Chương 78: Eleventh

He got to the end of his own notebook that night. None of it had left that room. That was the deal and he had kept it. So what he had on the bed was ninety pages of his own handwriting, copied out one column at a time, at the speed a person writes, in a basement under a parking lot forty one miles north. Nine years of depth readings. Under each column, the date off the white corner of a photograph.

And in the margins, the parts of Metcalf's handwriting he had been able to read, which got smaller every year, the way a man's does when he has stopped expecting anybody to read it. Most of it Abe did not understand and had decided not to mind about. What he could read was the part that mattered: how deep the water stood, and where, and what was underneath it. What he had at the end of a week was the shape of the problem, drawn very exactly. The shape of it was that there was no way in. He had looked.

He had been through every sheet with a date in the corner and every picture anybody had ever taken off a boat, and all of it came to the same place. Nobody alive knew whether the gold had gone down that hatch in 1940 or was still sitting on a train when the water came. The only way to find out was to go and look at it. The hatch had been eleven feet under black water for eighty years, and it was shut. He could stand on the bottom of Water Street with the whole weight of it stopped over his head.

He had known that since the winter. He could not open a shut thing. To open it he would have to take hold of the handle, and taking hold of anything he had not carried in with him let the world back in. Eleven feet down, the world coming back in is eleven feet of water arriving all at once. Ainsworth had said bring me a bar of it. One bar, on a table. That was the week. Metcalf had eleven years, and a boat, and a job, and had arrived at exactly the same wall. Abe had gotten there faster.

He had not gotten anywhere past it. Then he started working out how he would say that out loud, and got about four words in, and found there was nobody to say it to. Croft would want to know what it was for. June would ask him one question and then stop asking, which was worse. Peg thought he was doing coursework. That left the woman who had read his crimes off a sheet without opening the folder they were in. He had a card with a number on it. He could have called her that night and told her the true thing.

He had read all nine years of it and it did not open. That afternoon he had walked down to the shed instead of phoning Dobbs, because phoning would have been the easy way. He did not call her. He told himself it was because there was nothing to report yet, and he knew while he was thinking it that it was not that. He was sitting on his bed with the pages spread across the blanket and June's radio going through the wall when the screen came up behind his eyes.

Study · Novice Lv 9 (0 / 4, 050) Abe put his head back against the wall and laughed at his own ceiling. He had earned Set Stance in a yard, hitting things. He had earned Sharpening on a wheel in Riddell's yard with the light going. Every single point he had ever been given in his life had come off a floor or a bar or a blade. This one had come off him sitting completely still on his own bed with a page in his hands. The Weave had paid it out without one word about where a boy from Salt Row was supposed to be good.

He got the pen off the windowsill and wrote it out on the inside of the back cover, four lines, so that it would be there in the morning and he would know he had not made it up. Then he went and told June, because there was nobody else in the house. She was on her bed with her feet up the wall and the book about horses open upside down on her chest, and she let him get all the way to the end of it before she said anything. In January he would have thought that meant she was bored. He knew better now.

"So you're clever," she said.

"Nine. One off the top of the rank."

"That's what I said." June took her feet off the wall.

"Does it come with anything?"

"It comes with being able to do it again faster."

"Everything you get comes with being able to do it again faster." She said it in the voice she used for reading the doses off the box, flat and quick and slightly bored, the way she had read out the doses every morning since November.

"What was the folder, though." Abe stood in her doorway.

"Coursework."

"You've got coursework in a folder that thick," said June, "about water."

"Yes."

"Right." She picked the book back up and turned it the right way up.

"You know I don't care what it is."

"I know."

"I don't. You can have whatever you want in a folder. You've been strange since the Thursday before last and Peg's noticed and she isn't going to say anything to you, and I'm telling you that she's noticed, and that's all I'm doing about it." She found her page.

"Bring me back something stupid on Saturday. From a station. The worse the better."

"How stupid."

"Properly stupid. If it's nice I'm putting it in the bin in front of you." He went out and got half a step down the hall before she said the other thing, in the same voice, without lifting her head off the pillow.

"Abe. When somebody asks you on Saturday how you got good, what are you going to say?" Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. He stood in the hall with the light off. He had said the true thing into a camera on Wednesday and watched a woman write it down as modesty, and there was not one part of him that wanted to do that again.

"I'm going to say I worked hard," he said.

"Okay," said June.

"But you're going to say it like a liar, because that's what it sounds like when it's true." Leeds took two trains and most of the morning, and Abe spent the second one with his forehead against the glass watching a country he had never seen go past at speed. There was snow on the tops. Not much. Enough that the fields on the high side of the line had gone two colors and the walls between them stood up black.

Every so often there was a farm sitting in the middle of all that with its lights still on at eleven in the morning. He had been out of Calder five times in his life with somebody there to see him go. Every one of them was since December. Gault got on at Prescot with her coat over her arm and her phone already against her ear. She sat down opposite him, put the folder open on her knee, and did not stop for half an hour.

"No. He is not walking into your hall for what you paid him in January." A pause.

"Because that was January, and January is over." The pen went down the list while she talked, and stopped on a line, and went on.

"I'm not arguing about the number. I'm telling you the number has moved. You can have January's on Monday if you'd rather have it in writing." There was a table between them and nowhere else to look. She was selling him out loud, two feet away, and calling him he.

"He's eighteen." A pause, and the pen stopped.

"He was eighteen in January too, and you didn't call me in January." Then she put the phone face down on the table and looked out of the window for the first time all morning, and did not appear to see anything through it.

"Right," she said.

"Leeds is not Prescot."

"How."

"Prescot is a bus garage with a floor in it. Leeds has a hall that seats nine hundred and a man on the door who won't let you in without a card." She squared the folder up.

"And in Prescot in January nobody in that building knew which end of the room you went at. That was the single best thing I have ever had and it lasted three weeks and it's gone."

"Because of the clips."

"Because of the clips, and because of four minutes of you in a brown coat that went out last night with your number laid over the top of it." She turned her phone face up, looked at it, and turned it back over.

"A hundred and forty thousand people have watched it since last night. There are men on the circuit who've been coming for eleven years and have never had one person look them up."

"What did you tell Hesketh?" said Gault.

"The truth." Gault put the pen down.

"All of it?"

"She didn't use most of it."

"That is not the same answer as no," said Gault, and wrote something down, and did not say what.

"Is that bad?"

"It's marvelous. It's why there are three of them coming tomorrow instead of one." Gault got the pen back out.

"It also means nobody in that hall today is going to be surprised by you, and being a surprise was ninety percent of what you had. So you're going to have to be good instead."

"Right."

"Also there'll be about forty of you and only eleven get looked at properly, so if you're going to be sick, be sick on the train."

"I'm not going to be sick."

"No," said Gault.

"You're not." She said it like she was checking a box on a form, and went back to her phone. They heard the line before they saw the hall. There was a line outside, and it was not a line of prospects. It went back along the railings and around the corner and stood in its own steam. There were families in it, and old men, and two boys in school coats sharing a thermos. The whole line was talking at once, loud, like people who knew they were getting in.

A man was working along the railings with a paper sack, selling something hot, and going by the smell it was bacon. At the front of it, a woman at a table was selling tickets out of a tin. The doors behind her did not open until half past one, and nobody in the line seemed to mind that at all. Somewhere in the middle of all that, a phone was playing the piece. Abe heard his own voice say it works while I train, tinny and small, out of a stranger's coat pocket, and kept walking.

Gault walked Abe straight past the whole thing to a small door at the side, where a man looked at her card, and then at Abe's face, and did not ask for Abe's card at all. The hall had a curved roof and long windows up high in it and it had been something else before it was this. Abe worked that out from the floor. It was old and good, and it had lines painted on it for a game nobody played anymore. There were four stations down one side and a boarded area at the far end with mats on it.

A woman with a clipboard was sending people around the stations in groups of six, and above all of it, on the end wall, somebody had bolted up a board. It was a real one. Names in slots, and cards that a man on a stepladder changed with his hands. The seats went up in banks along both long sides, and they were empty. It was eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning in February.

A few people who knew somebody had come in early and sat spread out with their thermoses, and the rest of Leeds was standing outside in the cold, waiting for half past one. Abe stopped inside the door and looked at it. Then he noticed that he had been noticed. It was not everybody and it was not loud. It was a boy at the kit table saying something to the boy next to him without moving his head much. It was a man in a club jacket by the urn who stopped talking, finished stopping, and started again.

It was a girl in a green tracksuit going past who said "morning" to him like they had met, and they had not met. And somewhere up in the seats a woman said his name, not to him, and he made himself not look for her. In January six hundred people had walked past him in a bus garage and not one of them had known what he was. He got his bag off his shoulder and found somewhere to put it, and his hands would not settle down.

Up on the end wall there was a line ruled across the board with REALM 2 written above it, and Marchbank was the first name under that, on seventeen, exactly where he had been in December.

"He's here," said Priya. She had come up beside him with her bag still on both shoulders and her coat still done up. Priya Sandhu had been at every one of these since October, and in October she had arrived with a folder and a man from the school and a lift both ways. Today she had come on the train, on her own, and Abe did not ask about it.

"He's always here," Abe said.

"He's from Ketton. Everybody from Ketton comes to Leeds." Priya looked up at the board with him.

"They put you third."

"Third of what?"

"Of the ones they're going to look at." She said it flatly. Then she said, "That's very high," in exactly the same voice, and went off to put her bag down. Piers Danforth was eleventh. Abe found that out by reading the list on the wall by the kit tables. It was a sheet of paper with the running order on it and nothing else. Danforth's name was the last one on it, at the bottom. He had come ninth in the summer and ninth again in December.

Abe knew that because Danforth had told him both times, in a corridor, cheerfully, before anybody had to ask. He was standing on his own by the second station with his bag between his feet. Abe could not stop looking at him. In January, in Prescot, Danforth had been three deep in people for two hours. This morning two men in club jackets had gone straight past him to get to a boy from Salt Row who did not know either of their names.

"Third," said Danforth, arriving.

"What?"

"You. They've put you third." He said it pleasantly, looking out at the hall rather than at Abe.

"Third is the last one they properly watch. By the fourth they're writing up the first three, and by the seventh they're deciding where to have lunch."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I've been eleventh before," said Danforth. There was nothing at all in his voice. He might have been telling him where the bathrooms were.

"Danforth."

"Don't." He put a hand up about four inches.

"Whatever that was going to be, I don't want it. You'll be nice about it and then I'll have to be nice back, and I've got another four hours of this." Abe could not think of one thing to say that was not worse than saying nothing.

"How's your aunt?" said Danforth. Abe looked at him. On Monday, in the corridor outside the gym, Danforth had said out loud that two men from the city had walked Abe four minutes down his own street at seven in the morning with the whole street out watching. Abe had told him he could not say anything about it. Danforth had said no, I heard, and gone to class, and held the door for a freshman on the way. Now he was asking after Peg, pleasantly, with his eyes still on the hall.

There was not one thing wrong with it except that nobody else in that building knew there was anything to ask about.

"She's all right."

"Good." Danforth nodded slowly.

"I haven't said anything to anybody, if you were wondering. I'm not going to."

"I wasn't wondering."

"Yes you were," said Danforth, with no edge on it at all, and picked his bag up and went to find somewhere else to stand.