Glyn was fifty-eight and he watched the steelworks catch fire from the kitchen window, standing, a mug of tea in his hand, from the Sandfields side from which you can see the whole Margam plain and the Abbey Works stretched along the coast like a second city inside Port Talbot, and that expanse of sheds and chimneys and conveyor lines he knew the way you know the side of a person you have slept beside for forty years: he knew where the cold mill was even in the dark, even now that the cold mill was an orange line beneath a column of smoke that the sea wind bent towards the hill. It was the third bay, the one with the pickling lines. He worked it out from the point where the glow rose, not from what BBC Wales would say the next morning. He did not wake Carol. Some things, in this town, a man knows before he sees them.

His grandfather had started at the Abbey Works the year it opened, in 1951, when the plant was the largest in Europe and the town had filled with men come from every valley in Wales, from Pontrhydyfen, from Cwmavon, from the north as far as Merthyr; and his grandfather used to say one thing only, always the same, glass in hand at the workingmen's club in Aberavon: that the furnace never goes out, boy, a furnace once lit is lit forever, and when you put it out it is no longer a furnace, it is a shed. He said it like a law of physics and like a blasphemy, both at once. His grandfather had died in 1979, of dust in the lungs, the same dust that on Sundays settled on the windowsills of Sandfields and that the women wiped away with a cloth knowing that on Monday it would be back, because the dust was the work and the work was the bread, and no one in Port Talbot has ever truly wiped that dust from their mouth.

His father had worked the hot strip mill, the line where the red-hot slab passes between the rolls and is drawn out into strip and the heat dries your eyes at ten metres; and on the day Glyn turned sixteen, in 1984, the year of the miners' strike that here everyone remembers for the way it ended, his father had taken him to the Margam gate and handed him the tally. The tally was a brass disc with a number stamped on it, the number that identified you at the start of the shift: you hung it on the board when you went in, you took it back when you came out, and if at the end of the shift your tally was still on the board it meant someone had stayed inside. His father's number was 4471. When his father had retired, in 1996, the number had been reassigned, because numbers at the Abbey Works do not die with the men, they pass on; and by one of those coincidences that in the works they call fate and outside they call statistics, 4471 had fallen to Glyn three years later, when he moved from the stores to the cold lines.

He had worked thirty-four years with his father's number hung on his chest. He had seen the old continuous casting close and the new one open, he had seen the Indians arrive who had bought the lot, he had seen the price of steel rise and fall like the tide at Aberavon that in Port Talbot you know by heart, twice a day, and you set your life by it. And then, two years before, in the autumn of 02024, they had shut down the blast furnaces. They had shut them down for good, cooled them, blown out, as they say here, and Glyn had gone to watch the last tapping along with two hundred men in silence, and he had thought of his grandfather and his law of physics, and he had understood that the old man was right: with the furnace out, that was no longer the works his grandfather had walked into in 1951. It was a shed. A shed the size of a city, waiting for an electric furnace they would light perhaps in 02028, perhaps, and that would melt scrap instead of making iron from iron, and that would ask for a third of the men.

His son Rhys had never set foot inside. At nineteen he had gone to the Amazon depot beside the motorway, above Swansea, where there is no dust and no fire and no brass tally with a number, there is a barcode scanner that tells you where to walk; and Glyn had said nothing to him, because a father who has breathed that dust has no right to want it for his son, and because deep down, deep down, he had drawn a breath of relief that the boy would never do it. And yet tonight, watching the third bay burn, Glyn realised that the thing tightening his throat was not the fear for the job — the job was already half lost, everyone knew it, it was a matter of letters and of months — but the fact that the fire had come from the wrong side. Not from the furnace, for which fire is its trade. From the cold. The cold mill had caught fire, the one place in the works where fire was not meant to be, and this, to a man raised on his grandfather's law, seemed a wrong done to the order of things, as if the sea had risen to burn the hill.

He stayed at the window until the sky to the east, above the motorway viaduct that has cut the town in two since he was a boy, began to lighten to the same grey as the smoke, so that for a moment you could no longer tell where the night ended and the day began. The sirens had risen and then fallen. Carol was still asleep. Glyn set the cold mug in the sink. Then he went to the dresser drawer, the one where Carol keeps the bills and the buttons and the things you don't throw away, and he felt underneath, at the bottom, and he found it: the tally, the brass disc worn at the edges, the 4471 still legible if you turn it to the light. He had never handed it back. He should have, on the last day, but he had put it in his pocket and walked out of the Margam gate with his father's tally on him, and no one had asked for it back, because by then no one cared about the board any more. He held it in his palm. It weighed what a large coin weighs. Outside, on the plain, the fire was going out by itself, the way things go out when they have finished, and Glyn stood turning the disc between thumb and forefinger, from the side with the number to the smooth side and back, until Carol woke and from the room asked, her voice still inside sleep, if there was any tea.