Chương 81: Nobody Watches the Water

Then he ran the bath as hot as it would go, which turned out to be hotter than anything he had ever put his hand in. At home you get about four inches and then the boiler stops being interested in you. This one kept going. He turned it off when the water came up over the edge of his knees and then, after some thought, turned it back on and let it come up further. He used the third soap, and both the bottles, one of which turned out to be for hair and one of which he never did find out about.

Then he fell asleep in it. He woke up in cold water with his fingers gone strange, and the boy from Salford was going down the corridor outside telling someone about two desserts. He lay there working out what the hour had bought him. It had bought nothing. There was no number at the end of it and nothing to show June, and he found he did not mind.

He had used the only towel, so he went out into the corridor in his socks and took another one off the cart with the ninety towels on it, and went down to dinner with his hair wet. The dining room was down a staircase with a rail you could have moored a boat to. It was long and low and much too warm, with radiators under the windows going full blast and the windows shut against February.

There were small tables around the outside with ordinary people at them, couples and a man on his own with a newspaper folded into quarters. Down the middle someone had pushed six tables together into one long one and covered the whole thing with a tablecloth, and that was where the circuit went. Thirty-odd of them, all about his age, all washed and in their own clothes and completely unrecognizable from that afternoon. The plates were heavy. That was the first thing.

He picked one up off the stack by the door and nearly put it back down again, because it weighed about as much as a paving slab and had a green line around the rim. Dinner was paid for, which nobody explained to him, and which he only worked out when he saw the boy from Salford order two desserts and nobody stop him. They gave him a card with the food written on it in a list. There were eleven things and he had heard of four of them.

He sat there reading it like a set of instructions until the girl from Halifax dropped into the chair opposite and turned it around with one finger.

"Get the pie," she said.

"Which one of these is the pie."

"That one. It comes with potatoes. The rest of it is smaller than it sounds." She had changed out of the clothes she had fought in and she had a bandage on one knuckle and she looked about as tired as he felt.

"You're the Calder one."

"Abe."

"Jen Kelsall." She stuck her hand out and shook his once, hard, and let go before he was ready.

"You asked me how I did the foot thing."

"You showed me."

"Nobody asks. I've been doing it two years and nobody has ever once asked me." She got a roll out of the basket and tore it in half.

"It's my dad's. He can't do it any more because his hip's gone. He'd have been unbearable if he'd seen you get it."

"I didn't get it."

"You got it on the fourth go and then you got worse for an hour, which is what everybody does." Jen put half the roll back in the basket for him.

"Get the pie." He got the pie. It came in a brown dish of its own with a lid of pastry on it, and there was so much of it that he laughed out loud when the plate went down in front of him. He went through the lid with the side of his fork and the steam came up off it into his face and smelled of gravy and pepper. The potatoes had a well in the top with butter melting in it. He ate all of it.

Then he ate the roll, and then he ate most of a second roll and mopped the dish out with it, and Jen Kelsall watched him do it with an expression he could not read.

"What," said Abe.

"Nothing." She was smiling at something.

"Nothing at all."

"Who taught your dad?" said Abe.

"His mom." Jen said it with her mouth full, like it was nothing to say.

"It goes back. Nobody ever wrote it down, so somebody has to keep doing it, and my brother went and got interested in cars." She jabbed her fork at the air.

"So it's me."

"He still coaches you?"

"He sits on a kitchen chair in the yard and shouts. He can't show me anything anymore, so he shouts, and half of it's wrong now, because he's remembering it instead of doing it." She went back to what was left of her pie.

"The foot's the only bit that's still all there. The foot he can do off a chair." This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Abe thought about his father's coat, and about his father's handwriting in the margins of a book.

"Nobody taught me to stand. It's out of a book. My dad's."

"Thought so," said Jen.

"You stand like a diagram." She did not ask about his dad, and he did not ask about the brother, and the pie went on being good.

"You were on TV," said the boy from Salford, three seats down, with his mouth full.

"It's not TV. It goes out with the listings."

"It's TV." He put his fork around the table to include everyone.

"We watched it in the van. Fletcher had it on his phone and we watched it about four times."

"Five," said a girl in a Ketton tracksuit.

"Five." The boy from Salford put the fork down, lifted his chin, looked off to the left of the camera, and said, in a voice nothing whatsoever like Abe's, " I've done every hour of it on my own." The table went up.

"That is not what I sound like."

"That is precisely what you sound like."

"You did do the chin, though," said Jen.

"She made me do the chin."

"They make everybody do the chin," said the Ketton girl.

"I did mine in October and my brother still has it and he plays it at people." Then they argued about whether the pie was better than the Salford one, and then about the Salford hall in general, and then a boy at the far end said the Salford hall smelled of feet. Four people from Salford said that it did, loudly, all at the same time, and would not be talked out of it by anyone. After that they ranked the halls, with a scoring system that changed every time somebody was losing. Prescot had the worst floor.

Everybody agreed about the floor and nothing else.

"Bradford's clean," said the Bradford boy.

"Bradford's a shed," said Jen.

"My grandma cleans it." No one had an answer to that. Nobody at that table asked Abe how he had gotten good. Not one of them, all evening. They had all been in the hall, so nobody needed telling that the number was real. And the other half of it, the part June had been so sure someone would ask him on Saturday, was not a thing you asked. Every one of them had something in their family that someone had been handed by somebody else, and none of it was written down, and you did not go near it.

Jen had said it herself an hour ago and Abe had not heard it properly at the time. Nobody asks. He had asked her. In front of a hundred and fifty people, on a mat, with a whistle going. Abe looked at his plate and worked out that he had done something rude, and that she had answered anyway. Marchbank came and sat with them halfway through, with a plate stacked in a way that suggested he had been coming to these for years and had opinions about the desserts. He was different in a room with food in it.

In a hall he was careful and quiet and everyone watched him. Here he ate like a horse and argued for ten minutes with the Bradford boy about whether a film neither of them had seen was any good.

"It's not out," said the Bradford boy.

"It's out in April."

"Then you haven't seen it."

"I've seen the trailer," said Marchbank, with enormous dignity, "and the trailer was dreadful, and I stand by everything I've said."

"The trailer's always the best bit," said Jen.

"The trailer's the best bit of everything he likes," said the Bradford boy. Marchbank threw a roll at him. A woman at the next table said "Hey" without looking up from her phone, and the table went quiet and behaved itself and then forgot about it. The Wakefield boy shouted down the table to ask Abe whether it was true you could walk along the top of the wall at Calder.

"Not the top. There's a walk about halfway up."

"Can you fall off it?"

"You can fall off it."

"Has anybody?"

"A man my dad worked with went off it in a gale and landed in a boat," said Abe. The far end of the table made a noise like a crowd, and then he had to do the whole thing again for two people who had missed it. Then he had to describe the drowned north, which took a while, because they kept stopping him.

"The wall's the edge of it. Everything on the other side is streets. At low tide you get about eight hundred yards out before the-""Hang on. Eight streets."

"About four hundred and twenty streets."

"Four hundred and twenty streets of houses. Under the water."

"With the roofs still on," said Abe. Jen put her fork down.

"Does the sea smell different when it's over a street?" Abe opened his mouth to say he had never thought about it, and then thought about it.

"Yes," he said.

"It smells like a cellar."

"That's horrible."

"It's horrible in August."

"Say that again for him," said Jen, pointing her fork at the Bradford boy, "because he didn't hear it and he's going to love it." So Abe said it again. At Christmas he had sat at a table with a goose on it and three aunts, and one of them had asked him what his father did, and the room had stopped like someone had shut a faucet off. Croft's father had gotten him out of it with four words about the far tower and told him to eat more of the goose. Nobody at this table knew there was a faucet to shut off.

He had put his dad into the conversation himself, on purpose, to make thirty people laugh, and it had worked. He sat there afterward feeling strange about it, and not unhappy. They went out afterward, because Jen said the dessert was a rip-off and there was a place near the station. It was the first time Abe had ever been in a city at night that was not his. Leeds had its lights on. All of them. There was a street with shops still open at half past nine, and nothing shut, and nobody in a hurry.

There was a man playing a trumpet outside a bank, very badly. The Bradford boy put a coin in the case on the way past, and the man played worse out of gratitude. There was a line of about thirty people waiting for a bus, and the bus came while they stood there and took all thirty. Nobody was watching the water. In Calder everybody has half an eye on where the water is, all the time, without thinking about it. Here a man came out of a doorway backward with a crate and never looked at the road either way.

Abe stood on a corner in a city that went on being a city in every direction and could not stop noticing it. They got fries. Jen paid.

"It's my town twice a year," she said, when Abe started going for his pocket.

"That makes it mine. Sit down." The Bradford boy got something with a sauce on it that he could not finish and would not admit that he could not finish. Abe ate his fries walking, in a street with the lights on, in February, with people his own age, and was so happy that at one point he had to stop and stand still for a second in a shop doorway.

"You all right," said Jen.

"Yes."

"You've gone a funny color."

"I'm fine." Abe got going again.

"It's a good town."

"It's all right." She took the last of her fries out of the paper.

"You want to see it in the summer. It's completely mad in the summer." You want to see it in the summer. She had said it just like she had said get the pie, like it was already arranged. He turned that one over the whole way back.