Chương 82: Second Meeting

He got in at eleven and lay on top of a bed the size of a kitchen table with all his clothes on and could not get to sleep for ages. Two soaps in his bag for his sister. Money coming in the morning, and nobody had told him how much. A girl who talked like he would be back in the summer. His hair was still damp and he could still taste the vinegar off the chips. Somewhere in the wall a pipe ticked as the building cooled. Even the building was rich.

He got up at about one and stood in the middle of the floor in his socks. Nobody in the world knew he was awake. He let the world stop. The rain quit on the window, mid-run. The hum went out of the walls. SECOND MEETING had sat on his list since the bus garage in January with nothing to its name. It only worked on someone who had put him down, and until yesterday afternoon nobody ever had. He thought about the second bout, and the foot, and being flat on the boards. Then he asked for it.

Jen Kelsall was standing by the closet. She was in the same clothes she had beaten him in, with her front foot already turned out. She was not breathing, and her eyes did not follow him. The longer he looked, the more certain he was that she was not there at all, and also that she was. He walked all the way around her. Nothing happened. He came around the front and leaned in, closer, and then closer than that.

By the end his face was nearer to her face than it had ever been to any living person's, and he could see her individual eyelashes. She did not know he was there. Nothing happened. So he reached up, feeling stupid, and poked her cheek. The foot moved, the little half step that was not a step. He did not see it this time either. The carpet came up and took him flat across the shoulders. He lay there in the stopped world at one in the morning with the wind knocked out of him.

Abe started to laugh on the floor and found he could not stop. He had been alone inside the stopped world every hour since the third of October. Every single one of them. Thousands of hours with nobody to hand him anything, or hit him, or watch, or be there when he got something right. And a girl who was asleep somewhere down the corridor had just put him flat on his back inside it. Abe lay on the carpet of a hotel room in Leeds and grinned up at the ceiling like an idiot. Somebody had hit him in there.

Somebody had finally hit him in there. He got up, and she was back by the closet. She had not walked there. She was simply back, standing exactly where she had started, front foot out, as if the floor had never had him on it. The skill had set its pieces back up.

"Right," said Abe, out loud, in a stopped room, to a girl who could not hear him.

"Again." He went in properly the second time, hands up, both feet under him, like he would have gone in on a mat. The foot moved. He went down. The third time he watched nothing but her feet. He went down. The fourth time he got a hand to her wrist on the way past, and it did not matter even slightly. He went down, and got up, and she was back by the closet with her front foot out, and the room was very quiet. Once he tried just standing in front of her with his hands low, waiting for her to move first.

She had all the time in the world too. He gave up before she did. Once he tried starting it from behind her. She put him into the closet door. He tried asking for the tall boy from Ketton, too, the one who had kept him on the wrong end of a spear for three solid minutes. Nobody came. The Ketton boy had never once landed on him in three whole minutes, and the skill was exact about the difference. So it was Jen, or nobody. He found he did not mind.

Somewhere around the tenth fall he stopped laughing and started working. He took his sweater off, moved the chair into the bathroom, and gave the two of them the whole floor. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. She did one thing. She did it every time, and she did it perfectly, and she could not get tired, and she could not get bored, and she was never going to ask him what any of this was for. None of it was easy. That was the point of her.

Everything easy he had ever done in his life had paid him nothing, and there was not one easy thing in that room. The fifteenth fall was the same as the fifth. She was never going to get better, because she was finished, and he was the only one in the room who could. He went to the window once, between falls, with his shirt sticking to his back.

Leeds stood outside with its rain pinned in the air, a whole city stopped at one in the morning, and somewhere out in it was the street with the lights on where he had walked eating chips. He stopped counting the falls somewhere past thirty. He had a carpet burn on one shoulder and another one starting on his elbow, and the rain stood still on the glass in long pinned lines, and nobody in the world knew where he was. He had no way of telling how long he had been at it.

The clock on the bedside table said seven minutes after one and went on saying it, so the only clock he had in there was his own body, and by the end of it he was hungry in the deep way he got after a full day in the yard at home. He was flat on his back with one arm over his eyes when the screen came up across the ceiling. Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 9 (140 / 16, 200) Six hundred and sixty points, the bar had said in the afternoon. He had wondered on the way back to the hotel what was finally going to fill it.

A whole working day on a hotel carpet, getting knocked down by a girl who was not there. That was what. He lay on the carpet and looked at the number and laughed again, quieter this time, because it was the middle of the night in a hotel. The last fall before he stopped, he saw the half step start. He still went down. But he saw it start, and seeing it start was new, and his legs knew something on the way to the floor that they had not known at midnight.

Near the end he tried the half step himself, on nobody, in the middle of the room. It was not his. His feet were the wrong feet for it, the same as his hands had been the wrong hands for Croft's form for a month. The shape of it stayed in his legs anyway. He wondered, sitting on the carpet getting his breath back, whether the tall boy from Ketton was in there somewhere too. And whoever else ever managed to hit him, from now on, for the rest of his life. All of them waiting their turn by the closet.

He let the world go. The rain finished its run down the window all at once, and the hum came back into the walls. Then he went and made the tea in the little kettle, because it was there and it was free and it was his. He drank it sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, like the room was too much to be in properly. June he could tell. That was new as well.

He had told her on the eighth of October standing in the kitchen, and she had not asked him for one word of proof then or since, so she was the one person alive he could tell that there had been someone in there with him tonight. Somewhere in Calder his sister had probably watched a boy from Bradford call him a wall a dozen times by now. He got into the enormous bed and worked out how he would say it to her, and fell asleep somewhere in the middle of the second sentence.

He made the bed in the morning before he went down, because he could not work out whether you were supposed to, and getting it wrong the other way seemed like the bigger risk. The boy from Salford was ahead of him on the stairs going down, telling someone that the eggs were free. Everything was free. It was his third circuit weekend and he was not over it yet.

Breakfast was the same room as dinner with every curtain open, which made it a different room altogether, and there was a long counter down one side of it that had not been there the night before. Abe stood at the end of that counter. Nobody was standing there to say how much of it he could have. He got a plate. It was the same weight as the ones from last night. He went down the counter with it and put a bit of everything on it. Then he went back and put more bacon on it, which took a decision.

Then he sat down and ate in a room where nobody looked up. He was halfway through the plate when Jen Kelsall put hers down next to his and sat.

"Morning." Abe went red from the collar up, all at once. Last night, in a stopped world, he had stood near enough to this girl's face to count her eyelashes. At the time it had felt like leaning in close to a photograph. She had not been there, and nothing about it had been about her. Except that the photograph was sitting next to him now, eating a sausage and reading the label on the sauce bottle, and every part of his face knew exactly how close he had stood. She would never be told.

There was no version of the sentence that could ever be said to anyone, and he was suddenly very interested in his eggs.

"You've gone the funny color again," said Jen, reaching across him for the salt.

"It's the coffee," said Abe. Gault was over by the window on the far side of the room and had plainly been there a while. The pot was half down and the folder was open with about nine sheets of paper out of it, squared into two piles. She put a hand up at him without looking round. Abe took his plate over.

"Sit down. Eat that. I want to get through all of it now, because I won't get a clear run at you after ten."

"Right."

"Two of them, and both of them want to pay for your year." She turned the first pile so it faced him.

"They have both watched a Bradford boy get both hands on you and shove and go absolutely nowhere. There are eleven clips of it up and they have watched every one of them. The first one is going to be very nice to you, which is not the same thing as being on your side."

"Do I say something?"

"No. Let them." She poured.

"One of them told another one what he thought I was worth last spring while I was standing there holding the pot. Best ten minutes I had all year." Abe ate his bacon.

"The second one's worth listening to, so she's last."

"What do you want me to do?" Gault put the pot down and looked at the ceiling.

"I've been trying to work out how to answer that since Thursday and I still haven't got it. So you're getting both halves and you can sort them out yourself." She held up a finger.

"Say no to both of them. You're worth more in the summer than you are in February and I'd be doing my job badly if I let a stranger have you cheap on a Sunday morning." A second finger went up beside the first.

"It's your name on the sheet and I am not in charge of you. If either of them says a thing today that you actually want, take it."

"Which one do you want?"

"The first one, obviously." She picked the pot back up.

"I'd be very pleasant about it in the room."

"And after?"

"After, I'd be unbearable to you about it until March."

"How much did Saturday pay?"

"Downstairs, when they've gone." Gault put one pile on top of the other and squared the edges with both hands.

"Finish that. She's here at eleven."