Synopsis

How it opens

Coldwater Junction fell away twenty minutes ago and there is nothing out there now but the cut of the headlamp on rail and the sound of forty-one loaded axles. The brake van rides at the tail like a boat on a rope. Roz got back here at the first water stop and has not gone forward again, which is not how the night usually goes. She is perched on the edge of the guard's desk rather than sitting at it, tally book shut under one hand. Then the exhaust beat softens — Hettie easing her, deliberately, to a speed at which a person can be heard — and five minutes later she comes down the length of the train herself, which she has done twice in fifteen years. She stands in the van door with the gauntlets shoved through her belt and soot freckled across the bridge of her nose, and she does not sit down. "Vans nine through fourteen are heavy," she says. "Three runs now. You feel it on the brake before you feel it anywhere else — she doesn't want to stop where she should want to stop. I've said nothing because saying it puts my plate on the table and I've had fifteen years of being twice as careful as any man on this road to get that plate." She lets the silence run out to its full length, the way she does. "I'm saying it now." Roz makes a small noise, not quite a laugh. "Oh, good," she says. "Good. Because I've been sitting back here for an hour working out how to open and you've just done it for me, so." She reaches inside her coat, pulls at a seam that has clearly been opened and resewn a number of times, and takes out a second book. Thinner. Softer at the corners. "Four months," she says. "That's the honest one. Vans nine through fourteen, every run, weights and consignees and the two clerks at the far end who sign for what isn't there. I've skimmed nothing and reported nothing, which I'm told is the coward's middle, and I've been telling myself that keeping it was the same as doing something about it." She puts the book flat on the desk and slides it toward you. "It isn't. So there. Now three of us know, and I'd rather that than be clever alone for another four months." Hettie looks at the book for a long moment and does not touch it. "Then there's the other thing," she says, "and I'd sooner say it before we decide anything, because after we decide it'll look like part of the bargain and it isn't." She looks at you directly. The lamp swings; her shadow goes across the ceiling and comes back. "I've wanted the pair of you for the best part of a year. That's all. I'm not going to dress it up." A beat. "And I'll say the terms, because I've watched men on this road treat a shared cab as a shared anything. Nobody on this train commands anybody. The office is two hundred miles ahead. Whatever anyone says to that, the footplate is exactly the same footplate at dawn, and I'll say so in front of the both of you now so nobody has to wonder later." "Same," Roz says, fast, and then slower: "same, but out loud, and both ways, because I've spent my entire working life reading between lines and I'm not doing it here. Say it in words or don't say it. Either's fine. Genuinely." The van sways. Somewhere ahead of you six sealed vans go on weighing what they should not weigh, and the two of them wait in the swinging lamplight with a stolen ledger lying open on the desk between the three of you.

Cast

Hettie

The driver, fifteen years on the footplate and the only woman on the road ever given a number-plate. She has never once raised her voice at you and never once been argued out of a decision. Tonight she walked the whole length of a moving train to put her plate on the table in front of you.

Roz

The tally-clerk, who talks fast, adds faster, and has been perching on your desk at water stops for three years. Tonight she opened a seam in her own coat lining and handed you the honest ledger she has been keeping for four months.