Unglamoured

The permits clerk had not asked Wynn Ardwick's name once in two years, and she had begun to notice that he never needed to.

She noticed it the way she noticed everything at Kesteven Gate: sideways, without meaning to, filed and not examined. He said good morning in a voice she could not have described five minutes after he had used it. He never fumbled a form, never repeated himself, never once looked at her the way the seasonal men did when they worked out how tall she was. He simply already seemed to know.

The deck plates told her before the dial did.

Wynn Ardwick had her boot on the kerb rail and her hand flat on the housing when the timber lorry rolled the last foot onto the weighbridge, and she felt the change come up through the sole of her boot and into her palm: a soft heavy sound under the steel, more a swallow than a knock, the plates sitting down into their bearings instead of taking the load and holding it bright. A legal load rang. This one thudded. She had known crossing hands who could not hear the difference with their heads inside the housing, and she had given up trying to teach it, because it was not a thing you taught. It was eleven years of standing in the same half-metre of frozen concrete at half past seven in the morning with your hand on the same cold iron.

She looked at the dial anyway, because the dial was what went in the book.

Thirty-eight tonnes and a hundred and ten kilos, on a plated maximum of thirty-six.

"That'll be a no," Wynn said.

The driver had his window down already and his elbow out of it, which in that temperature was a statement rather than a comfort. He was a big man gone soft, in a body warmer over a checked shirt, and he had the particular cheerfulness of somebody who had decided on the road up that this was going to be fine.

"It weighed light at the yard," he said.

"It weighed dry at the yard." Wynn came round the front of the cab so he could see her without craning, which was a courtesy she extended out of habit and which had never once been read as one. She was six foot in her boots and broad through the shoulders with it, deep brown skin gone ashy over the knuckles with the cold and her black hair cropped close because anything longer was a nuisance under a wool hat, and she had learned young that standing above a seated man was a thing he would take personally whether or not she meant it. "It's been sat under sleet since Tuesday. Green timber drinks. You're two tonne over and a bit."

"Two tonne."

"And a hundred and ten kilos."

He laughed at the hundred and ten kilos, the way they all did, as if the precision were the joke and not the point. Wynn waited. Her breath came out in a slab and hung there. Behind her the yard lights were still on at twenty past eight because the light had not properly arrived and, by the look of the sky over the fell, was not intending to. The sky had gone the colour of a scoured pan. There was no wind at all, which was the part she did not like; wind she could work in.

"Look," the driver said, "I've a slot booked on the other side, and if I'm not through before this comes down—"

"You won't be through before this comes down either way," Wynn said. "You'd not get a plated load over the top road today, never mind two tonne over it. There's a lay-by at the Wharram turn where you can shed onto the hard standing and come back for the rest when it lifts. The number for the haulage office is on the board by the shed door. Ask for Marek, he'll not shout at you."

"And if I just drive it?"

"Then the barrier stays down," she said, "and I write it up, and you lose the licence rather than the slot." She said it in exactly the voice she had used for the lay-by and the number and Marek, because there was no version of this where raising her voice made it truer, and because the men who wanted a fight wanted you to give them the first half of it.

He looked at her for a while. Then he looked past her at the barrier, which was a red and white pole across a road going up into cloud, and at the fell beyond it where the road stopped being anybody's business but the other side's, and something in his face did the arithmetic and arrived where she had already been standing for two minutes.

"Green timber drinks," he said, disgusted.

"It does."

"Nobody tells you that."

"I'm telling you," said Wynn. "Reverse to the white line and I'll take the tare again on your way out, so you've it in writing for your gaffer."

He reversed to the white line. She took the tare again and wrote it in the book in her own square hand, and tore the docket and put it up into the cab, and he took it and said "Ta, love" without any malice in it and pulled off down the hill with his brake lights flaring at the bend. The forecast said nine days. It had said so twice before in her time and been wrong both times.

She put her hand back on the housing out of habit. The steel was cold enough now to feel wet.

The queue that morning was four: the timber that was going nowhere, a refrigerated unit that cleared in nine minutes because Cawley always had his paperwork right and always let you know he did, a farm pickup with a churn and a dog, and, on foot at the back, one of the seasonal men from the other side with a bag over his shoulder and no vehicle at all, stamping in the cold and looking at the permits window rather than at her, his ears bare and pointed to the frost and no borrowed face on over the top of them. She marked him without meaning to. You did. Enough of that and you clocked the ones who were rehearsing something.

Dot Rennick came out of the customs house with her coat buttoned to the chin and her reading glasses pushed up into her grey hair and her keys already out, which meant shift change, which meant Dot away down the road and round over the beck bridge to the town-side counter for the rest of the day and Wynn holding the gate side on her own.

Dot was sixty-one and came up to Wynn's collarbone and had been on that counter for thirty-four years, which was longer than Wynn had been alive and considerably longer than the town's memory of anybody's business but its own. She had a way of arriving beside you without having crossed the ground in between.

"You want to look at that sky," Dot said.

"I've been looking at it since six."

"They've moved it forward." Dot got her glasses down onto her nose and consulted a piece of paper she did not need to consult. "It was Thursday. Now it's tonight. Nine days of it, they're saying, and they're saying it in the voice they use when they mean it. Minus fourteen on the tops by Wednesday."

"Minus fourteen doesn't seal the gate."

"Minus fourteen and no wind does."

Wynn did not answer that, because it was true. Cold with wind was weather. Cold with no wind, at Kesteven, in a bowl of a yard at four hundred metres with the fell breathing down onto it, was the yard going to glass and the barrier housing filling with ice and the whole crossing sitting there like a stopped clock until it decided otherwise.

"Coal's ordered," Dot said. "It'll not come."

"No."

"There's the stores in the back of the records room and I've put a bit more in it than the sheet says, so don't be honest about it at me." She said this as though correcting an error. "And I'm on the town side once I'm across, and I'll not be back over till it lifts, because I'm sixty-one and I'm not doing that yard on my backside."

"Nobody's asking you to."

"They're asking me for a counter with somebody at it, is what they're asking, and there's me and half a temp between now and the New Year." Dot folded the paper away. "That's my nine days. Everybody wanting a permit stamped on the town side and nobody there but me."

That was the whole of it, and Wynn was grateful for it. Dot Rennick had never in thirty-four years asked her whether she would be all right, and Wynn had come to understand this as the single kindest arrangement anybody at the gate had ever made with her.

"Oh," Dot said, at the door, "and the rota's up."

Wynn went in and looked at the rota, because that was what you did when somebody told you the rota was up.

It was on the corkboard in the stamping shed between the fire notice and a curling photograph of the yard under snow in 1987, and it was the same sheet of paper it had been every winter, printed off by somebody in the district office who had never stood in that yard, with the weeks down the side and the names across the top. Christmas week: Ardwick. New Year: Ardwick. The deep weeks in January that nobody wanted, when the crossing ran four vehicles a day and the pipes went and you spent your shift with a blowtorch and a bucket: Ardwick, Ardwick, Ardwick.

Fourth year running.

Nobody had asked her. That was the thing she noticed, and she noticed it the way she noticed a load sitting down into the plates — not as an insult, just as a fact with a sound to it. Nobody had asked her, because there was no need to ask somebody who had never once said no, and there was no need to say no when you had nowhere in particular to be and no one in particular waiting to be got back to. Ellis had the twins. Marek's mother was bad. Dot was sixty-one. It made sense. It had made sense the first year, when she had volunteered, and it had gone on making sense every year since, quietly, without anybody having to be a bad person about it.

She looked at it a moment longer than she needed to.

Then she took the pen off the string and put a tick in the box next to her own name, so that it was written down as agreed rather than assumed, which was as much of a remark as she intended to make about it, and she went back out into the yard, and if a thing went through her at that moment it went through low down and did not come up as far as her face, and she would have said, had anyone asked her — and no one asked her — that expecting nothing was not the same as minding.

It was good sense. She had been raised in a town where her father's family had been on the same hillside for four generations and where her mother had come up from Leeds at twenty-two — Leeds born to Jamaican parents, and no relation nearer than Chapeltown once she was here — and never gone back, and between the two of them she had inherited a very clear understanding of what could be relied upon and what could not, and she had built a life on the first list and kept the second one short. She was thirty. She was the only person on the rota who could read a load off the plates by sound. Her hands were chapped and splitting across the knuckles from the barrier and would be worse by Friday, and she had a stove, and a paperback, and nine days.

She was fine.

The permits window threw its light out across the concrete, a long yellow panel with the lettering on the glass laid across it backwards. Inside, the clerk who did the permits was standing at the counter with the seasonal man's papers held up in both hands at the height of his own face, entirely still, the way he always stood — a mild brown-haired man of about forty, so unremarkable that Wynn, who could have described the tyre wear on a lorry she had turned back in March, had never once managed to carry his face out of the yard with her.

She had never learned his name and had never got as far as being embarrassed about it. It had not occurred to her, until that morning, that he had never had to ask for hers.

Beyond the barrier the fell had gone, cloud down to the wall line, and the first of it came in over the yard while she stood there — not snow, nothing so obvious, just a fineness in the air that settled on her sleeve and on the black rail of the weighbridge and did not melt. She put her palm flat on the housing. Under it, very faintly, the steel had begun to sing the way it did when the frost got into the bearings and started taking up the slack.

Wynn stood in the yard with her hand on the cold iron and listened to it, and did not go in for another minute and a half.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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