Chương 35: The Long Board

The train out of Calder went at eight on the sixth of December, and Abe got a window seat, and then the wall went past and did not come back. He had been outside it plenty of times. He had been under it, in the water, on the end of a rope. He had never once seen the length of it from the side. It went on and on. Gray, and streaked black where the rain came off the top.

There was a firing step every hundred yards, and a man standing in most of them with his hands in his armpits, and his father had stood in one of those for years and had died in one. Then the wall ended, and there was no second wall behind it, and no third one after that. Abe put his hand flat on the window like a little kid and left it there. He had always known there was country out there, the same as he knew there was a moon. What he had not known was that it does not finish. Fields, then more fields.

Then a bare hill with one tree on it. Then a road with two cars on it, going somewhere he would never find out about. By the time the mill town came up he was grinning out of the window at a river, and did not care who saw him. Gault had paid for the ticket. It was in his coat pocket with his name printed on it, and it was the first thing anybody had ever bought him that was not food. Somewhere past the mill he got his phone out and read the message again.

He had sent his on Friday night, standing in the hall by the coats, and it had taken him four goes. Can't do tomorrow. They're measuring me and it's out of town and I don't know when it finishes. Sorry. Croft took about a minute. Fine. Abe had been looking at it since Friday and it did not get any longer. He read it a fourth time between two fields. On Monday, at the board, Croft had said don't be early, I'm sick of you being early.

This was the first Saturday since the eighth of November that Abe was not going to be anywhere at two o'clock. Prescot came up out of the fields inside its own wall, and its wall was gray where Calder's is brown, and there were four cranes standing on top of it. They were building it higher. Then Abe was out on a street in a city that was not his, with fifteen minutes to walk and no idea which way, and he took all fifteen.

The trams were yellow and came up the middle of the road and everybody stepped aside without looking. Two boys his own age went past in a school kit he had never seen. And on that one road there were three training halls with the lights on. Two of them had boards outside with prices. Abe stopped at the second board and read all of it. It was not expensive, but it was an hour away from his sister.

On Monday he had gone up Fenner Street with a hundred and eighty marks in his pocket and been told there was not one free hour for sale in the whole of Calder. He had been picturing a room. Gault had said one morning, our people, standard battery, and Abe had built a room out of that, with a desk in it and a woman with a clipboard, and he had been carrying that room around for eight days. The building at the end of the road used to be a swimming pool. You could still see where the deep end had been.

There were about forty of them in it. Forty, and their coaches, and a row of adults along the back wall in good coats who were nobody's coach. There was a rig with weights on a track. There was a rubber pad the size of a car with a rail around it. There were tables down one side with people sitting at them writing, and a woman going along a bank of screens with a clipboard, and a noise in there like a market. And down the far wall, from the ceiling to about knee height, there was a board.

Abe stood in the doorway with his bag in his hand and did not go in for a moment. There had been a person in the room with him since he got on the train at eight, and there was going to be one until he got off it again.

"Dolan. Calder." A man with a lanyard came out of the crowd and said it like both words were on his list, which they were.

"Prentice. I run the floor. You're my nine thirty and you're eleven minutes early, which is fine, everybody's early the first time."

"I thought it was just me."

"Everybody thinks that." Prentice was already walking.

"Winter evaluation. We do it twice a year and the whole region comes, and your Miss Gault is over there pretending she isn't looking at you."

"Why does everyone come at once?"

"Because there is no point measuring a boy on his own." He said it in exactly the voice he had used for everything else.

"Anything hurts, you say so and we stop. Nothing in here is a competition." Abe looked down the hall at the board.

"Sir," he said, "there's a scoreboard."

"There is," said Prentice, "and I say that line every time and nobody has ever believed it." Priya Sandhu had a folder and a radiator and had done this five times.

"Don't sign the medical bit until they've done the shoulder thing," she said, sitting on the floor with her back against the pipe.

"Because if the shoulder goes wrong you want the medical after it. That happened to a boy I know and he went on about it for a year." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"How do you know all this?"

"My coach makes me read it. Second year, this one. He's out in the car and he doesn't come in until they call me." She pulled her gloves off and put both hands flat on the radiator pipe and left them there. Abe worked out a moment later that the radiator was off.

"Are your hands not cold?"

"They're never cold. That's mine." Priya shrugged at him.

"It's not much." Then she told him how the day went, because he asked and because she liked knowing things. Stations all morning, in any order they call you. The board goes up as the numbers come in and it stays up all day where everybody can read it. Bouts after lunch. Sponsors along the back wall the whole time.

"After lunch," said Abe.

"About two. Why?"

"No reason." Gault had said one morning. Abe had read that as a morning and had put it in a message to Croft on Friday night. Croft had said fine to a boy who was going to be in Prescot at two o'clock and had not known it yet.

"And they only bring so much money," she said.

"That's the bit nobody tells you until about eleven."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning there's eleven of them along that wall this morning and there were fourteen in the summer." She said it to the folder and not to him, and she did not have to work either number out.

"So three people in this hall go home tonight with nothing. Every single one of us has done that sum, and everybody is being extremely nice to each other about it."

"How do you know it's three?"

"Because I count them." Priya closed the folder and got up and brushed the back of her skirt off.

"Come on, they'll call you in a minute and you want to have seen the rig before you're standing on it." The top of the board had four names on it and all four of them had a two in the second column. Abe had never seen a two on a board in his life. Calder's wall has two hundred names on it and every one of them says Realm 1, and so does every name on every board Abe has ever stood in front of, because breaking is a thing that happens to adults in other parts of the country. These four were his age.

One of them had a bad haircut and was eating an apple.

"Marchbank did his in August," said Priya, following where he was looking.

"The other three went in the autumn. There's usually two or three."

"They're eighteen."

"They're good," said Priya, the way she would have said it was raining. Abe watched a man in a suit go over and shake Marchbank's hand, and then a second man do the same thing four minutes later, and Marchbank stood there with the apple in his other hand and let it happen to him like it was normal, because it was. The physical stations took two hours and Abe enjoyed every minute of them. They put him on the rig and made him hold things, then move things, then hold them again, and a screen kept a line going.

Prentice made a noise at the second one and did not explain it. A boy from up the coast with a strapped thumb went before him and was decent about being beaten on it. Two girls who knew each other and nobody else went after. Everywhere Abe looked there was somebody his own age doing something properly, and a grown man standing at their shoulder telling them how. Then the pad, with the rail around it. He stood on it and it took four seconds, and the school's says three things and this one kept going. DOLAN, A.

· 18 · CALDER Realm 1 · KINDLED · Layer 7 Body 7 · Mind 3 Body foundation: 1104 / 3600 Mind foundation: 1588 / 1600 The school pad gives you the top line and stops. This one gave them the bars. Nobody in Calder had ever seen inside Abe like that, and neither had Abe. He brought his screens up one at a time and had never had the whole of it laid out flat where another person could read it. Prentice read it through twice.

"You'll be over by the spring, at that," he said, to the screen and not to Abe.

"Seven's the bottom of the window and you're moving, so you'll go some time in the next few months whether anybody advises it or not. Four of the ones on that board went this autumn."

"Over."

"Realm 2." He was still reading.

"Bad luck catching this one in December, if I'm honest. A boy who has gone over is worth about double, and you are going to be that boy in March, and today you are not." Abe stood on a rubber pad in Prescot and was so pleased he could not think of one word to say. Prentice read the last line, and wrote something down, and went to find his next one.

A girl with a marker put him on the board twenty minutes later, and Abe went down the hall with everybody else to look, because that is what the whole room did every time she came out. WINTER EVALUATION · ARDWICK · 6 DECEMBER 1 MARCHBANK, E. · Ketton · Realm 2 · Layer 2 · Body 11 · Mind 6 2 BARDSLEY, A. · Prescot · Realm 2 · Layer 2 · Body 10 · Mind 7 3 PILKINGTON, R. · Millbeck · Realm 2 · Layer 1 · Body 10 · Mind 5 4 QUIRKE, D. · Prescot · Realm 2 · Layer 1 · Body 9 · Mind 6 5 DOLAN, A.

· Calder · Realm 1 · Layer 7 · Body 7 · Mind 3 Fifth. There were thirty five names under his and not one of them was near him, and there were four above him and he could not touch any of them. A boy behind Abe said "who's Calder" to somebody, and got told, and said "where," and then read the fifth row properly and stopped talking. Abe went on down the board after that, looking for nobody in particular, and found him in the ninth row. 9 DANFORTH, P.

· Calder · Realm 1 · Layer 5 · Body 5 · Mind 5 Piers Danforth was down at the far end of the hall with his coat over his arm, talking to a man in a good coat, and had plainly been in that building since eight o'clock.

"You never said you were coming," said Abe.

"You never asked." Danforth said it pleasantly, and did not look away from the man in the good coat.

"Third one for me. It's usually a quieter room than this."

"Third."

"They run it twice a year. I came fourteenth in the spring and ninth in the summer and ninth again today, and the whole point is the line between them." He looked up at the top of the board, and then at the fifth row, and his face did not do one thing.

"Fifth, though. That's very good." Behind him the man in the good coat was reading the board too, and he was not reading the ninth row. Then Danforth went back to him and said something, and the man laughed and put a hand on his shoulder. Abe watched the whole of it and thought it looked like a good afternoon for everybody. Abe stood there for a while and could not have told anybody what was wrong with a single word of that. Priya came and stood next to him with her coat over her arm.

"That's the highest Layer on there by four," she said.

"You know that."

"It's fifth."

"Yeah." She looked up at it with him.

"Four of them went over in the autumn. When you go over you start again at the bottom of a bigger ladder, and everybody on the bigger ladder comes out above everybody on the small one." Then the boy with the apple came over and read the fifth row and whistled at it.

"Seven," said Marchbank.

"In a year?"

"Nine weeks." Marchbank looked at him properly for the first time, and then put his hand out and shook Abe's, and he was pleased about it in a way that had nothing in it for himself, which Abe had not expected at all.

"That's a horrible number," he said.

"Well done."

"What's it like?"

"Being over?" Marchbank thought about it while he finished the apple.

"Everything's easier. Everything. You go back to Layer 1 and it feels like nothing for about a week and then you notice you're picking things up you couldn't lift in July."

"When did you do it?"

"August."

"Isn't that early?"

"My dad wanted me to wait until the spring." Marchbank found a bin for the apple core, and shrugged, and said it like it was nothing.

"But this is in December, isn't it." Abe stood in front of a board in a city that was not his and looked at Marchbank's row for a long time, with you'll be over by the spring going around and around in him. Layer 2. Eight weeks ago that boy had been down where Abe was, or near enough. Then he had gone over, and his layers had reset to the bottom, and every point he had ever earned had doubled on the way through. Body 11.

Abe has a bar at the top of a wall in a school corridor and a number on it that took him nine weeks, a broken hand, a night in three feet of moving water, and every hour he owns. Marchbank had a two and an apple. Nobody in that hall thought it was strange. Two men in good coats had already shaken his hand about it. And Abe stood there in his coat with his bag between his feet and wanted it so badly he had to look at the floor.