Chương 85: Everything Stops

He went up the Corn Road on Tuesday afternoon with the scrap one in his bag, meaning to say it. He had the whole thing ready. He had done it on the bus twice. It was four sentences long and the first one started with four loaves off a rack on Marley Street, and he had gone over it enough times that he had stopped being able to hear it. The shop was warm and the light was on over the bench, and there was a crate standing out on the bench with the lid already off. Abe stopped inside the door.

Doing the crate was Abe's. It had been Abe's since he was fifteen, and it was the only reason he had ever come in on a Tuesday. In January Riddell had stood at that door with his back to the shop and told him he was not doing the crate any more. It had not been out on that bench since.

"Prescot lot," said Riddell, to the crate.

"Forty edges and about half of them have been in salt. Flats first."

"Mr. Riddell."

"Flats first, and don't do the thing where you go fast to show me."

"Mr. Riddell, I need to tell you where the money comes from." Riddell's hand came up off the bench. It did not come far. It came up about as far as a man lifts a hand at a car that has already stopped.

"Don't."

"You said in January that if it was the kind of thing where a person ought to be somewhere else, I should think about it that week."

"I did say that."

"I didn't go."

"No," said Riddell.

"And then two men walked you up your own street on a Thursday morning in front of all of Salt Row, and I heard about it off the streets before I'd got the shutter up." He still had not looked up from the bench.

"So I've had my say and it did nobody any good at all, and that's the end of the part where I get one. Same as I told you in January. I've never wanted to know and I still don't want to know." Abe stood with his bag on one shoulder and four sentences in him and nowhere to put any of them.

"Right," said Riddell. Then, in the same voice, without a gap in it: "What did you do with the money?"

"What?"

"Leeds. Mrs. Bewley came in on Sunday and told me, and then she came in again on Monday and told me again." He put the rag back on its nail.

"So. What did you do with it?"

"I bought a sword." Riddell came off the bench. He came off it like he came off it when a man put something down on the counter that he had not seen before, which Abe had watched happen four times in three years.

"Who made it?"

"A man in Leeds. He does the kit tables at the halls."

"There's four men doing those tables and three of them are useless. Did he measure you before he let you hold one, or after?"

"Before."

"Before." Riddell said it to the ceiling, satisfied about something.

"Good. The ones who do it after are selling you the one they've already made." Then he wanted to know the steel, and Abe did not know. Then he wanted to know how long in the hand. Abe held his hands up and showed him, and Riddell moved the top one about half an inch and said that was better. Then he said it was not up to him, and that Abe was not to tell the man in Leeds that a shopkeeper on the Corn Road had been moving his hands about. He was delighted. There was not one careful thing anywhere in it.

Abe did the flats, and did not go fast, and it took an hour and ten and his hands smelled of it all evening.

"Thursday," said Riddell, at the door.

"You owe me a Thursday and I'm collecting it."

"Thursday."

"And bring the new one in when it comes." He had the bolt in his hand.

"I've never had five hundred and sixty marks' worth of anything on that counter and I'd like to see one before I die." Abe went down the Corn Road in the dark with the four sentences still in him. He got about forty yards and started them again out of habit, and then stopped bothering, because there was no version of the first one that did not begin with a rack of bread. That evening he worked out what it actually was, and he worked it out by accident, in his own yard, with his sister in the house.

He had gone out after dinner because the kitchen was too warm and June was doing her French at the table with the green book open at her elbow. He had gone out to run the form and nothing else. He got to the third step of it and the world stopped. Rain in the air. The light off next door's window standing still on the wet concrete. Fifty seconds, near enough, like it always was. Abe stood in the middle of it with his arms half up and thought, June is eleven feet away through a wall.

He came out of it so fast he nearly went over. Then he stood in the rain with his arms still half up and went back over it, and it came apart in his hands. He had said it out loud to a woman with a camera on Wednesday, like he had been saying it since October. A person in the room stops it. Not next door and not out in the street. In the room. And that was not the rule, and he already knew it was not the rule.

On a Monday morning in December he had gotten quiet in a stockroom in Prescot with a man three steps inside the door and his arm out at coat height, looking straight at him. It had come anyway, at about fifty seconds, and left him shaking on his feet. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He had put that down as the one time he hung on. He had never asked what it was evidence of.

Marek in the hall on Fenner Street, standing in the middle of that floor with his arms folded, watching him walk twenty yards. Croft two feet away at a bench with the canvas open. Eleven people around a grate at the bottom of Salt Row. His own kitchen, most evenings. He had not tried it in any of them. He had known the answer since the first week and had stopped asking the question. In that stockroom he had been too frightened to think about himself.

Every other time, in every room, he had stood knowing someone could see him. He had spent four months looking for the difference in the rooms, and it was in him. He went back inside, wet to the shoulders, and stood in the kitchen doorway.

"June."

"What."

"Don't look up. Keep doing what you're doing." June, who had known about it since October, kept her eyes on her French book and said, "Right." Abe stood in the doorway of his own kitchen with his sister ten feet away and let his shoulders down, and the world stopped in about a minute and a half. He stood in it, in the dead quiet, with the faucet holding one drop and June frozen over her book with her pen a half inch off the page. Then he let it go, and she looked up, and it was gone before her eyes got to him.

"Did it work," said June.

"Don't look at me."

"I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at your ear."

"That counts."

"That is the stupidest thing you have ever said in this house," said June, and put her head back down over her homework. Abe stood in the doorway and did it again, and got it. He stood there in a stopped kitchen, with a drop of water hanging under the faucet and his sister four feet away with her pen off the page. He could feel his own face doing something enormous, and he let it. Then he spent an hour finding out how far it went.

June kept her head down at the table and let him walk in and out of the kitchen behind her. Four feet, with her reading. Once in the doorway with the light on and his sister in the same room. Never if she looked up, and never if he only thought she might. Then he went out into the rain and did a day's work in his own yard with somebody in the house. He came in out of the yard at eleven with his hair flat to his head and the kitchen light still on.

June was at the table under it with her homework spread out and her coat on over her pajamas, because the heating went off at nine and it had rained all evening and it was still raining now.

"You're wet."

"It's raining."

"I know it's raining. I live here." She did not look up.

"Abe. When you go in March. On the boat."

"Yes."

"Do they know what you can actually do?" Abe stood in the doorway of his own kitchen with the yard still running off him onto the floor and looked at the calendar on its nail, with MON 9 MARCH across the square in green.

"They know what I told them," he said.

"That's not the same thing."

"No." June shut the French book on her finger to keep her place.

"Right," she said.

"So what happens if they find out you can't?" Abe stood there. He had spent eleven days being frightened of the wrong question. Every hour of it had gone on what would happen when Ainsworth found out what he could do. Not one minute of it had gone anywhere near what would happen when she found out what he couldn't. Peg was in the doorway behind him in her robe with her arms folded, and she had been there long enough.

"What can't you do," she said. Abe turned around. There was a sentence he had been carrying since the third of October. He had spent four months not finding a way to say it that was both true and sayable, and he had become so used to not finding one that he had stopped looking. He had given the whole school it works while I train. He had given Tench it works while I train. He had given a woman with a camera the same four words on Wednesday and she had written it down as him being modest.

He stood in his own kitchen at eleven o'clock at night in a wet shirt and said it.

"When I train, everything stops." Peg did not say anything.

"Not me. Everything else. The rain stops in the air and the light stops and nothing moves and I can keep going for as long as I can stand up." His voice went up at the end of it and he could not stop it.

"That's it. That's the whole Talent. It doesn't do anything else." The kitchen faucet dripped twice.

"How long," said Peg.

"Since the night of my birthday."

"No." She had not moved off the door frame.

"How long can you keep going." Abe opened his mouth and found that no adult had ever asked him that.

"As long as I want," he said.

"I take food in with me. That's the only thing that ever stops it."

"As long as you want."

"It doesn't take any time out here," he said.

"You'd blink, and I'd have been in there a day." June had gone very still at the table with her hand flat on the French book. Peg looked at her, once, and June looked back, and Abe watched his aunt find out in that half second that his sister had known for four months. Nobody said a word about it. It went across that kitchen like a draft under a door and it went into the wall somewhere and it will still be in the wall in ten years.

"Show me," said Peg. And there it was, and for the first time since the third of October it was not a no. Abe stood in the middle of his own kitchen and found that his hands had gone cold.

"You'll both have to look at the table."

"Abe."

"I'm not being clever. It's me. It doesn't start if I know somebody can see me." He heard how it sounded.

"And it takes about a minute. So you'll both have to mean it." June put her head down without being asked twice. Peg took longer. She looked at her own hands on the door frame instead, like you do at a needle. Abe let his shoulders down in the middle of his own kitchen and stood while nobody looked at him. It took longer than a minute. He could hear his aunt breathing. Then the rain stopped on the window.

He went across the kitchen through the dead quiet, past his aunt with her eyes down and not breathing, past the table, past his sister with one hand flat on a French book and her pen stopped half a word into a line, and stood at the sink with the window behind him. Neither of them saw the rain stop. They were in it with everything else. Then he let it go. June looked up first. She looked at the doorway. Then she looked at the sink. Then she put both hands over her mouth and screamed into them.

"Do it again," said June, through her hands. Peg had not moved. She was still looking at the door frame.

"Peg."

"You could have walked," said Peg. Abe stood at the sink with his hands at his sides.

"Yes," he said.

"I could have."

"A minute is a long time to have your head down."

"It is." Peg lifted her head then, and looked at him at the sink, and did not say anything for a while.

"So that's what you've got," she said.

"A thing you can do that nobody can ever watch you do."

"Yes."

"And your sister's known since October." Peg was not asking.

"Because she's the only one who ever just took your word for it." June did not look up from the table. Her ears had gone red.

"So you've been on your own," said Peg.

"It's not like that."

"That is exactly what it is like." She said it flatly, and not to him, and then she came off the door frame and went past him to the kettle, because there was nowhere else in that kitchen to go.

"Four months. In the yard. In February."

"It doesn't feel long."

"No," said Peg.

"I don't expect it does." She filled the kettle and put it down and did not switch it on, and stood at the counter with her back to both of them. Then she turned around and came across the kitchen and put her arms around him, wet coat and all. Abe stood in it with his hands out at his sides like a man being measured, because he could not remember the last time anyone had done that and did not know what he was meant to do with his arms.

"You silly boy," said Peg into his shoulder.

"Four months."

"I'm all right."

"I know you're all right. That is not the point and you know it isn't." She let go of him and pushed his wet hair back off his forehead with the flat of her hand, like she had when he was about eleven, and did not apologize for it.

"Four months out there in the dark on your own, and the two of us asleep eleven feet away."

"You'd have worried."

"I am your aunt," said Peg.

"Worrying is the job. It is all of the job. It is what I am for." She held on to the side of his head a second longer, and then let go and got the pan down off its hook.

"Sit down."

"It's eleven o'clock."

"I am aware what time it is." She put the pan on the ring.

"June, get him a dry shirt off the radiator. And neither of you tell me you're not hungry, because I have had a week of it." June went. On her way past she put her hand flat on her brother's back, once, and did not say anything. So Abe sat down at his own kitchen table at eleven at night in a wet coat and let his aunt make him eggs. Nobody talked for a bit. The pan got going. The rain kept on outside.

"Why are they taking you at all," said Peg. Abe looked at the table. There were four sentences he had carried up the Corn Road that afternoon and brought the whole way home again, and the first one started with a rack of bread on Marley Street.

"Because I can get somewhere nobody else can," he said. Peg did not turn around, and she did not ask him anything else.

"When you go on that boat in March," said Peg, with her back to him, "you'll have four men in the water with you the whole time."

"Yes."

"Right," said Peg.

"Right." Out in the yard the rain went on coming down harder than the drain could take it.