Chương 80: The Fourth Floor

The man on the stepladder changed the cards at four o'clock. He came out with the cards in a plastic tray, went up two rungs, and did it slot by slot from the bottom, like someone changing a departure board. People had been moving toward that end of the hall since half past three, coming down out of the seats with their coats already on, and by four the crowd at the board end went back further than Abe could see over.

When the man came out with his tray the noise died off it from the front backward, and by the time he was two rungs up you could hear the cards going into the slots. Abe watched from the wall with a bottle of water he had not opened. Working up from the bottom, the man got to the eleventh slot. He took Danforth's card out of the slot, looked at his tray, and put the same card back into the same slot. The second time he came past it he did not lift it out. He squared it up with his thumb and went on up the board.

Abe only saw it because he was watching the board and not the room. Piers Danforth was over by the doors with his coat already over his arm at four o'clock. Abe's card went in low, because at nine o'clock that morning nobody in this building had a number for him. Then the man took it back out and put it three slots higher. Then he took it out again, looked at his tray, and moved it up to the top of the block and shifted the column under it down by one. Then he stopped.

He stopped because there was nowhere above it to go. There was a line ruled across that board in black, and the names above the line were on a different color of card. The first of them had been in the top slot since before Abe had ever heard of Leeds. NORTHERN CIRCUIT · LEEDS · 7 FEBRUARY REALM 2 · TEMPERED · 1 · MARCHBANK, E. · Ketton · Layer 17 REALM 1 · KINDLED · 1 · DOLAN, A. · Calder · Layer 22 So Abe had the biggest number in that building.

Fourteen names sat above his on the wall, every one of them with a smaller number beside it, and not one of them was going to move for him today. The crowd made the noise for him. It went up when his card went up, and somewhere behind Abe a man told his son to remember he had been here for it. Then it came down again inside a minute, because it is a board, and boards do this, and the line at the urn re-formed.

Abe stood against the wall with a bottle of water he had not opened and waited to feel the way he had expected to feel, and it did not arrive. Then he saw who was standing at the foot of the stepladder. Marchbank had his hands in his pockets and his head back, and he had been standing there before the man came out with the tray, and he did not move while the cards went in, and he did not move afterward. The crowd had left him a step of space all around, without anyone asking them to.

Abe went over because there was nothing else to do that was not worse.

"You were watching that."

"I've been stood here since half past three," said Marchbank. He did not take his eyes off the board.

"I asked him this morning what time he does the cards. He said four. So I got a cup of tea at three thirty and I came and stood here, and then I had to stand here for twenty five minutes like an idiot, because I wasn't going to risk missing it." Abe did not have one single thing to say to that.

"Do you know how long it's been," Marchbank said, "since there was a bigger number on a board than mine?"

"No."

"August." He said it like you would give someone a bus time.

"Not on this board, not on the Salford one, not on the national sheet, not anywhere. Eleven halls. I've been the top line in eleven halls since August and every single one of them has been as boring as a wet Tuesday." He took his hands out of his pockets, finally, and looked at Abe.

"It's a good number, twenty two. It's bigger than mine."

"Thanks."

"It's not a good number, actually, it's a stupid number. I did the same thing everybody else has done all afternoon, which is work out how many hours." Marchbank almost laughed.

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen. October."

"Right." He looked back up at the board.

"I was nineteen in November." Down the hall someone dropped a stack of chairs and about half the room said something about it at once.

"Are you at the March one," said Marchbank.

"I think so. My agent does the calendar." You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Come and find me at the March one, and don't be polite about it, come and find me on the actual day." He got a hand out of his pocket and Abe took it.

"And Dolan. Whatever it is you're doing, and I've stopped wanting to know what it is, would you please not stop doing it." Then he went back down the hall to the end where the forty people were. About six of them turned around to say something to him as he arrived and he answered every one of them. Abe watched him do it and could not tell one thing from his face.

On the platform afterward Priya sat on the bench with her bag between her feet and her ticket in her hand, and she was quiet for a long time, and Abe sat next to her and was quiet too. The lights came on down the platform while they waited. It was not properly dark yet, though they come on anyway at that time of year.

"I'm not doing the March one," Priya said.

"Right."

"They pay my entry for four meets a year, and I've had my four." She turned the ticket over.

"So."

"You could pay your own entry."

"I could pay my own entry." She said it agreeably, like he had suggested something reasonable.

"And then everybody in that hall would know it, and they would all be very kind to me about it. It happens about twice a year, somebody paying their own way in. It's the worst thing in the building." Abe thought of seven or eight things and did not say any of them, because all seven or eight were about money. He had five thousand marks of his own on Gault's books, coming back to him a month at a time so that nobody would ever ask him where it came from. Priya Sandhu, sitting next to him, had a ticket home.

"I've got a job," she said.

"Since when?"

"Thursday. I start the week after next." She got her feet up onto the front of the bench.

"It's at the pool at home. Six to two, and then two to ten every other week, and my aunt's already told everybody, so."

"Is it all right?"

"It's completely fine. I'll be able to swim for nothing and I like swimming." Priya looked down the line at the empty rails.

"Stop feeling sorry for me."

"I'm not."

"You are. Everybody has been, all day. The woman with the clipboard patted my arm on the way out, and she has never once said a word to me in two years." She said it in the same voice she had used about the swimming, and Abe would rather she had shouted.

"Dolan. I have been to eleven of these. I've won four bouts in my life and three of them were against people who'd been ill. I've known since about October, and everybody else has known since about October, and the only thing that's actually changed is that in April I'll have some money."

"You're good at it."

"I'm not, though," said Priya.

"You're the only person here who's ever bothered to lie to me about it, so thanks, but no." Then the train was eleven minutes late, and Priya had said eleven off the board before Abe had found their platform on it. When it came in she got on it and Abe did not. He did not, because Gault had booked him a room in Leeds until Sunday. She had a reason for it and said she would go through it in the morning. She had not thought it was worth mentioning until twenty after five that afternoon. Priya did not wave.

She had her book out before the train was past the end of the platform. Danforth came down the platform a minute later with his gym bag over one shoulder, on his way to the front of the station. His father's car was waiting out there. In October, outside a hall on Fenner Street, he had walked off up the street toward the good end of it while Abe stood on the step working out how many shifts at Riddell's went into one hour of Marek's time.

"Not coming?" he said.

"They've put me up until tomorrow." Danforth stopped walking. He did not say anything for long enough that Abe could hear the announcement for a train to somewhere neither of them was going.

"Right," said Danforth.

"Good. That's what they do when they mean it." Then he shifted the bag onto the other shoulder and went out through the front of the station to the car. Abe stood on the platform and watched him go, and it was nothing like as good as he had expected it to be. He was still standing there when the departure board flipped over and the whole thing rattled, and a woman going past with two children told him he wanted to get inside, because it was going to come down in a minute. Abe had no idea where inside was.

He had a bed somewhere in a building he had never seen, in a city he had been in for nine hours, and Gault had gone to Salford, and there was nobody on that platform who knew his name. The room was on the fourth floor. Abe worked that out on the stairs, and then worked out that it was the third fourth floor of his life. There is the one at home, four flights of concrete with a light that works on the second landing only.

There was the one in Manchester nine days ago, where the window opened four inches and there was always a chair in the corridor with someone in it. And there was this. The carpet went on and on, red and gold, and it smelled of carpet cleaner and warm dust. There was a cart parked at the far end with towels stacked up on it, and it stopped Abe dead. He had never seen that many towels in one place in his life.

He stood inside his own door with the bag still on his shoulder and looked at the room before he did anything. There was a bed in it the size of the kitchen table at home, made up so tight you could have bounced a coin off it. There was a kettle on a tray with four different little packets next to it and two cups standing the right way up. The bathroom had a bath in it. Not a shower over a bath. An actual bath, on its own, with nothing else in it.

There were three little soaps wrapped up in paper, and two bottles, and a towel so thick that it would not fold properly. He put the soaps in his bag. Then he took them out and put them back on the side, because he did not know whether you were allowed. Then he stood there for a bit. Then he put two of them back in the bag for June and left the third one where it was, which he decided was fair to everyone. He sat on the end of the bed and called home.

Peg answered on the fourth ring, out of breath, and he could hear the kitchen fan going behind her.

"It's me."

"I know it's you, love, whose number do you think this is." Something went down on a counter.

"Have they fed you?"

"Twice. It's all paid for."

"Course it is. You're the prize pig." The fan roared and dropped.

"Go on then, tell me all of it." He told her about the bouts. He told her the boy from Bradford had hands that got hot. He told her the boy had tried to move him with them and could not, and that the hall had ended up calling him a wall. She said the hands were a stupid thing to be able to do, and asked whether he had been burned. Abe said no, and she said "Hm," and left a gap after it for him to fill in. He told her his card had gone in at the top of the board.

"Top of what board?"

"The board here. For the region."

"The whole region," said Peg.

"Yes." There was a pause with the fan in it.

"Well," she said.

"Right. That's grand, love. That's really grand." Another pause.

"Are you warm enough in there? Is there a blanket?"

"There's about six."

"Take one home," said Peg, and then something boiled over and she went, still talking, and the last he got was half a sentence about June being out with somebody from her class. Abe put the phone down on the bed and went and stood at the window. At home the fourth floor looks at the back of Bewleys', and at the yard, and at a strip of the Corn Road. This one looked at a whole city with its lights on, going all the way out to where it stopped.

None of it was anything to do with him, and every single thing inside this room was his until morning. He went to have another look at the bath.