unclaimed-recollection / 18 - The Parcel.md# 18. The Parcel > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Tern Junction yard, the charging shed, the Pinecliff local · **Act 2, Part 8** > Odran carries a parcel to Tern Junction and stays for tea.  I kept one of the three. You will remember that I had decided, on a train, with my hand on a parcel, that I would give it to the first hand in the yard, that I would not look for him, and that I would not stay. I said it was the third time I had decided it that week. I am now on the evening local to Pinecliff with my satchel against my boot and nothing on my knee, which feels, I find, like a coat I have left on a hook, and the parcel is delivered. That is the one I kept. The window of this carriage does not shut. It has not shut in the twelve years I have used the line, and the Guild has been told, and a man with a rag comes every spring and stuffs it, and by the first frost the rag is on the floor. There is a draught on my left ear. I am going to sit in it for an hour and put the afternoon in order, because I do not know what else to do with my hands. * * * The Crownward train put me down on the north side at ten past five, in the light that Tern has in the back end of the year, which is the colour of a brass lamp seen through weak tea. The larches on the Saddle had gone to gold the week before and were already losing it. There was a hard bright edge to everything. The peaks behind the yard had their first dusting on the high ledges and were pretending that was all. The local to Pinecliff was due at twenty to seven. I had an hour and a half. Nine minutes on the footbridge, and I do it in six, and I would have done it in six that afternoon too, except that the parcel was not going to the other side. The parcel was going down. I stood at the head of the bridge stair with the oilcloth under my arm for a time that I would not like to be asked about. Below me was the yard. The gantry. The long charging shed with its racks glowing in the open end of it, blue, as they do. Freight standing in the loading road with its green paint dulled by the weather and its gold lettering gone. A great many crates. A lantern or two lit early. And on the far side, set back against the rock with its door open and a thread of woodsmoke going straight up in the still air, the long low kitchen where I had never been. I did not look at it. I want that understood. I looked at the gantry, which is a perfectly good thing to look at, and at the loading road, and at the man who was standing in the gate at the foot of the stair with a tally board and the expression of somebody who has already refused you. "Yes," said the man. He was broad and tired and well over fifty, in a coat that had been put on that morning by someone arguing with it. I said I had a parcel for a Zahir Dasan, from his people at Hollin Salt, and he looked at the oilcloth, and then at the knot, and then at me, and said: "Night shed. He comes on at sundown. He is in there now, with the afternoon cells, because Zdena will have it that the boy must be fed first." He put out a hand, not to take the parcel but to indicate the yard. "You'll give it to him yourself. I do not sign for things in this yard. I have had it from the Guild twice about things that have gone astray in other people's hands." "I had thought to leave it with the first hand," I said. "I am the first hand," said Bohdan Krel, "and I am telling you where the second one is." It is hard to argue with that. I went in. * * * The charging shed at Tern is the nicest building in the yard and does not know it. It is long and low, timber, tarred, with a high pitched roof for the heat and the open end towards the loading road, and down both walls it has racks, in the dark green iron that every station uses, slotted floor to rafter with Standard Cells, each of them in its own pocket with a small pale blue light. There must have been eighty lit. The whole place hums, very low, like a house with a cat in it. There was a stove at the near end with a kettle on it, and a pair of crates for sitting, and a lantern on a hook, and a boy on his knees at the foot of the third rack with a cloth in his hand and his tongue between his teeth. He was not really a boy. I know that now. He was twenty-four or so, long in the back, with dark curling hair that needed a barber and a chipped front tooth, in a rust-coloured quilted vest over a blue tunic with a pattern worked into the cuffs. He had a rope scar across the palm of the cloth hand, which I saw because he lifted it, very quick, to see who had come in. His whole face was already doing something before he had decided what. "We are not open to visitors till six," he said, "but I would be very pleased to be wrong." "I am Odran Maresh," I said. "I have a parcel for Zahir Dasan. From Hollin Salt." I do not know what I had thought would happen. I think I had thought *parcel, hand, door.* I have said that I carry things for a living, and one of the things I have learned about it is that the person at the other end is never in the story you wrote for them. His face stopped. It stopped quite still. Then it went on, much brighter, like the shed when somebody puts the eighty-first light in. "*Odran Maresh,*" he said, in the voice of a man reading the name of a station aloud from the board. And then, getting up off his knees in a single movement, with the cloth still in his hand: "Oh. You're the one Sevran was living with before he came back here for training. He's training with me." I said, "Mm." It is a very good sound. It means that I have heard you and I will not be giving you anything further. It has been getting me out of rooms since I was a boy. I do not know why I thought it would work on a man who had just said *living with* in the voice of somebody who has been given a new fact and cannot wait to try it on. "In the same house," I said. "For a time. It was a small house." "That's what he said." He wiped his hand on his trousers and put it out and then, thinking better of the trousers, wiped it on the vest and put it out again. His grip was warm and entirely sincere. "He said, 'Odran has a very small house, and it is full of useful things.' I thought you would be older. Is that rude? I had you older. I think it is the way he says *my guide.* Is that for me? Is that my mother's knot?" It was his mother's knot. He looked at it as though it had spoken. * * *  He did not open it at once. He turned it over in both hands and found the corner with the thumbprint on it and put his own thumb there. Then he undid the cord, slowly, the way you do when you have been told since you were small that a knot is somebody's trouble taken, and the oilcloth fell open on the crate. A twist of grey paper, salt in it, a good fistful, coarse and a little pink. A little flat basket of dates with a leaf pressed over them. A scarf, a deep blue wool with one red thread in the border, folded in the way a woman folds a thing she has folded for thirty years. And a letter, one sheet, in the same upright Tavari hand as the address. "North pan," Zahir said, with the salt on his finger. "She always sends the north pan. She says the south is for pickling and the north is for people." He ate the salt off his finger, and shut his eyes, and said something in Tavari that I did not need to be told the meaning of. Then he took up the letter and read it standing, with his lips moving a little, and I looked at the stove. You should look at the stove when a man reads his mother's letter. It is one of the few rules I have that I did not have to learn. He laughed twice. The second time it went a little wrong in the middle. He folded the letter and put it inside the vest, flat against his ribs, and did not say anything, and took up the kettle. "Sit," he said. "Please. Sit. You have been on a train. There is a crate. The first cells aren't due for forty minutes and the kettle is already warm." He had the glasses out, two of them, from a shelf of three, before I had agreed to anything. "Tea is the least I can do. A day and a half on that line, and through Crownward. I know that line. They give you water and call it a drink." I should say that I had an hour and twenty minutes. I sat. * * * Here is a thing his mother said to me, in the bazaar at Hollin Salt, with her hands in her sleeves and her husband looking at the pans. *He makes tea when he is frightened. Ask him what is wrong, and then do not listen to the answer.* I had thought it was a joke, and then I had seen her face when she said it, and had thought it was a very good rule that she had learned the hard way. He put the glass in my hand, and it was very hot and very good, the gilt-rimmed sort of glass that I had been given at Hollin Salt and had not expected to see again, and I said: "What is wrong?" He had been halfway to sitting. He stopped there. "Nothing is wrong. I am hospitable." "Your mother said you make tea when you are frightened." "My mother," said Zahir Dasan, with great dignity, "has said a great many things in thirty seconds to a stranger in a bazaar, and I will thank you to weigh them." He sat down on the other crate. "But since you ask. The thing is Bohdan." I did not say anything. I held the glass. "Bohdan wants me on the loading road in the day. You know, the whole day, as well as the course. He says that one hand cannot be asked to be two, and then he asks it. He says it to Zdena, and Zdena says it to him. I am not a pot, I say to them, you cannot decide between you who stirs. And if I am on the road I cannot go to the course, and if I am not on the road he writes it on the board in chalk, and I find it in the morning, and it says *DASAN* and a line. Just the line. Do you know what a line is? It is worse than a word." "That is the first thing," I said. "What?" "Your mother said I should not listen to the answer. I think she meant that the first one is not the thing." He looked at me over the glass with his eyebrows up and a very slowly dawning delight. He has a face that cannot lie to anyone and does not try. It was a great deal of face for that hour of the afternoon. "She said that?" "In nearly those words." "Then she told you." He put the glass down. "Fine. The second thing is that she is coming for the first snow." It is a rule of mine that when a man deflects, you wait. I waited. He told me about his mother coming for the snow, and the bed that did not exist, and whether his father would bring a goat, which was a joke, and then was possibly not a joke. He told me about Idrin's test at the end of the month, four marks read off a leaf from memory and then an explanation of why a fifth would be a lie. I laughed at the goat. I did not laugh at the leaf. He told me all of it with the glass in his two hands and a quite genuine ease that was, I saw presently, being used as a door. And somewhere in it, in the way of a man talking about the weather in a room that has no window, he began to talk about Sevran. I had not asked. I want to be exact about that. But a man will go on telling you about his friend when he thinks you have been given leave. He told me about the rope. He did it with his hands, a long loop and the wrong end, and Sevran, he said, had been quite hopeless, quite magnificently hopeless, tried it a dozen times with his eyes shut, and then the twelfth time the whole knot had come down like a bad thought. He told me about the cell broker from Varrow with the shirt. "A relic pattern," he said. "Very old, very rare, the thing is practically a saint. Wrapped in a shirt, which was the broker's. And Sevran just looks at it, and says, 'Then I shall admire the shirt.' In that voice. You know the voice. The whole yard stopped. Bohdan laughed. *Bohdan.* He had to go and sit on the gantry leg." It came up out of me before I could do anything about it. I laughed. It was a short, quite undignified bark, in the middle of the shed, with a glass in my hand, and Zahir looked at me with such a lit-up face that I stopped, as one stops on a stair that is not there. *Then I shall admire the shirt.* It is exactly the kind of thing. It is precisely the thing he would have said on any morning of the three weeks I knew him, if only I had known to wait for it. It had needed another yard, and another man, and a clerk and a broker and a shirt. "He writes them down," Zahir said. "Did you know? He has a notebook. A small one, with an oilcloth cover. He writes the things he has been given. I looked once. I didn't read it, I only looked, and the writing is like a very neat hedge. He's got a long way to go at the practical, he is still a bit stiff on anything with weight on it, and his Aurevian is *improving* the way a loaf is, but, Odran, he is good. He is so good. Idrin said *adequate* to him on Tuesday. That is a medal. He has never said it to me. He has said *well* to me. I believe he is quite pleased with both of us. He is a man made of three sentences and he has used one of them." I drank my tea. It was a very good glass. I could not have told you what was in it. * * * "Is he well?" I said. I had not meant to say it, and I think we both knew that, and I have no excuse except that I had set the glass down empty and the sentence was the next thing in my hand. "Oh," Zahir said. "That is the pity. He is out." And then, very cheerfully, because it is a cheerful thing, it is nothing: "Idrin took him down to the Collegium this morning. The city. It's a check-up. The Collegium asked for him, as they did before, I gather, and the Guild's on the paper, and Idrin had a list of things to see about in the city anyhow. So the pair of them went down on the ten o'clock with a bag of ledgers and a hamper from Zdena. Back Friday on the evening train. He'll hate every minute. He said the doctor has a pen behind each ear." I said, "He has." "You know him?" "I took him down in the summer. The Guild asked for a follow-up, and a skipped appointment would have been my problem." "Well, now it's Idrin's," Zahir said, with all the kindness in the world, and he reached over and filled my glass. I have been trying to say what I felt at that, all the way down the line, and I will put it as plainly as I can. It was two things at once, and neither of them was larger. The first was relief. It was quite clean, and it surprised me, and it went through my shoulders like a hand unclenched. *He is being taken care of.* That is a thing a person can be glad about. I had walked into that corridor in the summer with a man who did not know what a corridor was, and sat on a wooden bench under a lamp for an hour with my hands between my knees, and thought, *someone ought to be doing this who is better at it.* Now there was someone. It did not need me. It had been a good thing to be needed for, and it was over, and nothing had broken. That is what a handing-over feels like when it is done properly. The second thing was not relief. It was that I knew the corridor. I knew the bench, and the lamp, and the smell of the doctor's room, which is wax and something sharp. I knew where one puts one's hat. And that some other man, in a coat that was not mine, was sitting on that bench now, with his hands between his knees, saying *he will be a moment,* and that Sevran would come out of the door and say *thank you* to the doctor, and *thank you* to the chair, and not look at the bench for the one who was not on it. Because he had not been told to look. Because it was Idrin's day, and mine was a summer. It was a job I did, and someone else was doing it, and I had not been asked. And I had not wanted to be. I would like that on the record. I wrapped my hands round the glass. "Good," I said. "That is good. Idrin is a careful man." "Isn't he," said Zahir, and sat looking at me. * * *  I should have gone then. I had an hour by the clock above the door, which is five minutes slow. I had the satchel by my boot and the bridge to do. A man gets up from a crate and says *thank you for the tea,* and says *give my regards to your mother,* and is in the yard before it is a conversation. What kept me was the way he had stopped talking. He had put his glass down on the crate between us, very carefully, in the way of a man who is going to need both hands for a sentence. He had pushed back the curls with the rope-scarred one. He looked suddenly a good deal younger and a good deal more worried than a man should look who has just been given a goat. "Can I say a thing," he said, "and you won't think it's rude." "I will think what I think," I said. "I will not say it." "That's about all anyone can promise." He took a breath. "I was going to say it on Friday, to Sevran, and then I thought, no, that's wrong, because it isn't about him. Or it is, but it's about both of you, and I only know one of you." He looked up. "I have known him very nearly two months. I'm with him all day. I think he is the nearest thing I have to a friend that I did not grow up beside. He sleeps up the stair from the kitchen and I keep the shed under him. I am in the rope shed and the kitchen and the yard and the chalk field and the platform with him, and I watch him, because it is what I do, I hear things through walls, you know that, they will have told you. And in two months, Odran, you have not been to see him, and he has not been to see you." I said nothing. "He doesn't say it. He wouldn't. But you know the footbridge? The long one. He stops on it. Not every day. Not even once a week. He stops in the middle and stands there with his hat in his hand, and the Pinecliff local is standing under him with its doors open, and he looks at it. I have stopped asking what he's looking at. It is always the same train." He pushed his hand through his hair. "And then he goes to see about the crock." "The fount," I said. It came out rather quietly. "You do know it." He nodded, as if this were the answer to something. "He tells it about the day. Zdena told him to. Out loud. In the old Kandren, with Zdena pretending to peel a root. He tells it about me, and the rope, and then he tells it about *you,* though not by name. He says 'a man I know' and then he is quiet and then he says 'and a very great deal to be grateful for.'" I should say that a person can go very still in a very warm shed. "Once," Zahir said, "I said to him, 'Your guide sounds a dull sort of man, if you don't mind my saying.' I was only joking. I was trying to see what happened. And he put down his spoon, and he looked at me with that terrible courtesy, and he said: 'He is the least dull man I have ever met. He only keeps it in his pockets.'" I did not say anything. There was nothing in my pockets. "He asks what you would do," Zahir said. "At the counter, when there's something odd. He doesn't say it aloud but I can see him ask it. And then he does what he thinks you'd do and, Odran, it is *always* right. The clerk went pink. He admires you. I don't mean that he is fond of you, though he is, that's plain. It's something more, or something else. I suppose sometimes I..." He stopped, and had the grace to look at the stove. "I have suspected something. A kind of affection. A level of it. I could not tell you what level. I can't put a finger on it, and I don't think I should try, because it isn't mine to put a finger on. He is *my* friend. I'm only telling you what the person in the next room has been like for two months, because I think the person behind the name should know." The stove ticked. Somewhere in the racks a cell came up to full and blinked, and the sound of the shed changed by a very little. "I have not said it to him either," Zahir said. "And I won't. But I've met you now. You are the man who brought my mother's parcel, and you drank my tea, and you asked what was wrong, and *listened,* which no one does. So I thought, if I do not tell this person what has been said in his absence, then I am the man who stood by the rack and watched. And he is back Friday. On the evening train. I would like it very much if you were there. Not through me. Just there. Directly. Where he can see you." I looked at my hands. They were round the glass again. I do not know when they had gone there. "I will think about it," I said. It was a good answer. It was the same answer I have given every person who has ever asked me for anything that was not on a sheet. It has the shape of a door that is only partly open, and it has served me for a great while. Zahir Dasan looked at it, kindly, for about as long as it takes to turn a card, and said: "Don't think." "I beg your pardon?" "Don't think. You are very good at it. Anyone can see. It is what makes you so careful, and it is probably why you're the one he thinks about when he is not thinking. But it will not do the thing." He put his big, warm, rope-scarred hand on my knee for the count of one, and took it away, as though he had not meant to leave it there. "Just do." * * * The cells were due at six, and I would like to say that I had gone before them, but the truth is that I had the sense, in the last quarter of an hour, to let him talk about something else. He told me about the goat. I think we both understood that was a kindness to us both. He walked me to the open end of the shed, and I put on my coat, and he said, very rapidly, that the dates were for me, that his mother had said I was to take some, that he had sworn on his life to see that it was done, and shoved the little basket into my hands with the leaf still over it. I tried to give it back. He would not have it. It is in my satchel. I have not eaten one. "Thank you for carrying it," he said. "I mean the whole thing. All of it. I know that is what you do. But thank you." I said that it was no trouble. It is the thing I always say, and it has never been true. The sun had gone behind the Saddle by then, and the yard had gone the blue of very old ink, and the lamps were lit along the loading road. There was a boy with a handcart, and a lantern, and somebody calling for the second gang. The air had the first real bite of frost in it, and the woodsmoke from the long kitchen, and the clean, cold, resinous smell the larches have in the last week before they go. I did not mean to look at the kitchen. I had, I think, been very good about it for an hour and a half. I had my face turned towards the stair. And then a gang went by with a barrow and I had to stop for it, and in stopping I turned a little to let them pass, and the kitchen was there across the yard with its door shut now against the cold and its window lit. It was a long window, deep-set, with a broad sill, and a lamp inside, yellow, on a shelf. And on the sill, with a cloth tied over it, and the lamp laying a line of gold along its shoulder, there was a crock.  I knew it. I would have known it across a field. It is a squat brown stoneware crock with a chip out of the lip like a bite, and it stood on the shelf over Resa's range for as long as I have eaten at her table. Somebody had moved it back to the sill. They had put it where the light would find it. And it was *warm,* one could see that; there was a little bloom of damp on the pane around it and the lid-cloth was lifted a finger's width at one side, by what was under it, as a blanket is lifted by a sleeper. It was alive. It was more than alive. It was being *kept.* I stood in the cold with a gang of men going round me and I did not ask what it was called, or who had fed it that morning, or whether it had been told. I did not need to ask. I knew exactly which man had put it where the light would find it, and in what language he had told it about the day. I do not know how long I stood there. A man with a barrow said "Oi." It was the second gang. I went up the stair. * * *  Nine minutes. I did it in nine. I would like to say it was because the stair was icy, and that is true, but I also stopped on the footbridge, in the middle, where it is widest, with my hand on the rail and the satchel on my shoulder and the wind coming off the Saddle with a taste of iron in it, and I looked down at the track below me. The local was standing there with its doors open and its lamps lit. It is a very ordinary little train. It is two carriages and a brake van with a stove-pipe, and it goes to Pinecliff and stops at each of the seven halts and is generally late. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. I have stood on this bridge and looked at it perhaps four hundred times, and I have never once thought of it as a thing that someone else might be looking at from the same place. I stayed there until the guard looked up and called, and I went down. That was an hour ago. The yard has gone. The shed was the last of it, a long blue-lit sliver at the end of the loading road, and then the line bent and put the Saddle between us and there was only the window and my own face in it, grey in the beard and a little the worse for the afternoon. The draught is still on my left ear. In my satchel there are some dates under a pressed leaf, and I have not eaten one. *Don't think. Just do.* It is excellent advice. I can see why it was given. Set beside what I have always done, which is to think carefully about each step and then take it in the same direction as before, it is the other side of the coin. I could get down at the next halt and go back up the line. I could be in the yard on Friday evening, where a man might see me. I could be in a great many places. I will say what I have. I delivered the parcel. I did not look for him, which is true, if you do not count the footbridge and the crock. I did not stay, though I stayed for a glass of tea and an hour on a crate. I was told that someone else has taken the corridor with the pens, and I am glad of it, and I am telling the window. And I heard that a man had said, of me, *he only keeps it in his pockets.* I have been through my pockets twice. It is a thing a person can check. The train goes into the first tunnel and the window turns to a black mirror, and I look into it with the lamp swaying and do not know what I see. A man in a good coat. A very ordinary face for a man who is asked things. I have said that I will think about it. I am thinking. I know. It is what I do. But I will tell you the thing I did not tell Zahir Dasan over his tea. I laughed at the shirt. I laughed in the middle of that shed with a glass in my hand, loudly, before I could stop it, at a thing said by a man who was not in the room. It is the first time since the summer that I have laughed at anything I had not first decided was funny. That is not nothing. I have decided to put it in my pocket, with the dates. The tunnel ends. The light comes back, thin and blue, over the first halt, and there is a lamp on the platform and nobody under it. The train slows. I take my hand off the sill. I have kept one of the three. I am still deciding the other two, which is a different thing to deciding them, and I am told that it is a start.