Chương 83: What Do You Want

They used a room off the back of the hall, with a long table in it and a window with a wet Leeds Sunday going gray behind it. Someone had put food out. Four kinds, fanned on a plate in the middle of the table, with the little paper cups they came in still under them. Nobody touched it all morning. The first one was a man called Brearley who owned the hall, and it took Abe about ten minutes to work out that he was not a scout.

"Nine hundred seats. I had two hundred and ten of them filled in November, and yesterday I turned people away at half past one."

"Because of me?"

"Because of you. I'd love to tell you it was the catering." Then he laughed at his own joke. Nobody else in the room did, and he did not appear to notice. His offer was six Saturdays at halls in three cities, and the figure made Abe's ears go hot. It was more than four months of what Gault paid him, for six days of standing on a floor.

"You'd be under us," Brearley said.

"Which only means you don't take anybody else's Saturdays. It isn't a cage."

"It's a bit of a cage," said Gault, from the end of the table, without looking up. Abe had his hands under the table by then, one holding the other one still. The number went around and around and he did not trust himself an inch. You're worth more in the summer than you are in February. Gault had said that over the bacon, four hours ago, with none of these people in the building. The last of those six Saturdays was in July.

He would be locked in until then, at what he was worth this morning, and he was going to be worth more than that a long time before July.

"No," said Abe. There was a second reason and he did not say it out loud. It was about a boy in a school hall with the heating off, who had said don't be early to him every Saturday since November and had never asked him for one thing back.

"I'm advised to wait," he said. Brearley looked down the table at Gault. Gault turned a page over.

"He is advised to wait," she said.

"Can the advice be moved?"

"You can ask him," said Gault.

"He's sitting there." Abe looked at Brearley.

"Sundays," Abe said. Brearley blinked.

"Sundays are dead."

"Sundays are dead because nobody's put anything on one. You just said it. You turned people away at half past one because Saturday's the only day there is."

"Son." He kept going anyway.

"Put me on a Sunday in March and find out." Abe put a hand flat on the table without meaning to, which he only noticed afterward.

"One of them. Not six. Nothing signed." Brearley sat back and looked at him like you look at a machine that has done something you did not know it did.

"That is the stupidest thing anybody has said to me in this building," he said.

"Do you know what it costs me to open those doors? Staff, and heat, and the woman on the tin, and a Sunday license I have not had out of a drawer since my father died."

"No."

"No. Nobody does." He was already reaching for his coat pocket, and then stopped himself, and put his hand back on the table instead.

"I did not say no either. March is four weeks off." The clock over the door got to eleven while Brearley was getting his coat on, and Abe finally understood what he had watched in the office doorway the day before. Priya had been doing this. For herself. One sheet of paper with everything she had done on it, held up a bit, her thumb partway down the page. A man being kind about it with one hand on the door frame. There was nobody left to do it for her.

She had gotten the train home on her own last night while he was eating a pie. He thought about saying her name out loud to Gault, four feet away, whose whole job this was. Then he remembered that he had said her name to Gault once already, in December, and that Gault had not asked who that was. The second one came in on her own at twenty after eleven, did not take her coat off, and did not open anything. She was small and about fifty and she sat down like someone who had done it in a hundred rooms.

Abe knew her before she had finished sitting down. She had put a card into his hand face down in a bus garage in Prescot in January, and Gault had taken it from him in the car before they were out of the parking lot.

"Have you still got it," she said.

"Miss Gault has."

"Of course she has." She put her hands on the table.

"I don't want your Saturdays. I want to know who tells you when you're wrong." Abe opened his mouth and shut it again.

"That's the answer, then." She sat back.

"Nobody does.

"I was here yesterday. You did four bouts and you lost one."

"Yes."

"Then you stood on a mat in front of a hundred and fifty people and asked the girl who beat you to show you how she did it." She tapped the table with one finger, once.

"I have been coming to these for twenty six years. I have seen that done twice."

"Oh."

"And then you got it wrong for an hour on a mat at the back, and not one person stopped you." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Miles Croft stops me."

"Is Miles Croft older than you?"

"Three months."

"Where did he get his?"

"His family."

"So he is three months older than you," she said, "and what he is teaching you is his family's, out of a school hall, on a Saturday morning, for nothing."

"Yes."

"Then he is doing it better than anybody has any right to expect." She said it without one drop of unkindness in it.

"And he is going to run out. You will go past the end of what he knows, and he will be the last person in that room to admit it, and you will be the second last." No one said anything for a while. Out in the street a car went past too fast for the weather.

"I take two people a year," she said.

"I am not offering you anything today. I will be at the March one and I will watch you again, and if you are still asking beaten girls how they did it, I will probably offer you then. And if you have spent the spring under that man's Saturdays, I will not, because I don't take people who are already spoken for." She stood up and put her hand out, and Abe shook it. Then she looked at the plate in the middle of the table.

"Eat something," she said.

"Somebody should." Brearley had not asked him how he got this good. Neither had she, and neither of them had said the word Talent. They had both put a number on him without it. If they had asked, the answer was a training one, and a training Talent is worth nothing, and everyone in that trade knows it. The stairs at the back of the hall smelled of diesel and wet coats. Gault stopped him on the half landing, got a brown envelope out of the folder, and put it into his hand.

"Eight hundred," she said.

"Count it."

"I don't need to count it."

"Count it."

"It's an envelope from you."

"It is today." Gault did not move out of his way.

"Count it, Abe. One day it will be an envelope from somebody else and it will be a hundred short, and I want your hands to already know how to do this without you deciding to." So he counted it, standing on the stairs with his coat over his arm and his bag between his feet. Eight hundred in twenties. Forty bills, not new ones, and some of them stuck. He lost his place at the fifth bill and had to go back to the beginning. Gault let it take as long as it took.

"You turned down about five thousand marks in that room this morning."

"You told me to."

"I did." She got her keys out of her coat.

"Forty boys have sat down at that table in eleven years, and not one of them has ever said no to a number because somebody advised it. Two of them should have." She stopped with the keys in her hand.

"And the second one noticed that you did. I would like you to notice that she noticed." Abe put the envelope into his inside pocket and left his hand flat on the outside of it.

"Don't spend that on your sister," said Gault. He looked up.

"I'm not being unkind about your sister."

"It sounded like it."

"I know it did." She came back up one step, which he had not expected.

"Eight hundred does not touch the number on your kitchen wall and you know that number better than I do."

"Miss Gault."

"Spend it on something stupid. That is professional advice and you may have it in writing." She was four steps down already.

"I'll see you on the seventh of March." The hall was enormous with nobody in it. Someone was stacking chairs at the far end, and every one went up into the roof and came back a second later. The man who had offered to make him a sword was still there, packing his kit tables away along the side. He had asked in January, in the bus garage at Prescot, with a tape around his neck. Abe had said he would think about it, and had thought about it every day since and done nothing.

"You," said the man.

"You said to think about it."

"I said that in January."

"I've thought about it." The man looked at him. Then he went behind the boarding and came back with a folder with Abe's own name on the tab in pencil. The corner of the tab had gone soft, like paper does when it has been in a box being flicked past since December.

"Let's see what your hands are used to," said the man, and put his hand out for the canvas roll, and Abe gave him the scrap one. He turned it over under the high windows, found the place where the steel had worn into a shallow dish, and laid his thumb across the edge sideways, like Riddell had shown him in October.

"Who sharpened this?"

"I did."

"On what?"

"A wheel in a yard. It's an old stone."

"How many times?"

"Nine," said Abe.

"Since October." The man turned it over again and looked down the length of the flat with one eye shut, and then he gave it back.

"The bar's scrap," he said.

"That's not an insult, it's what it is. Somebody cut a strip off something and somebody else threw it away."

"I know."

"The edge isn't." He said it in the same voice he had said the other thing in.

"Whoever showed you that showed you properly." They did it on one of the folding tables, with the light coming down out of the high windows and the chairs going up behind them. The man drew, and asked, and drew again, and rubbed out most of what he drew. He asked how long Abe wanted in the hand, and Abe did not know, so the man put a piece of broom handle in his fist and moved his fingers along it until Abe said stop.

"What do you do when somebody comes at you fast?"

"Set my feet."

"And then what."

"Nothing," said Abe.

"That's the whole thing. They stop." The man wrote something down and drew for a while without saying anything. Abe stood with the broom handle in his hand and thought about the night in December. He had gone out south of the channel on his own, after an animal the length of a bus. He had gone with a flat bar he ground himself on a wheel in a yard, because that was what he had. Then the water took him off his feet, and he came up in the dark with the head swinging at him, and put that bar into it with both hands.

It had worked. It had only just worked. He was going back into that water one day a month from March. A better one would not have saved him any of that, and he knew it. But every hard thing he had done out there he had done holding a strip of scrap, and this man was drawing something for his hands.

"Do you ever come off the back foot?"

"No. Not ever."

"No," the man agreed.

"You don't." He said it without looking up. He had watched Abe for four bouts from the side of a hall and had not said one word about any of them until now.

"Straight, or does it come around?"

"I don't know what most people have."

"Most people have what their father had," said the man.

"Which is why most people have the wrong one." He turned the sheet around so Abe could see it. It was a shape on a page, drawn twice, once light and once heavy over the top, with numbers up the side of it in a hand nobody else would ever be able to read. Abe looked at it. It was lines on a page and not a picture of anything yet, but every one of them was there because of something he had said out loud in the last twenty minutes. The length in the hand was the length of his own hand.

The weight was where he had put it. It was not his father's, and it was not Croft's grandfather's, and it was not off a wall in a shop. He had to look out of the window before he could say anything, and the man waited and did not make a thing of it. Then he asked what Abe wanted it for. Abe had an answer ready. He had been getting it ready on the stairs.

"For the circuit," he said.

"There's a meet on the seventh of March, and I need to be-" Then he stopped, because all of that was true and none of it was the thing, and the man had a pencil in his hand and the whole afternoon.

"No," said Abe.

"I want one that's mine." The man wrote that down. He actually wrote it, on the sheet, in the box that said PURPOSE, in the same unreadable hand as the numbers, and did not make one single remark about it.

"Five hundred and sixty," he said.

"Six weeks. I don't go faster for anybody and I have told better than you no."

"What do I do with this one," said Abe. He had the scrap one in his hand and had not noticed picking it up.

"Whatever you like. It's yours." The man was writing the date in a box.

"It won't help you. Mine won't take your stone, different steel, and everything your hands know about keeping an edge they learned on that bar. You will be starting from nothing and you will ruin mine twice before you don't." Abe stood with the flat bar in one hand. Riddell had let him have the wheel for nothing in October and then gone inside so he would not have to watch him make a mess of it.

"All right," said Abe. Then he paid him five hundred and sixty marks out of a brown envelope, on a folding table, in an empty hall in Leeds, on a wet Sunday in February. Then he went and bought his sister the worst thing he could find. It was in the window of the shop on the station, between the sandwiches and the phone chargers. A mug with Leeds town hall on it, and over the picture it said A GRAND DAY OUT, and the handle was a sheep. It cost him eleven marks.

He had never once in his life bought a thing that did nothing, and he stood in front of the window a while over that, and then he bought it. He got the four o'clock train with two hundred and twenty nine marks in his inside pocket and the mug wrapped in a paper bag on his knee. He had the whole way home to work out how to say it. I got paid today. True, and the smallest part of it. I said no to five thousand marks. That one needed Peg sitting down first. There is a man in Leeds making me a sword.

That was the one he wanted to say, and it was the one with five hundred and sixty marks inside it, and he could not find a way to say it out loud that did not have the money in it somewhere. Somewhere around Wakefield he noticed that he had been practicing all three of them on Peg, and not on June. June he would just tell. He had never practiced a sentence on June in his life. He practiced for Peg because Peg was the one who did not know. And he was the one who had decided that, back in October, on his own.