Chapter 2 Nine Hours of Tap

Marisel Veyron Pov

The first can took eleven minutes.

I timed it with the phone because I didn't trust my own sense of anything anymore. Eleven minutes for twenty litres, and there were sixteen cans, and that came to just under three hours, and I had until six in the morning. On paper I was going to be fine. On paper I'd fill all sixteen twice over and have time to wash.

I stood with my hand on the tap and watched the water come out the width of a pencil.

By the fourth can it was the width of a straw. I put my palm under it to check I wasn't imagining things and it was warm. Not cold. Warm, out of the cold tap, at ten o'clock at night, in a building with a tank on the roof.

I set the fourth can against the wall with the others and stood looking at four full and twelve empty and did the sum again and didn't like it.

The knock came at half eleven. I nearly dropped the can I was carrying. I put my eye to the gap in the door and it was Sable in a headscarf with two full jerrycans on the landing and a face like she'd already decided something.

"You said three o'clock," I said.

"You said three o'clock. I didn't agree to it." She came in past me and stopped in the middle of the room and looked at the line of cans. "Four."

"Four."

"And a tap that's running like a man with a bad chest." She put her two cans down by the door. "I've got four more at home. My landlord will notice six cans in a one-room flat by Friday, so I'd rather move them here."

"I'll make room."

She went to the sink and put her hand under the water and held it there. Then she turned it off and on again, and it gave that same dry knock and coughed and came back thin.

"How long has it been like this?"

"Since about ten."

"It's Thursday in half an hour."

"That's what I'm saying."

We did the rest of it together. She held the cans and I watched the tap and we swapped when my arms went. She talked to keep us both awake, her cousin's shop, the price of cooking gas, a man she'd nearly married in her twenties who turned out to have a wife in another city. I listened and answered where answering was needed and kept my eyes on the water.

At half one I took the full cans through one at a time and stacked them behind the fridge, and Sable moved the fridge with me, and it went over the tiles with a noise like something being killed.

At two the tap was down to a drip with the occasional spurt. Eleven full cans. Five empty. Two of Sable's.

At three she said, "Marisel. Sit down."

"I'm fine."

"Sit down or I'll sit you down."

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and she put a glass in my hand. Water out of a can, when the tap was still technically running, because she said my hands were shaking and she wasn't wrong.

"Tell me the truth," she said, sitting down opposite me with her legs out. "This isn't about the broadcast."

"It's exactly about the broadcast."

"You didn't watch the broadcast. You sat on that couch and stared at the wall through the whole thing and then you were on your feet like the room was on fire." She waited. "What happened to you?"

The tap dripped behind me. I counted four drips before I answered.

"I had a dream."

"You already told me that."

"It was a bad one."

"Was I in it?"

I didn't answer.

Sable leaned her head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. "That's how I know it wasn't a dream. In a dream you'd have put me in it. You'd have put Dacre in it. You'd have put yourself in it. You wouldn't have left me out." She brought her eyes down. "You've been doing sums all night. You counted those cans at eight and again at ten and again when we moved the fridge. You know that notice off by heart, I watched you read it, and you don't read anything twice. So don't tell me it was a dream."

The tap gave a spurt and stopped and started again.

"I'm asking you to trust me," I said, "and not to ask me yet."

"That's a coward's arrangement."

"It's the only one I've got."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "All right," and got up and started filling the next can.

At twenty to five the tap died properly. Not a drip. Nothing. I turned it off and on for a while and it gave one small cough and a mouthful of brown and then it gave me nothing at all.

Eleven full cans and two of Sable's. Six empty and one bucket at a quarter. Somewhere around three hundred and forty litres in a one-room flat, and eleven minutes of water left in a bucket, and no idea what the next five days were going to do to my arithmetic.

The first light came up grey and mean outside the window.

"It's not six yet," Sable said.

"I know."

"Somebody's pulled the supply early."

I got my shoes on.

"Where are you going?"

"Halim's. He owes me four cans and he opens at six."

"Marisel, the sun isn't even up."

"Then I'll get there before it is."

---

Kessel Road at half five was a different street.

There were women at the yard tap behind the tyre place, more than there should have been. A queue of pots and buckets and one woman with a baby bath balanced on her head, and she was sixth in the line and she'd been third at midnight.

Halim's shutter was already up. Halim never had his shutter up before six.

He stood in the doorway with a clipboard and his boy was loading the last cans into the back of a truck.

"Them's mine," I said.

Halim held up one finger, finished writing, and lowered the clipboard. "Morning, madam."

"That truck's got my four cans in it."

"That truck's got sixty cans in it and I've sold all sixty." He said it flat, the way you say a thing you've already said twice this morning. "Fella came at four. Paid cash, paid above the price, took the lot. Fifty-litres too, eleven of them, gone before I'd finished counting."

I stood there looking at the cans going up into the truck.

"Who?"

"Shop on Alder Vale." Halim shrugged. "Says he's got a warehouse. Been at it since four, him and a woman doing the counting. They've had every can off this road. And I'll tell you something for nothing, madam, I'd put money on which of us is going to be wrong about this weather."

Behind me Sable said, very quietly, "Alder Vale."

Two trucks down, backed up to the tyre place, a man in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up stood with his hands on his hips watching them load. I could see his shoes. I bought him those shoes for his birthday.

Dacre had told us, not a week ago, that he wasn't going to fill a single can and sit on them like an old woman.

And beside him, with a notebook open against her forearm, Vesper was counting.

I watched her mouth move. I watched her write something down and look up at the truck and write again. She had a pen clipped to the notebook and she was dressed for a market, not for half five in the morning, and she wasn't tired. That was the thing I couldn't get past. Everyone on that road was tired. She looked like she'd slept eight hours.

Sable said, "Marisel."

"I see him."

"What are we doing?"

"Nothing yet. Watch the notebook."

Vesper counted the last of the fifty-litre cans into the truck and wrote the number down. Then she closed the notebook and said something to Dacre and he laughed and put his hand on the small of her back.

"There were sixty," Sable said. "She wrote eleven first and then something else. I couldn't see the first number."

"She wrote eleven on the second line because that's fifty-litres." I said it slowly, working it out as I said it. "And she wrote a number on the first line that wasn't sixty."

"How do you know?"

"Because Halim said sixty and she counted and then she turned the page back and looked at it again before she wrote. You don't look twice at a number you're just writing down. You look twice when you're putting on a different one."

Sable was quiet for a second. "That's a lot to get from a woman's shoulders."

"It's the only thing I've got."

And then Dacre turned round and saw me.

---

He came across the road with his hands still on his hips and his shirt coming untucked, and I made myself stand still and not step back.

"Marisel."

"Dacre."

"You're up early."

"So are you."

He looked past me at Sable, and then at the two of us standing there in yesterday's clothes with our hair a mess. "You've been out all night."

"I've been home all night. I came out for cans."

"From Halim."

"From Halim."

He smiled at that, the way he smiles when he's about to say something that sounds generous and isn't. "You should have said. I'd have sold you some out of the warehouse at cost."

"You sold Halim's stock out from under him at four in the morning and you're going to sell it back to this road at three times the price." I said it without heat. "That's not cost."

"That's business."

"It's the same road you buy your nails on."

Something went across his face and it was quick, but I saw it. He didn't like being seen standing in the street like this. Two women with a handcart had stopped to watch. The one-shoe woman had come out of her stall and folded her arms.

"Go home, Marisel," he said, quieter. "I'll send a can round."

"I don't want a can round."

"Then what do you want?"

"Nothing from you." I started walking. "That's the whole of it."

"Marisel."

I kept going.

"Marisel." He caught my arm, not hard, and I stopped. "You're making a scene on my road."

"Your road's got a notice on it," I said. "Six this morning, five days, Kessel East, Harrow Row, Mbeki Close. Does Alder Vale go dry on Thursday, Dacre? Or is it just us?"

His hand stayed on my arm. He hadn't known. I watched it land, watched him turn it over, watched him do the arithmetic I'd done at nine o'clock the night before. Eleven minutes. His street was eleven minutes from mine and it was not on the paper.

"That's not what that notice means," he said.

"It means what it says."

Behind him Vesper had come up with the notebook closed in her hand. She looked at me with her eyebrows up, that soft concerned face she does so well.

"Marisel, love, it's half five in the morning. Come back to the flat, I'll make you something hot."

"I've got a flat."

"I know you do. I only meant-"

"You've got my earrings on."

Her hand went up to her ear and then came down again, and she laughed. Actually I laughed, a small one, almost admiring. "These old things? Dacre, didn't you say these were in the drawer?"

"I don't know where they came from," Dacre said.

"No," I said. "You wouldn't."

I walked away with Sable, and neither of them followed, and the two women with the handcart watched us go and one of them spat in the road after Dacre's truck.

---

At the gate of my building the woman with the baby bath was sitting on the step with the bath in her lap and a plastic chair pulled up opposite. She stood when she saw me.

"You left the paper on the tyre place."

"I am."

"Thursday six, five days."

"Thursday six, five days."

She sat back down and made a small gesture with her chin at the chair. "My name's Odile. I'm going to sit here, if it's all the same to you, until somebody official tells me it isn't. Because I went round my sister's at three and her tap's already dead, and that's Harrow Row, and Harrow Row's on your paper."

Sable looked at me.

I said, "Have you got anything to put water in?"

"Two pots and the bath."

"Then bring them up. Both of you. Sable, go and get your four from yours, and anything Odile's sister's got, and anyone else on Harrow Row who'll listen." I got my keys out. "We've got a tap in this building that still works. It won't work much longer. Fill everything that holds water."

"How long have we got?" Odile asked.

I looked at the sky over the roofs at the end of the street. It was getting light properly now, and it was already warm, at half five in the morning, on a Thursday in a week that was supposed to end with the sun coming down on us like a hammer.

"Tonight," I said. "Maybe not even that."

They went, both of them, and I stood on the step with the keys in my hand and thought about a notebook with a number on it that wasn't the number on the truck, and a deposit in cash from a frightened man with a hotel on the coast, and a woman who had slept eight hours the night before the taps went dry.

The first thing I needed wasn't water. I had water. The first thing I needed was to know what Vesper had written on the first line.