Chương 68: The Seventeenth

The hall in Prescot had been a bus garage, and on the afternoon of Saturday the seventeenth of January it held about six hundred people. You could still see where the pits were, filled and boarded and painted gray, and the roof went up and up into a dark that four strings of lights did not reach. There were three mats down the middle of it and a crowd around all three. Abe stood inside the door with his bag on his shoulder and did not move for a while.

"First time in the big one," Croft said, beside him, pleased.

"Say something."

"It's a garage."

"It is a garage. It's the best garage in the north." Croft had his coat over his arm and was already looking for people he knew.

"Right. Kit tables are down there, food is dreadful, don't buy the food, and if a man in a brown coat asks you what you weigh, tell him and don't ask why." Gault found him in four minutes, which was three longer than he had expected.

"That's a Croft."

"That's Miles."

"I know what his name is." She had read it off the boy's feet from thirty yards away.

"I have been watching that family stand like that since before either of you could walk."

"He brought me."

"That's better, actually." She had a folder and a lanyard and the expression of a woman who has already had two arguments today.

"Right. Listen to me and then go and enjoy yourself, because you have earned an afternoon and I am about to spoil it."

"Go on."

"This room does not sort people the way your school does." She put two fingers on his shoulder and turned him around to face the room.

"Twos at that end. Ones at this end. That is the whole filing system and it does not care what your number is." At the far end there were maybe forty people and a lot of space around them. At this end there were five hundred.

"So I'm down here."

"You are down here," Gault said.

"With a twenty next to your name and a realm 1 in front of it."

"Right."

"Everybody in this hall read that line on Thursday." She was looking at the twos end while she said it.

"Not one of them knows which end you go at."

"Is that a problem?"

"It is the single most useful thing that has ever happened to me," said Gault, and went off to have her third argument. Kit was two folding tables and a man in a brown coat. He had measured Abe in December, in a room upstairs at the fitter's with a radiator that banged, and he had been quick and bored and kind about it. He was quick and bored today too, though not all the way through it. He took the shoulder, and the reach, and the neck, and wrote them down. Then he stopped. He looked at the card in his hand.

He turned it over and looked at the back of it, which had nothing on it. He turned it back and read the December line again with his thumb under it.

"Stand up straight for me." Abe stood up straight. The man measured the shoulder again, the same shoulder, in the same place, and wrote a second number under the first one and did not say anything about the gap between them.

"You've been eating, then," he said.

"I've been on the water."

"Right." He clipped the card into the folder and reached past Abe for the next boy without looking up.

"Next." Danforth was at the far side of the ones, three deep in people, and he was completely at home. It was the first time Abe had seen it and it was strange to watch. Danforth knew names. He knew whose father was ill, and which city had moved its meet, and what a man called Sutcliffe had said in November, and every one of those people was pleased to see him. He had been coming here since September, and no sheet in that building could show that.

He caught Abe's eye across about nine people and lifted his chin, friendly, and went back to what he was doing. Croft, watching this, blew out through his nose.

"He's good at that."

"He is good at that."

"I'm not good at that." Croft was eating something he had bought from the food he had told Abe not to buy.

"I could be. I just find it unbearable." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Danforth came over about ten minutes later, on his own, with two cups of tea he had not been asked for.

"You'll want this. It's cold in here at the far end and you're going to be standing about until four." He handed one to Croft as well, without being funny about it.

"Right. Nobody has told you how the exhibitions run, have they."

"Croft's told me."

"Croft has told you what he thinks about them, which is different." Danforth said it warmly, and Croft shrugged and went on eating.

"Two minutes, or somebody goes down and stays down. No points, no decision."

"So if it goes the distance."

"It stops, and everybody claps, and nothing happens." He drank some of his tea.

"And the hall goes completely quiet for the exhibitions, which is the bit nobody warns you about. Six hundred people and you can hear the roof."

"Thanks."

"I got told that by a man from Ketton in September and it saved me from making an idiot of myself, so." He drank some of his tea.

"You'll be fine. You'll be better than fine, obviously." Then he went back to his nine people, and Croft watched him go the whole way.

"He meant that," Croft said, and he sounded slightly annoyed about it. There was a sheet pinned by the twos end with the forty names on it, because the twos get their own sheet, and Abe went down and read it. He read it twice. Then he stood there with his hands in his pockets and added it up, because that is what he had come down there to do. The deepest number on that sheet was a seventeen. Most of them were on fourteens and fifteens. Four of them were on twelves. Marchbank was on seventeen.

Marchbank had been on seventeen in December. Abe had shaken his hand in December at the winter board, when Marchbank was the best thing in that hall and generous about it. Marchbank had eaten an apple while he explained that everything gets easier afterward. Abe went back up the room and found Croft eating.

"Marchbank hasn't moved since December."

"Marchbank hasn't moved since December, no."

"Not one number."

"Not one number." Croft said it with his mouth full, as a fact so ordinary it was barely worth the chewing.

"You go over, and the part of you that came out of your own hours gets doubled. The part that came off crossings does not. That is the whole of what going over is. After that it goes slow."

"How slow?"

"Slow. Most of them go over at ten or eleven, and whatever they come out with is more or less the number they keep." Croft looked around for somewhere to put the wrapper.

"My grandfather hung on to eleven and my father has never stopped going on about it. Eleven. You'd be mad to hang around past that, is the general feeling."

"So none of them are moving."

"None of them are moving and they're all twos." Croft shrugged with his whole upper body.

"Nobody down there talks about numbers at all. Numbers are a ones thing. It's a bit rude down there, actually." Abe looked back down the room at the forty people with all the space around them. Every question he had was a stupid one, so he kept them, and they went to look at the food he had been told not to buy. Priya Sandhu was on the ones side with no folder and no coach. Abe saw her before she saw him. He had two steps to decide what to do, so he did what he would have done in a corridor and said hello.

"Dolan," she said.

"Yes. Of course you're here."

"Are you fighting?"

"I'm in the open half. Anybody can be in the open half, that's the point of the open half." She said it flatly and without any weight on it.

"I took the train. It's fine, I like the train." There were a lot of things Abe could have said, and every one of them would have made it worse. He had known that since the sixth of December, when a man took his hand off her shoulder and walked out to a car.

"Who've you got?"

"No idea. They draw it at three." Then she stopped doing the flat voice.

"I read the sheet on Thursday, by the way. Everybody read the sheet on Thursday."

"Priya."

"It's good." She got her bag up off the floor.

"I didn't want to stand here and pretend I hadn't read it, that's all." Marchbank came and found him at half past two. He came straight across the floor with a bottle of water in his hand, and about eleven people watched him do it, and he did not look at any of them.

"Dolan."

"Marchbank."

"You remembered."

"You shook my hand in December and I've thought about it since," Abe said. It was true, and it came out of him before he could make it politer. Marchbank laughed. He was taller than he had been in December and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the afternoon.

"Right," he said.

"I've got one question and it's a stupid one and I've been carrying it since Thursday morning, so let me have it and then we can talk about something else."

"Go on."

"Do you sleep?" Abe looked at him.

"Because I don't, much," Marchbank said.

"Not since August." He turned the bottle around in his hand.

"I read that sheet on Thursday and I did the thing where you work out what the other person would have to be doing. And I got to a number of hours. And the number of hours isn't in a week." He shrugged.

"So then I thought, well. Maybe he just doesn't sleep."

"I sleep."

"Do you."

"Every night. In a bed, like everybody else." It was all true and it explained nothing at all, and it sounded like a lie, and Abe heard it sounding like a lie while it was still coming out.

"Right," said Marchbank. He drank some of his water and looked out at the mats. Neither of them said anything for a while, and Abe could not read one thing on his face.

"I'll tell you the actual reason I came over," Marchbank said.

"There isn't anybody at this end of the room I have to think about, and there hasn't been since the summer, and it turns out that's worse. So. It's nice that you exist." Then he put his hand out, and Abe shook it, and Marchbank went back to the twos end where the forty people were. The woman with the card came at ten to three. She was ordinary and about fifty and she had a good coat on. She waited until Croft had gone off to look at the draw board before she said anything, and Abe noticed her doing it.

"Mr. Dolan. I'm not going to keep you and I'm not going to ask you anything."

"All right."

"You had a message on Thursday. That was me." She put a card into his hand, face down, and did not hold on to it.

"That's the same number. It works on a Sunday, which most of them don't."

"I'm signed until the summer."

"I know exactly what you're signed until and exactly what it pays, and I would not insult you by pretending otherwise." She was already stepping back.

"I was at that board in your school corridor four days before Ruth Gault was, and I wrote you up properly, and I was slow. I have thought about it every week since November."

"Why tell me that?"

"Because she'll have told you already," said the woman, "and I would rather you heard it the same both times." Then she went, and the card stayed in his hand, and it had a phone number on it and nothing else at all. The draw went up at three on a whiteboard by the door, and the hall folded in on it. Croft got there first because Croft always gets there first, and read it out over the top of everybody with his hand on Abe's shoulder, working down. The open half was thirty-one names.

The four exhibition bouts were at the bottom. Under them, in smaller letters, was a line naming the two people in that building who were on standby to put somebody back together, and the hours they were there for. EXHIBITION 3 · 4: 40 DOLAN, A. · Calder · Realm 1 · KINDLED · Layer 20 QUIRKE, S. · Ketton · Realm 2 · TEMPERED · Layer 16 Croft stopped reading out loud.

Down the room, at the twos end, somebody laughed at something, and forty people who had all gone through the door laughed with him, and none of them had looked at the board yet.

"Right," Croft said, eventually, in a completely different voice.

"Well. They've put you against a Tempered."