Chương 29: Gault

By Friday the whole year knew what his father had been. Nobody said it to his face. What happened instead was that people got careful, in the clumsy ways people are careful when they're eighteen and have had no practice at it. A boy Abe had never spoken to held a door for him.

"Do guards get to keep the gear?" Ellis Naylor said at lunch, with his mouth full. Nobody else asked him anything all day. Abe told him yes, the boots anyway, and liked him for it. People would be careful like that for a week, and then they would stop. He went out through the gates on the twenty eighth of November into a wet orange afternoon. Three shifts a week to get to, and three days until the board. The Corn Road on a Friday is people going home with bags.

He came down past the laundromat and the shut fish market and the drugstore with its shutter half down, and he didn't look at the drugstore, because he hadn't properly looked at it since he was thirteen. He was about a hundred yards from Riddell's door when a woman said his name.

"Abe Dolan." She was standing out of the wind in the fish market's doorway, in a good coat, holding an umbrella she wasn't using. She was maybe forty. She had the look of somebody who'd been waiting a while and hadn't minded.

"Ruth Gault," she said.

"I find people for the regional circuit, and I get paid for being early. That's the whole of it, and I've said it in that order on purpose."

"Right," said Abe.

"You've somewhere to be. Riddell's, four thirty." She said it flatly, like the weather.

"I rang and asked. I'd rather you knew I'd rung than found out later." Two freshmen went past behind her with their hoods up. One of them clocked Abe and elbowed the other. They got about ten feet down the road before one of them said that's him, at a volume that was not a whisper. Gault didn't turn around.

"That happens a lot now, I expect."

"A bit."

"Have you watched it?" Abe knew exactly what she meant. He looked at the wet sidewalk and didn't answer, and Gault nodded once as though he had. She got her phone out and held it up between them. She did it slowly, and she stayed where she was while she did it.

"Then watch it," said Gault.

"I'd rather you saw it than took my word for what's on it." He'd had three weeks of people telling him about it. June had shown it to half her year. A girl in the year below had stopped him in a corridor to say his sister had a speech about it now. It had been on the bus, and it had been under a desk in Mrs. Farrant's room, and Abe had spent all three weeks looking at the floor. It was eleven seconds long and it was filmed badly.

The gym screen filled most of it, tilting about, with the top of somebody's head coming in and out at the bottom. The board was up. Names and columns, much too small on a phone. Then the picture pushed in and got worse, and the columns came clear. Then the sound arrived, because whoever filmed it had the volume all the way up. The gym roared. It wasn't a cheer, but four hundred people making a noise at the same time because a number had turned up where a number wasn't supposed to be.

It came out of that little speaker flat and tinny and enormous, and under it a boy's voice said no, man, no, look at it, look at it. Abe stood on the Corn Road with rain going down the back of his neck and watched a room full of people lose their minds about him. He'd been in that room. He'd been six feet from the screen with his ears full of blood, and he had heard none of it, not one second, because he'd been busy trying to stay upright. The clip ended and went back to the start on its own.

Underneath it, in small gray letters, was the number of people who had watched it. 191, 406. Abe read it twice. Then he read it again, because the first two times he'd put the comma in the wrong place.

"That's the one that's still going," said Gault.

"There are four others. That one's the good one, because the sound's on it."

"That's more people than live in Calder."

"Yes."

"So," said Gault.

"I'll do this the short way. It's raining and you're due at four thirty." She put the phone away.

"There's money in what you are. It doesn't come from a school and it doesn't come from a job. It comes from people who back a kid early and take a share of whatever happens after."

"And you work for them."

"I'm the one they send when a school board says something impossible."

"It didn't say anything impossible."

"It said a boy nobody had heard of went from nothing to the top of a city board in thirty days." Gault smiled at him like it was a good story and she was enjoying it. Abe hadn't expected that and didn't know what to do with it.

"I've done this eleven years, Mr. Dolan. You're the first one I've had to explain his own numbers to, and I don't think you're pretending." Abe didn't say anything.

"Terms, then. Four hundred marks a month, paid on the first, into your name or your aunt's." She stopped there and let him hear it.

"Kit. Travel to the meets. A regional listing, which will matter enormously in two years and not at all today. I don't own you and I can't make you fight anybody. If you walk off in March you keep everything you've had." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Four hundred marks a month. The doses were two hundred and twenty.

His family had been going off that cliff every month since he was fourteen, and it was a bit more than half of what this woman was offering him for signing something.

"There's a thing first," said Gault.

"There always is. It isn't a trick and I won't dress it up."

"Go on."

"Assessment. One morning, our people, standard battery."

"What's a standard battery?"

"Everything. Stats, depth, skills, a bar reading." She was watching him properly now.

"Then the same again in ninety days, so we can see the line between the two. We don't pay for what a boy is. We pay for how fast he's moving." Abe looked at the rain coming off the awning.

"You've a sister," said Gault.

"Don't." It came out flat and hard and far louder than the road wanted. A man with two shopping bags looked over, thought better of it, and kept going. Gault put both hands in her pockets.

"That was fair," she said.

"I apologize. It was a lever and I reached for it because they usually work, and it was beneath the conversation."

"It's fine."

"It isn't. Thank you, though." Two million marks, and he could walk into any building in this city whenever he liked. He'd known that since October, and it had never once got him anything, because of the loaf. He had walked into a stopped grocer's on Marley Street in October, through a back door standing open on a broken latch. Getting in had cost him nothing. But the stopped world would not let him take hold of anything in it. The moment he closed his hands on a loaf, the world came back on its own.

He was an ordinary boy standing in somebody's shop with their bread in his hands, and over his head a floorboard creaked. He put the loaf back on the shelf. That was how it had gone with one loaf, in an empty shop, on his best night. Two million marks is not a thing a boy carries out of a shop.

It would have to come off somebody big enough to have it, and the day after that a family on Salt Row with a sick girl would suddenly have two million marks, and every neighbor on that street would know exactly where it hadn't come from. So that road was shut, and it had been shut since October, and it would be shut in March. Though nobody was asking him to find two million. Gault was standing in a fish market's doorway in a good coat, holding out four hundred a month, in the rain.

"Yes," said Abe. Something moved in Gault's face and went away again.

"That was quick."

"You said you'd do it the short way."

"I did." She went on looking at him after she'd finished saying it.

"Most of them go away and come back on Tuesday. The ones who say yes on the sidewalk are usually the ones who haven't got a Tuesday."

"I've got three days till a board."

"Then we'll say it's that." She got a folder out from under her arm. She'd had it under there the whole time, which meant she'd decided he was going to say yes before she ever opened her mouth.

"Take these home. Read them, all of them, and get your aunt to read them, because she'll find things you won't. I'll have them Monday and not before."

"Fine."

"The assessment's the Saturday after the board. Sixth of December, nine thirty, and it's an hour on a train and I'll pay for the train." She wrote something on the front of the folder and turned it round so he could see her do it.

"Fittings before Christmas. Two meets in the spring, and there'll be an afternoon here and there for the listing people. It isn't much of your time."

"That's fine," said Abe. He was thinking about two hundred and twenty marks. The words afternoon here and there went straight past him and he didn't reach for them.

"One more thing and then I'll let you go and be shouted at by Mr. Riddell."

"He won't shout."

"He was extremely short with me on the phone." Gault got her umbrella sorted at last.

"Numbers like yours don't happen twice, and somebody was always going to price you. It might have been me and it might have been a man in a bad suit from out of the county, and it'd have happened whether you wanted it or not. I'd like you to remember that I told you that on the day I signed you, and not in April."

"Why would it matter in April?"

"Because in April you won't read it as carefully. You'll think you already know what it says." She put the umbrella up.

"Four thirty. Go." Then she walked off up the Corn Road and didn't look back once. He was eleven minutes late and Riddell didn't say one word about it. He swept the shop and did the back shelves. He carried four boxes of leather offcuts up from the cellar, and then he put the last one down and said it.

"There's a woman wants to pay me four hundred marks a month." Riddell went on wrapping a heel iron in newspaper.

"Have you signed it?"

"Not yet. Monday."

"Read it Sunday, then. Not tonight." He put the iron down.

"Tonight you'll read what it pays. Sunday you'll read what it wants." Fourteen marks, counted out at eight, same as every Friday, and Abe said thank you, same as every Friday. He came back up the Corn Road in the dark, and this time he stopped at the drugstore. The shutter was all the way down. There was a light on at the back somewhere and a card in the window about flu shots. That was all there was to look at.

June's doses cost two hundred and twenty marks a month, and when the tin over the kettle came up short Peg made the rest up out of her own purse with her back to the room. She'd been doing that for four years. Abe stood outside a shut drugstore with a folder inside his blazer to keep it dry, and did the sum, because he couldn't stop himself. Four hundred a month.

Two hundred and twenty of it gone the day it landed, and the rest into the tin, and Peg never going out to the hall for her coat pocket again as long as she lived. Then he did the other one. The big stupid one, the one he'd never bothered with before, because it had never been worth doing. Four hundred a month, every month, never missing one. Never a mark of it on food or a coat or a doctor. Four hundred and sixteen years.

The money was the best thing that had ever happened to his family, and it still didn't get her, and it never would, and he was going to sign it on Monday anyway. He got his screens up on the wet sidewalk, standing in the rain outside a shut shop, because he wanted them to say something useful. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 5 Foundation: 214 / 3600 (Body Layer 6) Two hundred and fourteen points out of three and a half thousand, for two days of the hardest work he knew how to do.

There was nothing on that screen about a tin, or a drugstore, or a woman in a good coat. There never had been. Abe had spent two months telling himself that if the numbers got big enough, the rest of it would sort itself out. He looked at the screen, and then at the shutter behind him. The numbers weren't going to do it on their own. He was going to have to do both, and he had no idea how anybody did both. Peg had left the light on over the stove for him.

She was drying a pan and she still had it in her hands when he came in.

"Have you eaten?"

"A woman stopped me on the Corn Road." Abe put the folder down on the table between the salt and the electric bill.

"She wants to pay me four hundred marks a month." Peg looked at the folder. Then she pulled a chair out and sat down on it with the pan and the dish towel still in her lap, and she read the first page, and then she read it again, and then she said "four hundred" out loud, to the table.

"On the first," he said.

"Every month."

"Who is she?"

"She finds people. She showed me the clip." He got the chair out opposite.

"She's not being kind, Peg. She gets a share of whatever happens after."

"Good," said Peg.

"I'd rather she wanted something." Then she put her hand flat on the page and laughed at the ceiling, like somebody who'd been holding a door shut with her shoulder for four years and had just heard the wind drop. Abe had to look at the stove until it passed. June came out of her room. She'd have heard the laugh from in there, because you could hear everything in that apartment, and she stood in the doorway in her school shirt with her hair up and looked at the folder and not at either of them.

"Say the whole thing," she said. So Abe said the whole thing. The doorway, the phone, the terms, the train on the sixth of December, and the assessment.

"Say that last part again."

"They measure me. Stats, depth, skills, the bar." Abe heard his own voice go careful and hated it.

"Then again in ninety days, so they can see the difference between the two." Peg was reading page two and smiling at it. June came over and picked the folder up off the table, and she took it back to the doorway and stood under the light in the hall to read it, all of it, both sides of every page, the way she read everything. Peg put the kettle on, and the boiler did its noise, and June went on reading.

"Abe."

"Mm."

"It says the ninety day one is a condition." June didn't look up from the page.

"Continuation. That means they can just stop, doesn't it. In March. If they don't like the second number."

"That's what it's for."

"Right." She turned the page over and looked at the blank back of it.

"So what happens to us in March if you've slowed down?"

"I'll put that kettle on again," said Peg.

"There's cookies somewhere." Abe sat in his aunt's kitchen with four hundred marks a month on the table in front of him, and looked at his sister, who was sixteen and knew exactly one thing about him that nobody else in the world knew, and had just done the arithmetic out loud in a hallway.

"I won't have slowed down," he said.

"No," said June.

"I know."