Chương 25: The Same Water

Lena Ward did the highways on Monday morning, and she was the first person all term to make the room go quiet without meaning to. She'd brought a photograph. Somebody's great-grandmother had kept it, and Lena had taken it to the copy place on Gill Street, and she held it up and walked it along the front row so everybody could see. Six lanes of road going away in a straight line, with cars on it, nose to tail, as far as the picture went.

"There were about forty thousand kilometers of these," Lena said.

"You could drive from here to anywhere. My great-gran did it twice a year to see her sister."

"Where's the sister now?"

"I don't know," said Lena.

"That's actually the whole point of my report." Two people laughed and then stopped, because it turned out not to be a joke. The photograph was still going along the front row. Nobody had passed it on for a while. A boy in the second seat was holding it with both hands and looking at the cars. Lena got to the end. The end was about the roads going and never coming back, but the bit that stuck to Abe wasn't any of the parts she was proud of. It was one flat sentence near the bottom of her last page.

"So things get made in one city and they get used in that city," Lena read.

"If it isn't made where you are, it might as well not exist." Abe looked at his desk for a while. There's a medicine somewhere on this planet that takes the Fray out of a person like a stone out of a shoe. The Fray is what June has. It costs two million marks and it's made a very long way from Calder, and until about eleven o'clock on Monday morning Abe had only ever thought about the price. He put his hand up.

"Are there people who bring things across? Between cities?"

"There are," said Mrs. Farrant.

"They're extremely expensive and most of them die eventually, and that is a different report, Mr. Dolan, and nobody in this room has drawn it."

"Can I do that one as well?"

"No."

"My cousin says they use dogs," Ellis Naylor said, to the room in general.

"Your cousin," said Mrs. Farrant, "has told this class a great many things." She waited for the room to settle, and then she put her hand flat on Lena's report.

"This is the best one anybody has given me so far," she said.

"I expect it will stay the best."

"That's only because she brought a photo," said Ellis.

"Everyone else has got cards."

"Yes," said Mrs. Farrant.

"Exactly. Some of you might like to have a think about why." Abe walked home the long way and worked out that he'd tell Peg on Friday. Friday was good. Friday had a wage in it, and a wage on the table is a much better way to start that conversation than nothing on the table. He was very pleased with himself about Friday all the way up the Corn Road. Then he opened the door of the apartment. Peg was at the kitchen table with her coat still on and her bag by her feet. The stove was off.

She hadn't put the kettle on either, and Peg puts the kettle on without ever noticing she's done it. Abe's throat closed up before the door had finished shutting.

"Sit down," said Peg. He sat down. June came out of the back room and stopped in the doorway, and Peg didn't tell her to go anywhere, which was somehow the worst part of it.

"Molly Cottle's husband is on crew four," Peg said.

"Molly does the servery with me. She read me the Sunday list off her phone at eleven thirty this morning, out loud, in front of four people, because she thought I'd be pleased." Nobody said anything.

"Dolan," said Peg.

"Crew nine."

"Yes."

"Are you going again?"

"Yes." Peg nodded slowly, the way she'd have nodded at rain. Then she finally took her coat off and hung it on the back of the chair instead of on the hook, and that was how Abe knew how bad it was.

"I'm eighteen," he said, because somebody had to say something.

"I know how old you are. I was there."

"It's licensed. It's a real crew and the lead's been out there twenty years. The permit came through Mr. Riddell."

"I know all that. She read me the whole list." Peg put both hands flat on the table.

"Everyone in that kitchen knew where my nephew was on Sunday before I did." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"I was going to tell you."

"When?" Abe opened his mouth and shut it again. He'd had three days to pick a day and had only picked one on the walk home, and Friday sounded so thin now that he couldn't make himself say it. Peg let that sit there. She had a way of not filling a silence that was worse than being shouted at, and in four years she had never shouted at either of them.

"Your father had eleven years on that wall," she said.

"He had stone under him. He had forty men either side of him and a bell to ring, and the sea came over the top of it anyway and took him off." She said it flat, to the table.

"You're going out onto the same water in a boat."

"It isn't the same water. It's three feet deep, you can stand up in it."

"Abraham." He stopped.

"Your mother said something very like that to me about him once," said Peg.

"About the wall. About how high it was." Nobody said anything for a while after that.

"What's the lead's name?" said Peg.

"Dobbs."

"Spell it." He spelled it. Peg wrote it on the back of an envelope with the pen that lived by the bread box, and then she put the envelope in her coat pocket. She was writing down the name of the man who would be responsible for him out there, so that if he ever didn't come home she would know exactly whose door to knock on. All three of them knew that was what she was doing. None of them said one word about it. It was June who broke it. She just told the truth, and Abe had not seen that coming.

"He told me on Saturday," she said. Peg turned around.

"Before he ever went out on the water," June said.

"He told me before he told anybody. I said go, and I set terms, and I said we weren't telling you yet."

"You said."

"I said." Peg looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at Abe, and then back at June, and her face changed in a way neither of them had ever seen. She had worked out that the two of them had decided something about her together, and had not told her.

"Right," said Peg.

"It wasn't his idea." June's voice had gone up.

"It was mine. I said it because you'd get the bus down there on your half day and stand on the boards all afternoon. You would. You know you would."

"I might have done."

"You would."

"That's mine to decide," Peg said, "and neither of you thought so." She got up and filled the kettle after all, with her back to the room. June sat down at the table very slowly and didn't look at anybody. Nobody in that kitchen said out loud that the two of them had managed her. Nobody said it that evening and nobody said it in the morning, and it went on being true. Peg didn't forbid it, and she didn't argue about it, and by seven she was doing the potatoes.

That was what Abe had been braced for, but it was still worse than being shouted at.

"What time do you go?" she said, at the sink.

"Six."

"Sunday only?"

"Sunday. And Saturday, if Dobbs puts me on."

"Right," said Peg. That was all of it. She got the big pan down instead of the small one and started peeling for four instead of three. She was cooking extra so there would be something for him to take out in the boat on Sunday. She didn't say so, and Abe knew that saying it out loud would ruin it, so he laid the table instead. Then she started talking, which she hadn't done since she came in. She talked about the kitchen. Not about him and not about Sunday.

Molly Cottle had a new grandson and a photograph of him that she made everybody look at twice, and the woman in admin who does the orders had sent them four hundred tins of tomatoes and no rice at all, in November, which Peg said was on purpose.

"She hates us," said Peg, peeling.

"She's hated us since the summer and she won't say why, and I've decided I don't care about it. Molly says I do."

"Do you?" said June.

"No." She was being funny. That was the part Abe couldn't get past. His aunt was standing at the sink being funny at half past six about a woman he had never met, and neither of them had heard her do it in months. Then June asked whether the tomato woman had a name, and Peg said "June" in a voice with nothing at all in it, and June stopped. Nobody had done anything wrong.

Peg had been up since half past five and standing since six and her hands had been in water all day, and she had gotten to the part of the evening where she had nothing left for answering questions. She went back to the potatoes. A minute later, without turning around:"Sandra."

"What?"

"The tomato woman. She's called Sandra." Another one went in the pan.

"She was perfectly nice for eleven years and then she stopped. No reason I ever heard." He got the money out before he could think better of it. Forty five marks, in daylight, in front of both of them, which he had never done with anything he'd earned. He put it flat on the wood and pushed it across the table.

"That's Sunday," he said.

"There'll be another one this week." Peg looked at it. She didn't pick it up.

"That goes in the tin," said Abe.

"I know where it goes." Then she got her purse out of her coat on the back of the chair and counted out the rest of it, there, at the table, where they could both watch her do it. She'd never done that in front of them either. Four years of it, every month, always with her back turned at the counter. She put her notes on top of his and squared the edges up.

"Two hundred and twenty," said Peg. She stood up and put the whole lot in the tin over the kettle, and the lid went on, and it was the first honest month that tin had ever had. June was looking at the wall list. She'd been looking at it a lot lately. Two columns. WHAT IT COSTS on one side, three hundred and forty on the other, and a face she'd drawn in the gap when she was thirteen, sticking its tongue out. Nobody had moved the second number in a long time.

Abe had earned forty five marks on Sunday and every last one of them had gone straight past that list without stopping. He decided not to say so out loud, because it was the only cheerful ten minutes any of them were going to get out of the evening. June came and stood in his doorway at nine thirty with her arms folded.

"She wrote his name down," she said.

"I know."

"She's going to call the shed. Not this week. In about a month, when she thinks we've stopped watching her." June leaned on the frame.

"That's what she does. She called my school in sixth grade and I didn't find out for a year."

"Are you all right?"

"No," said June.

"Are you?"

"No."

"Good." She pushed off the doorframe.

"I'm not sorry, by the way. I'd do it again. I just didn't think about the bit where she'd have to hear it off Molly Cottle."

"Neither did I."

"No," said June.

"You never do the bit at the end. It's your worst thing." She went to bed. Neither of them had said one word about who was right, and neither of them was going to, and Abe lay there for a while listening to the pipes. Late that night the yard was hard with frost and the rain had stopped in the air over it, and Abe checked the one thing that was actually moving. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 4 Foundation: 2, 180 / 2500 (Body Layer 5) Three hundred and twenty short.

He stood in a stopped yard doing sums on his fingers, which is a stupid thing to do when the number's right there in front of you, and he did it anyway. A hundred a day, near enough, on a good day. It had been less than that lately and he knew exactly why. Everything in his own yard had stopped being hard, and the only two things that had been properly hard all month were an hour with Miles Croft and a rope in a moving boat. Three hundred and twenty. Four days of it. Five if the week went badly.

Seven days until the board read the whole year again. Abe stood out there in the frost and let himself want it, and there was nobody awake in Calder to hear him, so he said it out loud.

"Three hundred and twenty," he said, to a stopped street.

"Layer five by Monday. Come on."