Chapter 64: Tobias Lund
He was in the car park at Marden Linen at twenty to seven in the morning, standing by the fence with two coffees.
I came out of the six-o'clock handover door and saw a man of about fifty-five in a coat too thin for the weather, and I stopped walking with my bag still on my shoulder.
I had not seen him in twelve years and I knew him at forty metres by the way he stood.
Heels down. Weight through the middle of the foot. It is a stance you can hold for three hours on a cold mat and he has held it for forty years.
Tobias Lund is not a large man. He is about my height and thick through the chest and his hands are twice the size they should be. He held out one of the coffees.
“You take it black. Unless that has changed.”
“It hasn't.”
We stood by the fence. There is a bench but he did not sit and so I did not.
“I saw the newspaper,” he said.
“Everybody saw the newspaper.”
“I saw the other one too. Twelve years ago. Two paragraphs.”
He drank some coffee. “I wrote to you three times. The letters came back. Your mother had moved.”
“I know.”
“I went to the court on the Thursday and a woman on a desk told me it had been dealt with on the Tuesday.”
“It took a morning.”
“Eleven minutes,” he said. “I asked.”
That is Tobias. He asked, and then he wrote the number down, and then he carried it for twelve years. I waited for the rest of it. The part where he told me what I had thrown away.
He did not do that.
“You're working here?”
“Yes.”
“How many hours?”
“Fifty-five.”
He nodded at that the way he used to nod at a weight on a scale. Information, neither good nor bad.
Then he said: “I am going to ask you one thing and then I will go, because you have been up since four.”
“Ask.”
“At Christmas. When the man took hold of you.”
“Yes.”
“Which way did you turn?”
I said left. He did not react at all for about three seconds. He looked at the fence.
Then he put his coffee down on the post and did the smallest movement with his shoulders, the way he does when he is checking something on himself.
“You were a right-side player for ten years.”
“Yes.”
“Everything. Every entry, every grip. Your hikite was left and you turned right and you did it eleven thousand times, and I counted some of them.”
“Yes.”
“And a man grabbed you at a dinner table with no warning at all and you turned left.”
He picked the coffee back up. “Do you know why?”
“Because the right shoulder cannot take a man's weight.”
“Because the right shoulder cannot take a man's weight,” he said. “And you did not decide that.”
The extractor fans came on behind us and blew warm wet air across the tarmac. “Nadia. A body that has lost control does not choose a side.”
I did not say anything.
“You have been telling yourself for twelve years that you have something in you that gets out. Something with no judgement in it.”
“Something with no judgement in it does not check which shoulder is broken in the eighth of a second it has.”
“It was faster than that.”
“I know it was faster than that. That is my point.”
I looked at the ground. There was a drain cover and some grit and a cigarette end that had been rained on. “Will it help me?” I said. “In court.”
“No.”
He said it flatly and immediately and I have never been more grateful to anybody.
“You put a man on a floor. That is what happened and no one will unsay it. If I stood up in that room and talked about which side you turned to, they would hear an old man making excuses for his girl.”
“Then why tell me?”
“Because it is true, and you are the one who has to live in there.”
He put the empty cup in his coat pocket rather than on the ground, which is a thing he has done all his life.
“Marchbank. Thursday, seven o'clock. Upstairs above the carpet place on Vernon Street. Twenty-four mats and a strip light that flickers.”
“I can't.”
“I know. Thursday, seven o'clock.”
He said it once more and then he went to a small blue car with mats folded flat in the back seat, and he drove out past the roll cages without looking round, because he never has.
I stood in the car park with the fence at my back until the coffee was cold enough to drink in one go.
Then I went home and slept four hours and dreamt of nothing, and woke at three in the afternoon with my right hand closed.