Nicola Griffith - Slow River

“Why, who’re you expecting’.”

Tom. Even so, I made sure both chains were fastened before I opened the door a crack. “I’m not dressed.”

“We don’t mind.” He held up his hand. I saw it was attached to some kind of string. “Brought you a present.” A leash. And a dog. A black, stocky-looking thing with a startlingly pink tongue.

“No. I can’t –”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” he said cheerfully.

“He’s not to keep. Just to borrow for an hour or two every day, Can we come in?”

I opened the door and the dog dragged Tom in. “Sit down while I dress.”

“I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Fine.”

I went into the bathroom and showered quickly. I could hear the dog’s claws clicking on the floor as it padded about, sniffing things. When I came out of the bathroom, rubbing my hair, it sat down and panted at me. Its entire hindquarters shuffled back and forth as it wagged its tail.

I patted it cautiously on the head. It wagged harder. “It looks young.”

“He. He’s eight months old. His name’s Gibbon.”

“As in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”

Tom smiled. “Knew you had an education. Now, hurry up and comb that hair, tea’s ready.” I did, then checked to see if I had any messages. Just one, a notice from the plant, reiterating what Magyar had already told me: tonight’s shift had been extended. For the next three days, the notice said. No please or thank you, just an assumption that we would all cooperate.

We sat at the table by the window. The dog sat on the carpet, watching me carefully.

“I got him yesterday. From the pound. I thought to myself, ‘Tom, you’re getting old. More to the point, you’re thinking you should feel old and lonely. You need something to look after.’ I decided a dog would be just the thing.”

“But…”

“How am I going to walk a young, healthy dog like this every day? That’s where you come in. I saw you dragging yourself in the other night, and I said to myself, ‘That lass needs a bit of fresh air, something to take her mind off things.’ And then I heard about the bit of bother at the plant last night and thought a walk by the river would do nicely.”

I thought Tom thought entirely too much. And then I wondered how he knew I worked at the plant, and realized too late he’d been guessing. I smiled wryly. “By the time I get him to the river we’ll both be exhausted and it’ll be time for me to head back.”

But Tom had evidently been thinking about that, too. He actually folded his arms in satisfaction. “Bet you didn’t know you could reach the river not two minutes’ walk from here.”

I acknowledged defeat. “You’d better tell me how.”

I got to work early. Twelve hours was a long time to spend in a skinny, especially when there was cleanup and overlapping shifts arguing about jurisdiction, and I wanted to be prepared.

Tom had been right about the walk. The fresh air and exercise had stretched the tension kinks out of my shoulders and put vigor back in my veins. Although I knew it was all in my mind, I felt cleaner, as though the breeze had blown away the stain of aliphatics and aromatics from the spongy tissue of my lungs.

I sighed as I took my time sliding on wrist supports and strapping on my waders. Now I was going to clog everything up again.

“It’s going to get worse,” Kinnis said cheerfully. He hadn’t even sealed his skinny yet. “Lot of work to do.”

“I hear these daytime jerk-offs have only got a few more troughs up,” Meisener agreed.

“Less than forty is what I heard,” Cel said as she started stripping off her street clothes. “Hey, Kinnis, you were dumb as a rock on the net last night.”

“Yeah? At least I looked good, not like you, you ugly cow.”

I stepped out of the line of fire. The next stage would be thrown gauntlets, goggles, raucous laughter. It always made me feel out of place, the way the rest of the shift familiarly insulted each other, threw things, played jokes. They knew it, I think, but I never got the sense that they might gang up on me and herd me out. They could have done, in the beginning, but they hadn’t. Maybe I had been as strange to them as they to me. They wouldn’t do it now; I might be weird, but I had worked with them, helped them. I had been adopted and my difference was now taken for granted—like the slowness of a younger sister who is defended fiercely on the school playground. All of a sudden I liked these people, liked them a great deal.

The shift was hard, but we were used to that, and the two shifts meshed together more smoothly than I had anticipated. There was no sign of Magyar, but without any discussion, our shift took on the heavier, dirtier work. The day shift seemed content to let us. I wondered how many more centuries it would take to break the physically-stronger-equals morally-superior equation, then shrugged and concentrated on the job.

Once the day shift had left, the work was faster and smoother. An hour before the break, we had almost fifty troughs up.

“Maybe we should slow down,” Cel said from behind me. She was leaning on her rake, surveying the progress. “Time and a half is a hard thing to lose.”

“I wonder how Magyar got that for us.”

“The way I read it, she can get what she wants right now. Did you know she’s been in executive land all night? Rumor has it they gave Hepple’s job to the day-shift supervisor—Ho? Hu? something like that—and offered Magyar his job.”

“On the day shift?”

“Yeah,” she said, misinterpreting my expression. “What would she do with those soft wankers?”

“Do you think she’ll take it?”

“Maybe.”

We broke as usual after four hours. For the first time in a while, I sat by myself in the breakroom. I didn’t like the thought of a new shift supervisor. Magyar and I understood each other. It would be annoying to have to go back to being careful all the time about what I was and was not supposed to know. And Magyar was smart. What if the new one was mean, or petty like Hepple?

The second third of the shift seemed harder than the first, despite the fact that we were on our own. By the second break, Cel’s rumor had gone round and there was intense speculation. No one seemed to doubt that Magyar would take the job—the interest was all about who would take Magyar’s place. I watched the fish and spoke to no one, then went back to the troughs and worked like an automaton.

Finishing at four in the morning felt different from two. Bleaker. Or maybe I was just tired. It was one of those strange, warmish winter nights, when the air is full of moisture and you can hear the wind.

“Bird.” It was Magyar, waiting for me. “I expect you’ve heard the rumors.”

“Yes.”

We walked in silence.

“You won’t ask, will you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t take the job!” She seemed angry. At herself, or me.

I didn’t know what to think, or how to feel. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. It just…”

I smiled, I couldn’t help it. “Cel said you wouldn’t know what to do with those soft wankers.”

Magyar grinned back. “Work their asses off.”

We walked some more. I had no idea. where we were going.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time: better hours, more money. No Hepple. Then they asked me who they should give my job to. I thought about you. You know more about that place than you’ve any right to. You’d do a good job. But… I don’t know… you’re not who you say you are.”

“You could have suggested someone else. Cel, maybe.”

“Don’t think I didn’t consider it. But the more I thought about you, the more I thought we had some unfinished business. You lied about your identity to get a job you’re way, way too qualified for. I can’t trust a person who does that.”