Chapter 11: Pile Two

The ballroom of the hotel in Hereford had a sprung floor and a chandelier with two bulbs out.

A man on a ladder was hanging the first of forty-eight banners.

Kit had come to stop him.

He was not sure how.

He had a rolled script, a damp coat, and the theory that if he found enough errors the wall could not go up.

"That one's crooked," he said.

The man on the ladder worked for the hotel and did not have a name Kit was prepared to learn.

"It's level," he said.

"I used a laser."

"The text is level. The banner's crooked," said Kit.

"The text is the banner."

"Then it's the laser," said Kit.

He went on to the next.

Banner three said Dorian's second film was "devistating", and Kit made the man take it down.

Banner nine gave a quotation from the fourth film which had come from the third.

Banner fourteen was hanging upside down.

"Somebody read it upside down," said Kit.

"Why would you read it upside down?"

"It's what the printers sent," said the man.

"Then they've been thinking about the wrong thing."

The man on the ladder looked at him for a long moment.

"Are you the one who wrote them?"

"Yes," said Kit.

"No."

He said it before he had decided, and heard the yes land and the no arrive too late behind it.

"Seventh Row," said the man, reading it off the last banner.

"Is that you?"

"It's a seat."

By eleven o'clock ten banners were up and eight were corrected.

Kit had a pencil behind his ear and a hopeless, irritable feeling in his chest.

The wall made a long red-and-black line down the room.

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