Tavi stood in the doorway of the larder like a terrier that had been kicked twice and offered a bone once. His bare shins were smeared with gray wharf mud, his wool jumper was torn at both elbows. His eyes darted continuously between the crawling floor, Sister Merrow’s bread paddle, and the brass arch humming faintly in the washroom behind them.
In his right hand, the boy gripped a charred pine branch he had pulled from the kitchen ash heap. Its blackened tip still smelled of charcoal. In his mind, an infestation was something you beat with a stick until it stopped twitching or burned with kerosene until the stones turned black.
‘Drop the stick, son,’ Imran said. His voice was not loud. But it had the flat, unmoving power of a man who had told three hundred council tenants to put down cans of petrol before they burned their own kitchens down.
Tavi paused, his fingers tightening on the rough bark. ‘Master Corvin’s clerks said these things bite children’s ears off in their sleep. They said if one crawls in your boot, your toes turn green and fall off in the river.’
‘Master Corvin’s clerks are idiots who don’t know the difference between a hunting beast and a herbivorous scavenger,’ Imran replied calmly. ‘And if you hit that floor with that stick, you will smash sixty egg capsules, smear thirty nurse workers into the flour, and release an alarm pheromone that will cause every beetle in that wall to scatter into the bread ovens. Put the stick outside.’
Tavi looked at Pella, who gave him a brief, firm nod. The boy stepped backward, dropped the charred wood into the yard dirt with a dull clatter. Then he wiped his palms on his trousers. When he came back in, Imran was sitting cross-legged on the clean pine plank. He held a second camel-hair brush by its cedar handle.
From the kitchen back kitchen, the warm scent of boiled tea drifted through the doorway, with the dry crustiness of Merrow’s cooling sourdough crust on the bread racks. The boy sniffed the air hungrily, his stomach growling with a loud, hollow rumble.
‘Sit down,’ Imran commanded gently, tapping the bare wood beside him. ‘Cross your legs. Don’t let your boots touch the flour. Keep your weight centered over your hips.’
The boy sat, his small frame rigid with nervous energy. His breath came in fast, shallow gasps, smelling of cold river water and chicory tea. Imran picked up an empty pasteboard box that had once held tea leaves. He set it between them on the plank. Beside the box, Pella set down her small bottle of dark oak-ink and a bundle of dry parchment tags.
‘Hold this,’ Imran said, handing the boy the brush. ‘Not like a dagger. Not like an adze. Hold it like you’re holding a freshly boiled egg that has a crack in the shell. Two fingers on the wood, thumb underneath. Lightly.’
Tavi took the brush. His knuckles were gray with dirt and scarred from oyster shells. His hand shook with an irregular, jerky tremor. He jabbed the bristles toward the nearest beetle, causing the insect to draw its legs tight against its shell and tuck its head beneath its thorax.
‘Stop,’ Imran said, placing one firm, warm hand over the boy’s wrist. ‘You’re lunging. An insect senses the air shifted weight from your knuckles three inches before the bristles touch it. When you drop your hand fast, you create a bow wave of pressure. It thinks a sparrow is diving on it.’
He guided Tavi’s hand back until the brush rested three inches above the stone, where flecks of white pipe lime dusted the edge of the plank. ‘Watch my wrist. See how the motion comes from the fingers, not the shoulder? You don’t strike. You present the bristles as an inclined ramp. An insect that is carrying a heavy load always wants to climb upward away from the ground.’
Imran showed with his own brush. He lowered the fine camel hair half an inch in front of an advancing nurse worker. The beetle didn’t flinch. It paused, touched the soft hairs with its palps, found the surface stable, and walked calmly up the incline toward the metal ring.
With a smooth, nonstop sweep that made no sound against the air, Imran lifted the brush two inches. It turned his hand forty-five degrees. Then it tapped the metal ring lightly against the rim of the cardboard box. The beetle tumbled into the dark inside, landing on a bed of dry moss without dropping its semi-clear egg sac.
‘Now you,’ Imran said, releasing the boy’s wrist. ‘Pick the one near the flour sack. Take five breaths before you move your hand.’
Tavi took a breath. The boy’s face tightened in concentration, the wild street-urchin restlessness draining out of his stance as he stared at the small black speck on the stone. He lowered the brush slowly, his hand wavering for a second before steadying into a slow, level sweep.
The bristles touched the flat stone slab a tiny fraction of an inch ahead of the beetle. The insect stopped, tested the hairs with its front tarsi, and clambered aboard. Tavi’s eyes widened, but he didn’t snatch the tool back. He lifted the brush with painful slowness. His elbow was locked against his ribs, and passed the beetle over the cardboard rim.
A soft tap of his index finger against the wood. The insect dropped safely into the moss, its pale white brood capsule intact between its jaws.
‘Look at that,’ Tavi breathed, his voice barely heard above the quiet hiss of the larder draft. ‘It didn’t bite. It didn’t even run.’
‘Why would it run?’ Imran asked, allowing a faint, dry smile to touch the corners of his mouth. ‘You just offered it a dry bridge across a hot floor. Insects are the most practical creatures on earth, Tavi. They don’t have time for pride, and they don’t have time for fear. They just want to do their job and keep their kids alive.’
Imran reached over and adjusted Tavi’s grip slightly, angling the boy’s thumb closer to the brass metal ring. ‘Keep your wrist loose. If your forearm tenses up, your fingers will cramp in twenty minutes. A tradesman learns how to hold a tool so he can use it all day without ruining his joints.’
Tavi nodded, his brow creased with earnest focus. He scooped another nurse worker, transferring it with smooth, unrushed rhythm into the pasteboard flat. The tiny, clicking sounds inside the box grew into a steady, contented rustle.
Imran handed him a sharpened graphite pencil and a punched holes in cardboard slip. ‘Mark the corner of the box with the side number and the time. In pest management, an unrecorded catch is useless data. If we don’t know which corner of the floor is clearing first, we can’t tell whether our heat shield is holding.’
Tavi carefully scrawled ‘L-1 / 07:15’ onto the corner flap, his tongue poked between his lips as he formed the rough letters. ‘My net-mending uncle told me letters were only for tax men. He said an honest fisherman didn’t need to write.’
‘Your uncle was half-right,’ Imran said gently. ‘Tax men use letters to take things away. But tradesmen use letters to prove what they built and what they fixed. When you sign a job card, nobody can tell you that the floor cleared by magic.’
Sister Merrow appeared at the threshold. She held a plate with a thick crust of dark caraway bread smeared with fresh drippings. She didn’t speak. She simply placed the plate on the edge of the clean pine plank within Tavi’s reach. She nodded with quiet test at the boy’s calm hands.
For the next twenty minutes, neither of them spoke. The only sounds in the small pantry were the steady breathing of the river through the foundation vents, the faint clicking of hundreds of tiny legs, and the soft, rhythmic tap of cedar brush handles against pasteboard.
Tavi worked with terrifying intensity. Every trace of the wild, evasive dock rat had vanished. In its place was an apprentice mastering his first delicate clockwork operation. By the time Eren Tal returned with the first stack of clay pot pots, Tavi had passed forty-two nurse workers into the box without cracking a single shell.
Imran watched the boy work, noting the steady rhythm of his hands and the careful way he kept his knees from disturbing the emerging columns. ‘You have good hands, son. Most boys your age in Leeds want to smash everything that moves with a spade.’
Tavi didn’t look up from his brush, but his chest swelled beneath his ragged wool jumper. ‘In Lowbank, if you smash your tools, you don’t eat. My grandfather was a net-mender. He said if your fingers are rough, the fish go through the holes.’
‘Your grandfather was right,’ Imran said, standing up and stretching his lower back. ‘Now let’s go build these bugs a proper house before Eren drops those pots on his toes.’