The Sawdust House

The plant dies at ten to three and I am in the hall by twenty past, which is the whole eulogy it gets. The compressor belt has gone and taken something in the works along with it, the fitter can’t come before Monday, and eleven stalls of fish are riding toward this market on lorries that left the coast hours ago, every box of it dying faster the minute it stops being cold. That is the arithmetic. I have been the ice in this hall for nineteen years, my father the ice before me, and this is the first morning the ice is me and a shed and whatever’s left of last summer.

The shed is the sawdust house. Block ice keeps under sawdust the best part of a year if you stack it right and leave it be, and my father stacked it right his whole life and so do I. I take the lamp in and count. Two tiers and a part tier, hundredweight blocks, call it forty. On a Friday in June this hall eats seventy and asks what’s for pudding.

Colin gets here at four with his coat over his pyjamas because I knocked his mother up on the way past. He is fourteen and my sister’s boy and he looks at the dead plant like it’s a horse down.

“So what happens?”

“You sweat,” I tell him. “Get the barrow.”

The hall before the bell is a place customers never see and wouldn’t credit. The gates are chained. The lamps are on their poles. Kit comes off the lorries in a long cold procession, cod and whiting and skate wings, crab from the pots, sprats in their shallow boxes, and the whole guild of them in aprons and wellingtons setting out slabs and scales while the chalk boys do the boards. The porters go through with boxes on their heads on the old leather hats, two high if they’re showing off, three if they’re young. Somebody’s transistor is doing the shipping forecast to nobody. The Maddox girls build their herring wall the same as every morning, herringbone, what else, and the eel man sets his tank going with a noise like a bath emptying forever. Aprons get tied. Knives get stood in their steels. Water goes down the gutters pink and then clear. The cats arrive from wherever market cats are issued and take their posts, on wages nobody has discussed. Prices get born in here. Quarrels get fed in here. By eight it will all look like it happened by itself.

The Super does his round at half four, keys on his hip, and stops at my dead plant with his torch.

“How bad.”

“Forty blocks for a seventy-block day.”

He looks at me the way you look at weather. “Bell goes at seven regardless,” he says, which is the Super’s entire philosophy of life, and moves on.

So I ration. There’s no hiding it and no sense trying. I chalk it on my own board, first time in nineteen years the ice has had a board: PLANT DOWN. BLOCK ONLY. SHARES TODAY. And then I stand at the sawdust house door with the book and do the thing my father never had to do once, decide whose fish matters most, out loud, to their faces, before six in the morning.

The book itself was my father’s, board covers gone soft as felt, and his hand runs out a third of the way through where mine takes over in the same year the handwriting on my school reports stopped mattering. He kept weather in the margins, and debts, and once, in pencil, the word careful, underlined, no context.

Vera’s first. Vera is sprats and roes and has been since the war, a stall the size of a door laid flat, and she takes one barrow on a normal day and pays exact and even. She reads my board through the little glasses she keeps on a bootlace and comes over with her hands in her cardigan.

“Give mine away,” she says. “Sprats’ll sell by nine or they won’t sell at all. Ice me last or ice me never, love. I mean it.”

Here is where I’m meant to refuse her, a woman thirty years my senior giving up her share in a cardigan in the dark. I don’t refuse her. I need every block I can free for the big stalls, and one of the big stalls is Coble’s, and Coble’s is trouble I can already hear parking. So I take an old woman’s ice off her like it’s nothing, and I write it in the book, and the book doesn’t blink.

“Colin,” I say. “Tea-shed block, the small one. Chip Missus Vera a bucket for her roes. Off my own, not the count.”

He goes. It isn’t goodness. It’s the least sum that lets me sleep.

The middle stalls take their shares like weather. Harry Dunn hears twelve where he wanted eighteen, says right you are, and re-plans his whole slab in his head while I’m writing. Micky Foulds tries money, offers me half again over the odds to jump the book, and looks baffled when I tell him it isn’t a price problem. There is no sum this morning, I tell him. There’s a queue. He goes muttering that everything’s a sum, and he’s wrong.

Stan Garrow is foreman at Coble & Sons, whitefish, volume, four slabs and a till like a church organ, and Stan collects his ice the way a lord collects rent. He’s read my board. He arrives already wronged.

“Twenty blocks, Stan,” I say before he opens. “That’s your share and it’s the biggest share in the hall.”

“I take thirty-two.”

“Today the hall takes what there is.”

“Your plant,” he says, pleasant as a slammed door, “your problem. My cod didn’t break your belt. Short me and I’ll have an ice contract of my own by autumn, see if I don’t, and then it’s your shed stood empty, missus, not my slab.”

There are men you win against and men you let win the argument while losing the ice, and Stan is the second kind. I keep my voice at trade level. “Twenty today, first call tomorrow, and I’ll crush you the fine stuff for your window myself when the plant’s up. Or take your custom to autumn and buy your friendship ice from forty mile off and find out what it costs to be somebody’s stranger.”

He stares. I total his twenty in the book in front of him, unhurried, the way you’d count change for a bishop. What he does then is the thing nobody watching would understand. He goes back to his boards, takes the rag to them, and chalks every price down a step. Fish that won’t be iced deep must move fast, and Stan can be a swine and read a morning at the same time. Both things are true of half the men I serve.

The chalk goes down the hall after that like wind over a field. My allocations land stall by stall and the boards answer, a penny off here, tuppence off the tail cuts, skate rewritten twice while I watch. A market talks to itself in chalk before it ever says a word to a customer. All those neat prices the public sees at eight, they think it’s arithmetic. It’s biography.

Which brings me to Ronnie Petch and Les Garrity, and God help the ice that comes between them.

Shellfish, the pair of them, stalls facing each other across the aisle like artillery. Brothers-in-law once, and something happened, nobody agrees what, and Ronnie hasn’t spoken a word to Les since decimalisation, and no one has ever been sure the two facts are related. They order separately, ice separately, sell the same crab at the same price to the same town, and this morning they are each stood at my door demanding a full share, and their two stalls between them need less ice than either one alone if the stock sat together, and they know it, and I know it, and the clock is going like a tap left on.

The Super calls the half hour. Six.

I have four blocks left uncommitted and two men who won’t share a sentence, never mind a slab. So I do the only thing left in the book, which is to shut the book. I have Colin barrow one block, a whole hundredweight, out to the middle of the aisle between their stalls, and I set the tongs on top of it, and I say to the pair of them, at trade level, the whole aisle listening while pretending to gut whiting:

“One block. Between you. Carve it how you like or stand there and watch it go back to being weather. It melts the same speed whoever’s right.”

And I walk away, because ice is the one argument that settles itself.

For a while they carve in silence at opposite corners, four hands, one block, chips flying, each pretending the other is a rumour. Then the block gets small enough that their tongs knock, and Les says watch it, and Ronnie straightens up with eleven years in his mouth and says it, out loud, in the hearing of the whole hall.

“You short-scaled me on a hundredweight of whelks in September 1963, Les Garrity, and you smiled while you did it.”

“It was 1964,” says Les, “and I never, and your scale ran heavy the whole of that summer and everybody in this hall knew it but you.”

That’s the loud thing, then. Eleven years of Sunday dinners lost to a hundredweight of whelks and a scale that wanted oiling. Nobody laughs. Laughing would end it wrong. The two of them stand over the last of the block breathing like men who have run somewhere, and then Ronnie, because his corner of the ice is going faster, tips his chips onto Les’s bed, just tips them on, and reaches for the shovel, and Les moves his crab up to make room the way you’d move up on a bench.

By twenty to seven their stock is on one bed, one white slope of it, crab and whelks together, and they are arguing about the board price like a married couple, that is to say fluently, and neither one has admitted a single thing. The kindness in this hall never once arrives dressed as itself. It comes as spite with the labels swapped, and you take it, because it keeps.

Ten to seven. I walk the aisles with the book. Every slab that could be saved is white. Vera’s roes sit on my tea-shed bucket like the crown jewels of a very small country. The drizzle has started outside, and that’s worth two blocks to me at least, good cold Friday drizzle, and I note it in the margin the way my father noted luck, in pencil, so it knows it’s provisional. The sawdust house stands open and empty with the lamp still going, first time bare in nineteen years, and I let myself look at that for exactly as long as it takes Colin to trundle the barrow back, and no longer.

What the morning cost is in the book. Who paid it is in the book. The book is nobody’s business.

Seven. The Super rings the bell like he’s done it before, because he has, ten thousand times, and draws the chain, and the gates go back, and the first customers come in out of the wet complaining about the wet, past the boards with their freshly grieving prices, past Stan’s marked-down cod and the one shared bed of shellfish and an old woman’s bucket of roes, into a hall that looks, as ever, like it happened by itself.

A woman in a rain hood stops at the door-sized stall, first sale of the day coming, and picks up a box to squint at it.

“These sprats fresh, love?”