Chương 63: In Your Favor

Saturday he was in Riddell's sorting a crate of salvage, and three people came in who did not need anything. The third was a man in a good coat.

"Do you do knives?" he said, and Riddell said no, and the man looked down the shop at Abe, and kept looking, and then went out again. Riddell finished writing something in the book and put the pen down.

"How many people know you work here," he said.

"Everybody. I've worked here since I was fifteen."

"Right." Riddell squared the book up with the edge of the counter and left his hand on it.

"Somebody asked my sister on Thursday what you were like." Abe stopped sorting.

"What'd she say?"

"She said you were quiet and you'd never been late, which is true and is nobody's business." He picked the pen back up.

"I'm telling you so you know it's happening. I'm not telling you to do anything about it." Then he got the tin down off the shelf behind him and put it somewhere under the counter where it had not been before. Abe watched him do it and neither of them said anything. Nine days ago Riddell had gone up to the apartment over the shop for the rest of it, and come back down, and put twelve hundred and forty marks on the bench for four gray cores out of a marsh, and had not asked one question about where they came from.

Anybody asking questions about Abe was four questions away from asking about Riddell. Riddell had worked that out on his own, before Abe came in. Crew nine went out at six on Sunday with the light not up yet. It was January water and it did what January water does. Two of the boards had gone under in the night and had to be found with a pole before anybody stood on them. Abe worked the far end, because the far end is furthest from the ladder and nobody wants it. Purnell had the stern. Cottle had the middle.

Dobbs stood halfway up, where he could see the whole boat. The roof on the corner where half the sign had come off had given them three pullers since November. Purnell said they came up in the wind, and it had been blowing off the water since Thursday. At about eleven Cottle said "Puller," as flatly as he would have said a bus was late. Everybody stopped. It came out from under the same collapsed roof as the one in November. It got the stern line, and the punt swung around hard. Purnell went down on one knee.

Cottle grabbed the far rail.

"Line," said Dobbs. Abe already had it. In November that rope had gone out through his fists and taken the skin off both palms on the way past. His heels had stopped against a bench because there was nowhere else for them to go, and he had counted nine of Dobbs's footsteps and wanted every one of them faster. This time it did not go anywhere. He got both hands on it and set his feet, and the line stopped, and it stopped so completely that the boat came back level under them.

Then the thing pulled again, harder, because now it knew he was there. Abe felt it come up the rope. It was the same pull it had been in November, and this time it arrived in his shoulders and stopped there. So he pulled back. There was no plan in it anywhere. He got a wrap of the line around his forearm, put his weight in his heels, and walked backward down the punt one deck board at a time, hauling. Something came up out of the water at the other end that nobody on that boat had ever seen the whole of.

It came up out of a hole in a roof in eight feet of water, sideways, and it did not want to. It got a grip on the rail and the rail came off in its hand. Abe kept walking backward. Dobbs got there with the boat hook at about the point where its head cleared the water, which was two of Dobbs's steps and not nine, and Abe heard both of them. Then the hook went down past Dobbs's shoulder and stopped hard, and stopped hard again, and there was a great deal of water and no more pulling on the line. Abe let go.

His hands opened straight away and there was nothing wrong with either of them. He stood on a wet board over a drowned street with a length of rope in one fist and both palms perfectly fine, and could not stop looking at them. Then the screen came up over the top of them. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 15 Foundation: 240 / 19, 600 (Body 16) Fifteen. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

He had spent five weeks of his own time in the biggest essence market in the north, and at the end of them that bar had still been three thousand short. One morning on a boat finished it before eleven o'clock. Nothing he could buy had done it. Standing on a wet board with a rope in his hands and something coming up the other end of it had done it in about a minute. The puller went down slowly, the way they do. Nobody on that punt said anything at all while the water closed over it.

Then Dobbs came down the boat and took Abe's wrist and turned the hand over and looked at the palm, and then did the other one the same way, and gave them both back.

"Right," said Dobbs. That was every word he said about it. He went back up the boat and picked up the pole he had put down, and Purnell said "Right," a second later and in a different voice altogether, and picked hers up, and after that everybody worked, because there was half a street still to do and the light went at four. Cottle worked the middle for the rest of the morning and said nothing at all. At two o'clock he came down the boat, put a hand on the rail beside Abe, and looked out at the water.

"I'd have gone in," he said. Then he went back up the boat. The shed was loud when they came in at four, and it got louder, and by half past everybody in it had heard about the rail. Fenn was up the steps at the chalk ladder with his stub of chalk. The ladder is a board of names and numbers that has been on that wall since before anybody in the shed started. Nobody in Calder argued with it twice, because Fenn had never yet put anything on it he could not show you on paper. Fenn spoke to the room and not to Abe.

"The first of December, the school board in this city had him at ten. That's public. Half of you have seen it, and it is the last number that school has, because he has not been in it since term started."

"Seen it," said Mullen.

"The sixth of December, the regional listing has him at eleven." Fenn held the paper up and did not wave it about.

"Also public. It's got his name on it and the name of the city." Then he wrote 10 and 11 on the board, side by side, with five days between them, and put the chalk down. The shed went off like a dropped tray.

"That's not the argument any more," said Mullen.

"Cottle. Tell them."

"He hauled a puller off a roof by hand." Cottle said it to the stove rather than to anybody.

"I was four feet away. It took the rail off in its hand and he never stopped walking."

"So it was a small one," said Purnell, who had called the last one small herself, in November, standing in the same place.

"It was not a small one." There was a pause of the wrong length.

"There's a name for it," said Purnell, doing her laces and not looking up.

"When they go up like that."

"There's a name for everything."

"There's a woman. Halloran. Ivy Halloran. She got to twelve in this city and stopped, and that was, what."

"Twenty six years ago," said Fenn.

"Twenty six years ago." Purnell finished the lace.

"My mother worked with her. She does forms in an office up the top of town and gets asked about it twice a year and she hates it." The shed took that in. Then Cottle got there, and he got there in the wrong order.

"Salt Row," he said.

"October. Bottom of Salt Row. That thing that took the Bewleys' dog, and something went down there in the middle of the night and did it in with a bar, and nobody ever put a name on it." He had a boot in one hand and used it to point with.

"You get paid for a live one. Everybody knows that." He dropped the boot and put his foot down into it.

"Something happens to a kid in a stairwell in October, and by December he's in the papers in Prescot, and this morning he takes a rail off a puller." Cottle was right about October, and right about the bar, and right about the stairwell, but he was wrong about every single thing that came after it.

"Nobody's buying me anything," Abe said. The shed turned around. He had not planned on saying it, and it was out before he had picked the words.

"There's no sponsor buying me essence. There's a woman who pays six hundred a month into my aunt's account and it goes on rent and doses, and you can ask her, her name's on the listing." He put his mug down on the ledge by the stove so his hands had nothing to do.

"I train in the yard behind our block. It's the size of two parking spaces. There's bins in it." Nobody said anything for a second. Then Cottle nodded slowly, like a man who has had a thing confirmed.

"Six hundred a month," he said.

"From a woman on the circuit. Since when."

"November. Four then, six since the first."

"Since November." Cottle looked around the shed.

"And this morning he does that." Purnell said "Cottle," in the voice you use on a dog near a road.

"I'm not saying he's lying. Look at him, he's not lying." Cottle spread his hands, and he was not unkind about it, and that was somehow worse.

"I'm saying somebody put four hundred a month on that boy in November because they already knew."

"Six hundred a month," said Fenn, from up the steps, not turning around.

"That's twelve lots at what Riddell charges. Thirteen if you know somebody."

"So?"

"So you bought four lots in October, Cottle, and you're exactly where you were in October." Fenn came down two steps.

"Twelve a month doesn't move a grown man one rung in a year. You know that better than I do. You paid for it." The shed went quiet in a different way. Cottle looked at the stove for a while.

"Then it isn't the money," he said.

"Fine. It isn't the money. Somebody still knew." Abe stood by the stove with his hands empty. He had told them the truth twice now, and both times it had made Cottle surer. By the time the boots were on, two men at the door who had not been listening were telling it to each other, and neither of them had it right. Fenn stayed on the steps. He waited until the shed had mostly emptied, and then picked the chalk back up, and Abe stood at the bottom and watched him do it. Fenn put the chalk on the board next to DOLAN.

"Five weeks between the sixth of December and this morning," he said.

"I'm not putting eleven on this board."

"The eleven's the last one on paper."

"It is." Fenn turned the chalk over in his fingers and looked at it.

"Twenty two years I've not written a number on this board I couldn't show a man in writing. I'm about to."

"Then don't."

"Cottle stood four feet from it, and I've known Cottle nineteen years."

"So what are you putting?"

"The most anybody in this city has ever had." He wrote it.

"If I'm wrong, I'm wrong in your favor, and you can come and tell me on Sunday." The number on the chalk ladder, next to Abe's name, in a shed where eleven crews would read it over their tea for the next seven days, was 12. Fenn blew the dust off his fingers and went down the steps. Mullen got to the board first and made a noise like a kettle. Then the whole shed was around it. Abe stood at the back of his own crew with his coat half off and watched eleven crews read a twelve next to his name.

Purnell put her hand flat on the top of his head as though he were eleven years old. Dobbs looked at it a long time and then went and dealt with the tide sheet. It was the best thing that had happened to him since the third of October. He was the last one out, and he stopped in front of it on his own with his coat half on. Twelve was Halloran. Twelve was twenty six years and a woman in an office who hated being asked.

Twelve was the biggest number the whole of Calder had, and Fenn had written it next to a schoolboy's name and gone home as though he had done something reasonable. He stood there in his coat with the door open behind him. The board takes your Body number and your Mind number and adds them together. Everybody in his year had known that since Nita explained it to the back row in September. He had stepped onto that punt at six in the morning at Body 14, and he had been Body 15 by eleven. Fifteen. And Mind 5.

Fifteen and five is twenty. Abe stood in an empty shed and looked at a twelve that somebody had written in chalk as the most generous thing he could think of. A pad reads what is in you and prints it on a wall in a corridor. Whenever he next walked past one, it was going to print twenty.