Chương 37: The Free Place

By four o'clock on the sixth of December the hall had stopped being a competition and turned into a room with a lot of tired people in it. The mats came up. Somebody swept. Then the girl with the marker went down the hall one more time and ruled a line under the bottom name, and that was the winter evaluation over for six months. WINTER EVALUATION · ARDWICK · 6 DECEMBER · FINAL 1 MARCHBANK, E. · Ketton · Realm 2 · Layer 2 2 BARDSLEY, A. · Prescot · Realm 2 · Layer 2 3 PILKINGTON, R.

· Millbeck · Realm 2 · Layer 1 4 QUIRKE, D. · Prescot · Realm 2 · Layer 1 5 DOLAN, A. · Calder · Realm 1 · Layer 8 22 SANDHU, P. · Prescot · Realm 1 · Layer 4 Abe read the top of it, because everybody read the top of it. Four twos in the second column and then him. All four of them had broken through into Realm 2, which puts you back to Layer 1 and is worth about double anyway. Every man along that back wall had known it since half past nine. He did not read down as far as the twenty second row.

Neither did anybody with money in their pocket, and that turned out to be the whole of the day. Abe sat on a bench with his coat across his knees and watched the men in the good coats start moving. They had been along that back wall since half past nine. All day they had done nothing at all except stand there and read. Now they came off it, one at a time, and went to find people. A man went over and shook the Millbeck boy's hand.

The Millbeck boy's father made a small fist down by his side that he plainly thought nobody could see. A woman by the doors put both hands flat over her face and left them there. Two men in good coats started for the same girl from opposite ends of a bench and got to her at the same moment. One of them laughed and stepped back, and the girl went red to the ears. It was the quietest thing Abe had ever watched happen. It took about twenty minutes.

By the end of it every single person in that hall knew exactly where they stood, and nobody had stood up and read a single name out. Piers Danforth got his bag from under the far bench at about ten past four. The man he had been talking to all day was across the hall by then, with his hand out, saying something to the Millbeck boy, and the man did not look over once. Danforth put his coat on properly, one arm and then the other, and got his scarf sorted.

Then he went out through the doors on his own, and if he was in a hurry about any of it you could not have told it from watching. Prentice caught him by the lockers with the sheet in his hand.

"Do you know what you did in there?"

"I got the fourth one wrong."

"You got the fourth one wrong and then you got it right, which is the whole test." Prentice tapped the sheet against his leg.

"You came off my pad at ten this morning twelve points short of a rung and I have had people finding reasons to walk past that door ever since."

"Oh."

"Nine weeks. Twenty two years I have been at this, and I want to say a word to you, and I want you to take it as it is meant."

"All right."

"You're a prodigy," said Prentice.

"That's all. That's the word. I don't use it and I have used it twice." The true answer was one sentence long and Abe had it ready in his mouth. The only proof of it was a screen nobody but Abe could see, and he had nothing at all to put in a man's hand. He had told his whole year on the first day what his Talent was and they had laughed at him. Now a man had said the best word there is, and Abe still could not tell him.

"Thank you," said Abe.

"Good work," said Prentice, and went off to find the boy with the strapped thumb. Priya Sandhu was on the same bench Abe had left her on that morning, with her folder shut on her knees. Her coach had come in from the car about twenty minutes before. Abe had watched the two of them from across the hall, because he had nowhere else to look while he waited on his own coat. It had taken about a minute and a half. The man had done most of it and Priya had nodded twice.

Then he had put his hand on her shoulder, the same as he had that morning, and gone back out to the car. Priya had sat down on the bench and stayed there. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Abe went over because he could not think of any reason not to.

"Did you get one?"

"No," said Priya. She had clearly said that word to herself a few times before she said it to him.

"There were eleven of them," she said.

"I counted eleven at half past nine and eleven at two and eleven at four. And I know which ones went where, because I have been doing that since March like an idiot." She was looking at the far wall and not at him.

"Three of us," she said.

"Me, and the boy with the thumb, and a girl from Ketton who is not the one you fought."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't." It came out fast, and then she pulled it back in.

"Sorry. Not you. It's just that everybody says it and there is nothing at the end of it." Abe sat down on the bench next to her and did not say anything else, because everything he had was worse. He had come fifth. He had known it since about eleven o'clock and he had been pleased about it all day, in a room where eleven men with money in their pockets did nothing all day but read a wall. Nobody in that building had said one word about Abe Dolan and Priya Sandhu in the same sentence, and nobody was going to.

"Right," said Priya, and got up off the floor.

"What happens now?"

"I go home. My coach is still my coach until January because he is paid up until January." She got the folder under her arm.

"And then we see." Then she stopped, and turned around, and said the last thing Abe expected.

"When you sign your March papers," she said, "make them put the assessment date in writing on the front, not in the schedule at the back. Because if it's in the back they can move it by two weeks and you find out in a letter."

"Priya."

"It happened to a boy I know." She was already going.

"You're all right, Abe. You're actually all right. That's the annoying bit." Gault was in the lobby with two coffees and gave him one without asking. She had a copy of the sheet already. She had been at the back of that hall since two o'clock and Abe had not seen her arrive.

"Prentice has put something at the bottom of this that I'll be quoting at people until March."

"He said it to me."

"I imagine he did." She folded it into her bag.

"Monday it goes on the regional listing with your name and a number beside it." The coffee was bad. Abe drank it anyway.

"Priya Sandhu didn't get one."

"No," said Gault, and did not ask who that was, which meant she had known since about half past three.

"Three of them didn't. There are three at every single one of these, and there were four in the summer, and next summer there will be more of them than that."

"Is there anything that gets done about it?"

"Yes. The ones who don't get one stop coming." She said it in exactly the voice she had used for the listing.

"I am not being hard about it. You asked me a question about my trade and I have answered it."

"Why did you put me up to six hundred?" he said.

"You did that on Monday morning. You hadn't seen any of this." Gault looked at him for a while over the top of her cup.

"Because you went up again in front of your whole school that morning, and Monday is also the day your name goes on a list other people read." She put the cup down.

"And you were never only mine. There was a woman at your school gates in November, four days before I got there."

"Nita said. She got my name wrong twice and then went off up the road, and nobody ever knew who she was."

"I don't either, and I have never met her. It's a small trade and everybody drinks in the same three places." Gault said it flat, and in order.

"What I know is she stood there four days before I did, and went home and wrote it up properly, and by the time anybody at her end had read it I was in a fish market doorway on the Corn Road with a folder under my arm."

"You told me you get paid for being early."

"I do, and I wasn't." She got her coat off the back of the chair.

"Somebody else was early and they were slow about it, and I was fastest, and those are different things and the second one is the one I'm any good at."

"Why tell me that?"

"Because in April somebody is going to offer you more than I do, and I would like you to remember which of us moved." Gault got her bag up onto her shoulder.

"They've put that word on the sheet, by the way. Don't argue with it. It's worth money."

"Right."

"And today is one measurement. In March they take a second one, and what anybody's buying is the gap."

"What do they want to see in March?"

"Realm 2," said Gault. Abe put his cup down.

"Everybody in that hall thinks you'll be over by then and I have written it on the form, because that is what I think as well." Gault said it in the voice she kept for dates and money.

"Seven is the bottom of the window, you are past it, and boys who are moving go."

"And if I'm not over?"

"Then it had better be a very large number." Gault shrugged.

"Eleven." Ivy Halloran got to Layer 9 in thirteen years, and nobody in Calder had touched it in the twenty six since. Abe had been two rungs off it since Monday morning. A woman from up the line had just handed it to him as the thing you get if you fail.

"It's a fair ask," she said, and went back to her phone.

"Put the March date on the front of the papers," said Abe.

"Not in the schedule at the back." Gault looked up off the phone for the first time since she had sat down.

"Who told you that?"

"Somebody who's been coming here two years."

"It's good advice." She put the phone face down on the table.

"Send it to me in a message on Monday, so it's written down somewhere that isn't my memory. And there's a fitting before Christmas and both spring meets after it."

"That's a lot of Saturdays."

"It is." Gault got the door open with her shoulder.

"Your train's at five. Eat something on it, you look like a coat on a hook." Somewhere in the next hour he was going to be sitting in his aunt's kitchen. He was going to have to tell his sister that a woman in a good coat wanted eleven by March. Priya got on at Prescot and sat four seats down, and neither of them made anything of it. Somewhere past the mill town she came and sat opposite him.

She told him about a woman in Millbeck who took on two people a year and did not advertise, and made him put the name in his phone, and spelled it for him twice. Then the train slowed for a station Abe had never heard of and she got her coat off the rack.

"Do the Millbeck woman before Christmas," she said.

"She fills up in January and then she is gone until the spring." And she went down the carriage and out onto a dark platform, and waved at the window without breaking step, and that was the last Abe saw of her that year. The wall came up out of the dark somewhere after six, with a light on in every fourth gallery. Abe sat with his bag on his knees and let himself think about it properly for the first time since four o'clock. Eleven men.

Eleven all day, and eleven at the end, and eight of them had spent what they came with. He had walked into that hall at nine thirty with a Layer 7 that nobody in the region had seen out of a first year. He had stood on their pad and gone up in front of all of them. And he had done it with hours that nobody else on that board could have gotten if they had wanted them. He had not taken anything from anybody, though somebody had gone home with nothing anyway.

And there was nothing he could have done differently that would not have been losing on purpose. Both of those were true. Abe sat on a train with a phone in his hand and a name in it that Priya Sandhu had spelled for him twice, and neither of the true things helped.