Bin Day

Every seventh day the Above puts its bins out along the wall for an inspection nobody may attend. On the twenty-second morning the keeper said, over breakfast, that she would be attending.

She said it to Grizel, quite quietly. The hollow was in uproar before the sentence had reached the gate.

Lady Pettigrew rose off the stool with the collar opening round her like a window.

"The Court does not attend inspections. The Court is inspected. There is a word for a keeper who climbs into the Above's own vessel and looks, and the word is sacrilege."

"What's it a sacrilege against?" said Kit. "Nobody knows what they're for."

"That is precisely what makes it one. If we knew what they were for it would merely be trespass." She sat. The stool creaked.

Nettie came up from the patch. "Gnomesby," she said, in the second tone, the one for weather. "The Provost has never once looked in a bin. Fourteen winters and he's never had the nerve. If our keeper does a thing their Provost won't, then we've got somewhere." She went back down to think about where.

Grizel said nothing at all. She had been writing since the word "attending," and anybody could see from the speed of the pen that she was delighted, and would have denied it under oath.

"Relocating," said Tansy, from the coping, with her wings half open. That was the whole of her offer, and it was accepted.

They went up at dusk. The bin nearest the corner has a gap under its lid, and Kit went in through it with empty hands, and Tansy went in after her.

What the Above throws away is, from the height of a boot, a country, and the theology had never set foot in it. There was a tin with its lid folded back like a hat lifted in greeting, and a smell of fish coming off it, and the theology had never held that the Above ate. There were leaves in a wet heap, steeped: the Above brews. There was paper in sheets the size of the path, written on in more lines than any letter could want.

"Letters," said Tansy.

"To itself," said Kit, and the theology took on a clause.

The Above writes in the same letters as anybody. It writes them too big to read. A grumlin cannot see a word of its print whole; she has to walk along it, a letter at a time, and remember where she set out from. Kit walked along one, to the end, and came back.

"Half price," she said.

Tansy looked at her.

"Packets," said Kit. "They're all print. You pick it up." She did not say where she had met so many packets, and the ledger, told of it afterwards, put the hook beside it.

There was a sock, on its own, in the manner of socks. And there was half a biscuit, bitten once and put back, which neither school had allowed for. Tribute or shortbread, the Above had begun it and thought better of it, like a doctrine tried and given up.

Down at the side, under the gap, was the thing that had caught the light the week before. It was a sheet of paper, crumpled and smoothed and crumpled again, with wax on it in colours, pressed hard. Kit folded it once and put it inside the coat. She put something else in after it, something small and flat that had been lying underneath. Tansy, who misses nothing that goes into a pocket, looked at her, and Kit looked back, and neither of them brought it up. It was not shown at the table, and it is not in the book, and the ledger knows of it only because it has been told since by somebody who does not usually tell.

The paper she laid out under the lamp, and the hollow came to look.

It was a hedge, in green, in a band from one edge to the other. There was a gap in the hedge, which was a gate. And beside the gap stood a small square figure in a pointed hat, with the point leaning back over its shoulder like something looking to see who was behind it, and in one fist, held well out, a lamp. The lamp was yellow. It was the yellowest thing on the page, and it had lines coming off it.

Nettie's beard stopped. Pettigrew's collar stopped. Grizel took off her spectacles, and it was still there.

"It's seen us," said Wick.

"It's seen him," said Nettie.

"Fourteen winters," said Grizel, to nobody. "Rain, mowing, bins, one watering can. It has never once looked down." She put the spectacles back on. "Somebody up there has been looking down."

Kit carried the sheet to the gate and held it up in the light of the lantern.

Mungo looked at it. He said nothing, and he did not move. But the ledger knows the height of him against the gatepost to the width of a pen stroke, and it records that for some time afterwards he was seen to stand very slightly straighter. It has measured by how much, and it is not going to say.