62 - Nine Slots

Four heads came down on the first day and the whole of the first mast's gear came into the strip shed with them.

Getting a head down is not clever work. You put the shear legs up against the mast and make them off. You take the chain out of the sheave and lower it. Then somebody goes up with a drift and a lump hammer and starts the pin.

The pin has been sitting in stone dust and rain for sixty years. It comes out in a quarter of an hour if the mast is kind and in three quarters if it is not. Then the head comes down in a rope cradle weighing a hundred and forty pounds, and you do not stand under it.

Cinder Row watched the whole of the first morning from both pavements, because a street will come out for anything that happens above its own head. By the fourth head it had gone back to work.

Four in a day. Forty in twenty-two days is one and four fifths a day, and they had done four, and it had taken from the first bell to the eleventh.

Ferrin wrote the four in the book and did not write anything next to it, which was the same thing said better.

"We are behind on the first day," Wick said.

"We are not behind. We are on the wrong end of the order."

"There is an order?"

"There is always an order. It is the only thing I am selling."

Kalen put the manifest on the barrow and turned it so the three of them could see the column he had ruled at four in the morning.

"Eleven live and twenty-nine dead. The live ones come down first, all of them, in the first eight days."

"The dead ones are quicker," Ferrin said.

"The dead ones are quicker, which is why they go at the end. A dead head is two hours and a pin and I could do the last nine of them with a broken arm. A live one that goes wrong on the nineteenth day is a live one that goes wrong with nowhere to put it."

Doss looked at the column for about four seconds.

"Weather," he said.

"Say the rest."

"Rain in the third week. Dead heads in the rain is fine."

"That as well," Kalen said.

By the eleventh bell there was a Fine grade Pattern on the bench that nobody had expected.

It was not off the gantry. It had come in on the Tuesday with the ostler's gear off Fetter Street, now that the widow had her certificate and could sell lawfully.

It was in a cart brake, and Ferrin had it half stripped when Kalen came in off the line with brick dust in his hair. Ferrin had stopped. He had put the bar down and gone and got him rather than go on with it, which was correct, and which cost him an hour.

Kalen read it for twenty minutes with the jig holding the drum and his good hand doing the work.

PATTERN: Beforehand (Fine)

Held in: cart brake, iron and strap

Draw: Quicken, measured

The holder's hand is already where the thing is going.

Nine years on the low road and never once in the ditch. J. Ferrow

"Fine," Wick said.

"Fine."

"That is thirty marks."

"That is thirty at house rate, and Sabra has already put a figure on it, because Sabra puts a figure on a thing before she has finished looking at it." Kalen sat back off the bench. "Thirty-four, off my credit, and she will hold it four days."

"You have got a slot."

"I have got three."

Wick sat down on the end of the bench with his boots off the floor, which Kalen had given up saying anything about.

"Then take it."

"Say why."

"Because it is Fine and it is Quicken, and you are going to be under a mast for three weeks."

"I am not going to be under a mast for three weeks. You are going to be up one."

Kalen turned the drum in the jig and let it sit.

"Go on. Better reason."

Wick thought about it for a moment.

"Because your Quicken is nine and it has been nine since you were thirteen and it has never once been the slightest use to you."

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Then he heard himself, and looked at Ferrin, and Ferrin did not help him.

"That," said Kalen, "is a good reason."

It was. He turned it over on the bench for most of an hour while the two of them worked the second head, and he did the sum four separate ways and got the same shape out of it every time.

Thirty-four marks off his credit is thirty-four off the delivery figure. Thirty-four off the delivery figure is six days of Wick.

A full Bind on top of it. Nineteen marks at nought point eight yield, out of a Balance at minus five hundred and fifty-six. Not a Collection. Not nothing, either.

And at the end of it a Fine grade Quicken, in a man whose trade is standing still in front of a thing for four hours.

He wanted it. That was the part he made himself put on the bench next to the arithmetic and look at. A man who will not say what he wants has not costed the decision. He has costed a version of it that flatters him.

He had been fast twice in his life. Once out of an aisle, badly, into a sorting rack that went over and took a hammer with it. Once up a hundred and forty feet of foundry ramp behind Doss, arriving worse than he set off.

There is a thing that happens to a man who has been slow all his life and is offered speed on a bench for thirty-four marks, and it happened, and it took about an hour to stop.

"No," he said, at around the second bell.

Ferrin put the pencil down.

"You want the working?"

"I want the working. That is the arrangement now and it starts today."

"It starts with the one where I disagree with you."

"It starts with that one."

Ferrin had the column in front of him and did not look up off it.

"Thirty-four off the delivery is thirty-four we have not got in the third week, and the third week is the week we are going to want it. That is the whole of my objection and I have not got a second one."

"Doss."

Doss did not stop what he was doing.

"Slot is a slot," he said.

"Say the rest."

"There is no rest."

There was, and all three of them knew it, and Doss was not going to say it in a shed at the end of a working day. So Kalen said it instead, because he had worked out in the tenement that a crew who are not told the reason will invent one, and the one they invent is always worse than the true one.

"A slot comes out worse than it goes in. You take a Pattern out and it drops a grade. It does not come back."

"You have done that," Wick said.

"I have done that once," Kalen said, and wiped the drum and set it aside.

"I did it at this bench, over six hours, doing every single part of it correctly, and it came out one grade down exactly the way the book says it will. I am not doing that again for a thing I picked off a bench because it was lying there."

"Everybody fills their slots."

"Everybody fills their slots the week they get them, because a full sheet looks like a rich man's sheet."

Kalen hung the rag on the nail.

"Then they are on a floor two hundred feet down with the exact thing in their hands that they needed and nowhere to put it."

"So you sit on three empty."

"I sit on one empty."

He said it before he had entirely decided it, which he has been asked to stop doing. Then he stood there with his hand on the nail and worked out that he meant it.

"Two of them go in the first week I find something better than what I have got. That is what an empty slot is. It is not thrift. It is stock."

He looked at the three of them.

"The ninth stays empty on purpose. In this trade the thing you find is better than the thing you planned about two times in three."

"And if you never find it?"

"Then I have carried an empty line for a year and it has cost me nothing, because a slot does not eat."

Ferrin wrote it in the book without being told to.

"Enter it properly," Kalen said. "In the terms. If I fill the ninth without saying so to the three of you first, you can dock me a week."

"You cannot dock the man who pays the wages."

"You can if it is written down."

* * *

Doss went up the first four pins, because Doss goes up anything.

He is not a young man and a mast is not a ramp. By the fourth pin he was taking three quarters of an hour where he had taken a quarter, and saying nothing about it.

So on the second morning Kalen went up.

The mast rungs are iron, set eleven inches apart, and there are thirty-one on the tally shop mast. He had counted them from the ground on the first evening without deciding to, and he counted them again going up, which he noticed and did not stop.

Fourteen is the one where the sheave collar comes level with your chest. That is where you stop climbing and start working, and to start working you lock your weak hand round a rung and take your weight off your feet, and then your good hand goes to the roll.

He put his left hand out. The hand went where he sent it and it did not close.

He held on with his right and his forearm for about four seconds. Then he got the weight back onto the rung with his elbow, got his boot under him, and came down one rung at a time without hurrying.

Doss was at the bottom holding the ladder foot and looking down the street.

"Wick goes up," Doss said.

"Wick goes up."

That was the whole of the conversation and it was the most expensive one of the three weeks.

A Second Hand holds a thing still and cuts it. Kalen could hold anything in the world at a bench with the jig, in a shed, on his own time, and he had got faster at it every week since he built the jig. He could not hold a rung and a hook thirty feet over Cinder Row, and a boy of fifteen could, so a boy of fifteen went up.

He watched him go up the first time from the far pavement, where the reading is best. He counted the rungs under him as he went. He got to thirty-one and made himself stop.

The boy was good at it. That is the part nobody warns you about.

He went up like something that had never once considered the ground. He had the pin started inside three minutes. He called the grade down wrong, and cheerfully, and was corrected, and did not mind.

Kalen wrote it in the crew book that evening before he ate, because he did not trust himself to write it after. He put the date, and the mast, and four words.

Wick works the heights.

Then he sat and looked at the four words for a while with the lamp turned down. He had spent nine nights of his life transcribing a line that nobody had ever filled in, and had carried the case for it up a hundred and forty feet of ramp, and had stood in a room with it and lost.

He was not going to become a man who left a line blank because a blank line is easier to look at.

He sold the Beforehand back into the house and did not watch it go. The crew are paid at the post at the end of every week, in front of the yard, because a wage paid round a corner is not a wage.

Then the sheet did what it does when a man has been working, which is nothing at all for eleven days and then the whole of it at once.

NOTICE OF CAPACITY

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Sustained service assessed. Capacity raised.

Held .. 6 of 9

1 Tally 6 Hold Fast

2 True 7 ....................

3 Purchase 8 ....................

4 Fair Wear 9 ....................

5 Standing Order

He read it twice.

Four years of reading other people's paper, and every blank line on it had belonged to somebody else. The scrap bin. The plank. The case he carried into a room and put in front of four people.

This one was his. He was going to leave it blank on purpose.