Chương 71: What Money Buys

On Saturday the twenty-fourth of January, Abe went into the shop with it all worked out.

"Mr. Riddell, I've been thinking about it all week and I wanted to ask you about the-""No."

"You don't know what I was going to ask."

"You were going to ask me to buy lots for you in bulk and keep them in my back room." Riddell put both hands flat on the counter.

"Because a boy with a bag of money gets remembered."

"Yes."

"How much have you got." Abe told him. Riddell shut his eyes for a second.

"Abe. On New Year's Day I counted twelve hundred and forty marks across this counter into your hand, out of a tin." He said it steadily.

"I have thought about that tin every week since."

"I know."

"That was a boy who had a bad afternoon on the water. What you have just said to me is a business."

"I know it is."

"I cannot run a business like that through a shop that sells window latches and still be a man who sells window latches."

"I know."

"Do you." Riddell looked at him properly.

"Then why did you ask."

"Because I wanted you to say no out loud," Abe said, "so I'd stop working out ways to ask." Riddell's shoulders came down. He got the kettle on without being asked, which was the nearest he came to saying he was relieved. Gault fixed it in one phone call and was insufferable about it.

"You have five thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine marks in a tin under a bed, and it came out of a market in another city." She said it in the voice of a woman ticking a list.

"None of it is illegal. All of it is unexplainable. Those are two different problems and only one of them is mine."

"So what do I do."

"Bring it to me. I put it through the contract and pay it back out to you across the spring as money I owe you, and then it is wages. Nobody in the world asks a boy where his wages came from."

"That's it?"

"That is it. It is the most boring thing I will do for you all year and it is worth more than the listing."

"That's really."

"Before you thank me." Paper moved.

"I am now the person who knows exactly what you have got. That is not free. It is only not expensive today." Abe understood. He took it to her on the Tuesday in a supermarket bag, because he did not own anything better to carry it in. She counted it on a desk above a haulage office in Prescot, and she gave him a receipt with his name on it, and she did not make one single joke about the bag. He had never seen four figures in one place before December and he had never seen five in his life.

It did not look like anything, which he had not expected. It looked like paper, in bands, in a stack about as tall as a paperback. He put his hands on it before he gave it over, because he wanted to know what it felt like. It felt like paper.

"Now the important bit," said Gault.

"What are you keeping back? And I am asking as your sponsor, so say it out loud in front of me."

"Two hundred and eighty-nine. Essence and the fares." Gault raised her eyebrows about a centimeter, which for Gault is falling off a chair.

"Two hundred and eighty-nine out of five thousand seven hundred. Everybody your age spends the lot."

"I know."

"Why don't you?"

"Because I can't burn it," Abe said. He had worked that out on the train on the way down, and it had taken him four minutes, and it had ruined the rest of the journey. The lots he can afford are the dying ones at the cheap end, at eight marks each. Forty of them in Manchester paid him a hundred and seventy-eight foundation between them, and cost him five weeks of his own time to sit through. So five thousand marks is about six hundred lots. Six hundred lots is not a shopping trip.

Six hundred lots is six hundred days of sitting on a floor with one of them open in front of him, because the Weave would only let a man take one a day and he had tried it the other way. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Lots do not keep that long, and no market on this coast could hand him that many at once anyway. For four months the answer to every problem in his life had been if I had money. He had money now.

It was in a supermarket bag on a desk in Prescot, but it turned out money had never been the thing stopping him. The night market in Prescot opened when the light went and traded until morning, and it was where the lots that would die by breakfast got sold to whoever would have them. Abe went along it slowly with a case in his hand and money in his coat, and for once he was the one being followed. He walked it reading the lane the way he had read it in December, without meaning to.

The crates, the gaps between the stalls, which table a man could empty while its owner's head was turned. Buying was better.

"Twelve," said a man with a folding table.

"Eight."

"Eight is Manchester. This is Prescot."

"I know what it is." Abe put a hand on the case.

"I'm taking twenty of them and I'm taking them now, and in an hour and a half they're going to be worth nothing at all to you." The man looked at him for a while and then said nine, and Abe said nine, and they shook on it. Then he did it twice more down the same lane. By the end of it he was doing it well, and he did not enjoy that as much as he had expected to. At the last table the woman said she knew who he was.

Her son had been in the garage on Saturday and had watched him put the Ketton boy on the mat, and she said she would not be charging him nine. She charged him twelve. He did the math on the walk to the station. Twenty lots a week, every week, in whatever city Gault's calendar put him in, and the spring was all cities. He was still doing it when the train came. He got home at nine and put the case under his bed and did not open it.

Then he stood in the kitchen doorway with the folded price list in his hand and could not work out how to start. The wall by the window has had the same sheet of paper on it since before any of this. Two columns in June's handwriting, done in marker when she was twelve. WHAT IT COSTS on the left, and two million marks under it with every single zero written out. Beside the two million there was a face sticking its tongue out, so that anybody doing the subtraction had to look at a joke while they did it.

WHAT WE HAVE on the right. Under that it said three hundred and forty. It had said three hundred and forty since June wrote it, and Abe had walked past it twice a day for four years, and it had never said anything else.

"June."

"What."

"Have you got a marker?" June looked up from the table, with the green book open beside her elbow, where she kept it now. She looked at his face, and then at the folded paper. Then she got up and got the marker out of the drawer without asking him one question. Peg came in from the living room, because the kitchen had gone the wrong kind of quiet.

"What's happened," said Peg.

"Nothing's happened. Sit down." Abe put the list on the table.

"I sold the cores. All of them." Peg stayed standing.

"It's clean. Gault put it through her contract, so it comes back as wages." He got the receipt out of his coat and put it next to the list.

"It's got my name on it." He said the number. Nobody said anything at all. Then Peg sat down on the chair by the door, and she had not decided to. June did the wall. She got up on the chair, the way she had since she was small. She crossed out three hundred and forty with one line, and then she wrote 5, 840 underneath it in the same marker she had used four years ago, which had almost no ink left in it and made a sound like a zipper.

Then she got down and went and looked at it from the doorway, because that was where she looked at things from.

"It's a different shape," she said.

"It's a different shape."

"No, I mean the column. It's not a stupid column any more. It's a small column." June had her arms folded and her face had gone somewhere he could not follow.

"It used to be a joke and now it's a small number and I don't know why that's worse."

"It isn't worse."

"I know it isn't worse," June said.

"I'm just telling you what it is." Peg had not said anything at all. She was looking at the wall with her hands in her lap and her coat still on.

"Four hundred marks," she said, eventually.

"What?"

"The first thing on that list you brought back. The one you told me about in the kitchen." Peg did not take her eyes off the sheet of paper.

"It was four hundred marks to have somebody look at her properly. Four hundred."

"Yes."

"We have had four hundred marks in this house exactly twice since your mother died," said Peg, "and both times it went on something that had already happened." Then she got up and put the kettle on and told June to move her books, and the evening carried on being an evening, and Abe stood in the doorway for a while and let it happen. It was not the two million. It was not going to be the two million for a long time, and he knew the arithmetic on that better than anybody in the room.

But for four months the answer had been no because there was no money. Now there was money, and the answer to the two million was still no, and the answer to the first line on the list was not no any more. It had gone from never to when. He burned the case that week, in the yard, in four long stills. It was dull work and he had never told anybody that. You break the seal and you sit with it, and whatever is in there goes out of the world and into you at a rate that you cannot hurry, and then you do it again.

Forty of them in Manchester had cost him five weeks of his own life in a locked hall with nothing else in it. One a day is the limit. Twenty-two of them took him twenty-two days of his own time, and he came out of it three times to eat and once because Peg wanted the yard. When he was done, the yard was exactly as cold as when he started and the light on the wall had not moved. His own bar had.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 16 Foundation: 338 / 22, 500 (Body 17) Two hundred marks and twenty-two days of his own life, and the bar had moved by about half a percent of a layer. He sat on the step and looked at it for a while. Nineteen thousand six hundred. At the rate he had just paid for it, the whole of Body 17 comes to about forty thousand marks and more than ten years of his own days. And Body 18 costs more than that, and Body 19 costs more than Body 18, and it goes on doing that forever.

He was not upset about it. That is the part he could not have explained to anybody. He sat on a cold step in the dark with half a percent of a layer in him and thought, well, then, and went in to eat something. He went back to Riddell's at ten to six on the Sunday evening to do the sharpening he had said he would do. Riddell had already done it. All of it, the whole crate, edges up on the rack, done properly and done fast. Riddell had never worked like that in his life.

He was sitting on the stool at the back with the book shut in front of him and the pen on top of it.

"You've done the crate."

"I've done the crate."

"You never do the crate."

"No," said Riddell. He did not get up and he did not open the book, and then he told Abe to go home, because there was nothing here for him tonight, and that he would see him on Thursday. Abe got halfway to the door before he turned around.

"Mr. Riddell. Is everything all right?"

"Yes," said Riddell, and looked straight at him while he said it, and that was the part Abe could not get to sit down properly on the walk home.