Chương 32: The Count

"They're fine."

"Let me see them, then."

"June."

"If they're fine, let me see them," said June, and Abe was too tired to find the hole in that, so he put his hands out on the kitchen table like an idiot. She looked at the left one for a while.

"Right," she said.

"Not in here." Peg was four feet away at the stove with the radio on, doing something to a pan that did not need doing to it. Peg had been in a good mood since Friday and neither of them wanted to be the one who ended it.

"I've got homework," June said, to the room.

"You've had homework since Thursday," said Peg.

"I know. It's an ongoing situation." June's room was cold, because June's room was always cold, and the lamp was on the floor where it had lived since she was nine. She got up on the bed with her back against the wall and her feet on the radiator. It was not warm and never had been, and she used it anyway. Abe sat down on the floor with his back against the door.

"Go," she said.

"It's a long one."

"I've got nowhere to be. I've been in this flat since Friday." So Abe told her about the wind coming around off Mullen's hip, and then coming around further, which it is not supposed to do at all.

"Mullen's what?"

"Hip. It's the point past the third roof."

"Why is it a hip?"

"I don't know."

"That's a stupid name for a point," said June, and got her phone out. He kept going, because she listened harder when she had something in her hands. The street going empty underneath him all at once, like somebody taking a plug out. Purnell going in. Purnell getting a hand on a gutter and stopping there in the middle of it with the whole street's water going past her.

"Purnell's the loud one."

"Purnell's the loud one."

"Good," said June, still typing.

"I like her."

"I shouted at her."

"Good."

"June, she's about forty."

"I don't care how old she is, you never shout at anybody." June looked up.

"What did you shout?"

"Hold there."

"That's not shouting. That's two words."

"I said it twice."

"Oh, well then," said June. He told her about setting his feet in the channel with the pole in the gutter iron, and about a flooded street trying to take him off a roof and not managing it, and somewhere in there the phone went face down on the quilt. He noticed that and said nothing about it. Then he told her about the puller coming up on his blind side, which is what they do and why the shed calls them that.

"It went for her leg. I never saw it at all." He looked at the carpet.

"I felt the pole go heavy."

"What did she do?"

"She said it's got me. In a normal voice. Like she was telling me the time." June had her arms round her knees now.

"I hate that," she said.

"Yes."

"No, I properly hate that. Why is that the worst thing you've said?" Her voice had gone up.

"You've told me about a thing with eleven teeth in it and that's the worst thing, and it's four words." Somebody knocked twice on the door behind Abe's head and both of them stopped dead.

"Is there tea in this for anybody?" said Peg, through it.

"Two minutes," said June, in the voice of a girl doing homework. They listened to her go back down the hall. June waited for the radio, and then pointed at him to keep going.

"You're frighteningly good at that," said Abe.

"I've had practice. You're a terrible liar and Peg's a worse one." She put her chin on her knees.

"Get to the hook." So he got to the hook. He told her he had gone down along the line of the pole and hit something that was not stone, and that it had come off, and that he had felt it come off.

"And then I did the down and across."

"The one Croft says is rubbish."

"The one Croft has spent a month telling me is the worst technique in Calder. Yes."

"And?"

"It went in and it stayed in." June let out a breath she had plainly been holding for some time.

"Say that again."

"It went in and it stayed in."

"I want to tell Croft," said June.

"I want to tell him to his face and I want to watch him hear it."

"You've never met Croft."

"I'd introduce myself first. Obviously." Then he told her about the screen coming up while there was still a woman in the water.

"You read it and shut it," said June. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"There wasn't time."

"Abe." She sat up.

"You've been waiting for one of those since October." He had not thought about it like that once, all the way home, and he did not enjoy having it handed to him by his sister on a bed. He told her the rest anyway. The bar crossing while he was still standing in the channel, Novice to Apprentice, which is a rank and not a level, and he had been jammed at the top of Novice since the middle of November. Body from six to seven in the same breath. And the menu, still sitting there waiting for him.

"Sitting there how?" He got the screens up, which he could do now with his eyes open, and read her the bottom line. Swordsmanship · Apprentice HELD · no progress while a choice is open"There's normally a bar," he said.

"There's a line with nothing in it."

"So everything you do until you pick is worth nothing."

"On that one. Yes."

"That's horrible," said June, with feeling.

"That's like turning up and the shop's shut." She made him say all three twice, and then got stuck on the Common one for four questions, because she liked that it was cheap.

"Which do you want?"

"Drill Hand."

"Why?"

"First four seconds against anybody, exactly the way I drilled it. Every time. For the rest of my life." June looked at him over her knees.

"You want it because of Croft," she said.

"That's not why."

"Abe, you've been doing his face for three weeks."

"It's a good option."

"It's probably a good option and you also want it because of Croft, and both of those can be true." She stuck a foot out and pushed his shoulder with it.

"Ask the two who know. They're both in that building at nine."

"That's what I said on the roof."

"So do it, then." He thought that was the end of it, and got as far as a hand on the floor to push himself up.

"Sit down," said June.

"There's another bit."

"June, I've been up since five."

"I know. Sit down." He sat.

"I never believed the crate," she said. Abe did not say anything, and June took that as the answer to a question she had not asked yet.

"You told it twice and it came out identical both times. You don't do that." She was picking at a thread on the quilt.

"You never tell me anything the same way twice, ever, it drives me mad. And a crate falls on people standing next to crates. You were in bed. I know you were in bed, because I got up for water at midnight and you weren't in it, and at five you were."

"You never said."

"What was I going to say?" She got the thread free and rolled it between her fingers and did not look at him.

"Then the boards came off the steps," she said.

"June."

"Somebody nailed two boards over the top of those steps in October, and then one day they were leaning on the railing instead, and nobody on that whole row would look at them." She rolled the thread tighter.

"I looked at them every day. Twice on Tuesdays, because of the clinic."

"It was the fourth," said Abe. She stopped.

"What?"

"The boards. You keep saying October like it's the whole month." He heard it going out of his mouth and could not get it back.

"It was the fourth." June looked at him for a moment, and something complicated happened to her face, and Abe understood that he had just told her a great deal more than he had meant to.

"There was a man in this flat last week," she said, "telling Peg that somebody killed the thing at the bottom of Salt Row and never owned up to it."

"I know. I was there."

"You were there, and you ate a whole plate of potatoes, and you didn't look at me once all evening."

"June."

"And two hundred and twenty marks went in that tin in October at four in the morning and nobody has ever said where it came from." She looked up.

"Peg thinks Riddell was being kind. She actually believes that. She told me about it like it was a nice thing that happened to us."

"Riddell bought something off me."

"I know he did," said June.

"I want to hear what." So Abe told her. It took a long time, and she did not interrupt him once, and that was worse than being interrupted. He told her about the drain, and about counting eleven teeth and stopping at eleven because eleven was plenty. He told her what had happened to his hand down there, and how long he had sat on the steps afterward before he could stand up.

He told her about the core he cut out of it afterward, and about Riddell counting three hundred and ten marks onto a bench without asking one single question, and being unhappy the whole time he did it. And he told her the part he had never told anybody, which was that he had gone down there for the money and had known it was for the money the entire way down. June pulled the quilt over her feet.

"Right," she said.

"That's one."

"One what?"

"That's one time. When was the other one?" Abe sat on his sister's floor with his back against her door.

"Saturday night," he said.

"You came in about one," said June.

"I heard the door."

"You were asleep."

"I was reading." She said the next part fast, like somebody who had been holding it since breakfast.

"And on Sunday there was bread in this flat that Peg didn't buy, and Peg said the oats were her oats, and they were not her oats. I've been sitting on that all day. I made her a sandwich out of it." He could have said four different things and every one of them would have been another crate.

"I took it out of the grocer's at the top of Marley Street," he said.

"Bread, eggs, cheese, the oats. There's a man asleep over that shop and I did it anyway."

"Because you were hungry."

"Because I couldn't get quiet when I was hungry, and the board's tomorrow." June was quiet for a bit. Then she said something he was not expecting at all, and it came out shaky.

"Do they send you away for that?"

"What? No."

"You don't know that."

"June, it's a loaf of bread."

"You don't know, though, because you've never asked anybody, because there's nobody you can ask." She scrubbed her face with the back of her wrist, once, hard, and was clearly furious with herself about it.

"That's the whole thing that's wrong with you. There's nobody." He did not have anything for that.

"I'm not going to tell you it's fine," said June.

"It isn't. There's a man over that shop who doesn't know you exist."

"I know."

"But I'm not doing this again in February." She pulled the quilt straighter than it needed to be.

"Water days. All of it, bad bits included. And Saturday isn't a water day, is it. You worked that out and everything."

"It was a Saturday."

"It was a Saturday," June agreed.

"Well done. It goes backward now."

"That's not fair."

"I know it's not fair." She pointed at him, and then put her hand back down, because pointing was not doing anything.

"It's not the bread. I don't care about the bread. It's you sitting in here deciding how much I can handle."

"You made Peg a sandwich out of the bread."

"I'm aware of what I did," said June. It was a while before either of them said anything, and when she did, it came out of nowhere.

"Was he funny?" Abe had his father's paperback in his coat pocket, because it lived there now, and he had not noticed her looking at it.

"He was, a bit," he said.

"Not on purpose."

"That's not an answer."

"He'd come in off a watch so cold he couldn't do buttons. He'd stand in the doorway with his coat half off telling everybody he was fine." Abe turned the book over in his hands.

"He said he was fine for about a year. Mom used to hold the other side of his coat and wait."

"I don't remember him cold."

"You were eleven."

"I've got six things," said June.

"Six. And one of them's off a photograph and I can't tell which one anymore."

"Say them."

"He had a bad tooth and he used to go at it with his tongue when he was thinking. He carried me up the stairs at Salt Row once and had to stop halfway and pretend he was looking at something." She was going fast now.

"He gave the gulls names. He hated the radio. He put his hand flat on the top of my head instead of saying hello."

"He did that to me as well," said Abe. June stopped.

"Did he?"

"Every day. Then I got too tall for it and he did it anyway and it went wrong, and we both pretended it hadn't."

"That's five," said June, after a while.

"The sixth one's him laughing at something Mom said, and I can't hear what she said. That's the photograph one. I only worked that out about a year ago. I was so annoyed. I'm still annoyed."

"You told a whole class about him on Thursday," she said, at the end of it.

"A room full of people you don't even like."

"I know."

"So say things about him. To me. That's the entire thing I wanted, and you turned it into a fight in a corridor."

"I know," said Abe.

"I'm sorry."

"Good," said June, and pulled the quilt up.

"Go on then. Do another one." So he did. It was after eleven when he finally got up off her floor with his legs dead under him, and turned around to open the door. There was a tide table taped to the back of it. It was the free kind off the harbor office, printed for the winter, four columns of small gray times. Every shed in Calder had one up. Abe had walked past a hundred of them. This one had his sister's handwriting on it. Both Sundays were circled, the twenty third and the thirtieth, hard, twice round each.

Next Sunday was circled too, and next Sunday had not happened yet. Then he looked at October. October was covered in pencil. Little strokes, one after another, going back and back across the weeks. The first one was on the third. Fifty six of them. He counted, because he was Abe, and he could not leave them uncounted.

"I know you've found it," said June, behind him. He stood there with his hand on the door.

"I couldn't do anything about any of it," she said.

"So I did that instead. Don't make it a thing."

"June."

"Don't make it a thing." He took his hand off the door and turned around. His sister was sixteen and sitting up in bed with a quilt to her chin, looking at him slightly too long. She had looked at him like that once before, in a kitchen doorway in October, and he had lied to her that time and got away with it.

"What?" said Abe.

"Nothing." She reached down and turned the lamp on the floor so it pointed at the wall.

"The sixth of March is a Friday. I looked it up."

"June."

"That's a lot of going faster." She lay down and put an arm over her eyes.

"I'll be faster."

"Yes," said June.

"That's what I said." Then she told him to shut the door properly on the way out, because it did not catch unless you lifted it, which he had known since he was nine. The board read the whole year again in nine hours.