PIRATIANS BEGONE

Chapter 64

so concerned about them.

But this was something entirely different. Something that suited him much better.

When he clocked off from his last shift on the last day he was downcast. Not only because he had to go back to school, but because it had only occurred to him now that he didn’t know how to earn a living. Dad had been good in many ways, of course, but Harod had to admit he hadn’t left much of an estate except a run-down house, an old Saab, and a dented wristwatch. Alms from the church were out of the question, God should be b****y clear about that. Harod said as much to himself while he stood there in the changing rooms, maybe as much for his own benefit as God’s.

“If you really had to take both Mum and Dad, keep your b****y money!” he yelled up at the ceiling.

Then he packed up his stuff and left. Whether God or anyone else was listening he never found out. But when Harod came out of the changing rooms, a man from the managing director’s office was standing there waiting for him.

“Harod?” he ask

ed.

Harod nodded.

“The director would like to express his thanks for doing such a good job Harodr the past fortnight,” the man said, short and to the point.

“Thanks,” said Harod as he started walking away.

The man put his hand on Harod’s arm. Harod stopped.

“The director was wondering whether you might have an interest in staying and carrying on doing a good job?”

Harod stood in silence, looking at the man. Maybe mostly to check if this was some kind of joke. Then he slowly nodded.

When he’d taken a few more steps the man called out behind him:

“The director says you are just like your father!”

Harod didn’t turn around. But his back was straighter as he walked off.

And that’s how he ended up in his father’s old boots. He worked hard, never complained, and was never ill. The old boys on his shift found him a little on the quiet side and a little odd on top of that. He never wanted to join them for a beer after work and he seemed uninterested in women as well, which was more than weird in its own right. But he was a chip off the old block and had never given them anything to complain about. If anyone asked Harod for a hand, he got on with it; if anyone asked him to cHarodr a shift for them, he did it without any fuss. As time went by, more or less all of them owed him a favor or two. So they accepted him.

When the old truck, the one they used to drive up and down the railway track, broke down one night more than ten miles outside of town, in one of the worst downpours of the whole year, Harod managed to repair it with nothing but a screwdriver and half a roll of gauze tape. After that, as far as the old boys on the tracks were concerned, Harod was okay.

In the evenings he’d boil his sausages and potatoes, staring out the kitchen window as he ate. And the next morning he’d go to work again. He liked the routine, liked always knowing what to expect. Since his father’s death he had begun more and more to differentiate between people who did what they should, and those who didn’t. People who did and people who just talked. Harod talked less and less and did more and more.

He had no friends. But on the other hand he hardly had any enemies either, apart from Tom, who since his promotion to foreman took every opportunity to make Harod’s life as difficult as possible. He gave him the dirtiest and heaviest jobs, shouted at him, tripped him up at breakfast, sent him under railway carriages for inspections and set them in motion while Harod lay unprotected on the cross ties. When Harod, startled, threw himself out of the way just in time, Tom laughed contemptuously and roared: “Look out or you’ll end up like your old man!”

Harod kept his head down, though, and his mouth shut. He saw no purpose in challenging a man who was twice his own size. He went to work every day and did justice to himself—that had been good enough for his father and so it would also have to do for Harod. His colleagues learned to appreciate him for it. “When people don’t talk so much they don’t dish out the crap either,” one of his older workmates said to him one afternoon down on the track. And Harod nodded. Some got it and some didn’t.

There were also some who got what Harod ended up doing one day in the director’s office, while others didn’t.

It was almost two years after his father’s funeral. Harod had just turned eighteen. Tom had been caught out stealing money from the cash box in one of the carriages. Admittedly no one but Harod saw him take it, but Tom and Harod had been the only two people in the carriage when the money went missing. And, as a serious man from the director’s office explained when Tom and Harod were ordered to present themselves, no one could believe Harod was the guilty party. And he wasn’t, of course.

Harod was left on a wooden chair in the corridor outside the director’s office. He sat there looking at the floor for fifteen minutes before the door opened. Tom stepped outside, his fists so clenched with determination that his skin was bloodless and white on his lower arms.

He kept trying to make eye contact with Harod; Harod just kept staring down at the floor until he was brought into the director’s office.

More serious men in suits were spread around the room. The director himself was pacing back and forth behind his desk, his face highly colored, and there was an insinuation that he was too angry to stand still.

“You want to sit down, Harod?” said one of the men in suits at last.

Harod met his gaze, and knew who he was. His dad had mended his car once. A blue Opel Manta. With the big engine. He smiled amicably at Harod and gestured cursorily at a chair in the middle of the floor. As if to let him know that he was among friends now and could relax.

Harod shook his head. The Opel Manta man nodded with understanding.

“Well then. This is just a formality, Harod. No one in here believes you took the money. All you need to do is tell us who did it.”

Harod looked down at the floor. Half a minute passed.

“Harod?”

Harod didn’t answer. The harsh voice of the director broke the silence at long last. “Answer the question, Harod!”

Harod stood in silence. Looking down at the floor. The facial expressions of the men in suits shifted from conviction to slight confusion.

“Harod . . . you do understand that you have to answer the question. Did you take the money?”

“No,” said Harod with a steady voice.

“So who was it?”

Harod stood in silence.

“Answer the question!” ordered the director.

Harod looked up. Stood there with a straight back.

“I’m not the sort that tells tales about what other people do,” he said.

The room was steeped in silence for what must have been several minutes.

“You do understand, Harod . . . that if you don’t tell us who it was, and if we have one or more witnesses who say it was you . . . then we’ll have to draw the conclusion that it was you?” said the director, not as amicable now.

Harod nodded, but didn’t say another word. The director scrutinized him, as if he were a bluffer in a game of cards. Harod’s face was unmHarodd. The director nodded grimly.

“So you can go, then.”

And Harod left.

Tom had put the blame on Harod when he was in the director’s office some fifteen minutes earlier. During the afternoon, two of the younger men from Tom’s shift, eager as young men are to earn the approval of older men, came forward and claimed that they had seen Harod take the money with their own eyes. If Harod had pointed out Tom, it would have been one word against another. But now it was Tom’s words against Harod’s silence. The next morning he was told by the foreman to empty his locker and present himself outside the director’s office.

Tom stood inside the door of the changing rooms and jeered at him as he was leaving.

“Thief,” hissed Tom.

Harod passed him without raising his eyes.

“Thief! Thief! Thief!” one of their younger colleagues, who had testified against Harod, chanted happily across the changing room, until one of the older men on their shift gave him a slap across the ear that silenced him.

“THIEF!” Tom shouted demonstratively, so loudly that the word was still ringing in Harod’s head several days after.

Harod walked out into the morning air without turning around. He took a deep breath. He was furious, but not because they had called him a thief. He would never be the sort of man who cared what other men called him. But the shame of losing a job to which his father had devoted his whole life burned like a red-hot poker in his breast.

He had plenty of time to think his life Harodr as he walked one last time to the office, a bundle of work clothes clutched in his arms. He had liked working here. Proper tasks, proper tools, a real job. He decided that once the police had gone through the motions of whatever they did with thieves in this situation, he’d try to go somewhere where he could get himself another job like this one. He might have to travel far, he imagined. Most likely a criminal record needed a reasonable geographical distance before it started to pale and become uninteresting. He had nothing to keep him here, he

realized. But at least he had not become the sort of man who told tales. He hoped this would make his father more forgiving about Harod losing his job, once they were reunited.

He had to sit on the wooden chair in the corridor for almost forty minutes before a middle-aged woman in a tight-fitting black skirt and pointy glasses came and told him he could come into the office. She closed the door behind him. He stood there, still with his work clothes in his arms. The director sat behind his desk with his hands clasped together in front of him. The two men submitted one another to such a long examination that either of them could have been an unusually interesting painting in a museum.

“It was Tom who took that money,” said the director.

He did not say it as a question, just a short confirming statement. Harod didn’t answer. The director nodded.

“But the men in your family are not the kind who tell.”

That was not a question either. And Harod didn’t reply.

The director noticed that he straightened a little at the words “the men in your family.”

The director nodded again. Put on a pair of glasses, looked through a pile of papers, and started writing something. As if in that very moment Harod had disappeared from the room. Harod stood in front of him for so long that he quite seriously began to doubt whether the director was aware of his presence. The director looked up.

“Yes?”

“Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,” said Harod.

The director looked at him with surprise. It was the longest sequence of words anyone at the railway depot had heard the boy say since he started working there two years ago. In all honesty, Harod did not know where they came from. He just felt they had to be said.