Chương 38: Four Hundred Streets

The train got in at twenty after six, and Abe was in his aunt's kitchen by seven, still in his coat, with the folded sheet on the table in front of him. Peg read it standing up with one hand on the back of a chair, because she'd been on her feet since six that morning and sitting down was something she did once a night.

"Who are the four above you?"

"They've all broken into the next realm. Three of them have had coaches since they were about twelve."

"Paid for, then," said Peg.

"All four of them, bought and paid for since they were twelve."

"Yeah." Peg read the four names one more time, all the way down, and then set the sheet flat on the table.

"Does the six hundred come on the first," she said, "or does it come if you're good enough."

"On the first. She can't take it back until March."

"Right." She put the sheet down on the table and squared it up with two fingers.

"Fifth in the whole region. I'm going to tell them at the servery tomorrow and they can all be sick about it." Then she put the pan on, and that was Peg finished with the winter evaluation. June hadn't said anything at all yet. She was sideways on the other chair with her feet up on the radiator, reading the sheet upside down from where she was.

"Right," said June.

"What did they actually measure?"

"Body. Mind. Depth. How long I could hold a bar out at arm's length, which was worse than everything else put together."

"No. I mean what did they write down." Abe opened his mouth and found he didn't know.

"There was a pad," he said.

"Prentice had a pad in the morning and a paper test after it. The numbers went up on the wall in marker. I don't know which of those they keep."

"So somebody's got a piece of paper with you on it and you don't know which piece of paper." June swung her feet off the radiator.

"Does it say you got the fourth question wrong first?"

"I don't know."

"Because that's the good bit and it'll be the bit they leave out." She tapped the sheet where the fifth row was.

"And who's allowed to look at this?"

"Anybody. It goes up on a listing on Monday."

"Then that's the version that's true," said June, "and you've never seen it." She got up and pulled the calendar off its nail and put it on the table. She wrote listing on Monday the eighth. Then she turned the page into January and wrote BOARD on Monday the fifth. The first Monday of the month is always a read, and the fifth was the first day of the new term as well.

"What's the March one?"

"Realm 2," said Abe.

"And if I'm not over, she wants eleven."

"Eleven what?" said Peg, from the stove.

"Layers."

"Is that a lot?" June had been reading about layers since the day Abe's name went to the top of that school board, and she got there before he did.

"Nobody in this city has done nine in twenty six years," she said. Then she went quiet and put her feet back on the radiator, and did not write anything about March on the calendar. The listing went up on Monday morning and it didn't do one thing. Nita Sowerby found it on her phone in registration and turned the screen around so the two rows behind could see it. Ellis Naylor asked whether there was money in it, and Abe said there was, and then the bell went and thirty people got up and went to French.

His name sat on a list that people in a trade read, in a small font, above a boy from Millbeck and below four boys who'd broken into a realm he couldn't get near until spring. Then he came around the top of Salt Row at four o'clock and there was a van across the bottom of it. They had the light on a stand again, because the afternoon had already gone. Three of them. Dark waxed coats mended at the shoulders, two long hooks, and the bar with the worn head, and it was possibly the same three men.

Twelve days ago there'd been forty people watching. Twelve days ago a woman he'd seen at that bus stop his whole life had stood next to him and told him they'd been at it since one. Tonight there were eleven, and most of them had their arms folded, and nobody was standing close. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Mrs. Bewley was on her own step with a cardigan pulled around her, and she wasn't watching the men.

She was watching the mouth of the cut, which is where the water goes under the road.

"They're doing the grate," she told Abe, without being asked.

"They did the grate in September."

"Is that what they came for?"

"That's what they've got on the sheet," said Mrs. Bewley.

"It isn't what I called about." The young one was down on the road on his front with a flashlight, with his head and one arm into the gap under the curbstone. The other two stood over him and talked about something that wasn't the grate. Abe stood at the back of eleven people and wanted, badly, to stop the street. He got about as far as thinking it.

There were eleven people around him and a man swearing gently into a hole four feet away, and he hadn't been able to get quiet with anybody in the room since the first night in October. His own kitchen was too full some evenings. And there was nothing out there to read anyway, which took him longer to work out. He went through what was actually on that road, one thing at a time. A van with the doors shut, two hooks and a bar.

A clipboard that wasn't on the van, wasn't in anybody's hand, and probably wasn't in this street at all. Everything he wanted to know was inside three men's heads. The one place in the world Abe Dolan couldn't go was inside somebody's head. So he stood there and watched them work instead. The big one took the bar off the van to lever the grate up, and Abe watched his hands and his feet the whole way across the road.

He'd done this in November with the same crew and it had meant nothing, because in November Abe had been guessing. He wasn't guessing now. He'd spent Saturday in a hall full of the best eighteen year olds in the region, on their pads, with instruments on him, and he'd stood on a mat opposite three people who were seriously good and found out exactly what that feels like from the inside. The big one got the bar under the lip and set his feet and leaned on it.

His stance was right, and he'd been doing it for thirty years, and there was nothing in it he had to think about. There was no waste in it anywhere, and it was good to watch, because he had done it ten thousand times. But he wasn't strong. The grate came up about two inches and stuck. He took a breath and did it again, and the second time it came, and he stood up and put a hand in the small of his back.

"Do you want a hand with that?" said Abe. Kelsall looked up from the hole and told him, quite kindly, to get back on the sidewalk with everybody else. So Abe got back on the sidewalk with everybody else, and stood there with his bag on his shoulder, and understood something he did not want. He could have lifted it. Not with better form, because his form was worse, but he could have put his hands where that man's hands were and taken it straight up off the road, and he could have done it four days ago.

His father stood on that sea wall for eleven years. His father went into the water for money, and came home, and put a secondhand training book back in his bag, and never said one word about any of it out loud. Abe had wanted to be that his entire life. He'd gone past it in ten weeks without noticing, and there was nobody standing in that street he could say it to. He thought about asking whether they were taking anybody on. Then he thought about where that job had put his father, and he didn't ask.

The young one came up out of the gap with his cheek black. He said the grate was fine and the grate had always been fine.

"Snow by the weekend," he added, to nobody, wiping his hands down his coat.

"Saturday night. Sunday morning at the latest."

"Kelsall does that," said the big one.

"He's right about it, and all. Never yet been any use to me." The van was still there on Tuesday when Abe got home from school, and they had the light on again. June was out on the step in Peg's coat with her arms inside the sleeves, talking to the big one. Abe had stood at the back of a crowd for two afternoons and gotten nothing out of anybody. June had been out there eleven minutes.

"This is my brother," she said.

"He does water on Sundays. Tell him the thing about the pumps."

"There's no thing about the pumps."

"You said there was a thing about the pumps."

"I said there's no pumps," said the big one.

"That's a different sentence." His name was Brammall. He was about fifty, and he had the sort of face that's been outside for thirty years, and he had a mug of Peg's tea in his hand, which meant June had been inside and out again while Abe was walking up the road.

"Dolan," Brammall said.

"Your sister says Dolan."

"Yeah."

"Then you two are Tom Dolan's." Abe said yes, and something went through him that he had no name for.

"He was on the sea wall nine years," said Brammall.

"Long time back. I did two winters with him on the north end before I went over to the crews." It was eleven years. Abe knew it was eleven the way he knew his own birthday. It was written in the front of the paperback in his coat pocket, in his father's handwriting, and he'd said it out loud in a classroom twelve days ago in front of thirty one people. It was the only number about his father he had ever owned. He didn't correct him.

He stood in the road with his face gone hot and let a man be wrong about the one thing.

"He used to bring cake up," said Brammall.

"Every shift. His wife made it and he'd bring a whole tin of it up the ladder. Stand there handing it out at three in the morning. He wouldn't eat any himself, and if you asked him why he'd say he'd had his in the kitchen." Brammall drank some of the tea.

"He never had his in the kitchen. He just liked doing it." June was watching Abe's face, and Abe knew she was.

"He talked the whole night," said Brammall.

"Every night. Never shut up once." Their father had marked a whole training road out in blue pen in the margins of a book, and had never said one word of it out loud in his life.

"That sounds like him," said Abe.

"Are you coming back?" June asked.

"Thursday, maybe. Friday. Depends what else comes in tonight." Brammall put the mug down on the wall.

"It's not us that decides."

"Who does?"

"A list."

"Who writes the list?"

"Somebody in an office in Prescot who's never been down this road." There was no heat in it at all.

"Look. Three of us for four hundred streets. It was three of us for four hundred streets in November, and there's fewer of us now, because two went over to the harbor where the money is."

"So what happens to the ones you don't get to?"

"They wait."

"And what if it's this street?"

"Then you call it in and you keep your kids out of the cut and you wait. I'm sorry. I'd rather tell you that than tell you something nice." Mrs. Bewley said, from her step, that she'd called it in about her dog in October, and nobody had come about that either. Nobody answered her. Kelsall was winding a hook onto his arm and Nokes had already gotten into the van.

"What was the pile under it?" said Abe. Brammall stopped, with the mug halfway back to his mouth.

"Under what?"

"The one they took out of here in November. It was standing on something. It was up out of the water higher than it should have been."

"Couldn't tell you," said Brammall.

"The cuts get swept when there's a boat, and there's no boat until March." And he got in the van. The light came off the stand and the bottom of Salt Row went dark, and June stood on the step with her arms inside her sleeves and didn't go in.

"Nine years," she said.

"Eleven."

"I know it's eleven." She'd been standing there working out whether to say it, and Abe knew exactly what she was going to ask. He could go down the road and ask Brammall again, and Brammall would tell it to him the same way, and there was nothing written down about it anywhere by anybody.

"Do you think that's true?" said June.

"The cake."