Chapter 77: Wednesday
Tobias trained on Tuesdays and Saturdays in a hall behind a Baptist church on Fenner Street.
Sprung floor under the mats, which is rare, and which he had fought the church committee for over two winters.
Eighteen mats.
Four wide, four and a half long, with a strip of tape where the half was.
He put me in the corner by the radiator for six weeks.
The corner has two walls. I did not have to keep checking behind me.
He never said that was why.
That Tuesday there were nine of us.
Three adults, six children in the beginners' line.
One of the children was a girl called Esme who was nine and gripped everything too high.
She took the collar up by the seam at the neck, where it feels strongest and where it does nothing.
She was strong enough to get away with it against other nine-year-olds.
“Show her,” Tobias said, going past me with an armful of belts.
That was all the instruction he gave. It was the first time in eight weeks he had asked me to touch anybody.
I knelt down so my head was below hers, which is the only correct height to teach a child from, and I asked if I could move her hand.
She said yes.
I put her fist down four inches, onto the lapel where the material doubles.
I turned the knuckles in.
“Now pull.”
She pulled and nearly took me over, and her face did something complicated.
“That's not me being weak,” I said. “That's you being efficient.”
She thought about that the way nine-year-olds do, seriously, for about a second and a half.
Then she ran off to try it on a boy.
I stayed on my knees a moment longer than I needed to.
I had knelt in that family's dining room eleven times in three years, on oak, in tights, with my hands flat on my thighs.
It is the same joint. It is not the same act. I have thought about that a great deal since, and I still cannot explain it in a way that satisfies me.
Afterwards Tobias made tea in a kettle that took nine minutes.
He did not ask one question about the case.
He asked about my shoulder.
“It clicks on the third set,” I said.
“Then do two sets.”
“That is not a fix.”
“No,” he said. “It is a plan. Fixes are for people who are finished.”
He had a way of putting a sentence down and then leaving the room in it.
We drank the tea standing up. Out in the hall a father was trying to get a five-year-old into a jacket that was already on him.
“You are quiet tonight even for you,” Tobias said.
“They've made me an offer.”
“Good?”
“Maybe.”
“Then be slow,” he said. “You are allowed to be right. You are not allowed to be right in a hurry.”
I did forty breakfalls before I left, which I had worked up to from one in January.
Left side, right side, back.
The right still made me pause before I committed. A hesitation of about a tenth of a second, which on a mat is enormous.
Tobias watched twelve of them and then went to lock the store cupboard.
The next day was Wednesday.
I had not been to Willow Bank since the seventeenth of December.
Nobody had banned me from it. My bail conditions named two people and one house. They did not name a building on Sunnyside Road with a laurel hedge and a car park for eleven cars.
But I had stopped going, because in January my whole life had been about doing nothing that could be described as a decision.
At two o'clock that Wednesday I was in the launderette flat with the chronology notebook open and the heating off to save money.
Two o'clock is when I used to arrive.
Two twenty is when the tea trolley came round the day lounge, and I used to take the far end because the far end had the two residents nobody sat with.
Ten past two is when the other trolley came down the corridor.
The medicine trolley.
Steel, waist height, dark blue drawer fronts, a brake on the near castor that never held on the slope by the fire door.
Wheeled by a member of staff, stopping at each door, with a folder open on the top.
I could see the folder. I could see the plastic wallet cable-tied to the handle, with a laminated sheet in it, curling at one corner where the lamination had failed.
The sheet was the week's rota.
I put the pen down.
I sat in a cold rented room with my hands on my knees for a long time, and the thing that was wrong began, very slowly, to come up out of the floor.