Chapter 20Eight Counts

The roller shutter of the warehouse rolled up. She turned her glove over and looked at the place on the palm that had worn thin.

That was eight o’clock the previous morning. The gloves were made of white thread and had been washed many times. The palm had worn so thin that she could see the lines beneath it. She worked her fingers in, pinched the cuff between thumb and forefinger, gave it one upward shake, and the glove sat snug. The other glove had come unstitched between the fingers. She had wound a black hair tie round the loose stitching twice, until it no longer flipped out.

That day she came down the stairs at ten to seven. She passed the letterboxes every day. They stood by the stairwell, made of iron, and the lid’s lock was broken, so they could only be pushed open with a thumb. She pushed one open and looked in. There were other people’s bills, or a supermarket flyer. When she had looked, she pushed the lid back down.

The repair shop at the junction had not opened yet. Someone had chalked a row of numbers on its roller shutter. They might have been prices, or a phone number; she could not tell. Along the road the trees had shed their leaves. The leaves were dry, and the passing cars had flattened them into patches. It was a twelve-minute walk to the metro station. She counted every day, not out loud.

The warehouse was on the outskirts of the city, with a corrugated-iron roof, and four conveyor belts ran side by side. Returned parcels came in through the door, box after box, and each box had a slip stuck to it. The slip had twelve squares printed on it, each one giving a reason for the return. She did not look at the squares. She only scanned the barcode. Once scanned, the box dropped into its matching roll cage. The cage was wheeled off, and another was wheeled in.

Her shift had forty-one people in it. She knew seventeen of them: which ones came in on rotating shifts, and which ones would nap for a while at lunch.

The conveyor spat out a box every four seconds. Her hand finished the scan within the first three seconds and waited the last second for the next box to arrive. Three seconds, one second, three seconds, one second. A shift lasted six hours, and the twenty-minute lunch break was counted in there too.

She had counted. Nine hundred boxes went through every hour. By the third hour it was still nine hundred. Nobody had asked her to count, and the clock on the wall did not count either, so she counted for herself.

One of the returned boxes held a desk lamp, its plastic wrapping still intact. As she scanned it, she saw that the seventh square on the slip had been ticked. She did not look to see what the seventh square said. The box dropped into its roll cage and landed on top of an unopened box of towels.

At ten in the morning the supervisor walked past the door with a clipboard under his arm. Every ten minutes he drew a stroke on the clipboard, then walked on. The strokes ran in rows, neat and even.

A woman on the next row kept humming the same song. By the third time through, she hummed half a line along with the woman, then stopped, turned the box round in her hands, and went on scanning.

Before lunch the woman pushed a box over to her side and asked, “You go and dance every night?”

“Forty minutes,” she said.

The woman nodded and did not ask anything more. She pushed the box back and hummed half a line, then stopped.

At midday she ate a piece of bread wrapped in greaseproof paper, sitting at the end of the conveyor belt. The tap on the water dispenser had lost part of its handle, so she had to hold it down with a finger to get any water. The break room had no window. A fire-escape plan was stuck to the wall, its red arrows pointing at the door, the arrows faded to a pale colour. She broke the bread in two and kept one half for the evening.

She had sewn the dark patch on her right knee herself. The stitches were crooked and the thread was thick, but it held. The warehouse floor was concrete, and standing too long made her knees tighten first. Every hour she bent her legs all the way down, then straightened up.

The toe of her right shoe had worn through, and white thread poked out of the hole. She did not change her shoes. A new pair cost two weeks’ wages, so she changed the laces instead. The right laces went round one more turn than the left, across the instep, and were tied above the ankle. She had worked out this way of tying them herself, over more than a month of trying. When she landed, her foot no longer shoved forward.

Her shift ended at two in the afternoon. The supervisor stood by the door with the clipboard still under his arm. As each person walked past, he touched the tip of his pen to the board once. When she walked past, the pen came down, and the clipboard had one more dot on it.

She rode the metro four stops into the city. The carriage was crowded. She stood by the door and undid her earphone cable. The cable was always tangled into a ball. Her method never changed: find the two ends first, then shake three times. Once she had the two ends, she shook it three times, unwound it ring by ring, and the cable hung down straight.

The interchange passage was long. The tiles were white. One of them had cracked, and the crack had been filled with black sealant and smoothed flat. Every time she passed that tile, her foot came down on its edge.

On the carriage advertising panel was a pair of shoes, their soles very white, without a single scuff. She looked at them once, then looked at her own feet. Her monthly pass was tucked behind her ID card, and the photograph on the card had been taken two years earlier. In it her hair was longer than it is now.

On the seat opposite, a child was peeling an orange in one long strip. Halfway through, the peel broke. The child stared at the broken end, and the mouth dropped open. She laughed out loud and quickly pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Even after she had pressed it, her shoulders shook twice.

※

She came out of the metro, crossed the square, and reached the top of the stone steps.

In the square there was a flower seller. The water in the buckets was black, the stems standing in it with their cut ends gone white. She walked past the buckets without stopping.

There were twenty-six stone steps, running down from the square. The bottom three were wide enough to stand on, and those three were the ones she practised on every day. The rest of the square was either sloped or crumbling. Two of the steps had their corners patched with cement, paler than the stone. She never stepped on the edges of those two.

Each day she went down to the bottom three steps and set her things at the foot of the steps: the speaker, a few sheets of cardboard, a bottle of water half drunk. The cardboard came from returned boxes at the warehouse, opened out and flattened, and each day she brought one piece and weighed it down on the stone. There were always returned boxes at the warehouse, so the cardboard never ran short. On the cardboard were the marks she had pressed into it: two knees and two palms, the palm marks deeper. The iron railing had rusted in patches, and rust flaked off at a touch.

At one corner beneath the steps was a café. Its roller shutter was half raised, and the lights were white and on even in daylight. A socket by the doorway belonged to the café.

Inside, an instrumental piano piece was playing very quietly. The coffee machine gave a single hiss, and steam shot from its pipe and soon thinned away. The person behind the counter wore a dark apron, sleeves rolled to the elbow. On one forearm was an old white burn scar, long since flattened.

She went to the café doorway first, plugged the speaker into the socket, and sat on the step to wait for it to charge. A full charge took an hour.

The speaker was old, its paint chipped, and its handle was wrapped in tape. Once fully charged, it could play for only forty minutes. So she practised for forty minutes every day, no more and no less.

While it charged, she watched the battery indicator, its segments lighting up one at a time. When it reached the third segment, she turned the speaker over and looked at the small label underneath. Half the lettering had worn off the label, and what remained were the last few characters of the model number.

On the far side of the square, someone had set up a stall of old books. The books were arranged by thickness, not alphabetically. Each time she went past, she saw the same book in the same place, face down.

Pigeons walked slowly on the stone steps and did not get out of anyone’s way. She sat and waited. One pigeon came up to her shoe, stopped, looked at it, and walked on.

That day, as she sat down, the person from inside the café came out through the door and moved the chair beside the doorway half a step towards the socket. The chair leg scraped across the slab with one short sound. Once it was moved, the person went back inside and carried on wiping cups.

The chair was half a step closer to the socket. She could reach the plug with an outstretched hand.

The tape on the handle was grey, wound round many times, one corner lifting, and each time she carried the speaker she had to press it down. That day the person took a roll of beige tape from under the counter, set it on the step beside the socket, and said nothing.

She picked it up and looked at it. It was the tape the back kitchen used for packing, and nothing was written on it.

“Thank you,” she said.

The person in the doorway nodded once and did not come out.

She peeled the old tape off, ring by ring, and folded it into a small wad on the step. She wound the new tape on in three turns, each one overlapping half of the turn before. When she had finished, she lifted the speaker by the handle, and the tape did not curl up.

She had no teacher. At sixteen, she learned in an underground car park, following a radio. The radio sat at the foot of a pillar, with a single speaker, and its sound was thin. The floor of the car park was oily and slippery underfoot. She looked for a clear patch between the pillars, one each day, and whichever patch she found was her place for that day. The radio played the same song every day, and it was not until the fourth play that she knew where the fifth beat fell.

For the first month she learned only one movement: the instep stretched taut, the arm swept across. She swept between the pillars for a month, rubbing a patch of oil off that section of the car park until the grey cement showed beneath.

※

At ten to ten at night, the café’s window glass reflected the sky. In the glass there was a curved edge of pale violet, hanging above the roof. On the dark side there were patches of scattered light, piece after piece. They were not stars.

She did not look up. She only looked at the glass.

Street lamps came slanting in from the side, stretching the steps into long shadows that folded down one step at a time. She set the speaker on the bottom step and pressed play.

The speaker played a looping drum pattern she had chosen herself. One loop lasted one minute and twenty seconds. The first four beats were slow, the last four fast. In the slow four she had to hide her movements; in the fast four, the movements had to show.

The speaker cone had torn, so the sound leaked out through the tear, with a slight rasp. She set the volume to the sixth notch and did not turn it up any further.

This passage ran in eight-count groups. The first three beats were the opening: the instep stretched taut, the arm swept up to shoulder-line height. On the fourth beat she began to turn, the left foot stepping back half a step, and the right foot landed on the sixth beat. On the seventh and eighth beats she kept her weight on the right side, waiting for the next group.

The eighth beat was the closing accent. The closing accent had to be held, and once it was held, the next group had somewhere to start. This was the one she practised most. On the eighth beat she always managed to hold; only the sixth beat ever came early.

On the fifth beat her left shoulder sank first. She lifted it back up and did not let it sink. On the sixth beat her right foot came down, its toe touching the stone first, and the sound arrived a fraction before the drum.

When her right foot came down, she heard the sound of her sole first, a shade ahead of the beat. She had trained herself to do that. The beat did not ask for it.

Ten minutes in, she lay down on the cardboard, planted both hands on the ground, and pushed her body up off it. Her palms pressed the marks on the cardboard, and the marks went a little deeper.

At ten o’clock exactly, the Eiffel Tower began to flash. Its lower half flickered on and off for five minutes. She had counted: it was five minutes every time, not a second more. Her beat did not line up with the flashing, and she did not stop.

When it finished, the tower went back to its usual brightness, and the rows of lights steadied again.

When she turned, she saw in the glass that the person was still wiping cups. The wiping had not stopped.

At forty minutes she stopped, picked up the bottle, and drank a mouthful. The water had gone lukewarm. She set the bottle back on the corner of the cardboard. The cardboard had been pressed very flat, and every piece carried her marks.

When she had finished, she sat on the steps to change her shoes. The water on the steps was cold and seeped up through her trousers. She did not change position. Her socks were grey, the toes worn thin too, and she tugged them down. Under the insole of her right shoe were two sheets of paper, both folded into quarters, their edges gone soft. A corner of one paper poked out a little through the hole in the worn toe, grey-white, and she pressed it back in with her thumb.

That was the rejection slip. She had drawn it out of its envelope, flattened it, folded it into quarters and pushed it under the insole. By then the toe of her right shoe had already worn through. The hole was black, with white thread curled up at its edge. When she applied to perform in the square, the photograph she attached had shown this very pair.

She waited sixty-one days. She had brought a voided slip back from the warehouse, and every night she drew a stroke on its back. On the sixty-first day the letter came, in a grey envelope. Inside was a slip with a red stamp on it. No reason was written.

She went to ask. The square’s management office was on the street behind the metro station, on the second floor. In front of the counter stood a row of chairs. Four people sat in them, holding number slips. The chairs were wooden, and someone had scratched a short line into an armrest with a fingernail. A notice was stuck to the window glass. The third line of the notice had been crossed out, and a new line had been written beside it by hand, in black. She waited more than an hour. When it was her turn, the clerk behind the window pressed the slip flat on the desk and glanced at the red stamp. The stamp pad on the desk stood open, its ink crusted over.

She asked why no reason had been written. The clerk glanced at the slip and pushed it back towards her.

“That isn’t my department,” said the clerk.

The clerk did not look up.

On the way back the metro was almost empty. She took out the voided slip and counted the strokes on its back again. Sixty-one. Every one of them was straight.

She folded the voided slip into quarters, laid it on top of the rejection slip, and pushed both under the insole of her right shoe. The paper was thicker than the insole, and it pressed right up against the hole. When she walked, the edge of the paper rubbed against her toes. She had grown used to it.

One evening a tall woman sat on the ninth step. A bag hung from her shoulder on a long strap. White feather pieces stood in layers at the nape of her neck, stiff, not lying down. Her neck was long, and when she spoke her chin barely moved. Her two shoes did not match. The left was a satin pointe shoe; the right was a worn trainer.

That day she danced a different passage, slower than usual, every beat counted clearly. The woman stayed on the ninth step and watched the whole passage through. She did not applaud, and she did not say it was good.

When she had finished, the woman stood up, came down from the ninth step without holding the railing, and stopped at the edge of the bottom step.

“Your right foot lands early. That isn’t a mistake. It’s yours.”

When the woman spoke, every sibilant came out clean, with no blurring. When she had finished, she went up the other side of the stone steps. Her two shoes struck the stone, one light, one heavy, one after the other, and the sound grew distant.

She went over the sentence from start to finish in her head, and her lips moved twice.

That night she did not ask who the tall woman was. The next day she let her right foot land a little early, on purpose. All that week, every time she came down, she went round the ninth step, past its side.

※

Today it was not yet fully light.

She had no shift today. She woke at twenty to five, put on her black coat, its cuffs gone fuzzy, and rolled the sleeves up twice.

By the door the two shoes stood side by side, the left toe pointing at the door, the right toe at the wall. That was where she set them every night. It had never been changed.

She walked for twenty minutes and did not take a bus. She passed a newspaper stand. The newspapers had not been put out yet; they lay on the ground in bundles, each one weighted with a stone.

At a quarter past five she reached the top of the stone steps and went down to the bottom three. There was no one on the steps. The café lights were already on, and its roller shutter was still half down.

No one was on the ninth step. She glanced at it, then looked back down at her feet.

A cleaning lorry came in from the far end of the square. Its hose sprayed the stone slabs, and water ran down along the edge of the steps, stopped at the bottom step, and gathered into a small pool. The water came up to just in front of her shoe, and she stepped back. The driver wore dark gloves and did not look at her. An empty plastic bag was blown to the edge of the steps, stopped there, and did not move again.

The person from inside the café came out once. They stood in the doorway and looked up at the mist, then at the steps. Then they set a paper cup on the step beside the socket, steam rising from its mouth. There was a little white powder on the apron. They did not look at her. They turned and went back in, and the roller shutter came down a little further. No one picked up the cup. The steam rose from its mouth into the mist, and then it could no longer be seen.

The mist pressed in from across the river, lay along the edge of the steps, and crept up them one step at a time. Far off in the mist stood the tower. Its lower half was clear, the lights in rows. Above that it dissolved into the white, and the top could not be seen.

In the mist a bird called once, briefly, with no second call.

She did not look up. Above the mist hung the disc.

She pulled the laces one more turn tight. The left laces did not move. The right laces came down from above the ankle, went round the instep, and she pulled them tight one more turn, her knuckles going white. The mist had dampened her fringe; a strand clung to her temple, and she did not brush it away.

The chair at the café doorway was still beside the socket. The half step it had been moved the day before had not been moved back.

She set the speaker on the bottom step and pressed play. When the drum came in, she stood up and counted three beats.

One. Two. Three.

On the first beat she thought of the laces. On the second, the battery. On the third, the rejection slip.

The instep stretched taut. The arm swept up to shoulder-line height.

As she counted, her lips made no sound. As the arm rose, her left shoulder sank a little first. She did not let it sink; she lifted it again.

She got through only the first movement. Red tape crept up from outside the bottom step, clinging to the edge of the stone, in rings, and stopped in front of her feet. The tape was the red of an official seal, its edges very neat and without a single crease. A film of damp lay along its edge, glistening. The back of the tape was white and had no adhesive, yet it clung to the stone and did not move at all.

A man stood on the ground just outside the bottom step. He wore a grey coat, and an ID card hung from a silver clip on his chest. The card had no photograph, only a row of squares. His leather shoes were polished to a high shine, and a few droplets of mist clung to the toes. He stood on the far side of the tape, ten paces away from her. His right hand was raised, palm outwards, fingers spread, signalling for her to stop.

He did not speak.

The damp under her feet seeped in through the hole at the tip of her right shoe and reached her sock.

Usually at this point the corners of her mouth would lift first. Today they did not.

She did not raise her voice. Her arm was still at shoulder-line height, and she did not lower it.

She said, “…I’ll just finish these eight counts.”

The hand did not move.

The music was still playing, and the drum for the fourth beat came in. She reached out and pressed pause. She did not switch it off, because switching it off and on again would take two minutes.

She drew her arm back, the movement as clean as if she had rehearsed it many times. Far off in the mist, the lower half of the tower lit its first narrow beam, and it fell right on the worn-through tip of her shoe.