The academy occupied the second floor of a converted warehouse on Mercer Street, up a flight of iron stairs that rang underfoot, and Tomas Reiner climbed them the way he climbed every staircase, without hurrying and without looking at his feet. He had the address written on the back of a tuning appointment card. He had checked it twice on the bus. He did not know why he had checked it twice, except that the morning had the quality of things he preferred to get exactly right.
Stonebridge Martial Arts had announced its adult scholarship assessment in a small notice in the Fenwick Gazette and a printed sheet taped inside the window of the music shop where Tomas sometimes bought felts and bridle tape. One place, each year. A year's training without fees, equipment provided, and a modest bursary toward the costs that gather around any serious study — travel, courses, time. Applicants had to be over twenty-five, in work or seeking it, and able to show, in the words of the notice, "commitment rather than accomplishment." Tomas had read that last phrase several times. It was the reason he had applied. It was, as far as he could tell, the only door in the city with that sentence written over it.
There were other reasons, underneath that one, that he had not written on the form. For a year now he had trained alone, in the evenings, in the front room of his flat with the furniture pushed against the walls, running through what he knew the way he ran scales on an unfamiliar piano — carefully, to find out what the year had done to it. The work had held. That was not the problem. The problem was that a discipline practised entirely in private begins, slowly, to fold in on itself, like a letter never posted. A man needed other bodies in the room. He needed resistance that had opinions of its own. And he could not afford Stonebridge's ordinary fees on a tuner's income — he had done the arithmetic three times, in three different months, and the arithmetic had not budged. So: the notice, the form, the bus across Fenwick with the address written on a tuning card.
Hannah Weiss sat behind the reception desk with a clipboard and a list of names already half ticked. She was forty-one, with reading glasses on a cord and the particular patience of a person who has processed the paperwork of other people's ambitions for a long time.
"Name?" she said.
"Tomas Reiner."
She found him on the second page. "Reiner. Yes. You're number nine. Occupation — piano tuner." She said it without emphasis, merely confirming what the form said, and Tomas nodded. "There's tea by the wall. We'll call people through in groups. The assessment is basics, movement, a little partner work. Nothing you need to be frightened of."
"Thank you," Tomas said.
He took his place along the benches with the other applicants. There were eleven of them, all adults, all in the careful clothes people wear when they want to look like they belong somewhere they have not yet been admitted to. A woman in her forties with a physiotherapist's posture. A broad young man who kept flexing his hands open and closed as if warming them for labour. Two friends who had clearly come together for courage and were now pretending, separately, that they had not. Nobody spoke much. Through the open doors of the main hall, Tomas could see the mats — deep blue, worn pale in the centre — and beyond them the photographs that lined the far wall in frames of dark wood: decades of students, tournaments, summers, men and women squinting into old sunlight.
He had known the room would look something like this. He had not expected that knowing would help so little.
The three black belts came in together, the way senior people do, already mid-conversation. Tomas knew their names within minutes, because other people's deference announced them. Rafael Duarte, thirty-six, regional champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu more than once, was the one everyone watched first; he had the lean completeness of a man whose body had been argued with by experts and had won. Colin Marsh, thirty-two, was heavier through the shoulders, a strength-based fighter with a laugh that arrived before his jokes did. Kenji Sato, thirty-four, moved the least of the three and seemed to speak only when speech improved on silence.
They were not running the assessment. The founder would do that, when he arrived. But they were senior students, and this was their room, and the applicants understood this in the way applicants understand weather.