Chapter 2: Another Quarter Hour
I told that too smoothly.
Twenty-six minutes is a number. It is not what happened.
What happened had a shape, and the shape had a hinge in it, and the hinge was fifteen minutes long.
Here is how you kneel for a long time on a hard floor.
You do not sit back on your heels straight away.
You keep an inch of daylight under the seat for the first minute so the ankles can find their angle.
You put the tops of the feet flat. Tucked toes are for people who expect to get up.
Then you let the weight down through the shins, not the kneecaps, and you spread it along the bone the way you would spread a load across a beam.
That buys you about twelve minutes.
After twelve minutes the shin burns where it meets the boards. There is nothing to be done, and knowing that is itself a technique.
I was somewhere in the eleventh minute when my right heel moved.
It moved perhaps a centimetre. It was not a protest. It was circulation.
“Nadia.”
I did not turn my head. Turning the head is an answer.
“Another quarter of an hour, I think.”
She did not say it to me, exactly.
She said it into the room, the way you would mention that a window was open.
Nobody asked what for. Nobody had ever asked what for.
Celia went on describing a wedding in Suffolk where the marquee had flooded.
And on my left, a metre and a half away, my husband cut his steak.
I want to be fair to Julian, because fairness is the only thing I still have any use for.
He did not tell me to kneel.
He had never once, in three years, said the words.
He also never said the other words, and there are only two kinds of men at that table, and he was not the first kind.
He cut the steak the way he did everything, which was competently and without any surplus.
Left hand on the fork, right hand drawing the knife back towards himself, one clean stroke, no sawing.
He ate the piece. He put the knife down at four o'clock on the plate. He picked it up again.
Twelve strokes.
I counted them, because I was counting the boiler anyway and the mind will take any work you give it.
He did not look at the floor. I do not think he was pretending not to look.
I think by then he genuinely did not see it, the way you do not see a coat stand.
The first year he had seen it.
The first time, three months after the wedding, he had come up to our room afterwards and stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
He said, She's sixty-six.
He said, It costs you nothing.
I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence anyone has ever said to me.
Because it was true, arithmetically. Twenty-six minutes costs nothing. Eleven times twenty-six minutes costs nothing.
You cannot put it on a charge sheet. You cannot photograph it. A doctor cannot find it.
That is what makes it usable.
So I knelt for the extra quarter of an hour, and I passed the time the way I had learned to pass time in corridors outside competition halls.
You do not think about the fight. You think about a thing with edges.
I thought about a bag.
A blue kit bag with a broken zip pull I had replaced with a bootlace. Inside it a towel, a spare belt, zinc tape, and a jar of honey I ate with a spoon after weigh-in.
I thought about the smell of a hall at seven in the morning before anybody has sweated in it, which is dust and floor polish and cold rubber.
I thought about the sound a hundred people make when they all breathe out at once.
Four minutes twenty. A hundred and ten seconds. Four minutes twenty.
Damon asked for the bread. Somebody laughed at the flooded marquee.
My hands stayed flat on my thighs the entire time, and I want that on the record, because for three years the whole discipline of my life came down to the position of two hands.
Fingers together. Palms down. Thumbs tucked in along the seam of the skirt.
The moment a hand comes off the thigh, something in the shoulder wakes up, and I had spent twelve years making sure it stayed asleep.
“Nadia.”
“Yes.”
“You can get up now.”
There is a thing I should say about Julian now, rather than let you find it out slowly, the way I did.
He was not ignorant. He was not weak. He was not frightened of his mother.
He simply had no opinion about the floor, and a man with no opinion about the floor is standing on it with everybody else.