Chương 77: Four Minutes

On Tuesday night June went through his clothes. It started at the table, over the potatoes.

"There's a camera thing tomorrow," Abe said, like it was the fourth thing on a list. June put her fork down.

"What do you mean a camera thing."

"Gault set it up. Somebody comes to the school and films you for about four minutes and it goes out with the circuit listings."

"You're going to be on TV."

"It's not TV, it's the listings."

"Abe." June had both hands flat on the table now.

"Abraham. That is TV. That is actually, literally TV, that is the definition of the thing." She turned around to the empty doorway and shouted, "PEG. HE'S GOING TO BE ON THE TV."

"She's at work."

"I know she's at work. I'm practising." June picked her fork back up and put it down again straight away, because she could not eat and think about this at the same time.

"Okay. Okay okay okay. What are you wearing?"

"My coat." June looked at him the way you look at somebody who has just told you they intend to swim home.

"Your school coat."

"It's a coat."

"It's got Calder Senior on the front in yellow." June was already getting up.

"Right. Come on. Get up, I'm serious, I'm not having Kerry see you on a screen in that collar." June put her fork down and went straight into his room without being asked. Everything he owned was on his bed inside four minutes. It did not take up much of the bed.

"That one's got the collar."

"The collar's fine."

"The collar's been through the machine about nine hundred times and it goes like this." June did it with her hand, a little flap.

"On a screen that's all anybody's going to look at."

"Nobody's going to look at my collar."

"Everyone is going to look at your collar." She held the gray one up against him with her arm out straight, and then dropped it on the floor, which was her verdict.

"Right. You're wearing Dad's." Abe stood there.

"It's brown," said June, already at the closet.

"It's boring. It's got no shape in it at all and it's going to be too big on you across the back and I don't care, because it's the only thing in this house that looks like somebody chose it." The camera came on Wednesday. There were two of them. The woman was called Hesketh, and she did all the talking, and she had a clipboard she never wrote on while Abe was watching.

The other one was a boy about twenty in a knitted hat who held a light up on a pole and did not say a single word for the whole hour, and whose name Abe never found out. They did it in the equipment room off the gym, because it had a window in it and Tench had said no to the gym itself. They moved the vaulting horse out of the shot. Then they moved a chair into where the vaulting horse had been. Then they moved the chair twice more.

Then Hesketh had the boy in the hat take the light all the way around to the other side and start again, and the whole thing had eaten most of an hour before anybody asked Abe one question.

"Nothing to be nervous about," she said.

"It's four minutes. It goes out with the circuit listings."

"All right."

"Say your name and where you're from and how old you are." He said it. She made him say it again with his chin up. Then she asked him what his Talent was.

"It works while I train," said Abe. He had been saying that since the third of October. Tench had had it, and the whole senior year had had it, and it had the enormous advantage of being true. Hesketh waited for the rest of it with her pen up.

"And what does that mean, exactly?"

"It means it works while I train." Hesketh looked at him for a moment.

"All right," she said.

"And what does it do?"

"It helps me train." Hesketh smiled at him.

"That's lovely," she said.

"That's really lovely. Can we go again, and this time not sell yourself short?"

"I wasn't selling myself short. That's what it is." Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"I know, love. That's the trouble." She turned a page over on the clipboard.

"You went from the bottom of a school board to the top of it in nine weeks. People are going to want to know how, and 'I worked hard on my own' is what everybody says who did nothing at all." The boy in the hat moved the light about a foot.

"So what should I say," said Abe.

"Say the same thing and say it like you believe it." She reached over and turned his collar down flat while she said it.

"You're the fastest thing this region has seen in twenty years. That's not me being nice to you, it's what the sheet says. Just tell me that." They got it in two more takes. She was pleased with him both times. Then she wanted him training, and that turned out to be the rest of the afternoon. Hesketh wanted forty seconds of him training. She asked for it several times, in slightly different words each time, as if he had not followed her the first three times.

"Just do what you'd normally do. Don't perform it. Do it like we're not in the room."

"I can't do it while you're in the room."

"Nobody can. Everybody says that and then everybody does it."

"No. I mean I can't." Abe said it as plainly as he had it.

"That's the actual thing. If there's a person in the room it doesn't start." Hesketh let the clipboard hang down by her leg.

"So what would you like me to film," she said.

"I don't know."

"No. Neither do I, and I've got to hand somebody four minutes on Thursday." So they filmed him doing the form. He ran the gate and the ferryman and the low tide and the turn, in real time, at half past three on a Wednesday, in his father's coat, in front of two strangers and a light on a pole. It was the worst he had run it since before Christmas.

He came off the back foot on the turn, twice, which is the one thing the whole form is built to stop you doing, and the boy in the hat had to be moved because Abe nearly went through him. Anybody watching that would not have looked at it twice. It was not fast and it was not clean and there was not one single thing in it that the whole of Calder had spent nine weeks being frightened of.

"Lovely," said Hesketh.

"Once more, and finish it looking at me." He did it once more and finished it looking at her.

"Good. That's the one." She was already winding the cable up around her elbow.

"We'll put the numbers over the top of it." Walking back through the gym afterward, with the coat over his arm, Abe worked out what had happened, and it was not complicated. He had told the truth on a camera and she had heard him being humble. A class had started while he was in there. Forty people were on the mats and Amrit was arguing with Naylor about something at the top of his voice, and one by one, the whole way across that floor, they stopped.

Behind him, at the door, Hesketh put a hand on the arm of the boy in the hat and turned the light back into the room.

"There," she said.

"That. Get that." Abe turned around to see what she was pointing at, and it was him. He went down to the shed on Friday afternoon to tell Dobbs he could not come on Sunday. He could have called. Fenn kept a phone in the shed and the number was chalked on the door frame in a hand that was not Fenn's. Abe went down anyway, because phoning would have been the easy way, and he had decided somewhere around Wednesday to say it to Dobbs's face. Low tide, and the shed was mostly empty.

Two of the punts were up on blocks with a man underneath one of them doing something to it that involved a lot of swearing. Dobbs was at the bench at the far end with the book open and the light on over it, doing the week.

"Mr. Dobbs."

"You're not on today."

"I know. I've come to say I can't do Sunday." Dobbs did not look up from the book.

"Right," he said. Abe stood there. He had four more sentences in him and all four of them were about Leeds, and he had rehearsed two of them on the way down the hill. He did not get to use either one, because Dobbs turned a page and said, "Is it the fighting?"

"It's the fighting."

"Where."

"Leeds."

"Hm," said Dobbs. He wrote something in the book with a pencil about two inches long. Then he put the pencil down flat on the page to keep his place. Abe had watched him do that about thirty times and had never thought about it once.

"Purnell'll do the pole," he said.

"She'll be unbearable about it, so don't come back and ask me how it went, because she'll tell you and it'll take an hour."

"Right."

"Do you want the Sunday after?" Abe had not expected that.

"Yes."

"Then you've got it." Dobbs picked the pencil back up.

"You're on the crew board until you tell me you're not on it. That's how the shed works. It's not a favor and I'd take you off it in a minute if you got slow."

"Am I getting slow?"

"You're getting famous," said Dobbs, to the book.

"That's usually the same thing and I haven't decided about you yet." Then he went back to the week. Abe went out past the punts and up the ramp, and the man underneath the punt said something about the weather coming in on Wednesday that neither of them had any reason to remember afterward. It went out on Friday, at six o'clock, between the tide report and the football. Peg had the little screen up on the counter with the sound turned up over the fryer.

She had come in at five thirty and refused to sit down about it. June had the good chair pulled all the way around, and she started before it did.

"If they've cut the part where you say your name I'm writing to them."

"You don't know there's a part where I say my name."

"There's always a part." There were four minutes of it and Abe was in about ninety seconds of them. They gave him a man's voice first, over the top of a shot of the sea wall that had nothing to do with anything.

"That's not our sea wall."

"June."

"It isn't. Ours has a crack in it." Then there was Calder from the water, which somebody had filmed from a boat on a much better day than any day in February.

"That's summer. Peg, look at the water, they've put summer on it. It's February, are they allowed to do that?"

"They never do," said Peg, leaning in over the counter. Then there was the school corridor with the February sheet on the wall and a hand going along the names, and the hand stopped on his. June smacked the arm of the chair with the flat of her hand. Then it was him, in a chair, in his father's coat, with the light coming in the window of the equipment room. June came straight up out of the good chair.

"The coat! Peg. Peg, look at him in the coat." Peg made a noise.

"You look smart," she said.

"Shh," said Abe.

"I'm allowed to say it in my own kitchen. He looks smart."

"He looks like Dad," said June, and sat back down, and put her feet up on the arm of the chair. On the screen, Abe said that it worked while he trained, and that it helped him train, and then stopped, because that was all he had said. On the screen, Abe said he had done every hour of it on his own in a yard with two trash cans in it, and his chin was up, because she had made him do it with his chin up. Then the man's voice came back over the top of him and called him a prodigy.

June had been talking over the whole thing since it started. She stopped. Afterward there was some football, and Peg went and stood at the sink with her hands in the water and did not put the radio on, which she always puts on.

"They called you a prodigy," she said, to the window.

"I know."

"Did they ask you first, or do they just."

"They just do it."

"Hm." Peg went on washing up.

"That's a word for somebody who was born like it, that is. You weren't born like it. I've known you since you were four days old and you were not born like it, you were a slow feeder and you cried at anything with a motor in it."

"So what's it for, then?" Abe stood in the middle of the kitchen with a dish towel in his hands.

"It's for people who," he said, and stopped. Peg rinsed a plate and stood it on the rack.

"They want it to be simple," he said.

"Well," she said.

"It isn't, and I don't like it." She let the water out and dried her hands and turned the radio on after all, and that was the end of it. June said nothing at all about it, then or later, which Abe noticed and did not ask about, because there was a folder upstairs he had been getting to the end of all week.