Chapter 21: Forty-One Minutes
Nine boiler cycles and a bit.
Forty-one minutes.
The longest of the twelve by six minutes, and I knew that at the time, because I always knew.
I am going to spend most of this chapter somewhere else, and that is not evasion, it is an accurate report of where I was.
You cannot stay in a room like that for forty-one minutes.
The mind will not do it.
It goes and finds something to hold.
What it found was a village hall in the town I grew up in, on a Tuesday, in about 1994.
Brown parquet with mats over it that did not meet in the middle, and a hatch to a kitchen, and a man of forty in a washed-out jacket saying my name wrong for the first three weeks.
Tobias Lund taught eleven of us on a Tuesday and nine on a Thursday, and he had a whistle he never used and a notebook he used constantly.
The first thing he taught, before anything, before a grip, before a step, was how to land.
Six weeks of falling over.
Six weeks.
Children get bored, and he did not care.
He would say: you will spend more of your life on the floor than standing.
Learn the floor.
Chin to the chest.
Arm out at forty-five degrees.
Slap the mat before the shoulder gets there and let the arm eat the shock.
That is ukemi, and it is the whole of the art, and everything after it is decoration.
I was twelve.
I thought he was making us do the boring part first.
At twenty-two I understood that the boring part was the only part with a moral to it, because it is the half you use on other people.
You do not throw a person into the ground.
You throw them so that they can land.
That distinction is the difference between a sport that has been legal for a hundred and forty years and a thing you go to prison for.
I lay in that thought for a long time on Christmas night, on the boards between the sideboard and the window, at the far edge of twenty-two people's good evening.
The room, meanwhile, since I was in it and could not help auditing it.
Twenty-two seated, becoming twenty-one, then twenty, as people got up for the lavatory and came back another way so as not to pass me.
Aimee, sixteen, came past four times with things, and on the second pass she put a glass of water down on the floor by my knee without breaking stride, and did not look at me.
That girl has a job with me now.
Forty candles, of which nine had gone out by the time it finished.
Margot at the head, upright, both feet flat, running the evening.
Julian three metres away with his back at an angle that meant his right shoulder was towards me and his face was not.
Damon standing at the fire for a while, then sitting, then standing.
That is the detail I would give a jury if a jury were interested in the twenty minutes before.
He could not settle.
He kept getting up.
The pudding came in with the brandy lit and everybody made the noise you make.
Vaughan proposed a toast to Margot and called her the hardest-working woman in the county, and there was a good deal of that sort of thing.
At about ten past ten she said, “You can get up now, Nadia.”
I said, “Thank you.”
Forty-one minutes on hardwood at thirty-four years old, in December, after four hours on my feet doing silver.
Standing up took about nine seconds and I had the sideboard within reach the entire time and I did not touch it.
I went to the kitchen and ran my forearms under the hot tap.
Mrs Bell was scraping plates and said nothing and put a cup of tea beside me, which was the second glass of water of the evening, in a manner of speaking.
Then I went back in, because the coffee was mine to carry and there were twenty-two of them.
They were getting up.
That is the thing to hold on to about the next three minutes: the room was standing.
Chairs going back.
The rector saying his goodbyes to people who would see him in twenty minutes in the hall.
Somebody looking for a phone to take a photograph of the table before it was cleared.
I came in through the door from the passage with the tray on my left forearm, steadied with the right, four kilos loaded, thirty-one pieces of silver on that table catching all forty candles.
And Damon came round the end of the long table towards me.
Not fast.
Three steps, into the space between the sideboard and the window, which is two metres ten wide, and which I had spent forty-one minutes measuring from the floor.