Chương 64: Twenty

June was at the door with her bag on when he came down, and she stopped with one arm in her coat.

"You're in uniform," she said.

"I know."

"You haven't been in uniform since term started." She got the other arm in and started on the buttons from the bottom up, got them wrong by one, and started again.

"Are you in trouble?"

"No."

"Are you going to be?"

"Probably."

"Good," June said, and opened the door. She walked at his speed instead of hers, which meant she wanted something.

"So why today," she said, at the corner by the laundry.

"I need a number on paper by Saturday."

"You've got a number. Fenn wrote you one yesterday and you came home like somebody had hit you with a plank."

"Fenn's is wrong." June thought about that for most of the length of the laundry wall.

"Wrong low or wrong high," she said.

"Low."

"By how much?" He did not answer that. They were at her gate, and he had worked out on the way down the stairs that he did not want to say it out loud until the school's pad had said it first.

"Fine," June said.

"Don't tell me. I'll read it on a wall like everybody else." Then she went in through her gate without waiting to hear what he made of that. The cultivation corridor smelled of wet coats, the way it did on the first Monday of anything. The board was at the back of it, two hundred names in Nita Sowerby's green marker, with the top ten lines ruled off in permanent black by somebody's careful work about thirty years ago. DANFORTH, P. was on the top line.

Abe stood in front of it with his bag on one shoulder and read the whole thing from the top down, and nobody looked at him at all, because half the year had not seen him since the last day of term and the other half had stopped expecting to. Danforth had read Layer 11 on the fifth of January. Nita had dated the line 5 JAN in the small green letters she used for dates, and getting there had cost his father a lot of crates. He had held the top line for a week.

Abe's own name was on the second line with 1 DEC written small beside it in the same green pen. Ada Bewley was fourth now, at Layer 6. She had spent Christmas doing early mornings at the Corn Road laundry and holds on her bedroom floor with the bed shoved against the wall, and it had moved her seven places up the board. In December she had told him her boots leaked. She had done all of it in them.

He was still reading when Ellis Naylor came past with a football under his arm, stopped, walked backward four steps, and said "You're here."

"I'm here."

"Right," Naylor said, and went off down the corridor at a run to tell somebody. Mr. Tench was in the cultivation office with the year list and a mug he had clearly forgotten about.

"The reading was a week ago," he said.

"I know."

"You were not at it."

"I know." Tench put the list down.

"Then you know I can't call the year in twice for one boy who wasn't here for it."

"Not the year." Abe stayed where he was in the doorway.

"Just the pad, and a printout with the twelfth of January on it. There's a competition in Prescot on Saturday and it's full. Gault told me no in December, but she's not saying no now, and the only number she's got for me is still the December one." Tench did not answer for long enough that Abe heard the radiator come on.

"Break," he said.

"Not now. At break, when the gym's empty, and you and I will do it quietly and you'll take your paper and go."

"Thanks, sir."

"Don't thank me yet." Tench picked the mug up and looked into it and put it down again.

"There'll be twenty of them in that doorway and I'm not sending anybody out." The gym at break was supposed to be two people. Tench got the pad up off the cart and plugged the screen in where the basketball scores used to go, and by the time it had warmed up there were eleven people in the doorway. By the time Abe got his coat off there were forty. Nobody was making any noise. Forty people stood in a doorway in a school gym at eleven o'clock in the morning, and not one of them wanted to be sent back to class.

Nell Mott was at the front with her arms folded and a look on her like a woman who had bet money.

"Anytime you like," Tench said. Abe stepped onto the pad with his hands out of his pockets, and his legs did not feel like his. He had thought about how to stand. He had thought about it in a marsh, and on a bridge in a city nobody in this room had ever been to. Now he was here and he could not remember one single thing he had decided. The screen changed. DOLAN, A. · Layer 20 · Body 15 · Mind 5 Nothing happened at all.

Forty people looked at a screen at the end of a hall, and the first sound anybody made was Sam Ottley at the back saying, quite reasonably, "It's broken." Two people laughed. Then they stopped, because Tench was not laughing. He was standing beside the cart with his arms down, looking at the screen. Stolen novel; please report.

"It isn't broken," Tench said. Amrit said, "That's a two and a zero."

"I know what it is," Ottley said.

"No," said Amrit.

"It's got two numbers in it." Nell Mott came out of the doorway and walked the length of the gym and stood under the screen with her head back, reading it from close up, checking it. Then she came back and stood next to Abe with her hands in her sleeves, and stayed there while everybody else talked. Nobody was going to cheer. Abe worked that out standing on the pad, with his coat over his arm and his name up on the wall in letters a foot high. He had wanted a noise.

He had wanted one since the sixth of October, when Nell Mott picked a bench up off the floor with one arm and the whole room cheered her. Then Tench had called Abe up to the pad, and Abe had done sixty push-ups, and nothing had happened at all. What he got today was forty people going quiet. Nell Mott was still standing next to him. Then they started talking, and every one of them talked to somebody else and not to him. They said his name a lot.

He heard Danforth, and he heard a boy behind Ottley say record and get shushed for saying it. That went on for a while. Then Tench got them out with about four words, and one of them was lunch. They went, and then they made room. Forty people who had been shoulder to shoulder two minutes ago flattened back against the wall bars to let him come down the middle of the gym, and nobody had asked them to. One boy near the front put a hand out to move his friend aside.

Abe walked out through the gap they left him and did not look at anybody, because he could not think of a single thing to do with his face. Tench caught him at the door with the paper still in his hand.

"There's nobody in this building who can teach you now." He said it flatly, and he was looking at the cart while he said it.

"I know," Abe said.

"You've known since October. I've known since October." Tench put the printout into his hand.

"The difference is that until this morning I could tell myself I was wrong."

"Go and eat something," Tench said.

"You've gone a color I don't like." He got as far as the corridor outside the locker rooms, and then the size of it hit him all at once, and he had to stop and put a hand flat on the wall. He still had the printout in the other one. Twenty. He had been last at everything from the sixth of October to the third of November. He had stood on that gym floor with a broken hand behind his back while thirty phones went up over people's heads.

Every hour of work behind that number had been done in a stopped world with nobody in it. Abe stood on his own in an empty corridor and made the noise himself, and he was happier than he had ever been about anything. Then the bell rang and he wiped his face on his sleeve and went and got a tray like everybody else. Nita did the board after lunch, and Abe went and watched her do it, because he wanted to see how she was going to solve it. She had a stepladder, which she had never needed before.

She erased the top line first. DANFORTH, P. came off the wall under the side of her hand, and she had put that name at the top of that board more times than she had put anybody's.

"He had it a week," she said.

"I know."

"He was so pleased." She wiped her hand on her skirt and looked at the green on it.

"He went around everybody who did badly. He did it for an hour." Then she wrote his name on the second line, and nothing else on the board moved, because nothing else had changed since the fifth. She did the top line last. DOLAN, A. · Layer 20 · Body 15 · Mind 5 The columns were ruled for one digit. She had to put the zero in under the two and squash it, and whoever had ruled those columns had never needed room for a second. The corridor made a noise.

Then it made a different noise, because Ellis Naylor put his finger on the board and counted down it and said, "Hang on. He's further in front of Danforth than Danforth is in front of us."

"Who's Halloran?" a girl in the year below said.

"One of the teachers, I think," her friend said. Abe was standing right next to them. Then they went back to talking about the board. Abe knew who she was. Ivy Halloran had held twelve for twenty six years, and she worked in an office at the top of town. He had been two off her on the first of December, and he had wanted it so badly that month that he practiced the walk up to the pad in a stopped corridor, twice, so that he would look normal doing it.

He got it on the twenty ninth of December, on his own, in a school yard in Prescot, with the sleet standing still over the roofs. Then he had gone past it before New Year, and he could not now remember which day. Nita went along his line to do the last column and stopped. The board has five columns and the fifth one is what your Talent does, in two or three words. She had written every one of them since September. Mott's said lifts what she holds. Croft's said cuts through. Danforth's said reads a room.

She held the marker over the space at the end of Abe's line and stopped there. She had asked him once already, in November, in this corridor, with sixty people listening, and he had told her to leave it empty. She had left it empty for ten weeks. So she waited on the stepladder with the cap off.

"Go on then," Abe said. Nita turned around up there.

"You said can't."

"I know what I said."

"I've had that word in my book since October." She had gone red in the face.

"Do you know how stupid that gap looks? I put it there because you told me to."

"I know."

"Don't say it just because you had a good morning."

"That's not why." Abe looked up at her.

"In November I thought it'd make everyone ask me how I did it."

"And now?"

"Now they're asking anyway." He put his bag down.

"Write it." She wrote training on the end of his line. It was the shortest thing in the column, with room left over after it. Sam Ottley read it over Abe's shoulder and said, "Training. That's it? That's what it does?"

"That's what he told us in October," Nita said, and came down the stepladder with the marker in her teeth. Abe read his own row across, one end to the other. DOLAN, A. · Layer 20 · Body 15 · Mind 5 · training Ottley had already gone off down the corridor. Croft got to him on the stairs and was so pleased about it that it was actually embarrassing.

"Fifteen. Body fifteen." He was walking backward in front of Abe and not once looking at the stairs.

"Dolan, my uncle does the wall at Ketton and he's on eleven and he is the size of a door."

"I know."

"You don't know, because you've never met him." Croft got a hand on the rail to stop himself going down a step.

"Saturday. My place, nine o'clock. You're going to put that opener on me and I'm going to eat it, and then we'll find out what you've actually got."

"You're going to eat it, are you."

"I'm going to eat it." He grinned.

"And bring the scrap one. Not a school blade. I want to see the thing you've been swinging in that yard." Then Naylor yelled at him from the landing and he went, still walking backward for the first three steps. Gault called at two o'clock and did not congratulate him.

"Twenty," she said.

"Right. Sit down, because I've got four things for you and you want them in one go."

"I'm standing in a corridor."

"Then lean on something." Paper moved at her end of the line.

"Thursday the listing goes up. Your row on it is going to make about four phones ring by dinnertime and I like the people on two of them."

"What do I do about that?"

"Nothing. That's mine." Something got written down.

"Saturday the seventeenth, Prescot. There's a competition. It was full on Friday, but it isn't full now."

"You got me into a full competition in four days."

"I did," Gault said, and did not tell him how. Then she said a name. Then she said it again, slower, and waited.

"Marchbank," Abe said.

"He'll come and find you before I get there, so be nice to him. He's the one certain thing this region has got and everybody has been telling him so all year." A chair moved.

"He has a calendar like yours, Mr. Dolan, and rather more of it." Then she said the sixth of March, and Abe said "That's the ninety days," and Gault said "That's the ninety days," and neither of them said anything else about it.

"I'm not going to pretend this is a small thing," she said.

"You've made my spring extremely complicated and I'm delighted about it. Eat properly. You sound thin over the phone, which shouldn't be possible." Then she hung up, and Abe stood in the corridor outside the music rooms and worked it out. He had promised Miles Croft nine o'clock on Saturday morning. He had promised Gault a card in Prescot on Saturday afternoon, and Saturday was the seventeenth, and there was only one of it.

Danforth was at the gate at four o'clock, standing where nobody stands by accident, with his bag over his shoulder. He had his hand out before Abe got to him.

"That was a very good morning for you," he said.

"Genuinely."

"Yours was a good week. Eleven's massive."

"It was." He said it lightly and he was smiling and it was a real smile.

"I'm not going to be strange about it. I'd be lying if I said the timing wasn't funny."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, that's worse." Danforth laughed. Then he asked it, politely, with his chin down.

"Can I ask you something and you can tell me to get lost?"

"Go on."

"How." There it was, at four o'clock, at a gate, from the fairest person Abe had ever met. Abe had a whole answer ready. He had built it over two months and every word of it was true and it explained nothing at all.

"I trained," he said. Danforth looked at him. He looked at him for a while without answering, and his jaw set and let go again, and Abe caught it, because he had spent three months learning to read people who were standing still.

"Right," Danforth said. Then he said "See you tomorrow," and went off down the road toward the good end of town, and he was smiling the whole way.