Chương 56: The First of January

Abe woke up at nine ten on the first of January in his own bed, having slept in it, on purpose, like a person. He lay there for a while and listened to the building being quiet. Then he remembered the dog. He went and asked Peg about it before he had his shoes on, standing in the kitchen doorway in yesterday's shirt, and Peg said yes to it without looking up from the kettle. So the dog was taken care of, and it was not the thing June had wanted. She had wanted him to remember on Wednesday.

Then he remembered the hill. Ada had gone up the top of the hill behind the block before it got light, the way she did every year, and had stood there on her own and watched the year come in over the water. She had told him about it twice now. He had said he would try. It was nine ten. The sun had been up for over an hour. Abe put his arm over his eyes and lay there and felt like a piece of dirt about it, which at least made a change from the other things. Riddell had the shop open on the first of January anyway.

There was nobody on the Corn Road. Every other place on the street had its shutters down and a note on the door about Monday. Riddell's had the light on at the back, and the bolt off, and a radio going.

"We're shut," he said, without looking up.

"I know."

"Then why are you in my shop." He turned a wrench over on the bench and put it in the wrong tray on purpose so he could take it out again.

"Go and be young somewhere. It's New Year's Day." Abe had counted four out in the alley behind the shop and left the rest at home, wrapped in a shirt, under his bed. Four, because five felt like a different conversation. He put the bag on the bench and opened it. Riddell looked into it for a long time without moving. Then he reached past Abe and took the cores out one at a time and set them on his own cloth. Four of them, in a row, gray and dull and the size of a fist.

He went through the same routine with each one. Lamp, then cloth, then thumbnail, then the little glass he kept in his breast pocket. He was slower with the fourth one than the first.

"Clean," he said.

"Okay."

"They're all clean." He put the glass back in his pocket.

"That's the part I'd like you to understand, Abe. All four."

"Is that a problem?"

"One core is a boy who got somewhere he shouldn't and did something stupid about it. One I can sell." Riddell put the cloth down.

"It's four." He went out the back and came in with the tin, and counted it out on the bench. It took a while. Most of it was in twenties, and there was not enough in the tin, so he had to go up to the apartment over the shop and come back down again, and he did not say one word on either trip.

"That's the shop and it's me," he said, when it was all on the bench.

"Mostly me. A shop this size cannot have twelve hundred marks walk out of it in January with nothing walking in, so it didn't." Twelve hundred and forty marks. It made a stack you could not close a hand around. So that was as much money as Riddell had. Abe stood and looked at the stack of it and thought about the cores under his bed, which were more than that bench was ever going to hold.

"In October you brought me one and you were shaking," Riddell said.

"I've thought about that once a week since, in case you're interested." Abe put the money inside his coat.

"I'm not asking you anything," Riddell said.

"You know that."

"I know."

"Right." He picked the wrench back up.

"Then don't come in on a Sunday. Sundays my sister's here." Abe walked home along the Corn Road with more money in his coat than Peg made in three months. He was going to have to spend most of it today. Twelve hundred marks in a coat pocket is not something a person keeps carrying around. The thing about it was that today it would work. Gault paid on the first, and Gault had paid this morning, and there were six hundred marks sitting in Peg's account with a sponsor's name on them.

So he would not have to tell anybody a lie. Peg would work out where the money came from on her own, and she would work it out wrong, and he would let her. He stood outside the good shop at the top of the Longmarket and made himself look straight at what he was about to do, because it was worth looking at. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Then he went in and bought a coat. June's coat was dark green and it had a hood with a wire in the edge so it kept its shape.

It was warm enough that a person could stand at a bus stop in it for twenty minutes and not care. For Peg he bought a radio. It was a proper one, the sort that sits on a kitchen windowsill and works, with a wooden case and a dial that moves smoothly instead of in jumps. The one on their windowsill had been dying since before he Awakened. Peg hit it on the side and it came back for a bit, and everybody in that apartment had heard her do it about a thousand times.

He carried both of them home in a bag with a rope handle and a shop's name on the side, and he felt sick the entire way. Peg got the radio out of the bag and put it on the table and looked at it.

"Where's this from," she said.

"The first landed today." Which was true.

"The first landed today," Peg repeated. She turned the radio around and looked at the back of it, and then at the front.

"The first is six hundred marks and two hundred and twenty of it is June's."

"I know what it is."

"Do you." She plugged it in. The dial light came on, orange, and the room filled up with a man talking about the weather off the coast, and it was so clear that June came out of her room to see what it was. Peg stood there and listened to a weather report she did not care about for about half a minute.

"It's lovely," she said.

"You shouldn't have. And you should have put it on essence, and you know it."

"Here we go," Abe said.

"Don't here we go me." She did not turn the radio off.

"You've got a woman in an office paying you to get better at something, and my kitchen sounds nice now. Do you see the shape of that?" June put the green coat on in the kitchen and did the zipper up to her chin and stood in it.

"It's got a wire in the hood," she said.

"I know. That's why I got it."

"I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying you've lost your mind." She put the hood up. From inside it she said, "Peg's right. You should've bought the stuff you rub on yourself and gets you stronger."

"That's not what essence is."

"It's what it sounds like." She took the hood down.

"How much better would you have gotten, though? With the money for this?" Abe stood in his own kitchen and worked out that the honest answer was not very much. The money would have bought tins he could only open one of a day, and one week in that marsh had paid him more than every tin he had ever opened. He could not say one word of it out loud.

"A bit," he said.

"Well." June ran the zipper down and then up again, because it was a good zipper.

"It's the nicest thing anybody's ever bought me. I still think you're an idiot." They had the year's first proper dinner at four in the afternoon, because Peg had been off her feet all day and had gotten started on it at two out of boredom. She was in the apartment the whole day. She sat in her chair with the radio on and the door open and a magazine she did not read, and she got up every so often to look in the pan. Abe watched her do it and thought about what she was in the middle of and did not know.

Peg thought the money on the table came from a woman in an office. June knew about the still and thought that was everything. So his aunt was standing outside two locked doors at once, in her own kitchen, on a day off, being pleased about a radio. Then he looked at the cupboard. There was food in this apartment. There was going to be more of it in the cupboard tonight than any other night this year, because it was the first of January and Peg had done a shop.

The wheel ran on food and he could carry nine days of it at a time. Nobody would have to be robbed. He would not have to walk into anybody's stockroom. It was thirty feet away and the door had no lock on it. He stood in the doorway and ran it all the way to the end anyway, because he had promised himself in October that he would always run it all the way to the end. The person he would be stealing from was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon, tasting it and pulling a face at it. So the answer was no.

He got to it before she had finished pulling the face, and it did not make him feel like a good person. The thing with October happened over the plates.

"Right," June said.

"Settle an argument. Your birthday."

"What about it?"

"What did we have. The night before. Before any of it started." She had her fork up.

"I say fish and Peg says it wasn't."

"Fish," Abe said. Peg looked up.

"Hang on," June said.

"That was August. That was when the oven went." June went back to her plate without making anything of it. He had eaten that dinner. He had sat in this chair and eaten it hours before the Weave arrived and told him he was worth nothing. He could see the kitchen and the light over the table, but he could not get at one thing that had been on it.

"Fine, then," June said.

"Easy one. What did I give you?" And Abe went to answer that, and there was nothing there either. He knew there had been a present. He knew she had made him wait until after, because she always did that. He could remember being annoyed about waiting. Two months of his own life had gone past since the last time he thought about any of it, and the whole business had gotten as far away from him as something out of the year he was nine.

"The book," he said. June's fork stopped.

"It wasn't a book," she said.

"June, I'm winding you up."

"Right," said June. She did not say anything else about it. She ate the rest of her dinner and talked to Peg about a girl in her year, and then she said, "Does it get the one with the call-ins?"

"Your mother liked that station," Peg said.

"I know she did," said June. Nobody said anything for a while, and Peg turned the radio up a bit. June came and stood in the kitchen doorway while Peg was on the phone to Marge.

"You went funny at me," she said.

"About the present."

"I didn't."

"You did. You went white and then you did a joke." She had her arms folded inside the coat sleeves.

"You do that now." Abe put a plate on the rack. He had the whole thing ready to say. It was one sentence long, and she was the only person on Earth he could say it to, because she already knew about the still and she had believed him in four seconds when he was standing in her doorway in October with nothing to show her. I couldn't remember Ray Garbutt's name last night.

It was going to be one line out of his mouth and then it would be in the room, and June would sit down on the arm of the chair and ask him how long, and he would have to say two months, and then she would ask two months of what.

"I'm tired," Abe said.

"That's all it is." June stood in the doorway a moment longer.

"Okay," she said, and went and sat down. Abe did the dishes, and stood at the sink for a while afterward being fully aware of how small a thing that was. When he came through, June was in the chair by the window with her legs over the arm of it, writing in a school notebook. She had a pen in her mouth and her new coat on over her pajamas, indoors, at seven in the evening, because she had not taken it off since four.

"That's homework and it's the holidays," Abe said.

"It's not homework." He came around the back of the chair to see, and June shut the book with her finger still in the page. She did it slowly, and calmly, and she looked up at him while she did it. He had already read it. Four words at the top of a clean page, under today's date, in her round handwriting.

"It's for me," she said.

"What is it?"

"It's for me, Abe." Everybody in that apartment kept notes about June. Peg did it on the calendar, the clinic did it on a card, and Abe did it in his head every day without calling it anything. He had never thought about what it would be like to be the one getting written down. It said: the third of October.