she meant: "I did the right thing," she said. "I know I did. I'd do it again. I just want her to come home."

The line hummed.

"The bird," Wendy said, carefully, like she was learning a foreign word.

"The bird," Lieselot said. "Yeah."

She heard, down the line, the thing she'd heard once before — a small distance closing in Wendy, not unkindly, the way a window closes when the weather turns. Wendy was going to get out and not look back, and that was right for Wendy and Lieselot did not begrudge it her. But she understood, holding the warm receiver, that she'd just said a thing to Wendy that Wendy could not follow her into — I just want her to come home — and that the not-following was the whole of it, was the bus leaving without her in more ways than the one, except that this time she was not standing in the cold kitchen being left. This time she was at the window, on purpose, with a clock on her, waiting for a thing she had chosen to want, and Wendy was the one on the outside of it, in a phone box in a city, with her coins running down.

"I'll let you go," Wendy said. "Your coins."

"They're mine," Lieselot said, and it made no sense, the way the thing she'd said at the door to Wendy in the first week had made no sense, and Wendy laughed, because she thought it was the armour, the dry thing, and rang off, and the line went to the long dead tone, and Lieselot stood holding it a moment longer than she needed to before she put it back on the cradle and went back to the window where the old man was watching the grey for her while she was gone.

Marcel came at the failing of the light.

She heard the car first, the careful low note of it slowing at the end of the Pastoorstraat where strangers always slowed because the street did not look like it went anywhere, and she knew the note of it now, had learned it across the season the way you learn the cough of a sick bird, and she was at the kitchen door before he was out of it, and Jules half rose at the window and she said, "Stay," not sharp, and he stayed, and watched.

Marcel got out and shut the door quietly and stood by the car a moment looking down the dark garden at the loft, the way he always looked at it, the look of a man at a grave that was also a bank, and then he came up the path with his flat cap in his two hands, off his head, the way he'd held it the first time he came, and stopped a few feet short of her on the wet brick, and she saw that Dries was not with him. The car was empty behind him. He'd come alone, and that was a thing, that was the whole conversation almost, that he'd left the angry one at home and come up the dead street alone at last light to stand in front of a girl with his cap in his hands.

"You'll have nothing," he said. Not a question. He'd done the sum too. Of course he'd done the sum. He was a fondspeler same as the rest of them, came from a loft of them, his dead father the best of them; he'd been doing the Barcelona sum every July of his life. "First day's nothing. I know it. I didn't come to ask is it home."

"It's not."

"No." He turned the cap a half-turn in his hands. He looked older than he had in the spring, or maybe it was only the light. "I came because—" and there he stopped, and she watched a man who had carried a hard clean thing for forty years, a grievance with edges he could hold, come up against a thing with no edges and not know how to take hold of it. He had come for the bloodline, all season. He had come for the birds, or the truth, the two restitutions, and she had given him the harder one, the truth, in front of the whole town, and now there was no birds to demand and no lie to break and no clean grievance to carry up a dead street in his two hands, and he stood on the brick with his cap turning and the thing he'd built his life around dissolved out from under him, given back, too late, in a room that smelled of beer and pigeon and forty years of his father being right.

"My father's name's on a card," he said at last. "On the wall. In your club. In biro." He said biro the way you'd say a wound. "Somebody put it there after. Beside the gold."

"I know. I saw it."

"In biro," he said again. "Forty years they put your grandfather up in gold leaf and they fetch my father down off the wire of the world in a bit of biro on a card that'll curl up off the wall by Christmas." His voice did not rise. That was the thing about Marcel, it never rose; it went lower instead, down to a place where it cost him. "And I'm standing here and I can't — I came to be angry about it, and I get up your street and I look at the shed, and there's a bird of his blood out over that water tonight flown straight, flown clean, with a girl stood at the window for it that's no kin to him and no kin to me, and I can't get the anger to light. Forty years it lit off a match. Now I can't get it to take."

She did not say anything. Jules had taught her that too, without teaching it — when a man is saying the true thing at last, you do not help him, you let the silence carry it the rest of the way.

"Is she good," Marcel said. "The hen. His blood. Out there now." He tipped his head a fraction at the dark south past the loft. "Tell me true. You'd know. You've the eye, they say, God help you. Is she the bird he'd have wanted carrying it across?"

And Lieselot thought of the hen in her two hands at the edge of form, light as a lie and heavier than the town, the heart going under her two fingers like something trying to get out of the country faster than she ever had, and she said, "She's the best I've ever had my hands on. He bred her toward this race for twenty years. If anything of his is worth crossing that water tonight, it's her."

Marcel nodded, slow, and put his cap back on, and that was him done, that was the whole of what he'd driven up the dead street for, to hear that the bird carrying his father's stolen race back across the sea was worthy of it, and she'd given it him straight, and it was both more and less than he'd come for, the way the truth had been more and less than he'd come for all along.

"My father waited at a window like that," he said, turning to go. "Three days. In '58. He knew his bird had won. He knew it the way you know your own hand. And he stood at his window three days for the result to come down off the master clock and tell him he was a hero — and it came down and told him he was second, by a handful of metres a minute, to a Maes." He stopped with his hand on the car door. "He never stood at the window after that. Twenty-odd more years he flew, and he never once stood at the window for a bird. He'd send the boy out to watch. Me. I'd watch and shout in to him and he'd not come. Said he couldn't stand the waiting. But it wasn't the waiting." He got the door open. "It was that he'd waited once, sure as he'd ever been of anything, and the clock had made a liar of his certainty, and he'd not give it the chance again."

He got in and shut the door, quiet, and the car backed careful down the dead street and was gone, and Lieselot stood on the brick in the dark a while with the cold coming up out of the ground through her socks before she went back in, where Jules sat at the window with his face to the south he could no longer see, holding her cup of cold coffee in his two hands to keep them warm.

"You heard that," she said.

"I heard it." He didn't pretend he hadn't. "Frans Bery at his window three days, sure as his own hand, and the clock telling him he was nothing." Jules turned his cup. "And then never standing at a window again. Twenty years. A flyer that wouldn't watch his own birds home." He shook his head, the slow weight of it. "That's the worst of what your grandfather did, jong. Not the minutes. Not the gold. He took the watching off a man. He made a man unable to stand at his own window. There's no biro card mends that."

She sat back down in the second chair, in Marcel's empty place near the glass, and the last of the grey was going out of the sky now, the green heap losing its edge against it, the dead winding-gear gone to a black bone, and somewhere out under all of it, a thousand kilometres south and west, over France in the dark, the hen would be down now in some strange roost, some farmer's barn or a poplar at the edge of a field she'd never seen, her head in under her wing, the night between her and the last of the water, waiting for the sun the way the honest things wait.

"He could've left it buried," Lieselot said. The thing had been sitting in her all day, under the lurch and the climb-down, and it came out now at the dark window where it was safe to say. "Staf. He could've burned the tin in '88 and died a hero and let me sell the birds and get the bus out and never know any of it. Frans was dead. Nobody'd have ever — the official's dead, you said. Gust would've taken it to his grave. He could've left it all buried and clean and I'd have got out of here in September and never once stood at a window for a pigeon in my life." She looked at the empty perch she could no longer see. "Why'd he leave it. Why hand me the whole rotten thing and tie me to it with a season. Was it cruel or was it the other thing. I can't get it to settle which."

Jules was quiet a long time. The light went all the way out of the window while he found it.

"I think," he said, "he couldn't give it back and keep you loving him. Both. He'd worked that much out, lying up there dying. He could've the love or he could've the truth, he couldn't have the both off you, and he was greedy enough and honest enough at the same time that he wouldn't choose — so he did the coward's brave thing, which is he left the choosing to you. Handed you the tin and the season and got out of the way and died before he had to watch your face do whatever it was going to do." Jules set the cold cup down on the sill. "That's not cruel, jong. It's not clean either. It's a man who loved you and lied to everyone, and couldn't carry the both into the ground, and trusted you to be braver than he'd been. And you were." He found her in the dark, the pale eyes. "You were. You stood up in that lokaal and you were braver than the man who taught you everything you stood up there knowing how to do. Now sit at the window. The bird's down for the night. There's nothing to watch but you'll watch it anyway, the both of us, because that's the loft we keep now. The honest one. And the honest one watches even when there's nothing coming, because the watching's the part that was true all along — it was only the clock he made lie. He never once faked the watching."

She sat at the window in the dark beside the old man, and out the glass the south of the sky was black now and had no bird in it and would have none for two days, and all down the dead street the other windows were lit and watching the same black south, the cold ones and the kind ones, the dozen old men who still flew the long water, every lamp in Sint-Amandsheide that had a bird out over France burning into the same patch of dark, the whole town up at its windows doing the one thing it still did together — and somewhere far under that black, over the water, the future was down for the night in a strange tree, with the worst of the crossing still to come and the daylight still to find, late, late already, and not coming yet, but going to.

Chapter Twenty-Eight — The Second Night

The field came on the second day, in the afternoon, the way it always came, all at once after nothing.

She had got through the morning of the second day the way she'd got through the whole of the first, by chores, by the level scoop and the changed water and the scraped boards, by going down the garden in the grey before light to the breeders and the youngsters that knew nothing, and doing the loft right, because the loft was the one place she could still make come out true by hand. She did not let herself stand at the window of a morning. She made herself eat the heel of Jules's bread standing at the counter. She made herself wash the cup. And then at eleven the federation feed came alive on the transistor and a man's flat voice was reading velocities off Barcelona, and the second day stopped being a day and became a list.

Jules came up the garden when he heard it start. He'd taken to sleeping a few hours in Staf's chair in the front room and going home to his own birds at first light and coming back, an old man ferrying himself between two waits, and he came in now with the cold still on his coat and sat at the table and got the little radio between them and turned it up a hair, and they listened the way you listen to a doctor list off a ward — this one, not this one, this one.

It was the good lofts first, the ones close in, the famous names from down by the French border who were three and four hundred kilometres nearer Spain and got their birds back while the long northern lofts were still standing at empty wire. A loft at Tienen clocked at a velocity the man read out twice. A loft at Sint-Truiden. Then nearer, a name Jules grunted at, a man he'd flown against forty years, an Eisden loft — and Lieselot's whole body went to the south of the sky at the word Eisden before her head told her it was only a place, only a club, not him, not the Berys, just a man with a fast bird and the luck of the draw on the wind.

"That's the field opening," Jules said. He said it without looking at her, into the radio, the way he gave her the hard things now, sideways, so she could take them without having to be seen taking them. "From here on they'll come all afternoon. The clever ones first, the lucky ones, the ones the line took kind." He turned his cup. "Ours is a thousand kilometres and the wrong end of the wind, jong. We don't open with the field. We never did. Your grandfather never once clocked a Barcelona on the day, not in his life, and he won the thing." He stopped. The plain fact of it sat between them, what won the thing meant now, what it had cost to make those two words true, and he let it sit and did not soften it. "She'll not be in this list. Don't listen for her in this list. You'll only learn the list off by heart and break your own heart with it. Listen for the shape of it. The shape says: the close birds are home. That's all today's good for telling you. The far birds are still out."

She listened for the shape of it. It was hard. The names came down off the radio like coins into a slot, chunk, chunk, each one a man somewhere out across Flanders catching a bird at his own wire, stripping a rubber ring, dropping it, a week of his life made in the time it took, and not one of them was her wire and not one of them was her bird, and she sat at the table with her hands flat on the wood and made herself hear the shape and not the names. The close birds are home. The far birds are still out. The far birds were still out over France somewhere, climbing up off their second roost into a second day's flying, and one of the far birds was a blue hen with a clean keel and a heart that went under two fingers like a thing trying to leave the country, who'd come in last off the training tosses her whole short life and come in anyway, and the man on the radio did not know her name and would not say it, and that was right, because she had a thousand kilometres still to do and the worst of the water still under her.

People came to the window again, all that second afternoon, the way they had the first — the dozen old lofts down the dead streets with their faces to the same grey, the cold ones and the kind ones, the town doing its one shared thing without taking attendance. But it was different on the second day, and she felt the difference, sitting where she could see the strip of sky over the loft roof. On the first day they'd all been waiting on nothing together, level, the sky equal to all of them because it had given none of them anything yet. Now the field was clocking. Now some of those windows had their bird home, had a man's week made, had the radio saying his name; and some did not; and the wait that had bound the whole street together yesterday was coming apart today into the made and the unmade, the way it always did, the way it had in 1958 and every July since, the sky sorting the town into the lucky and the still-waiting, and not caring which window had been kind to her and which had turned.

She found she could still stand it. She'd found that on the first day and it held on the second: the sky did not know the feud and did not keep the score and threw the birds back, when it threw them, on nobody's deserving. A man down the Mijnwerkerslaan who hadn't had her name in his mouth since the Sunday got his Barcelona cock home at three o'clock and she heard the small commotion of it three gardens off, a door, a voice, a woman called out to come and see, and she did not begrudge it him. She sat at her own window with her own empty wire and did not begrudge a cold man his bird, and understood that this was new in her, this not-begrudging, that the old self she'd built for fifteen years would have made a hard dry joke of his luck to keep the wanting off her own face, and she had no joke today. She just wanted her hen home. There was nothing dry left in it to hide behind.

The light started to go out of it around eight, the long Flemish July dusk that took its time, and the radio's list thinned with the light, fewer names, longer gaps of the man saying nothing, the close lofts all home now, the field gone quiet for the night.

"That's the day done," Jules said. He reached and turned the radio off, the small mercy of the silence after it. "They're down for the night, the far ones. Yours among them. She'll be roosting somewhere in France this minute with the third day in front of her." He looked at the dead grey square of the window. "Third day's the day, jong, for a loft like this. If she's coming, it's tomorrow, the last of the light, the way they come from a thousand kilometres. You know this. You said it to me at the start." He pushed himself up out of the chair on his stick, the joints going. "You should sleep. Real sleep, in a bed, not the chair. There's nothing comes in the dark. A bird doesn't fly at night. You can leave the window an honest leaving and not lose a thing by it."

She did not move from the window.

"I'll sit a while."

He looked at her. The pale old eyes in the wreck of his face. He'd been going to argue it, she could see, the sensible old-flyer thing, the bird doesn't fly faster for you sitting up, and then he didn't. Something in her face stopped it. He stood with his hand on the stick and read her the way he read a bird, in the hand, without words, and put whatever he'd been going to say back down.

"It's not coming tonight," he said instead. Gently. Making sure she had it. "You understand that. You're not sitting up to catch her. There's nothing to catch tonight."

"I know."

"Then what are you sitting up for."

And it was Wendy's question, near enough, the one from the cold hall yesterday — that's not what I asked — and she found she had the answer to it tonight where she hadn't had it then, found it came up in her plain and finished, a thing she'd worked out somewhere in the long grey hours without noticing she was working it.

"I did the thing already," she said.

Jules waited.

"In the lokaal. With the clock on the table. I did it already — gave it back, said it out, the whole rotten true thing, in front of all of them, and I knew when I did it the bird might not come. I knew it could go down over the water and never come up and I'd have given away the town's whole — everything — for nothing anybody could see, for a name on a card in biro and a girl at a window with no bird. I knew that. I weighed it. And I did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do whether she came home or whether she didn't." She kept her eyes on the dead window, on the south she could no longer see. "So I'm not sitting up to catch her, like she owes me coming back for being honest. She doesn't owe me that. Nobody promised me that. I'd do the same again if I knew for certain she was at the bottom of the sea right now. That part's done and it doesn't get undone by whether she comes." She stopped. The thing had come out of her truer and steadier than she'd known it was in her. "I'm sitting up because the loft watches. That's all. The honest loft watches, even when there's nothing coming. Even when the bird owes it nothing. You said it yourself the first night. The watching was the part that was always true."

Jules was quiet a long moment. Outside, the last of the dusk went out of the window-square and the loft roof lost its line against the sky and the dark came up out of the gardens the way it did, from the ground, the way cold did.

"Your grandfather couldn't have said that," Jules said at last. "Not at fifteen. Not at seventy." He moved his stick, a small adjustment, an old man settling a thing. "He waited on the clock to tell him he was a hero. Frans Bery waited on the clock to tell him he was a hero, and it lied, and he never stood at a window again, twenty years of it, because he'd waited once sure of the answer and the answer'd been took off him. The two of them, the cheater and the cheated, both of them waiting on the clock for the verdict, both of them ruined by it the one way or the other." He found her in the near-dark, the pale eyes. "You're the first one of the whole lot of them to sit at the window not waiting on the verdict. Already gave the verdict yourself. Already did right with your own hands and your own mouth before a single bird was up. Whatever comes up out of the south tomorrow — and something might, and it might not — it can't tell you whether you did right. You took that out of the sky's hands. That's the thing your grandfather couldn't do and Frans couldn't do." He let a breath go. "That's grown, jong. That's the whole of grown, right there. Doing the true thing and then letting the sky be the sky."

She didn't answer. There was nothing to answer. She sat with her hands flat on the cold sill and the dark full now in the garden, the loft a darker block in it, the breeders asleep on their perches down there with their heads in under their wings, and somewhere a thousand kilometres south, down for the night in a poplar at the edge of a field she'd never see, the hen with her head in under her own wing, the worst of the water still in front of her, and the third day still to find.

Jules went home at eleven, to his own birds and his own wait, ferrying himself back across the dark town on his bicycle with the lamp going, and she sat on at the window after he'd gone.

She did not put the lamp on. She'd learned that much in two nights — that the dark of the room let the dark of the sky in, made them the one dark, so that sitting in it she was almost out in it, almost over the water with the hen, and the lit room only threw her own face back at her off the glass and shut the south out. So she sat in the dark and let the south be the room.

Around one she made tea she didn't drink and stood at the back door with it, in the cold coming up off the bricks through her socks, and looked at the loft. Den 58 was in there. Half the loft came down off De Sint, off the bird that won a lie in '58 — the breeders, the youngsters, the whole near-pure line bred toward across forty years, the line worth more than the house, that Dries wanted carried off to Eisden and the Antwerp man wanted kept whole behind glass and Marcel wanted given back by right and the club wanted left where nobody could take it down. The most valuable thing in the town was a brick shed at the bottom of a miner's garden, full of sleeping birds, and the best of them was over France in the dark and might be at the bottom of the sea, and she stood in the cold with the tea going cold in her hands and found she did not think of De Late as worth more than the house. She did not think of her as Den 58, or the legacy, or the bloodline, or the thing the season had hung on. She thought of her as the hen that came in last and came in anyway. Daar is ze. There she is. Staf's two words, the only soft thing he'd had in forty years, and she understood standing in the cold doorway that they weren't about winning. He'd never said them at a win. He'd said them low, to himself, the once or twice, when the last bird he'd given up on dropped out of an emptied sky long after the corn was down. There she is. Not the fast one. Not the first one. The late one, that you'd stopped being able to want home because wanting hurt too much, coming home anyway, out of the dark you couldn't see across, late, but coming.

She went back in and sat at the window.

Toward three, in the worst part of it, the part where the body's faith goes thin and the arithmetic turns ugly, she let herself think the other thing, the thing she'd kept the chores between herself and for two days.

She let herself think: maybe this is the price.

Maybe you don't get to take a whole town's one win off it, off a dead man who loved you, off the men at their windows, hand it to a grave at Eisden and a name in biro, and keep the bird too. Maybe the sky keeps a count after all. Maybe the hen was already down over the Pyrenees, already taken by the Gulf weather Jules called the Gulf of Lion, the open water where birds went and you couldn't follow, and maybe that was the bill come due for the lokaal, the cost of the truth, the thing that made it real — the right thing done and the sky taking the bird in payment so she'd know forever what right cost.

She sat with that a long while in the dark. It was a powerful thought at three in the morning. It had a shape to it, a justice to it, the kind of shape the mind hands you when it's tired and frightened and wants the world to mean something even at your own expense.

And then she put it down.

She put it down deliberately, the way Jules had taught her to put down a frightened bird, two hands, no grabbing, set it on the perch and let go. Because it was the same lie. It was the clock-lie wearing the other coat. To say the sky took her in payment for the truth was to say the truth was a thing you bought a bird's safe homing with, a thing you'd done to be paid for in feathers, and if you'd known the price you might not have paid it — and that was just 1958 turned inside out, just Staf's bargain run backward, the sky made into a clock you could read your own deserving off. She would not give the sky a clock. The hen would come or the hen would not come, and it would mean nothing about whether she'd done right, because she'd already done right, with the clock honest on the table and her own mouth, before the hen was ever in the air. If the hen came it would not be a reward and if the hen drowned it would not be a punishment. It would be the wind, and the water, and the bird's own heart and wing, and the plain mercy or the plain hardness of a sky that did not keep her count. That was the whole of what she'd taken out of the sky's hands in the lokaal: the right to read herself off the weather. She would not take it back at three in the morning because she was tired and frightened and wanted the bird so badly her chest hurt with it.

She wanted the bird home. She let herself want it, fully, the way she'd never let herself want a thing out loud in her life — wanted the blue hen up out of the south at last light, the speck resolving, the drop, the catch, the warm half-kilo of her in two hands. She wanted it so much that wanting it was almost the same as praying, which was why people prayed, which worked about as well. And she held the wanting in one hand and the truth in the other and did not let either one poison the other, did not let the wanting make the truth a bargain or the truth make the wanting a sin, and that was the new thing, that was the grown thing Jules had named — to want with your whole chest and to know the wanting bought you nothing, to do right and want hard and keep them clean of each other in the dark.

The light came up grey and slow at the end of the second night, the third day's grey, the same flat North Sea grey with the black heap against it and the dead winding-gear against it, the day that was the day if it was any day at all.

She had not slept. She stood up off the chair stiff as an old woman, the print of the sill across her forearms, and went down the garden in the new grey to do the loft, the level scoop, the changed water that didn't need it, the scraped boards, because the discipline was the door and the loft watched even when there was nothing coming, and she scraped under the third perch down where the hen would land if the hen landed, where the hen had not landed for two days, and did not press the bruise of the empty place, and did press it, the once, because it was still hers.

Then she filled the kettle for the two of them, for Jules coming back across the town on his bicycle, and put it on the cold ring and lit it, and stood at the kitchen window with her face to the south of the sky where there was nothing yet and would be nothing for hours, the close field all home, the far birds still climbing up off their roosts into the third day's flying — and somewhere out under all that grey, a thousand kilometres and the worst of the water behind her now, the hen was up off her poplar and turning north into the last of it, the worst of it done, the whole long water still to cross but turned for home at last, late, late already, two days late and the third light coming, and not home yet, and going to be, the way the honest things wait and the late ones come — daar is ze — not yet, but coming.

Chapter Twenty-Nine — There She Is

The third day was the day, and it gave her nothing all morning, the way the day that is the day always does.

She'd done the loft in the new grey and filled the kettle and Jules had come across the town on his bicycle with the lamp still going against the half-dark, and they'd sat at the table with the transistor between them again and the man's flat voice reading velocities, and on the third day the list had changed its shape the way Jules said it would. The close lofts were long home and out of the reckoning now. What clocked on the third day were the middling ones, the lofts a hundred and two hundred kilometres back from the border, birds that had roosted a second night over France and come up off it into the last of the distance, and each name off the radio walked the field a little nearer to her own end of it, a little nearer the long northern lofts at the wrong end of the wind, where the only sane thing to expect was nothing.

"That's the field walking up to us," Jules said. "Don't listen for her in it yet. She'll be the last of the last, if she's anything." He turned his cup a quarter, the way he did, an old man marking time with a hand that couldn't keep still. "A loft like this clocks at the end of the light or it doesn't clock. You know it. Stop your ears to the morning."

She tried. It was harder on the third day than it had been on the second, because on the second day the far birds had still been a country away and you could keep them abstract, a roost in a poplar she'd never see; and now the man on the radio was reading names off lofts she'd nearly heard of, clubs only a long evening's flight to the south of her own dead wire, and the abstract thing had a wind in it and a clock running and it was coming north up the country toward her one velocity at a time, and she could feel the day narrowing toward its one hour the way a wait narrows toward the thing it's waiting on, until there's only the last of it left and the whole weight of three days standing on it.

At noon she made him eat. At two she went down and scraped boards that didn't need it and changed water she'd changed at dawn, because the loft watched, and she'd learned that the watching was the part of it that stayed true when nothing else would, and she scraped under the third perch down where the hen would land if the hen landed and pressed the empty place the once and left it.

The afternoon went the way the long northern afternoons of the great race had gone for forty years, slow and grey and faces-up.

They came to the window again — the dozen dead lofts down the dead streets, the cold ones and the kind ones, fewer now than two days ago because some had their birds home and some had given up the count, but the ones still in it were still in it, faces to the same south, the town doing the last of its one shared thing. A man two gardens down she could see if she stood, an old flyer with nothing left but this, standing at his own wire with his clock in his fist and his mouth going, komeen, komeen, not to any bird in the sky because there was no bird in the sky, to the south itself, to the empty grey, the way you say a thing to keep it possible by saying it. She knew that prayer now. She'd been saying it herself for two days without moving her lips.

Around five the light started its long Flemish business of going, and the radio's list thinned the way it had thinned the night before, longer gaps, the man saying nothing for whole minutes, and Jules turned it down to almost nothing and they sat in the near-silence of it with their faces to the window.

"Now," Jules said. He said it low. "Now's the hour, if it's an hour. This last of the light. From here to dark is the whole of it for a thousand-kilometre bird." He looked at the grey square of sky over the loft roof. "Watch the south. Not the radio. The radio's for the lucky and we're past the lucky. Watch the south with your own eyes and don't blink it away."

She watched the south with her own eyes.

The light went the way it went in July, the long slow surrender of it, the grey thinning to a paler grey low down over the green heap and the black winding-gear, the high blue going out of the top of the sky first the way it always did, draining off toward dark, and the birds in the loft below the window settling into their evening mutter, the breeders and the youngsters that had never been to Spain and knew nothing of any of it, shifting their feet on the perches, putting their heads in toward their wings. The empty wire took the last of the light. The third perch down was bare.

She did not let herself stop watching to grieve it. She held the watching and held the wanting, both at once, in the two hands Jules had taught her — wanted the hen up out of the south with her whole chest, the way she'd let herself want it in the dark of the night, fully, helplessly, a wanting that was almost the same as the old man's prayer two gardens down — and held it clean of the truth she'd already told on the green baize three days back, did not let the wanting make the truth a thing she'd traded a bird's homing for, did not let the truth make the wanting a sin, kept them apart in the two hands the way you keep the line from kinking, and watched the south, and the light went.

Jules saw it first. Of course he did. Sixty years of standing at a window had made him a thing that saw specks, an old machine for seeing them, and he didn't say anything for a second, only went still in a way she felt before she understood it, his whole ruined body going to a point at the window, and then he said, very quietly, not to startle the sky:

"There."

She looked where he was looking and there was nothing. The grey south, the dead heap, the gear. Nothing.

"There," he said again. "Low. Off the gear. Coming up the line."

And then she had it. Low, the way a thousand-kilometre bird comes in at the end of three days, not high and proud the way they came off a club toss but low and dead-level and beating, working the last of it out of a body that had nothing left, a speck off the black shoulder of the winding-gear, holding the line, coming, a dark mark on the going grey that was not a rook and not a starling and not the thing the eye makes up out of wanting because she'd learned the difference in a season and this had the beat of it, the long low driving beat of a bird coming the last kilometre of a thousand, and she stood up off the chair so fast it went over behind her and did not hear it go.

"Don't run down," Jules said, low, steady, his hand finding her arm without his eyes leaving the speck. "Don't run down yet. Let her come. You go banging out the door now and you'll flush her off the line, she's that tired, she'll spook to a roof and sit and you'll lose your minutes. Let her come to the wire. She knows the wire. Let her find it." His hand tightened. "Quiet, now. She's done a thousand kilometres to find this. Don't take the last hundred metres off her."

So she stood at the window with the chair on its back behind her and her heart going the way she'd felt the hen's go under two fingers a hundred mornings, a thing trying to get out of her chest, and she watched the speck resolve. It came low off the gear and crossed the dead streets, and it was the hen, it was unmistakably the hen, the blue of her gone to nothing in the failing light but the shape of her, the line of her, the bird she'd held every dawn of the season, and she came low and slow and finished, the wings beating short and shallow now, no glide left in her, no height, all the gloss flown off her two days over France, coming home the way the late ones came, the way she'd come in last off every training toss her whole short life and come in anyway, long after the corn was down, long after you'd stopped being able to want her home because wanting hurt too much — and here she was, out of the dark she couldn't see across, out of the open water that took the birds you couldn't follow, late, two days and the third light late, the field long home and the race long decided and her velocity nothing now, nothing, a placing so far down the sheet it would never be read off a radio in any garden in Flanders — and home. Coming. There she is.

She came over the wire and dropped to the board the way a stone drops, no flare, no showing, just down, spent, onto the alighting board outside the trap, and stood there a half-second swaying on her feet with her beak open and her sides going like a bellows, a half-kilo of bird with a thousand kilometres in her and nothing left, and then she went in through the wires to the corn and the water she knew were inside, because that was what the trap was, that was the whole of what a loft was, the place that was inside when everything else was open sky and open water, and Lieselot was down the garden by then, walking fast and not running, into the loft in the last of the light.

She caught the hen.

She did it the way Staf had shown her without meaning to teach her and Jules had shown her on purpose, two hands, no grabbing, the hen too far gone to flush, going only a step and then giving herself up into the hands the way the spent ones did, and Lieselot had her, the warm half-kilo of her, the heart going under the two fingers along the keel like a thing that had tried to get out of the country and had got there and back and was still going, still going, fast and thin and alive, and the keel was a blade under the fingers, the breast burned right down, two days' flying eaten straight off the bone, and she was hot, fevered-hot with the work of it, and her feathers smelled of distance, of weather, of the salt off the water and the dust off France and something underneath it that was just the warm dry reek of bird, of the loft, of home.

Lieselot did not say anything for a moment. There was nothing to say. She stood in the loft in the dark with the spent hen in her two hands and the heart going against her fingers and behind her she heard Jules come down the garden slow on his stick, and the night coming up out of the gardens the way it did, from the ground, and the breeders muttering on their perches, undisturbed, knowing nothing.

Then she did the thing.

She found the leg with her thumb in the dark and the countermark on it, the numbered rubber ring she'd put on the hen's leg three days back at the basketing with her own hands while the truth she'd just told still hung in the cold air of the lokaal — found it by feel, the small rubber band of it, and worked it off over the foot the way you did, gentle, the hen too tired to mind, and held it in her fingers, the little ring with the loft's number on it that was a week of a life and a bird's whole crossing made into a thing you could drop into a clock.

And she clocked her.

The constateur sat on the bench by the window where it had sat sealed since the basketing, the honest clock, the one Gust Verhoeven had set and sealed under his own cold hand three days back with the whole town watching and the truth already spoken on the table behind him — the clockwork drum inside it turning its slow true turn since the morning of the release, counting the real minutes of the real days with no hand on it but time's. She lifted the lid of the slot and dropped the rubber ring in and turned the handle, and the mechanism took it, the drum and the punch, the small hard machinery of honesty doing its one thing, and it struck the ring down onto the paper drum inside against the time, the true time, the third day, the last of the light, hours and hours behind the field — punched it onto the tape, a real mark, a real minute, the bird home at the hour the bird was home and not a minute sooner, and the clock said so, and the clock was not lying.

It was the gesture that, in 1958, in a kitchen in this same town, had been a lie. A young man, twenty-four, the coal already in his lungs for good, had stood over a clock like this one with a clock-keeper's connivance and made the drum say his good bird was home a handful of minutes before his good bird was home, and turned a strong second into a record-book first, and won the great race, and been the town's one legend for forty years on a clock made to lie about a handful of minutes. And here, forty years on, in the dark, a fifteen-year-old girl dropped a real ring into an honest clock and punched a real time onto a real drum, the late time, the nothing time, the time that would win her nothing and put no name on any board — and it was the same gesture, exactly the same, the hand and the ring and the slot and the turn, and it was true. The lie and the truth wore the same body. That was the whole of it. The act Staf falsified, done honest, in the dark, by the only person he ever told.

She closed the clock.

Jules was in the loft doorway by then, leaning on his stick in the dark, and he didn't say anything for a while either, and neither did she. She stood with the spent hen still in one hand and the closed clock under the other and the heart of the bird going against her palm, slowing now, slowing toward the long after-rest of a bird that's done a thing it should not have been able to do and come back from it, and the two of them stood in the dark of the loft with it.

"She's clocked," Jules said at last. Quiet. Not a question.

"She's clocked."

"At what."

"Last of the light. The true time." Lieselot didn't look up from the hen. "It'll be nothing. Down the bottom of the sheet. Past where they read."

"It'll be nothing," Jules agreed. He said it the way he gave her the hard things, plain, no softening, because the softening was the lie and she'd taught him too, by now, that she'd rather the plain hard thing. "She's two days behind the field. There's no placing in it worth the ink. The race went to a loft at Tienen two days ago and the town'll never hear her name." He moved his stick, the small old adjustment. "And she's home."

"And she's home."

"There's the whole of it," Jules said. "Right there in your hand. That's the whole of the thing." He looked at the hen, the pale old eyes in the wreck of his face finding her in the dark. "She went out across the water you can't follow, the open water, the thing took your grandfather's nerve and Frans Bery's nerve both, the not-knowing of it, the bird gone into the middle of the wait where you can't see — and she came up out of it. Late. Beat to nothing. Nothing on the sheet. And up out of it. That's not a win, jong. Don't you ever let the town tell you that was a win. It wasn't a win." He let a breath go, the long rattle of his chest. "It's better than a win. It's the thing a win was always only pretending to be."

She held the hen. She felt the heart going down toward rest under her fingers.

"She doesn't owe me this," Lieselot said. She said it to the hen, mostly, to the warm spent body of her, working it out as she said it the way she'd worked the other thing out in the dark of the second night. "I said it the other night. I'd have done the same if I'd known for sure she was at the bottom of the sea. I didn't tell the truth to buy her home. She doesn't come because I was honest." She turned the hen's leg in her fingers, the bare leg where the ring had been. "She comes because she's a homing bird and the wind let her and the water let her and her own heart held out the last of it. That's all. It's not a reward. If she'd gone down over the Pyrenees it wouldn't have been a punishment. It's the wind and the water and the bird." She looked up at Jules in the dark. "I'm not going to read it. The coming home. I'm not going to read it for a verdict on the truth. The truth was true three days ago with the clock honest on the table. This doesn't make it truer."

"No," Jules said. "It doesn't."

"It just comes," she said. "Late. The way the truth came late. The way—" and she stopped, because the next name was the one that mattered, the one the whole thing turned on, and she made herself say it plain. "The way it came too late for Frans. He never got his bird home to an honest clock. He won the thing and it was took off him and he never stood at a window sure of an answer again, twenty years of it. Frans is in the ground and the win's his now and he's not here to have it. It came. It came too late for the man it was owed to. But it came."

Jules didn't answer that. There was no answer to it. Late, but coming, turned all the way over to its hardest face — the restitution that arrives after the man it's owed to is dead, the truth that comes when it can do nothing for the one it was stolen from, the win handed back to a grave. That was the cost the town had been afraid of and the cost she'd paid on the green baize three days back with her own mouth, and here was the bird home to prove the cost was real and to prove that paying it had bought no one a single thing back from the dead. The hen home changed nothing about that. She came up late out of the water she couldn't see across, and a dead man's name was a true name now, and neither of those things undid the other, and Lieselot stood in the dark of the loft holding both of them at once in the two hands Jules had taught her, the spent hen and the hard truth, and did not let either one poison the other.

She put the hen up on the third perch down with her own hands, set her on it gentle, two hands, no grabbing, and let go, and the hen took the perch and stood on it swaying a second and then folded down onto it and put her head in under her wing among the others that had never left Flanders, and was home, asleep on her own perch in the dark, the late one, the one that came in last and came in anyway, the most valuable thing in the town and a bird worth nothing on the sheet, both at once, asleep.

Lieselot stood at the loft window then, the one Staf had lifted her to when she was small so she'd be first to see the speck — stood at it from the inside now, in the dark, with the clock closed honest on the bench and the spent hen on the perch behind her and the south of the sky gone full dark out the window where there'd be no more birds tonight because a bird doesn't fly in the dark.

She looked at the south anyway.

Daar is ze, she said, not out loud, the way Staf had said it low to himself the once or twice when the bird he'd given up on dropped out of an emptied sky long after the corn was down. There she is. Not the fast one. Not the first one. The late one, that you'd stopped being able to want home because the wanting hurt too much, coming home anyway, out of the dark you couldn't see across, late, the field long home and the race long lost and nothing on the sheet, and home.

There she is.

Chapter Thirty — The Loft Window

The hen ate on the second morning, which was the morning Lieselot knew she'd keep.

She'd not been sure in the night. A bird could come up out of a thousand kilometres on the last of its heart and then stand on the perch the next day and not take corn, the work having eaten something past the muscle, down into the part of a bird you couldn't read with two fingers along the keel, and go off it in a day and be gone in three with nothing to be done. Jules had told her that the way he told her the hard things, flat, on the way out the gate the night the hen came home, so she'd not lie awake building a thing the morning could take off her. But on the second morning she went down in the grey with the kettle not yet on and the loft cold and the breeders muttering, and De Late was off the perch and down on the floor at the corn, working it the way a hungry bird worked it, the small hard head going, and Lieselot stood in the doorway and watched her eat and did not go in, because going in was the kind of wanting that spooks a thing, and she had learned that too by now.

She let the hen eat. She stood at the door in the cold and let her, and that was the whole of the morning, and it was enough.

The town did not come back to her, and she had not thought it would.

She had known, on the green baize, with the confession in her own voice in the cold air of the lokaal and the brass clock set down by the sealing wax and Gust Verhoeven's face going to the thing it went to, that she was not buying anything back with it — not the town's love, which she'd had pointed at her for one season and given up, and not Staf's name, which she'd taken down off the gold leaf with her own mouth — that the truth was a thing you spent and did not get change from. She'd flown the season out anyway. The hen had come home anyway, late, the bottom of the sheet, nothing on her. And the town went on not coming back, the way she'd known it would, men she'd grown up among turning a quarter at the bakery the way you turn from a draught, not cruel, just closed, a window shut when the weather turns.

What she had not known was that some of it would come the other way.

René came the third evening after the hen was home. He came up the alley behind the gardens the way the bad hand had come the night of the open latch, but he came to the gate and not the loft, and he stood at it in the dusk in his coat with his cap in his two hands the way Marcel had held his at the graveside a hundred years ago in April, and he did not come in.

"I heard she homed," he said.

"She homed."

"Late."

"Last of the light. Day three." Lieselot stood at the gate and did not open it. The key was on her, on the loop of string inside her coat, where it had lived since the morning of the latch, since she'd taken it off the nail it had hung on since before she was born. She had not put it back. "Nothing on the sheet," she said. "She's down the bottom past where they read."

René nodded at that, slow, the way you nod at a thing that's the only true coin going. He had the look of a man who'd not slept well since March, the gas cut and the wee one sick and the welcome hand he'd sold; the look had not gone off him for the season turning. "I came to say," he started, and then didn't, the way they all didn't, the town's whole tongue a thing for not saying, and he turned his cap once in his hands and tried it again from somewhere lower down. "Staf had me down the loft a hundred Sundays," he said. "He'd have fed me at his own table. And I went and—" He stopped. He looked down the dark garden at the loft. "I went and did the thing to his bird. The old red cock. For—" and he couldn't say what for, because what for was money, and a man does not say the price of the thing he sold his hands for to the granddaughter of the man whose table would have fed him.

Lieselot looked at him over the gate in the dusk. She thought of the old red cock, the hard eight-year-old, that's a racer, that's a man, a bird ruined in a single night by a friendly hand for whatever Dries or Marcel or his own black hour had paid, a season spent in a dark, no winding him back this side of next year. She thought of the hen down the bottom of the sheet, and of Frans Bery in the ground at Eisden under a stone they couldn't afford the good lettering on, and of how a town that pays men in nothing buys their hands, which was the thing Jules had said and the thing 1958 had been, the same machine, forty years apart, René's hand on the nest-front and Door Vandersmissen's hand on the master clock the same hand in the end.

"He moults out wrong," she said. "The red cock. But he's alive. He's a breeder now."

René's face did a thing she didn't watch all the way, because some things you let a man keep.

"I'll not have him die owing," René said, low, and that was the whole of it, that was as near as the town ever came to the word, a man at a gate saying he'd not die owing, and then he put his cap back on and turned and went down the alley in the dark, and Lieselot stood at the gate a while with the key against her chest and did not call him back and did not, either, hate him, and could not have told you which of those was the harder.

Marcel came on the Sunday.

She heard the car before she saw it, the grey Opel coming slow up the Pastoorstraat the way it had come in April, and she went out to the front because she'd not have him come round the alley to the loft, not him, the loft was hers and he'd been into it enough in her mind for a season; if he came he'd come to the front door like a man.

He didn't get out at first. He sat in the car at the kerb with the engine off and looked at the house, and Lieselot stood in the doorway and let him look, and then he got out, slow, a hard man in his fifties with forty years of something gone out of him in a week, and he came up the path and stood at the bottom of the step, and Dries was not with him. The car was empty behind him. That was a thing she read and held: Dries was not with him.

"You homed your bird," Marcel said.

"Day three."

"I heard." He stood with his hands at his sides, no cap in them this time, nothing in them. "Down the bottom of the sheet, they said."

"Nothing on her," Lieselot said. "The race went to Tienen two days before she was over the border."

Marcel nodded. He looked past her at the dark of the hall, and then he looked at the south of the sky over the roofs the way every man in this town looked at it without choosing to, the gear and the green heap and the grey going, and when he spoke it was not to her exactly.

"My father never homed a bird to a clock he could trust again," he said. "After '58. Twenty years he flew. He'd stand at the window and the bird would come and he'd catch it and clock it and never once know, the rest of his life, whether the clock that took his time was a true clock or a clock somebody'd had a Sunday with. You took that off a man." He was not looking at her. "Not you. Your—" He let it go. "He never stood sure at a window again. Twenty years. And then he was in the ground at Eisden and the thing was still his and not his, and I had a page out of a logbook and a certainty and a brother who wanted it to have hurt, and that was the whole of the inheritance, a wound and no name on it."

"You've got the name now," Lieselot said.

"I've got the name now." Marcel's mouth did something. "On a card, in biro, beside forty years of gold leaf. In the back of a club room in a dead town." He looked at her then. "It came too late for the man it was owed to. You know that. You said it yourself, in there, with the clock on the table — you said it before I could. Frans is in the ground and the win's his now and he's not here to have it. You took the words out of my mouth so I'd not have to be the one to say them and be a hard man saying them." He shook his head, slow. "That was either the cruellest thing anyone's done to me or the kindest, and I've not worked out which, and I don't think I will."

Lieselot stood in the doorway and held it, the two hands, the way Jules had taught her, the spent thing and the hard thing, and did not let either one off the hook.

"Do you want the birds," she said. Plain. Because it was the question that had ridden the whole season, the third option, the bloodline to Eisden, Den 58 out of the Maes garden and into a dead man's son's, the only restitution that ever mattered to Dries, and she'd held De Late up in her hands a hundred mornings knowing she might have to hand her over a gate to a man with a forty-year wound, and she'd rather ask it on the step and have it answered than carry it another night. "The line. Den 58. You can have it. I said the truth on the table, that's done, that's not a thing you bargain back. But the birds — if it's the birds that's the restitution, you can have the loft. I'll not stop you. It's the one thing I've got that's worth what was took off your father, and if it's that or nothing, take it."

She said it and she meant it and it cost her the whole of the thing she'd come the season into being. She stood in the door and held her face shut over it and waited.

Marcel looked at her a long time.

"No," he said.

He said it slow, and then he said the rest of it, looking at the south of the sky and not at her, because the men of this town can only say the true things to the weather.

"Dries wants them," he said. "Dries'll always want them. He wants Den 58 in his garden at Eisden so men drive over to buy a Bery bird, and that's not a correction, that's interest, that's a thing my brother wants because the wound never got fed and a wound that never gets fed wants to eat. I told him no. I told him this morning. That's why he's not in the car." He let a breath go. "A man came up the Pastoorstraat forty years ago — your grandfather — and made a result and made himself a legend and made my father nothing. And if I take the birds, I'm a man who came up the Pastoorstraat and took a loft off a fifteen-year-old to make my dead father something. It's the same road. It runs both ways and it's the same road." He looked at her finally. "I don't want the birds. I never wanted the birds. Dries wanted the birds. I wanted my father's name said out loud in the room where they took it off him, by somebody the town would have to believe, and you went and did that, in your own mouth, before I had to threaten it out of you. That's done. The birds are yours. Staf bred them and you flew them and your name's on the entry, clean, and the line stays where the man who built it put it." He turned to go, and then he didn't, the way they all didn't. "Keep them honest," he said, to the car, to the street. "That's all anybody's owed now. There's no one left to owe more."

He got in the grey Opel and started it and went down the Pastoorstraat slow, the way Wendy had gone in her good shoes a hundred years ago, getting smaller, the town making everything smaller as it went toward the edge of itself and the road out, and Lieselot stood in the door and watched the car go and did not know, for a long minute, whether she'd won anything or lost anything, and then understood, the way she'd understood about the hen, that winning and losing were the wrong shape for it, that there were things you did because the other road was the same road, and that was the whole of it, and you didn't get a sheet at the end with your velocity on it.

Bram came round Sunday evening, sober, which was its own kind of weather.

He stood in the kitchen the way he stood when he had a thing to say and three pils were the usual road to saying it and he'd not taken the road, and so the thing came out bare and badly, which was the only way it could have come out true.

"I'd have sold them," he said. "You know that. I'd have signed them to the Antwerp man in April for what I owe and had over, and I'd have put you on a train to your mother in Genk and told myself I was giving you out, and you'd have gone, and the birds would be in a loft up by Antwerp behind a man who buys lines, and Frans Bery'd be in the ground at Eisden with the thing still off him." He looked at the cold range, not at her. "Da left them to you and not to me. I asked you why, in May. You didn't know. I didn't know. I was hurt about it the way I'm hurt about everything, the easy way, the way a man's hurt who's made being passed over his whole— " He stopped. He'd never got near this far. "He left them to you because he knew I'd sell them and you wouldn't. That's the why. He knew which of us would do the hard thing. He knew me forty-six years and he knew I'd take the money, and he knew you a season's worth, in the corner of his eye, while he was dying, and he knew you'd not." Bram's hands were flat on the table. "And he was right. And I'm not going to be in your way. That's the most I've got, Lies. I'm not going to be in your way. I know it's not much."

"It's not much," Lieselot said.

Bram nodded, because it wasn't, because she'd said the true thing and he'd rather the true thing, he'd taught her that without meaning to the way Staf had taught her the keel, by being a man you had to learn to read past.

"No," he said. "It's not." And he stood a while longer in the kitchen with his sober hands flat on the table, and then he went out, not to the café, she heard later, just out, up the Pastoorstraat and back, a man walking off the thing he couldn't drink off for once, and that was Bram's whole turn, the small true one the season got out of him, a man not standing in his daughter's way and saying so plainly and not pretending it was more than it was.

She did not call her mother to say the hen was home. She thought about it, the phone box at the dead high street, the card in the drawer four years, Salon Christiane, Coiffure Dames, Genk, bel maar, wanneer ge wilt, the back room that got the morning, the good school, the sciences and the languages, the train, the whole of the out she'd built herself for fifteen years to want. She thought about it and didn't go.

It wasn't that the out had closed. That was the thing she'd worked out in the night, second-dark, the hen not yet home and her holding the choice free of the outcome in the two hands: the out hadn't closed. She could go yet. She could finish school in Genk in the back room that got the morning and be a girl from a town that wasn't this one, and the loft would have to go to the club or the Antwerp man, the will said fly them this season and she'd flown them this season, the season was done, the door was open both ways.

It was that out had stopped being the same as free. Her mother in the hall in Genk, four years out and not one ounce lighter, no clock on her door — she'd heard it down the line in May and not had words for it and had words for it now: that you could get out of the town and not get out of the thing, that flight was not the same as choosing, that her whole life's want had been a kind of running and running was a thing you did instead of deciding. She'd decided now. She'd stood on the green baize and decided, with the clock on the table, before a bird was in the air, and the deciding was the freedom, not the train. You could carry a loft to Genk in your chest the way her mother carried a town she'd left, the unflown thing heavier than the flown one. She'd rather the loft she chose than the out she fled to.

Whether she stayed, in the end, or went — she didn't know yet, and it had stopped being the question. The question had been who. The out had only ever been a way of not answering it.

On the eighth day after the hen came home it was a Saturday, and at four in the afternoon Lieselot was down the garden at the loft.

The town was out in it the way the town was always out in it on a Saturday, the dozen lofts down the dead streets, the faces up, an old man two gardens down with a stopwatch in his fist and his mouth going, komeen, komeen, not yet to any bird but to keep the thing possible by saying it, the whole back of the street tipped to the same south, the town doing the last of its one shared thing, the thing it still did together when it would not look at her at the bakery, because the wait was bigger than the feud and the southern sky was bigger than the both. There was a club race on, a little vitesse from northern France, the close birds due any minute, and she had three of her own in it, ordinary birds, no legacy in them, just birds she'd conditioned with her own hands and basketed at the lokaal where they still sealed her clock under Gust's cold thumb because the rules were the rules and a clock got sealed honest whether the man sealing it would meet your eye or not.

She had her hand on the loft door and the light was doing what the long July light did at four, going gold and thin along the brick, and inside the wire the birds were settling, the low collective mutter, the shift of feet, De Late on the third perch down with her keel filling back out, eight days of corn going onto the bone the work had stripped, the most valuable thing in the town and a bird worth nothing on any sheet, both at once, alive.

And then all at once — not one by one, all at once, the way a field of corn lies down under a gust — they turned. Every bird in the loft swung its small hard head to the same quarter of the sky, the south, out over the roofs and the dead winding-gear and the green heap, out toward France and the long water beyond it, and went still.

She stood with her hand on the door and did not move.

It was the hour. He'd fed them at four for forty years and birds are clocks with feathers, and her own three were due off the toss and the loft knew it, the corn-rattle hour, the come-home hour. It was the hour. It was nothing, the way it had been nothing in April when she'd stood here with her hand on this same bolt three days after he died and the forty birds had turned south as if he were out there still, late, but coming, and she'd locked the loft and told herself it was nothing and that had been the first lie she'd told that week and it had been to herself and it had been small.

This time she did not tell herself it was nothing.

This time she stood at the loft window — the one Staf had lifted her to when she was small, there, little one, there, do you see him, so she'd be the first to spot the speck — stood at it from the inside now, on purpose, the key on its string against her chest, the clock honest on the bench, the late hen on the perch behind her with her head coming up toward the south with the rest, and she looked at the south of the sky with her own eyes, not because she had to, not because a dead man had tied a season to her hands, not as the heir of a thing built on a stolen handful of minutes, but because she'd chosen it, the watching, the wanting, the loft, the truth, the birds, the town's real love and not the wage it paid for silence — chosen what she'd honor and refused the rest, the lie, and the out that was only flight — and because down there, somewhere over the gear, a speck would resolve out of the going light any minute now, an ordinary bird off an ordinary toss, hers, coming the way they came, low and driving and finished, out of the open water you can't follow, late, the way the late ones always came, the way the truth came, the way restitution came too late for the man it was owed to but came.

Daar, she said, low, the way Staf had said it, to no bird yet, to the south itself, to keep it possible by saying it. There.

Late, but coming.

THE END