Chương 84: The Ninth of March

He got in at twenty to eleven with the rain still coming off his coat, and June was still up. She was on the living room floor with her back against the sofa and her French book open on the carpet and the radio on, and she put her hand out for the bag before he had gotten his coat off.

"Give."

"It's not good."

"It's not supposed to be good." She got it out of the paper and held it up in front of her with both hands and looked at it without saying one word. It was a mug. It had a picture of Leeds town hall on the side of it and A GRAND DAY OUT written over the top of the picture in gold letters that had already started coming off, and the handle was a sheep. Not a sheep shape. A whole sheep, standing sideways, with its legs making the hole you put your fingers through.

"Abe," said June.

"There were worse ones. There was one with a dog on."

"There was a worse one?"

"The dog one was smaller." June turned the mug around slowly, like you turn something at a museum.

"The sheep has got a face," she said.

"I know."

"The sheep has got a face and it is looking at me." She put it down on the carpet in front of her and sat back and looked at it some more.

"I love it. I'm going to drink out of it every single day and Peg is going to hate it." Then he put the two hotel soaps down next to it, still in their paper.

"They're from the hotel. They were free." That was nearly true. June unwrapped one and smelled it.

"Oh, that's lovely," she said, and smelled it again. She did not ask him how much he had been paid. Eleven marks of it was the mug on the carpet. Five hundred and sixty of it was an order in a folder on a shelf in a hall in Leeds, with his name on the tab in pencil. June did not ask and he did not say. Out in the kitchen the sheet of paper on the wall by the window went on saying what it said, with nobody in the room to look at it.

He went through to the kitchen for a glass of water he did not want, and Peg was not asleep either. She was at the kitchen table with her shoes off and one foot up on the chair opposite, and the radio going low, and her phone lying face up by her elbow, turned so she could see it.

"How much did they give you," she said.

"Eight hundred."

"Right." Peg turned the radio down.

"I called your Miss Gault on Tuesday." Abe stopped in the doorway with the glass in his hand.

"You did what?"

"I called her. I'm your guardian and I'd never spoken to the woman who pays you, and I decided that was stupid." She said it like she would say it was the third thing on a list of six.

"So I got the receipt out of the drawer and I called the number off the top of it. She was very good about it. We talked for about twenty minutes."

"About what?"

"You. She thinks a great deal of you and she says so in a way I didn't enjoy." Peg picked her cup up.

"And I asked her where the money came from." June's radio was going through the wall. Behind Peg, the faucet was dripping like it had dripped since August.

"You told me it was wages," said Peg.

"It is wages."

"She told me it came out of a market in another city, and that she puts it through her own books so nobody ever asks you about it." Peg drank some of the tea.

"So the pair of you told me the truth. I've been sitting here since Tuesday trying to work out how the two of you managed that between you." Abe did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that was not either a lie or all of it.

"Do you know what I've been doing since Tuesday?" said Peg. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"No."

"Neither do I, hon, that's the trouble with it." She put the cup down on the table and turned it around by the handle.

"I've been going about my week. I've done four days of dinners and I've done the ironing and on Friday I sat in that chair and I laughed at something on the radio. And underneath all of it there's been a thing going around and round, and the thing is this.

"I have been in this house four years and I have kept it going on what I get, and what I get is not very much, and I have never once said that to either of you because it is not either of your faults." Her voice did not go up.

"And on Tuesday a woman on a phone told me that there has been more money than I have ever had in my hand at once sitting under a bed in my house since November."

"It's for June."

"I know what it's for." Peg's hand came down flat on the table, once, not hard.

"Don't. I know exactly what it's for and I would not touch one mark of it and I'd have said so on Tuesday if anybody had asked me." Abe put the glass down on the counter.

"That's the part I'm not proud of," she said.

"I'd have liked to have been asked. That's all it is. It's a small horrible little thing and I've been carrying it around all week and now I've said it and it can go in the bin." Abe stood in the doorway with the rain still coming off his coat and could not get anything to come up his throat.

"I'm not going to ask you again tonight," said Peg.

"You should know that I've got her number and she's got mine, and she wasn't surprised to hear from me. I didn't enjoy that part either." She picked the cup back up.

"Get your coat off. You're dripping on my floor." He lay in bed that night and counted it up. He had walked into that hall on Saturday morning with nothing. Two hundred and twenty nine marks in his coat on the back of the door. A sword being made for him, six weeks. A hall owner who had not said no to a Sunday in March. And a woman who would be at the March one, watching, who had told him to his face what she wanted to see. Down the hall June was laughing at something on her own. He fell asleep happy.

That had not happened in a while. On Monday morning the whole school had seen it. It had gone out on Friday evening and Abe had spent the whole weekend in Leeds, so he had missed the entire first wave of it, which turned out to be the worst possible way to arrive. Ottley did the chin at him before he had gotten through the gate.

"Sam."" I've done every hour of it on my own."

"I know what I said. I was there."

"It's the coat," said Ottley, walking backward in front of him.

"You look about forty in the coat. My mam said you looked like somebody off the news and then she said it was sad, and I said why is it sad, and she wouldn't say." Amrit was waiting by the science room with the February sheet in both hands. He had taken it off the wall. Someone had drawn a mustache on Abe's row weeks ago, curling up at both ends, with a small hat over the top of it, and nobody had ever taken it down. Amrit had brought a pen.

"Dolan."

"Amrit." He did not look Abe in the face, and he got on with it fast, because he had clearly been getting ready for this since Friday and did not want to be talked to first.

"Would you write on it."

"Write what?"

"The thing off the end. What the man said." Amrit had the pen out already and the cap off." The fastest thing this region has seen in twenty years."

"I could write something true instead."

"No," said Amrit.

"That one. Please." So Abe wrote it down, in his own handwriting, on a piece of paper with a mustache on it, and he did not believe one word of it while he was writing it. Amrit held the sheet away from his body all the way off down the corridor so that it would not crease. Nita Sowerby caught him outside the gym at half past eight with her arms full of folders.

"Right," she said.

"You've been the only thing in this building since Friday night and I want you to know what they're saying, because nobody else is going to tell you."

"Do I want to know?"

"You want to know. Amrit spent two weeks telling everyone your Thursday was drugs." Nita got the folders up onto her hip.

"Nobody's interested in drugs any more. Now it's the coat, and the number, and whether the hall in Leeds is bigger than the one in Prescot, which it is." Abe kept his face where it was.

"And Thursday?"

"Gone. Amrit's on a man from the government now, which at least isn't about your dad." She started walking.

"That one's got nothing in it, so it'll die by Wednesday, and then they'll want a new one."

"Off who?"

"Off whoever's nearest." Nita was already halfway up the corridor.

"It was Ward's brother in November and it will be somebody else by Easter. I only tell you because everybody else is enjoying it too much to." The letter came that afternoon. It was on the kitchen table when he got in from school, opened, with the envelope squared up underneath it. She had opened it and she had put it back straight. Abe read it standing up with his bag still on. It was one page. It thanked him for his time.

It confirmed that under the terms of the agreement dated the thirtieth of January, the unit was giving four weeks' notice of the first scheduled activity. It gave a date. It said that transport would be arranged and that he should bring nothing. Monday the ninth of March. He read it twice and then went to the sink for a glass of water he did not want, and stopped with his hand on the faucet. June had already put it on the calendar. It hung on its nail by the door where it always hung.

She had written MON 9 MARCH across the square in green marker, in her own handwriting, in letters big enough to read from the sink, and she had underlined it once. She had not said a word about it. She was in the living room ten feet away with the radio on. Abe stood at the sink and understood, for the first time and all at once, that he had four weeks. Four weeks, and then a boat, and four divers, and Ainsworth, who had learned his crimes by heart so she could watch his face while she said them out loud.

And a door in a drowned bank with two hundred and eighty tons of gold behind it, sitting where it had been sitting since 1940. And he could get to it. He was the only person alive who could get to it. And then he would be standing in the dark in front of a shut door with his air running out, and taking hold of the handle would let the world back in, and the water he was standing in would be deep water again, all at once. He had known that in Manchester.

He had known it in the room with the mug ring on the table, while Ainsworth was still talking, and he had not said it out loud. She had told him he was not in trouble today. Then she had said the other thing, the honest one, the one he had been carrying around ever since. I can't tell you what happens next year, and I won't say I can. Peg came in behind him and put the kettle on.

"There's a date on my calendar," she said.

"I know."

"Is it a good date or a bad date." Abe looked at the green marker.

"It's a good date," he said. Lying to Peg had gotten easier since October. He made himself notice that it had.