Four O'Clock, as King

Seventh period was gym, and they played basketball, badly, in the cold gym with the high windows, and Frederick was not picked early, because he never was, and was put on Theo’s side by the gym teacher, Mr Kaminski, who did the picking himself on Tuesdays to stop the same people being last, and who blew his whistle at Frederick twice for travelling, in exactly the voice he had always used, and Frederick travelled again on purpose the third time, to see, and Mr Kaminski blew the whistle again, and said, “Hanover. Feet,” and Frederick said, “Sorry, sir,” and was so happy he could barely stand up.

They lost by eleven points. Theo scored four of theirs and claimed six.

In the changing room afterwards nobody said anything to him except Devon, who said, “You travel like my grandmother,” and then, after a moment, quieter, while he was doing up his shoes and not looking up, “Good, though. Today. Back in. That was good,” and finished his shoes and went out before Frederick could answer.

The bell went at ten past three.

---

The side gate was the way out as well as the way in. It was a gate in the chain-link fence at the back of the gym, beyond the custodian’s bins, and in the mornings it was unlocked by the custodian and in the afternoons there was a man on it, in a fluorescent vest, with a clipboard and a lanyard, who checked the passes of the people who used it, which were the delivery drivers and the custodian’s van and Frederick, and nobody else.

The man’s name was Mr Obi, and he had been on the gate since before Frederick came, and he had checked Frederick’s pass every afternoon for three years, although he knew perfectly well who Frederick was and had never once, in three years, failed to look at the pass, carefully, and then at Frederick, and then back at the pass, and then said, “Thank you, young man,” and let him through.

He held out his hand for the pass.

Frederick gave it to him. It was the same pass. It said ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL - STUDENT on it, and HANOVER, F., and had a photograph of him from his first week at Ellicott in which he looked about nine.

Mr Obi looked at it, carefully. Then at Frederick. Then at the pass again. Then he gave it back.

“Thank you, young man,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr Obi.”

He went through. Then Mr Obi said, behind him, not loudly:

“You did very well today.”

Frederick turned round.

Mr Obi was looking at his clipboard. He did not look up. He made a tick on it, with a pen on a string, very neatly.

“I’m only saying,” he said, to the clipboard. “Everybody heard. Back in your class. That was very well done.” He made another tick. “That’s all. Go on. Your man’s waiting.”

---

Castellanos was at the car.

He was standing beside it, on the pavement side, where he always stood, with the back door already open, and his hand on the top of the door, and he was looking not at the ceiling, because there was no ceiling, but at the sky over the roof of the gym, which was white and high and very clear.

Frederick walked towards him.

He had wondered about this. All through seventh period, in the gym, between the whistles, he had wondered what Castellanos would do. Castellanos had been told. Of course he had been told. He had been told before anybody, very likely, the way the people who stand by doors are always told before anybody, and he had been standing by the car since a quarter to three, in the cold, knowing, with nobody to say it to. Frederick had wondered whether he would say Your Majesty, or sir in some new way, or stand differently, or open the door differently, or bow, which would have been unbearable. He had wondered whether he would look at him.

Castellanos looked down from the sky.

“Afternoon, sir,” he said.

It was exactly the same. The same two words, in the same voice, at the same speed, with the same very small pause between them, and his hand on the top of the door in the same place, and the door opened to the same angle, wide enough and no wider. Frederick had heard it four hundred times. He heard it now, the four hundred and first, and it was identical to every one of the others, so completely and so carefully identical that he understood, getting into the car, that it was the hardest thing anybody had done for him all day, and that Castellanos had probably been practising it since a quarter to three, standing by the car in the cold with nobody watching, to get it exactly the same.

“Afternoon,” said Frederick.

Castellanos shut the door. He shut it the same way.

He did not say anything else in the car. He did not turn the radio on, and he did not ask whether Frederick wanted it, and at the lights on Canal Street he did not look in the mirror. He drove to the hospital exactly as he drove to the hospital every afternoon, by the same streets, at the same speed, and Frederick sat in the back and looked out of the window at the city, which was the same city.

That was the thing he noticed. The city was the same. The laundrette and the shoe repairer and the place that sold Ethiopian coffee, with its queue. A bus going the other way, with a driver in it who might have been Mr Hartigan and was not. A man on a ladder taking down a paper skeleton from a shop window, because it was nearly the end of the day, and somebody had told him to. Children in costumes coming out of a school on the corner of Canal Street and Ninth, a small witch and two ghosts and something that might have been a dragon or a dog, holding hands with their mothers, going home for tea before it got dark enough to go out again. Nobody on the pavement looked at the car. Nobody knew, or everybody knew and was going home anyway, and it did not matter which.

He had become King of fourteen realms forty-five minutes ago, in geometry, and a small witch on the corner of Canal Street was eating a biscuit.

“Mr Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“Thank you.”

Castellanos drove for a while.

“For what, sir?”

“For the door,” said Frederick.

There was a pause. In the mirror, Castellanos’s eyes went up, briefly, to the roof of the car, and then back to the road.

“It’s my door, sir,” he said. “I open it the way I open it.”

---

There were more people across from the side entrance than there had been on Monday. Twice as many, perhaps. They filled the pavement behind the low wall of the car park opposite and spread along it in both directions, quietly, in their coats, and the flowers along the top of the wall had doubled too, and somebody had tied a ribbon to the lamp post, a long one, in a colour Frederick could not see properly in the flat afternoon light. Nobody was shouting. Nobody was doing anything. When the car turned in off the hospital road, the whole long line of them turned their heads at once, the way a field turns in the wind, and then nobody moved, and nobody called out.

He saw the woman with the timetable.

She was near the middle, at the front, against the wall, a woman of perhaps sixty in a brown coat and a knitted hat, and she was holding something up above the wall in both hands, at arm’s length, flat, towards the car. He did not know what it was at first. A card. A sign. And then, as the car slowed for the turn under the canopy and came round broadside to the wall, he saw that it was a timetable, a paper one, the AmRail public timetable for the line, the same blue one he had in his bag, open at the middle pages where the columns were, held up in both hands so that it faced him like a hymn book faces a congregation.

She did not wave it. She did not say anything. She held it up, quite still, and looked at the car.

He did not know how she knew. Nobody knew about the trains. He had checked. He had asked his mother not to say and she had not said, and Rosalind Aird did not know, and the nurses did not tell. And then he thought of the man in Baltimore with his timetable from 1962, folded small, and what Rosalind Aird had said about him in the library on Saturday, he doesn’t know about you, he knows about hospitals, and he thought that perhaps the woman in the brown coat did not know about him either, and was only holding up the thing that she had read to somebody once, in a building like this one, in a chair by a window, because it was what she had.

He lifted his hand.

He did it before he had decided to. He lifted his hand to the window, flat, palm out, not a wave, only a hand, the way the people on the pavement had lifted theirs on Wednesday and on Monday, and the woman in the brown coat saw it, he was sure she saw it, because she lowered the timetable an inch, two inches, and held it against her chest, and her face did something, and then the car was under the canopy and the concrete pillars were in the way and he could not see her any more.

Castellanos put the handbrake on.

“Sir,” he said, and got out, and came round, and opened the door the same way.

---

The sixth floor was the same. The tea-coloured corridor. The trolley with the blood-pressure machine. The nurse on the desk, a different one, a young one with her hair in a plait, who looked up as he came past and opened her mouth, and closed it, and looked down again at her screen and said, to the screen, “Afternoon,” and went very red.

“Afternoon,” said Frederick.

At the end of the corridor the big quiet man was by the window, with his hands folded, looking at the ceiling. He did not look down. Frederick went past him into the room.

His father was in bed today, not in the chair. He was propped up on the two pillows, in the grey cardigan, with the blanket folded back to his waist and his hands on top of it, and he was awake, and he was looking at the door, and when Frederick came in his eyes came round to him at once, quicker than they had all week, as though he had been watching the door for a while.

The clock above the door said four minutes to four.

“Papa,” said Frederick.

He sat on the end of the bed, where he always sat. He put his bag on the floor. He did not take anything out of it.

His father looked at him.

It was not the long look. It was a short one, a direct one, the look his father had used to give him across the dinner table in London in the summers when Frederick had come back from somewhere, from the park or the river or a friend’s house, and his father wanted to know how it had gone, and was going to find out, one way or another, and would rather Frederick told him than make him ask.

His father’s mouth moved.

“Where?” said his father.

It came out at once. It came out on the first try, without any looking, as though it had been ready, as though his father had found it hours ago and had been holding it since, in the front pocket, for when Frederick came in.

“Geometry,” said Frederick.

His father’s eyes stayed on him.

“Sixth period,” said Frederick. “Mrs Pruitt. We were doing the angle in a semicircle. The proof. Priya had just got it, at the board. It’s always a right angle, wherever you put the point on the curve. It doesn’t matter where.” He swallowed. “And at two o’clock nothing happened, and then her computer made a noise, and she asked to speak to me outside, and said the school had had an email, and she was supposed to tell me. And then she asked if I wanted to come back in. And I said yes. And I went back in.” He stopped. “And then Dr Brooks said it on the loudspeaker. To everybody. And asked them all to stay in their classes. And they did. And Mrs Pruitt said right, where were we, and drew it six more times.”

His father looked at him for a long moment.

Then the corner of his mouth moved. The right side, the side that worked. It moved up, slowly, a quarter of an inch, and stayed there.

“Good,” said his father.

---

He did his homework.

He did the French, which was a page of the past historic that nobody ever used, and the chemistry, which was three questions on moles, and he did not do the history, because it was not due until Thursday and because he did not yet know what a proclamation was for, though he thought he might by tonight. His father watched him. Once, during the chemistry, his father’s right hand moved on the blanket, a small movement, towards the page, as if to point at something, and Frederick looked, and it was the second question, where he had written the molar mass of sodium chloride as 58.44, and he did not know whether his father was pointing at it or not, and decided that he was, and that it meant it was right, because it was.

At a quarter to five he put the chemistry away and took out the timetable.

The blue one. The same one the woman in the brown coat had been holding up against the wall. He opened it at Wednesday.

He had been reading his father the trains for five weeks. He had read them in the first week to a man who could not hear, and in the second to a man who could hear and could not answer, and since the twentieth to a man who listened with his eyes shut and sometimes said one word. He had read them to the King. Every afternoon, at a quarter to five, he had sat on the end of this bed and read the next day’s arrivals at Union Station to the King of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom of America and of twelve other places, and it had never once seemed strange to him, because the King was his father, and the trains were the trains.

It was the first time they had been read by a King. It was the first time they had been read to a man who was not one.

He did not say that. He read the trains.

“Wednesday,” he said. “Tomorrow.” His father’s eyes closed. “Six-fourteen from Richmond. Six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one. Seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, calling at Wilmington. Seven-twenty-five from Harrisburg.”

He read them all, in order, slowly, the way he always did. The eight-ten from New York, the Senator, which would not be late tomorrow, because it was a Wednesday, and the bridge at Havre de Grace only held it on Tuesdays. The ten-fifteen from Boston. The midday from Pittsburgh. He read until five, as he always did, and he did not get to the end, because he never got to the end; the last one in from Boston was at eleven fifty-two at night, and the hour always ran out somewhere in the afternoon trains. At five the nurse with the plait put her head round the door, and saw them, and went red again, and went away, and he closed the timetable. His father’s eyes were still shut, and his father’s hand was lying open on the blanket, palm up, and Frederick put his own hand in it for a moment, and it closed, and then he had to go, because at six there was a Council, and he was to be at the table.

Outside the window the light had gone. The railway lights had come on below, red and green, and the long train from the north had come in at a quarter to five, under the hospital, exactly on time, and gone on into the station, and was standing there now, at the platform, with its doors open, letting people off, the way it would tomorrow, and the day after, whoever was King.