Sums Done Twice
[POV: NESSA]
There were four hours a day that belonged to the House and Nessa Coyle knew exactly when they were.
Not because anyone told her. Because you could see them. From about the second bell to the sixth her mother was a person: she talked, she did the wash, she said things that were funny on purpose. Then somewhere in the afternoon it started going out of her, the way the tide went off the flats — not all at once, just less and less of her in the room — and by the eighth bell she was sitting down between tasks, and by the tenth she was sitting down between sentences.
Nessa had worked out at about nine years old that the four hours did not come out of the end. Everyone said eleven years like it was a wall at the far side of a field. It wasn't. It came out of every single day, in the afternoon, a little at a time, and what the House was actually taking was not eleven years in the year forty-five. It was this evening. It was tonight, and last night, and the one before.
She had never said this to anyone because she had no idea how to say it without it sounding like arithmetic, and it was not arithmetic, it was her mother going quiet at the table.
The routine was:
Up at the fifth bell. Range lit, water on, her mother still asleep because the mornings were the good part and you did not waste them on lighting ranges.
School until the ninth — the parish room in the Ninth, forty children, one master called Ivell who was sixty and did not much care but who had given her the slate and had once said you're quick in a bored voice that she had carried around for two years.
Then the apothecary on Weir Street, where she ran parcels and got four coppers a week and occasionally something better, because Mr. Gant sold things he did not write down and had worked out that a thirteen-year-old girl with a serious face could carry a package through a checkpoint that a man could not.
Then home, to do the things that had to be done standing up.
That was the real division of the household, and it had never been spoken aloud: Nessa did standing-up, her mother did sitting-down. Her mother mended, and shelled, and folded, and wrote in the penny book. Nessa fetched, carried, climbed, hauled the water, went up on the roof when the gutter blocked, and did the stairs.
It had happened so gradually that she was fourteen months into being the one who did the stairs before she noticed it had happened at all.
The knife was not for the tallyman.
That was the thing she would have explained to him if he had asked, which he hadn't, though he had definitely seen it.
The knife was for the stair.
There were eleven doors on Cutler's Stair and by the fourth year everyone on it knew that the Coyle woman was bound and knew roughly to what, and there is a kind of man who reads woman alone, dying, thirteen-year-old daughter as an address rather than a tragedy. Two of them had come up the stair in the last year. The first one had gone away when she opened the door with the knife along her arm. The second one had laughed at her, and then had looked at her face for a second longer, and had gone away too.
You did not report it. Reporting it meant the wardens, and the wardens meant a report, and a report on the household of a bound debtor with a minor dependent meant somebody at the House reading the word minor and thinking about the remainder.
Because that was the other thing everybody knew and nobody said: if her mother went before the eleven years was up, the balance did not vanish. It went to the estate, and the estate was a room with a range in it and a girl.
Nessa had asked once, at eleven, what would happen.
Her mother had said, nothing will happen, because I'm going to finish it, in a voice that ended the conversation, and had gone on shelling peas; and Nessa had gone to bed that night and understood for the first time that her mother was not trying to survive the eleven years.
She was trying to outlast them. By nine months. By six days.
That was the whole plan. That was what all the sitting down was for.
The notice came on the sixteenth of Rime.
Afterwards Nessa could not decide which part of it she hated most.
She had expected the hat-on man. Everyone knew about the hat-on man; her mother had described him once, the one who had come for Bel Ivers on the floor below, in and out in two minutes, the words run together. Nessa had spent four years building a person to hate and had got very good at it.
And then this one knocked twice and waited, and took his hat off under the beam, and did not argue about the knife, and told her to look at his coat so she would know there was no rod in it, and said because otherwise you will spend fourteen days wondering — which was the exact thing she had been doing for four years and which nobody had ever named.
And then he went through the penny book and found the four days.
She had watched her mother's face while he did it. Her mother had kept that book by hand for ten years, at the table, in the evenings, in the four hours when she was going quiet; and this man had taken it and read it in four minutes and found a week in Thaw six years ago with eight entries instead of seven.
You did it better than they did, he said. That is what the page says.
And her mother had laughed, and then put her hand over her face, and Nessa had stood there with her knife on the table feeling something come apart in her chest that she had spent four years building up, and she had thought, with complete clarity:
Don't you dare. Don't you dare be decent about it. You are still going to do it.
That was the part she hated most. Not that he was cruel.
That he was careful, and it changed nothing at all.
Fourteen days is not a long time and it is not a short time. It is a thing that sits in a room.
They did not talk about it for the first three. On the fourth her mother said, over the wash, "I've been thinking about what to say," and Nessa left the room, and came back twenty minutes later, and her mother did not bring it up again for a week.
On the eleventh day Nessa came home from Gant's and found her mother at the table with the penny book open at the last page and the pencil down.
"I've stopped," she said. "There's no point carrying it past the notice. It's the House's number now."
"It's yours. You kept it ten years."
"Nessa."
"Keep counting."
"Nessa."
And Nessa had shouted — she had not meant to, it came up out of her like something being sick — "If you stop counting then they were right the whole time!" and then had gone up on the roof and sat by the blocked gutter for an hour and a half in the fog until her hands hurt.
When she came down her mother had lit the lamp and made tea, and the penny book was open again, and there was a new line in it dated that day.
Neither of them said anything about it.
On the twelfth night Nessa lay awake and did the sums.
Nine months and six days, from the thirtieth of Rime. That was the thirtieth of Rime, year forty-five.
Eleven years at four hours the day was sixteen thousand and sixty-four hours. Her mother had paid fifteen thousand and something. Nessa did it twice, once forwards and once backwards, because you were supposed to check them, because otherwise most people got them wrong.
She lay there in the dark with the number and turned it over.
Sixteen thousand hours. For two hundred marks in the year thirty-four, when a boat went down with a man on it and there was nothing else.
That was six and a half hours a mark.
Nessa Coyle was thirteen years old and she lay on her back in the dark and worked out what her mother had cost per hour, and found that she could not make the sum come out to anything that was not obscene, no matter which way round she did it.
You are supposed to check them.
She checked it.
It came out the same.
On the fourteenth morning she got up before the fifth bell and swept the floor, all of it, into the corners, and put the kettle on, and did not know why she was doing any of it until she caught herself squaring off the cloth on the table and had to sit down on the step outside for a minute.
When she came back in her mother was up and dressed, in the good grey, with her hair done.
"He said you could be in the room," Maren Coyle said. "You don't have to be."
"I'm going to be in the room."
"I'd rather—"
"I'm going to be in the room," said Nessa, "and I want you to stop deciding things for me in the last hour of it," and her mother looked at her for a long moment and then nodded once, and put the kettle back on, and said, "Then get the other cup down, because he knocks twice and waits, and we've got about four minutes."