Chương 30: Fifty Seconds

Croft's lessons were two o'clock on a Saturday, in the yard behind the gym where nobody went in winter. Abe got there early because he always got there early. He had Gault's folder in his bag, because he hadn't been able to make himself leave it at home. There was a date on the front of it in a woman's handwriting. Two days until the board. Croft showed up at four minutes after two with his hands up his sleeves.

"Right," he said.

"First Saturday. Try not to be terrible." He was terrible. Not at the form. The form was fine. He'd done it about nine hundred times in stopped afternoons nobody would ever count, and his feet went where they were supposed to go. What went wrong was that Croft leaned on him in the third set and Abe moved. It wasn't much, but it was three inches at the hip. Invisible to anybody in that school except the boy doing the leaning. Croft stopped. He stepped back and went over Abe from the feet up, hunting for the fault.

"Do that again." They did it again. Abe moved again, less, and hated it more.

"When did you last eat," said Croft.

"This morning."

"What."

"Toast."

"How much toast." There was no good answer to that one. Abe gave him the true one anyway, because Croft would have had it out of him by four.

"Two." Croft said a word Mrs. Farrant would have sent him out for.

"You've put on a whole layer since I met you," he said.

"Do you know what that costs to run? My mother has a book about it. There's a page in it that's just numbers and the numbers are stupid, and my father goes through half a shelf of the kitchen a day and he's stopped growing."

"I know."

"You clearly don't know."

"I know," said Abe.

"Knowing isn't the problem." Croft opened his mouth. Then he shut it again, and that had never happened before. He had four marks in his coat and a whole house up the hill with a kitchen in it, and he didn't offer. Abe was grateful for that, though he couldn't have explained why to one person alive.

"Well," Croft said.

"Eat something. You're wasting my Saturday." The thing Croft got wrong was that it wasn't only the food. Abe walked back down the hill with the folder banging against his back through the canvas. He had signed nothing yet. It sat on the kitchen table under the salt. Peg had read it twice more since Friday, and she'd started saying the sixth in the voice she used for hospital appointments. The sixth of December. A morning, their people, a standard battery.

Then ninety days, and then they would look at the two numbers and decide. I won't have slowed down. He'd said that to his sister with the page still in her hands, and she'd said no, I know. He had been lying in the dark ever since, working out that there was exactly one way to make it true. Everything about that was two days away, or ninety, and none of it helped him get through a Saturday on two pieces of toast. This is what he thought about on the Corn Road, in the dark, at twenty after five.

The board was Monday. He had two days. He needed hours. Hours were the one thing he'd ever had more of than anybody, though they were exactly what he couldn't use, because a boy who can't get quiet can't go anywhere. He had not been able to get quiet since Wednesday. Every time he sat down his stomach was in the room with him, talking. So the money would fix it. Four hundred marks were coming on Monday morning, and two hundred and twenty of that was June's the day it landed, and the rest went in the tin.

For the first time in his life there would be something in that tin that a person could buy food with. Two days was the problem, and he stood outside the laundromat with the warm air coming out of the vent onto his legs and knew he was going to do it anyway. He went through the reasons walking home. None of them were good enough, and he went through them anyway, one at a time. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Two days of eating properly before a read would do more for him than four days of it after. He had been carrying somebody's crates and somebody's boxes for eight weeks to buy food he could have taken in fifty seconds. There was a last reason, and he did not put it down with the others. He had walked out of that storeroom in October and had thought about it nearly every day since. Nobody was going to be hurt.

That was the one he kept going back to, and he had heard grown men on the Corn Road say that same sentence about worse things. He waited until twelve thirty. Peg's light went off at ten. June's stayed on until eleven. After that there was a strip of it under her door, so she was reading with the lamp on the floor, same as she'd done since she was nine. Abe lay on his back with his coat on and listened to the apartment.

Then he got up, and went out through the door, and got quiet on the second landing where the light was broken. Marley Street at half past twelve on a Sunday morning, held still. In the middle of falling, the rain had stopped, and it hung there in the streetlight, thousands of them, all the way up. Abe walked through it and it went round him and closed up again behind him and did not fall. He came up the alley on the shop's blind side. The back door was still bad.

Somebody had put a new hasp on it since October, and they'd screwed the new hasp into the same soft wood. Abe had known they would. Riddell had said something about screws and old pine once, over a heel iron and a sheet of newspaper, and Abe remembered everything. In October that door had been standing open on a broken latch and he had walked through it like weather. Tonight it was shut, and he stood in front of it with the rain hanging over his head and did not put a hand on it.

The rule had never bent for him once. He could cross the whole city while it stood still, and nothing in it would move an inch on his account. The second he pulled at anything that wasn't his, the world came back and brought all its noise with it. Above the door there was a window with a curtain across it. Behind the curtain a man he had never met was asleep. Somebody in the room with him would stop him getting quiet. Somebody asleep on the other side of a ceiling would not. Abe had known that for weeks.

It had never stopped feeling like a trick he was playing on the man upstairs. He stood there a long time for a boy who had already decided. Then Abe let the world in. It came back all at once, the way it always did. Rain landed on his shoulders and the whole street started breathing, and somewhere behind the shutter a fridge came on, and the alley turned into a real place with a real man sleeping over it. He got his fingers behind the hasp and pulled. It came out of the pine with a small tearing sound.

Nobody more than ten feet away would have turned a head, though to Abe it went up the whole alley and over the roofs and out to sea. He stood in a live alley with a broken hasp in his hand and waited to find out whether anybody had heard it. Nothing moved upstairs. The rain went on falling on the trash cans. Abe pushed the door open and went in. Inside, the storeroom smelled of cardboard and onions, exactly as it had. There were shelves on three sides of him.

Through the doorway, next to the counter, the bread rack sat where it always sat, tomorrow's markdowns on the bottom shelf. That one room held more food than his whole kitchen at home, and it was not close. Boxes of cookies stacked to his shoulder. Crates of soda still shrink-wrapped. Chocolate in a carton with the lid already cut off, and chips in every flavor the company made, and a shelf of the cereal with the cartoon on the box that June had asked for once when she was about nine and never asked for again.

He picked up the bread first. Four loaves off the bottom of the rack, tomorrow's markdowns, the ones that would have gone in the trash on Tuesday. Then eggs, and a block of cheese in plastic, and a bag of the cheap oats Peg bought. He stopped there. Past that it stopped being food and started being a haul. He put it all in the bag. He put the bag over his shoulder. Then he stood in the middle of a room he had no right to be in, with his shoulder taking the weight, and started trying to get calm. It did not come.

He had known it wouldn't, and knowing had never once helped him with this. In October there had been a floorboard over his head and it had been over before it started. Tonight there was no floorboard. Tonight there was only a fridge running and rain and the sound of his own breathing going in and out too fast to be any use to him. Abe closed his eyes in a stranger's storeroom and tried to talk himself down. It had never worked before and it did not work now.

He tried the shed, and Dobbs saying wind's coming round by noon. He tried the hall board and his own name at the top of it. He tried June with her feet on the radiator. None of it went anywhere. The bag pulled on his shoulder, and every small sound in that building arrived on its own: the fridge, the rain, a car four streets off. He heard a man coming down the stairs about nine times, and it was never a man coming down the stairs.

Then he thought about his father, who had stood on a wall in a coat that weighed more than June. Who had gone into the water for money. Who had never taken one thing in his life that wasn't his. He had known that one would be the worst, and he had gone and thought it anyway. So he stopped reaching for calm and went at it the only way he knew. The settle. Feet. Weight. The floor.

He had done this in a school corridor and a drain and three feet of black water and the yard behind his own block, and his body did not care in the slightest where it was standing. A boy who could get quiet anywhere, holding four loaves of somebody else's bread. It took him about fifty seconds. The rain stopped in the air outside the window, and the fridge stopped, and the whole enormous noise of the world went out like somebody had taken a hand off a bell.

Abe stood in a silent storeroom with a bag of somebody else's food on his shoulder and found that he could not hear his own heart. Then a screen came up in front of him, and it was very short. Stealth · Novice Lv 2 (4 / 200) He read it twice. A brand new skill, and it had come up already past its first bar. The first bar was fifty points long, and the Weave had paid all fifty in one go, and four points over, for fifty seconds of standing still in a stranger's storeroom.

There was no crossing on it, no menu, no choice to make, and Abe knew exactly what he had been paid for. The Weave had never paid him a point for anything that wasn't hard. He walked home through a stopped city with the bag on his shoulder and the rain hanging in the air all the way up the Corn Road. It was a short walk and he stretched it out. He went past the drugstore with its shutter down, and past Riddell's with its shutter down, and past the laundromat with its vent not blowing anything at all.

He came up the stairs and let the world in on the landing. Then he put the food in the back of the cupboard behind the pans, where Peg didn't look. He'd take it out a bit at a time, so nothing in that kitchen ever looked like more than it had been. Then he sat on the edge of his bed with his coat still on. June's terms were the water. After every water day, all of it, bad bits included. She'd stood in the kitchen doorway and made him say it back to her. Saturday was not a water day.

Abe sat in the dark and turned that over, and it held. It was true, and it would still be true tomorrow, and it was the thinnest thing he had ever stood on in his life. He would be out on the boats in the morning. He would tell her about the boats. He got his coat off eventually and lay down. He lay there and waited to feel bad about the man asleep over the shop, or the four loaves in the cupboard, or the screen. What he kept coming back to was how easy the fifty seconds had been.