I woke up in a different body.
Not different to look at. Same broken nose in the shaving glass, same cut over the eye going yellow at the edges, same hand — worse, actually, the swelling gone purple overnight and the two split knuckles stuck to the sheet. But when I stood up, the room didn't tilt. I stood there waiting for it and it didn't come, and I walked to the washstand without a hand on anything, and it was the first time since the headlights that I'd crossed a floor without thinking about the floor.
I did ten press-ups on the boards to see. I'd have managed four the day before. I did ten and could have gone on, and stopped because the hand wouldn't take it, and stood there breathing easily with sweat starting on my back and thought: that's real. That's actually real.
Then I got dressed and went down to face the bread.
Polly was at the range with her back to me and she didn't turn round.
"Sit down."
I sat. There was tea on the table, one cup. There was no bread on the table, because there was no bread.
"Somebody," Polly said to the kettle, "came into my kitchen last night and ate a loaf, the end of the dripping, the last of Sunday's pudding, and a piece of cheese I was keeping for Finn." She turned round with the pot. "I've been wondering who."
"I was hungry."
"You were hungry."
"I'd not eaten all day. The round—"
"The round." She poured. She did it carefully, and set the pot down carefully, and then looked at me across the table with the look I'd been avoiding since the mirror: not suspicious, worse than suspicious. Interested. "I heard about the round."
I put the bad hand under the table.
"Don't," she said. "I've seen it. Half the street's seen it. Scudboat was in the Garrison till closing telling anyone who'd listen. You cut a man's face in Kaplan's yard."
"He was stealing from us."
"He was. And you could've brought that to Tommy, and Tommy would've dealt with it, and nobody would have had to be sick over a wall." She pushed the cup toward me. "Instead you took a razor to a bookmaker in front of half of Digbeth like a man who wanted it talked about."
I didn't say anything.
"Drink your tea, Jack."
I drank my tea. She watched me do it. She'd known the man I was wearing since before he could walk, and she was looking at me now the way you look at a coat that's the right colour and the wrong size, and I understood that whatever I'd bought last night with the razor, I'd paid for some of it here, at this table, in a currency I didn't know the price of yet.
The front door went. Then Finn's voice, high and frightened. "Polly— Polly—"
She was up before I was.
They'd done Arthur's face.
There was nothing else to see. John had him under one arm and Finn had the other side, and Arthur was walking, more or less, but one eye had closed completely and the mouth was split top and bottom and there was a print across his cheek where something with a hard edge had been laid into it more than once.
"Christ," Polly said. "Christ. Get him on the chair — John, the chair—"
"Coppers," John said. His voice had gone thin. "Six of them. Took him off the corner at half nine in the morning, Pol, half nine in the morning in front of the whole fucking—"
"Where's Tommy?"
"Sent for."
"Ada?"
"Coming."
Arthur sat. He put his head back against the wall and opened the one eye that worked and found me with it.
"Jacky," he said, through the mouth. "Look at you. Up before dinner."
"Who did it, Arthur."
"Him." He tried to laugh and it hurt him. "The man himself. Belfast. Had two of 'em hold me and did it with a stick. Very tidy. Asked after Tommy the whole time, like we was old friends. Give my regards to Thomas." He shut the eye. "Give him my regards, he says, and puts the stick in again."
The room had filled up while he talked. Ada in the doorway with her hat still on. Finn against the wall, white. Polly with a basin and a cloth, already at the face, and Arthur flinching from her and letting her anyway.
And me at the table with my swollen hand in my lap, and something in my chest that wasn't fear, and wasn't the guilt I'd waited for last night either.
It was heat. It was the yard again.
Tommy came in without a word and looked at Arthur for a long time.
Then he pulled out a chair and sat, and took his cigarettes out, and lit one, and the whole room waited for him to speak and he let it wait.
"He's sent a message," Tommy said.
"He's sent a message?" John came off the wall. "He's put Arthur's face through a fucking wall, Tommy, that's not a message, that's—"
"It's a message. A message is exactly what it is." Tommy didn't raise his voice. "He picked Arthur because Arthur's the loudest. He did it in daylight on a corner because he wanted it seen. He did it himself because he wanted us to know he's not afraid of us. And he sent me his regards" — a thin, cold smile — "because he wants me to come and find him. This morning. Angry. With the family behind me and no plan."
"So we go," I said.
Every head in the room turned.
I hadn't meant to say it. Or I had — I'd been going to say it for the last minute and hadn't decided, and then it was out. And I could feel what it sounded like coming from the brother who'd been a joke a week ago: not funny any more. Not slow.
"A copper puts hands on a Shelby in the street," I said, "in front of the street, and we sit here? Then every man in Small Heath who paid us Friday knows we can be done for nothing. That's not a copper's war, Tommy. That's ours. Six of them. We can find where they drink."
John was nodding. Arthur, with his eyes shut, said "Aye" like a man agreeing with a hymn.
Tommy looked at me.
Not the measuring look from the table. Longer than that. He looked at me the way he'd looked at Arthur's face — like a thing that had changed shape overnight and needed re-measuring — and then he looked at my hand, which I'd forgotten to hide, and then back up.
"Yes," he said.
I hadn't expected that.
"It's a war. You're right. He's declared it and we'll fight it." He tapped ash into the saucer. "And we'll fight it on the ground I choose, on the day I choose, with him not knowing which day it is. Not this morning, in the street, on his timetable, with Arthur's blood still on the corner for the Evening Despatch. That's what he wants. He's a soldier, Jack. So am I. I know what a man wants when he pokes a stick in a hole." He drew on the cigarette. "He wants to see what comes out."
Nobody said anything.
"So nothing comes out. Not today. Arthur gets his face seen to. John, you go and find out where this man sleeps, who he eats with, which of the six had the other stick — names, not descriptions. Finn, you're in the house till I say otherwise." He stood. "And nobody, nobody, goes near a copper. Not in a pub, not in an alley, not by accident. If Campbell wants a fight he can come and ask for it properly, and we'll pick the venue."
He looked at me once more on the way past. Stopped.
"Come with me."
He took me out to the yard where the horse was kept and shut the door on the house.
"James," he said.
"He was skimming."
"I know he was skimming. I told you to find out why."
"I found out. Sick boy. Doctor's bills." I kept my voice flat. "He'd have gone on doing it. Now he won't, and neither will the next man, because the next man was in the yard."
"You took a razor to him."
"I used my judgement."
Tommy smoked.
"You did," he said. "That's the thing." He turned the cigarette in his fingers. "A week ago you couldn't do Fridays. Yesterday you did the round straight, and then you did something that's had the whole of Digbeth talking, and this morning you sat at that table and said a thing I've been thinking since I walked in the door — and said it before I did, out loud, in front of the family." He looked at me sideways. "I don't know what happened to you, Jack. I'm not asking. But I see you."
He dropped the cigarette and stood on it.
"Don't waste it."
He went back in. I stayed a minute with the horse.
Influence: 12 → 15.
That was all — quiet, small, gone before I'd finished reading it. Three points, for being listened to in a kitchen. Nothing for the round. Nothing for the loaf. It counted the yard, and it counted the table, and I was beginning to understand that those were the only two kinds of thing it ever would.
Polly caught me on the stairs.
She'd come out of Arthur's room with the basin, and she stopped a step above me with the water gone pink in it, and she looked down.
"You said it well," she said. "In there. War. Tommy liked it."
"He said."
"He did." She shifted the basin to her hip. "He liked it because it's what he thinks. And you knew it was what he thinks. Didn't you."
"I—"
"You knew what he'd say before he said it, so you said it first." Her eyes were very steady. "That's a clever thing to do, Jack. That's a very clever thing to do, for a boy who last week couldn't tell his own face from a wall."
She went past me down the stairs. Two steps. Then she stopped without turning round.
"Careful," Polly said.
And went to empty the basin.